If you believe petitions truly matter, here’s one we can really get behind

By David McElroy · November 5, 2011

In order to show how much they care, the folks in the White House have set up a website for people to make petitions about issues they care about. What the politicians didn’t count on was someone using their system to satirize how vapid and condescending the actual responses are.

Any sane and realistic person knows that the administration doesn’t care how many petitions you sign. (It’s not just this one, of course. No administration cares about petitions, contrary to what many people assume.) It’s only interested in how many votes you can deliver and how many dollars you can give.

For the rest of us, they’re just interested in placating us. They’ll pretend to listen. They’ll write boilerplate responses. They might even promise a pony sometimes. But it’s not going to change reality.

The White House petition system is for PR purposes, pure and simple. We all know that. And when politicians go through the motions of pretending to take us seriously, it’s condescending. So here’s a petition that I hope you’ll actually consider signing:

We demand a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition.

Since these petitions are ignored apart from an occasional patronizing and inane political statement amounting to nothing more than a condescending pat on the head, we the signers would enjoy having the illusion of success. Since no other outcome to this process seems possible, we demand that the White House immediately assign a junior staffer to compose a tame and vapid response to this petition, and never attempt to take any meaningful action on this or any other issue. We would also like a cookie.

That’s one petition I can sign with a clean conscience. When the world is absurd, it’s sometimes easier to laugh at it. In politics, it seems like the only sane response other than taking up arms.

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