“Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.”

• Opening lines of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol

“Bob Marley was dead. There is no doubt that his music lives on.”

• I just quoted that from my head.

 

Donald Trump’s assertion that the election is rigged (if he loses) has unleashed a plethora of conspiracy theories, some of which have given rise to extremists actually touting that they will be doing their own patrolling of voting precincts to report any suspicious activity.

One of the ways that the election is supposed to be hijacked is through the use of the Graveyard Vote, having people registered to vote who are deceased and having a political operative cast a vote in their place for the offending candidate.

Interesting to think of dead people voting or even speaking up about the current election, but in a way the dead do talk and the words they have said before still vibrate our ear drums.

I can hear my PaPa from the grave talking about how the republican nominee in the current presidential election doesn’t even resemble the Republican Party that he so adamantly supported in his life. The man had more autographed pictures of “The Gipper” than he had pictures of his own grandchildren and that man loved his grandchildren. I know he would not in any way shape or fashion have supported Trump.

Talking of Reagan, he was the one who said what is now called “The Eleventh Commandment” with the following in his 1990 autobiography,

“The personal attacks against me during the primary finally became so heavy that the state Republican chairman, Gaylord Parkinson, postulated what he called the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican. It’s a rule I followed during that campaign and have ever since.”

Personally, I think Reagan would slap the shit out of Trump. Yet, that is another matter. But to think that his Vice-President said that he would vote for Hillary speaks volumes as well.

The Pew Center has said that there are as many as 1.8 million active voters in the United States. There was even a political cartoon concerning the matter this past week that suggests the Graveyard Vote will be very active on behalf of the Democrats.

Pretty good, huh? Raven and all for a little Poe allusion. The chicken adds a little, but the raven!

Well, it would be rather inconceivable to think that the election would be close enough to actually think that 1.8 million dead voters could sway the election, but think about it – the dead still have much to say.

I think of a passage in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, not because we only have 60-something shopping days left, but because it seems pertinent to the current political landscape.

It comes after Jacob Marley comes back to talk with the miserly and self absorbent Donald, excuse me, Ebenezer Scrooge. He warns him that he will be haunted that night: the Ghost(s) of Christmas Past in the form of a dozen ladies who have come forward with accusations of sexual assault; the Ghost of Christmas Present in the form of a large apparition with a wicked comb over; and the Ghost of Christmas Future in the form of a Fox News commentator conceding the presidential election to Hillary Clinton.

Sorry got out of hand there.

But Dickens does relate in the first chapter of the holiday classic,

“The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power forever.”

It’s the suggestion that all of these haunted spirits were so clearly wanting to “to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power forever.” But if they could vote, it seems that they would then want to cast their vote for the greater good in society, and not just in America.

If the dead could truly vote, they would do so with the knowledge beyond our mortal scopes. Perhaps, like Marley, they could foresee events to come if certain actions do not change. And maybe their votes would reflect their wanting to interfere for the greater good. In that case, I know where the Graveyard Vote will go.

And finally on to another Marley, maybe Jacob Marley’s very distant cousin, Bob Marley. He said,

“The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively.”

Truly words that live beyond the grave.