When I was teaching politics to matriculation students in Perth Western Australia in the early 1990s, I showed them the Whitlam blockbuster(1) The Dismissal.  This week I watched the biographical telemovie Hawke released in Australia in mid-2010.  In the years between these two media experiences I also enjoyed Labour in Power(1993) and The Howard Years(2008).  I watched these portrayals of the conflicts of partisan power politics and the battles for leadership.  These audio-visual accounts of Australian partisan politics at the highest levels at various times in the year from 1983 to 2006 enriched my years of retirement.  I have taken a dispassionate interest in the world of politics since my university days in the 1960s. 

By 2005 I was no longer employed in FT, PT or casual-volunteer work, and no longer an active participant in non-partisan politics as it is played in its myriad ways in organizational and community life.  By the time I came to enjoy all of these televideo, telemovie, accounts of partisan politics, I was in my late middle age, age 55 to 60, and the early years of late adulthood, 61 to 66.  By these years in my lifespan I had come to agree with the French political sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote that: “There are many men of principle in political parties, but there is no party of principle.”  I had also begun to appreciate the following words of H.L. Mencken, the American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, and acerbic critic of American life and culture.  “Under democracy,” he wrote in 1956, “one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule---and both commonly succeed, and they are also right.”(2) –Ron Price with thanks to (1)The Dismissal, TV Docudrama in 1983 on the removal in 1975 of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam; and  (2)Quotations on Politics,” The Quote Garden.

Those who are too smart to engage in politics
are punished by being governed by those who
are dumber, said Plato 2500 years ago….And,
as the American politician Stewart Udall wrote:
we have come to confuse power with greatness. 
The idea that you can merchandise candidates
for high office like breakfast cereal & that you
can gather votes like box tops is one of the many
and ultimate indignities of democratic processes.(1) 
These were some of the reasons I have been, over
the last fifty years, attracted to the Baha’i electoral
process in all its forms, practices and philosophies.

(1) Adlai Stevenson in his speech of the Democratic National Convention on 18 August 1956.

Ron Price
20 December 2010

If you google the words, Baha'i Electoral Process, freediver, you will get much more than I can say in this little box. You can see a 4 minute video and much else.-Ron Price, Tasmania