The Mountains of Instead

  DREAM BOOK  2 July 24, 2008 In a huge, dark, crowded train station or transportation hub – L and I going to New Hampshire, but I don’t have the right papers – I have my passport but it needs to be renewed.   I go to an office to have this done. Small, dark, shabby space, people in old clothes on benches with bundles, like a refugee center. In an inner office a thin Chinese woman has brought a bag of groceries for a co-worker.   Long wait.   Another woman in the office draws a plastic curtain on a rod between the refugees space and the offices. I am finally admitted; a kindly Asian woman deals with the problem in a [different] crowded and shabby office.   She collects, and gives to me, the usual gift package you get on these occasions – some booklets, trinkets, stickers.   I insist I don’t want it but she presses it on me, ironically, cheerfully. One item, a bottle of something – liquor, shampoo – breaks as I leave, and leaks, spreading smelly liqui...

  JO OUR ELECTOR:   A CIVICS LESSON After the 2016 election, in which the popular vote went to one candidate but the Electoral College went to the other, there was much talk of finally abolishing the college, and it has roused again with the 2020 problems.   Of course there’s a lot to be said for such an action, however unlikely the long process of constitutional amendment might take, and how such an amendment might be constructed.   But – perhaps because I live in a state whose majority can be predicted with certainty and therefore whose Electoral College vote is never in doubt, where national candidates and their ads rarely appear – I began thinking of a different system, or rather a revamping of the present one.     Suppose, rather than being merely ceremonial and bound to the winner by popular vote of each state, the Electoral College was itself elected, on a district-by-district basis, as the framers seem to have assumed they would be (though eac...