As Uncle Hugh used to say, “The guy who cleans your septic tank probably won’t buy the myth that your shit doesn’t stink.”

All right, ladies and gentlemen, tell me whether I’m a simplistic cretan, or is there any real need to count ballots quickly?

Thing is, I recall the late Jim Berry warily asking me about Steck-Warlick voting card machines back in 1970. Travis County was considering a faster way to count ballots, since, as in all things Austin, getting vote tallies was an exercise in hanging out in bars and making phone calls. Of course sometimes the newsroom just became sort of a bar in and of itself. Hell, we had to wait for the returns somewhere. I recall a particularly vigorous game of whiffle ball played on the newsroom floor, one big open linoleum-tiled, fluorescent-lit space with a horseshoe copy desk at one end and society, just transitioned from the “Women’s Section”, at the distant other. Wadded up copy carbons from the early editions made passibly harmless missiles pitched into the zone of a steel pica pole. Anything outside the copy desk rim was the outfield. If you dropped a ball, you had to make the next round of calls to those perennially late precincts out in the hills. Rick Fish had a no-hitter going the night those East Austin boxes came in electing Richard Moya county commissioner (Yes, friends, a decidedly Tejano-sounding name in a time when it was still permissible to use “wet-back” in the lede.)

But he was later among the commissioners who decided to try punch-card voting machines. Optical readout.

“Well, Jim, they’re just machines. They do what you tell them to do.”

“They do what somebody tells them to do.”

I was bowing to the inevitable political appetite for expediency and gratification, of which we, newspapers, radio and television, were zookeepers and it was always feeding time. Now, in an era when the Wolf of the Steppes is back in vogue as the enemy America can’t seem to do without, we are faced with the peril without paper. Nothing you can hold in your hand to say the way you voted was the way that was counted. It’s not everywhere that there is no paper record, but in some, a print-out is all that’s required. In others, it’s an email.

Okay, time out.

I don’t think there’s much wrong with the overall vote count that hasn’t always been. But I spent too many years listening to gossip to believe in conspiracy theories. For example, if the Kennedy conspirators are right, somewhere around a hundred people would have had to keep their mouths shut for about half a century. For five decades they didn’t say anything, do anything, get drunk, get divorced, get married or make any pyrrhic enemies? Really? To fake the moon landings would have directly involved around 5,000 folks. And five thousand government employees, who cannot resist the compulsion to bitch at length to virtually anybody who drinks alcohol, could never let the secret of the century slip just once?

Still, there needs to be a double blind to voting, and that would only work with old fashioned paper ballot counted by human beings, who cannot do what somebody tells them without talking about it or getting paid not to. Hopefully, by check. And the record of that vote should perhaps be less at the mercy of a delete button.

I think you should at least have a fire.

But we will always have the rats on our side.

And trust me, everybody rats.

Everybody.

Just ask Whitey Bolger.•

No, the only serious voter fraud right now is in the racist notion that it ought to be difficult to vote. The people who grow up behaving badly in expensive clothes and cars at teenage drunk parties where private swimming pools are involved seem to think that poor people have the luxury of thinking so far ahead as politics can reasonably offer a reward. In most cases they don’t and in some, they can’t. If the proposal doesn’t hit your paycheck this week, admit it, all politicians sound pretty theoretical. And American politics doesn’t write checks that quickly . There is no perceivable voter fraud right now because there’s not much real value to your vote. Nobody will pay you for it, at least not enough to risk both of you going to jail, which seems to be surprisingly likely to happen. So there is at best a vague correlation between your vote and your political needs unless you lend money, pump oil or run sweatshops in Southeast Asia. There isn’t much voter fraud because there’s no percentage in it. Those here illegally have just learned not to do stuff that will get your resident status noticed. They drive stakes, swing nail guns, clear rocks behind the ditch witch and keep their heads down. Especially when installing new ductwork in your attic. They aren’t likely to trade their jobs for our votes. Talking to government agents who could get your legal residency invested with a post-it, just for the privilege of voting for some foreigner probably doesn’t seem like that good an idea.

Insofar as where the line will be redrawn a year from now, most problem people don’t think their votes will make any difference; they’ve got way too much to worry about between now and then.

But they’re right. Their votes wouldn’t make a difference.

There’s not a “they”.

We can start with the guy paying somebody else’s Social Security who fears that an open border might mean he won’t be able to compete. We can go on to that other guy, who would just like to stop paying protection. Still others have learned to just go about their lives paying no attention to politics or news and praying the sky doesn’t fall on them.

Just like the rest of us.

Our children won’t speak Spanish, but neither will theirs, for all manner of social and practical reasons. iPhones and video games will do the rest.

We lead every dance, so we’re in no danger of becoming them.

They, antithetically, don’t stand a chance.

Maybe there is a conspiracy

For my birthday I got the Pupcup.

I hope one day all of you, my friends, get a gift like this one.

It isn’t a wonderful gift. In fact, it’s awful. Other than news of a death in the family, it is about the worst birthday gift, not that I’ve ever received, but that I’ve ever known about.

First, it purports to be a cup.
But you can only drink from one side of it. Otherwise the pup’s nose pushes the rim away from your mouth and dribbles hot beverage down your neck. Somehow coffee stains on your collar remind those near and dear that you used to chew tobacco. So it’s a left-handed coffee cup.

Second, it’s ugly. It’s sort of a brown mustard yellow. No, not Gulden’s brown mustard, yellow French’s after it sat in the sun too long at the cemetery homecoming. It’s not exactly smiling, but neither is it growling. And, you know those Jesus paintings that are always looking at you? This thing never looks at you. In fact, it never looks at anything. The eyes are different sizes and the pupils al slightly off center so that it always looks as though it’s paying attention to something else. My eight-year-old granddaughter simply called it, “Creepy.”

But my son and daughter-in presented it to me in such a way that could only love the thing. They gleefully pointed out everything that was grotesque, impractical and outrageously funny about it. Who would have created such a thing? Why would they ever have imagined that they could sell it? And most puzzling: Were they serious? Was this some dear old sister who devoted her entire ceramicist’s career on a Barnum-worthy exhibition of misconstruction? Or did somebody bump the machine just as it was turning out a record number of doggie cups? So take that, Adam Smith. Nobody wanted it. It certainly wasn’t scarce. Not innovative. Not even useful or novel. But somebody bought it, if for no reason other than that it was not all of the above. Capitalism is the professional wrestling troupe of the gods.

Or maybe not

Somewhere between the Trail of Tears and my comfortable middle class existence lies the thinnest thread of kinship, so thin I should be ashamed to even mention it except to make a point. In my father it was wider and stronger. I have Native heritage, but I’m not an Indian; although I have been drunk with Indians. One of them pointed out to me across a linoleum-topped McCurtain County bar that Oklahoma is a land so laden with attractions that perfectly rational Native Americans traded it for whiskey.

Then, on an April morning in 1863, the United States Army burned the family farm near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee. That fall Abraham Lincoln declared a national day of thanks.

Our family has never celebrated it.

Call us ingrates.

Christmas, on the other hand, is a time so merry I allow the mention of Charles Dickens name without insult. The man was Karl Marx in fur-lined jingle bells. Which is not, I repeat, not a Christmas song.

Oh, yeah. I usually yield charitably to Dickens at Christmastime. Although I feel he rests a poor fourth behind Virginia O’hanlon and Frank Church, Clement Clarke Moore and Gene Autry.

In that order.

• My Celtic gods, did poor Whitey forget he was Irish or something?

The Nation where we let bygones be bygones.

After a couple of centuries.