Every Vote Counts: A Celebration of Democracy (Global Citizen, CBS-TV, aired October 29, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 p.m. CBS-TV showed another hour-long special encouraging people, especially young people, to vote. It had a typically awkward title -- Every Vote Counts: A Celebration of Democracy -- and it began engagingly with a marching band from an historically Black college doing a spectacular routine as their music was talked over by unseen voices celebrating the virtues of democracy and voting as a means to preserve it. Actually, the United States is a republic, not a democracy, and much of the success of the Republican Party over the past few decades is their shrewdness in exploiting the anti-democratic features the Founding Fathers put into the U.S. Constitution -- the Electoral College, the equal representation of every state in the U.S. Senate, the near-total power of state legislatures to determine election laws, and the power (not in the Constitution but baldly asserted by then-Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803) of the courts in general and the Supreme Court in particular to invalidate laws as unconstitutional -- to get their candidates in office and advance their agenda.

Though the show remained ostensibly nonpartisan and didn’t make a forma endorsement of one side or another in the current Presidential election, it was pretty clear what the biases of the producers were from whom they chose to include. Most of the participants were either women, people of color, or both. A lot of them were Queer, including quite a few Transgender people, and there were also segments devoted to U.S.-born young people who were voting even though their immigrant parents still can’t, as well as families whose parents have naturalized and therefore will be voting in a U.S. election for the first time. One particularly haunting young man said he was an immigrant from Iraq and he recalled what “elections” were like there -- with only one candidate at the top of the ballot -- and I joked, “That’s the beauty of America! You still have a bloodthirsty dictator running for re-election as President -- but you don’t have to vote for him! You can vote for someone else!” Another person was a 102-year-old woman who noted that she was born two yers before women won the right to vote nationwide -- and it occurred to me that while I’m reading a book about Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and their relationship during World War II I’m watching a TV show featuring a woman who might well have cast her first Presidential vote for FDR.

The heavy domination of women and people of color, and the issues they mentioned as important to them in deciding how they would vote, definitely “tilted” this show towards the Biden camp -- it’s hard to imagine that we were watching very many people on this show who would be likely to vote for Donald Trump -- though it did feature some Republican former officeholders, including former Ohio Governor John Kasich (the last man standing against Trump for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination, and this year an endorser of Democrat Joe Biden), former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and former Tennessee Senator Bill Frist -- who had just published an op-ed in the Washington Post co-authored by former Democratic Senator Tom Daschle saying that we should be patient and not expect a winner to be announced on election night but should wait until all the mail-in votes come in. It was a plea not only to the Trump administration to stop their insistence that whoever is ahead in the count on election night should be declared the winner, but also to the media not to call a “winner” on election night and therefore build up an impression that if the other side comes from behind in late-arriving mail ballots it’s not a legitimate result.

The show also featured various musical guests, including Bille Eilish (who didn’t perform but announced that she is casting her first-ever vote this year -- I hadn’t realized she was so young she hasn’t been eligible before, especially since she seems so mature as a musical artist -- now, if she’d just lose the green birdshit from her hair … ). Shawn Mendes (whom I haven’t been particularly impressed with before) played a beautiful song called “Wonder” that was both a love song and an oblique social statement about equality and the universality of human experience, and Mendes sang it with a level of power and soul I hadn’t expected from him). The country doo Dan & Shea in a nice ballad called “When I Pray for You” that, like the Mendes song, was primarily a love ballad but also had a subtle message that we are all one and God loves all of us. The one song that rubbed me the wrong way was the Black-Eyed Peas with guest artist Maluma doing a horrible piece called “Feel the Beat,” though “Feel the Butt” would have been a more appropriate title since the song was one of those sexist, objectifying odes to women’s body parts (maximally displayed, at least by network-television standards, by the women on stage with the performers).

Oddly, earlier on the show there’d been a rap number I’d actually liked -- “Lick” by Offset, which came at the end of a segment advocating for the right to vote for convicted felons as soon as they’re released from prison. Offset said he was an ex-con himself and hadn’t realized he could vote until this year, and the song “Lick” was rapped to a soft, subtle beat and was about the singer rejecting the thug life and the mistakes that had put him in prison -- a rare expression of human dignity and social responsibility from a form that usually celebrates murder, rape, robbery, drug dealing, Queer-bashing and greed! (Also, you could actually understand most of what Offset was saying, which is surprisingly not true for most rap performances.) The last song was a duet by Alicia Keys and Brandi Carlile -- the Black woman was at a white piano and the white woman was at a black one -- on s song called “Beautiful Noise” that, like the Mendes and Dan & Shay pieces, at once was a love song and an ode to human commonality. If nothing else, the dominance of people of color on this show and the repetition of the message of human equality put this show definitely on the Democratic side of America’s political divide; though neither the names “Trump” nor “Biden” were ever mentioned, it was pretty clear who would win the election if the people on this program were the only ones voting!