This is my official announcement. Let Medium break the news to the world that a rank amateur is running for the world’s most powerful political position!
You see, for 24 years, I have been advocating for an alternative democracy. This includes 2.5 years on Medium, with 170 articles and 4,395 responses, most of which are dedicated to this alternative democracy. No one wants to consider my ideas. I am still an echo chamber of one.
So how should I fill up my echo chamber?
Well, two Medium contributors recently gave me some clues to my next step. I had talked to these people before about my TDG (the alternative democracy). Like an evangelical Christian finding some unconverted soul who is nice to talk to, I was leaning on these two once again to take my TDG seriously.
On June 9, 2021, A. Nonymous said to me:
I remember reading your plan. I suspect that you’d have to be freakishly famous to get any traction. We teeny little invisibles are lucky if anyone reads what we write — and certainly nobody important ever will.
On July 6, 2021, Anthony Lawrence said to me:
No, it’s a sign that you’re not famous.
If somebody famous thought it up … different story.
Did you notice the common word in these two responses?
FAMOUS!
FAMOUS!
Did they say “FAMOUS?”
I need to get famous. That’s the path!
I belong to the lower middle class of Canadian society. This demographic is not conducive to being famous.
I recently lost my job of 15 years as a math/science tutor at a local college. Now I am looking for a new occupation to take me to retirement. I am taking some bookkeeping training. BOOKKEEPING? HOW IS THAT GOING TO MAKE ME FAMOUS?
Well, maybe I could embezzle funds. But I would need to embezzle a lot to get famous. It might take me 10 years to embezzle enough for me to make the national news. Ten years is too long to wait. And I might get caught before reaching the “famous” threshold. Prison does not appeal to me as a retirement home.
Maybe I could do a daredevil stunt! However, the famous daredevil stunts that happened in my youth just won’t cut it anymore. Jumping motorcycles over rivers or climbing the outside of skyscrapers are, well, just old school, barely worth an article in a small-town newspaper. I would really have to up the ante to get today’s world attention.
How about bungee jumping at 30,000 feet from a 400 mph Boeing 737? With an M16 in my right hand shooting down UFOs and eating a popular junk food with my left hand? That’s pretty American, right? That’ll get the attention I so need!
If you are a marketer for a popular junk food, please talk to me about an endorsement—before your competitor talks to me.
Such a stunt might put me on the wrong side of six feet of dirt. But the results of being famous in this way will be instantaneous. So, I can justify sacrificing myself to the good cause of expanding my echo chamber. But I worry about the camera crew who will be filming me making this stunt. I can’t put them through this ordeal. There’s no point in me going through this stunt without a camera crew following me. So while this path to fame seems to be out, I’ll still take the endorsement money for promoting popular junk food at the end of a bungee cord.
Here’s another neat idea for fame!
Why not run for the 47th President of the United States?
That will make me famous, right?
I don’t go to prison. I don’t die. I sell lots of books about an alternative democracy. That works for me!
I would like to claim this idea as my own. But someone else ran for president on a lark before me. And he got several hundred thousand write-in votes in several election cycles. For those of you under 55 years old, may I suggest that you check out a fellow named Pat Paulsen on Wikipedia. He became famous in this way.
Stay tuned to Politically Speaking for more campaign announcements.
Thanks again to A. Nonymous and Anthony Lawrence for your wonderful suggestion. And thanks to Mr. Pat Paulsen (RIP) for the inspiration.
Remember, things could be worse!
Published on Medium 2021
Prez 47 Satire: Liberation of North Montana