7/5/99

When There's No One to Vote For...

What we need is a candidate to represent everyone who wants to vote against everyone.

    "This is Shai Pines, your on-the-spot reporter, and today we have a special guest: Yomtov Vahav, the next prime minister of Israel.
    "Mr. Vahav, isn't this a bit of a shock, that you're about to become our nation's leader?"
    "Maybe it's a mistake."
    "No, sir: all the polls show it's a runaway. No one else is close."
    "But I don't even know where the Knesset is. I've never been outside Afula, except once, when my brother was married in Hadera. What a wedding that was, the music was something like I never heard! Do you know which bus goes to the Knesset?"
    "Don't worry. You'll get a car, and a driver."
    "Like a ‘taxi special’."
    "That's right. Mr. Vahav, tell me about your party."
    "It's only one man, and that's me. But my wife helps a bit."
    "There's been a lot of criticism about the party name. It's not very nice in English, y'know."
    "I don't know any English. In Yemen I was a thresher. You don't need to speak English to thresh."
    "So why is the party called 'Darky'?"
    "It's an old Italian song. They played it at the wedding."
    "Aha. 'Darki' -- 'My Way,' in Hebrew. Excuse me, Mr. Vahav, we're going to take a commercial break. We'll be right back..."
    "Tar-r-r-rum de dum, da-da-da-da-da-da ... Do you have a cell phone? What a silly question! You're Israeli! And like every Israeli, you're wondering why cell phones are so primitive. Get ready for -- brap-a-da-da-dummmmm! -- the newest wonder from Allo Technologies, the brain-cell phone! The ear-piece goes right where it belongs, implanted inside your ear! The mouth-piece -- that's right, folks! -- conveniently located where your front tooth is. All the wiring is internal, and you can forget about that stupid battery forever! The Allophone's unique energy source is a solar-powered skullcap you wear until ... heh, heh ... until you go where the sun don't shine forever! If ya got a brain, get an Allophone!"
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"THIS IS Shai Pines, and we're back with the man who will soon be prime minister, Yomtov Vahav. The question on everyone's mind: how did this happen? How did a person, not even known in his own shul, come to be the most powerful man in the nation?"
    "You got a minute?"
    "If not more."
    "It's like this: every election, I ask myself, Yomtov, who are you going to vote for? I don't know, I answer, so I ask my wife. She can read, you see, so she knows a lot. And she says, everybody's no good. If we vote for Shas, maybe they'll think it's because we think they're good. So we can vote for Meretz, to teach Shas a lesson, but then Meretz will think we think they're good. You see, there's something wrong.
    "My wife says there's more and more parties this year, but still, nothing for us. And she asks the neighbors, and they say the same thing. One day she says to me, 'Yomtov, I know who we should vote for.' Who, I says. 'Me,' she says."
    "Your wife decided to run for prime minister?!"
    "Like everyone else. But there's a problem, she has to help with the grandchildren, she has no time to be a prime minister. So she looks at me and says, Yomtov, you're a retired thresher, you have time, go be prime minister. We'll vote for you."
    "And?"
    "We told the neighbors that if they didn't have anyone to vote for, they could vote for me. Yirmiyahu, on the fourth floor, he said, 'A vote for Yomtov is a vote against everyone else!' "
    "I see. So that became your platform. Your electorate -- the floating disenchanted voter -- turns out to be the vast majority of the nation. You attracted the protest vote, filling a longstanding, untapped, unrecognized need in a politics-mad democracy like ours, by giving everybody a nobody to vote for. Brilliant!"
    "I don't know what you're talking about, but it sounds like what Yirmiyahu said."
    "So what happened then?"
    "Simple. Yirmiyahu told the Romanians across the street, and then in the next block, Baruch heard. Baruch is very important in Afula, he fries felafel balls at the bus station, so everyone in the country going from north to south, or south to north, has to listen to Baruch, because Baruch loves to talk, and what does Baruch talk about? Not felafel balls. Politics."
    "Word of mouth. It's classically Israeli."
    "Yesterday, Bibi called me. He wants to know if I'm going to vote for him. I know how things work. I make him a deal. If he votes for me, I'll vote for him. Then he says if I stop this nonsense he'll make me a minister. I made him the same offer, and he didn't talk for a minute. Then he said he'd think about it."
    "Have you been in touch with other politicians?"
    "A few generals called. They said they remembered I was a good soldier. I told them the truth, I forget if I was a soldier. Maybe I was. Anyway, they all told me I was very brave, and maybe they could be ministers for me. I said if there's a war, I'll call them, but in the middle of a peace process, who needs all these generals?"
    "Can you confirm if you've made any concrete promises yet?"
    "I promised my son Yoram, he's not married, that when Pnina Rosenblum calls, I’ll  offer her anything if she'll go out with him."
    "One last question, sir. Not since Yitzhak Shamir have we had a national leader elected on a platform of, shall we say, 'Nothing doing.' Are you going to be another prime minister without portfolio?"
    "Maybe you should come back later and ask my wife, she's babysitting right now while my daughter-in-law Tzippi is at the hairdresser. But I can tell you this: most of the country is voting against everybody, and everyone else is voting for somebody, which means who ends up happy? Nobody. Except for those who vote against everybody ... including me."
    "But that's a logical impossibility."
    "No. That's Israel."
    "Thank you Mr. Vahav."
    "Can I say hello to my wife?"
    "Uh, sure, why not?"
    "Allo, Esther! Can you see me? No? Kick the chupchik on the side of the TV to turn it on."
    "Coming to you live from Afula, this is Shai Pines..."