Once more, with callused, exhausted fingers, we take up the pen.
On November 6, 2012, as the last voters filed through the polls, we at Fiction Writers for Better Misinformation hung up our ink-stained capes, thinking we’d done all we could to keep America together through the divisive campaign season. We looked on with some satisfaction as votes were counted, winners named, and the machinery of democracy chugged forward.
The republic survived. We rested.
But now, we fear we feel a new political threat tearing at the unity of the American body politic. The unending, fruitless quarreling between Democratic and Republican national leaders is not only causing direct harm to the economy, but is also keeping alive the deep sense of tribal division that made life so testy during the campaign. It’s almost as if the campaign never ended. If only someone would win these fights already! But, no, the politicians have our constitutional republic in a head lock and they’re going to keep squeezing until fair lady liberty blacks out.
We need new ideas that will jolt us out of this pointless grappling. Clearly, the political class has no such new ideas. We need creativity. We need imagination. We need Fiction Writers for Better Misinformation.
We will rise to the challenge. Here is our first humble suggestion:
FBMisin Governing Solution #1:
Democrats drop their demands for stricter gun control legislation in return for pegging future top-bracket income tax rates to the number of gun-related deaths in the country in the preceding year. We will create an index of gun deaths per million in the population, setting 2010 as the benchmark year. If gun deaths rise one percent in 2013 compared to the benchmark, then the top tax rate rises one percent. If gun deaths fall, then so do taxes on the rich.
To the naive this may sound morbid, but it gives the right a chance to prove that, as the saying goes, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Since, if that’s the case, then we can find ways to stop those people. Suddenly, Republicans have an incentive to support effective mental health care, improved early childhood education, poverty mitigation programs, anti-domestic violence initiatives, heck, even quality research into what works. Democrats, of course, will jump to support all these things, as well.
We will bring you more FBMisin solutions soon.
Read the original notice of the launch of Fiction Writers for Better Misinformation.
