Yet I see on television, how they keep encouraging to vote — more and more these days, I’m wondering, why bother? does my vote really count? Being one among millions of voters in California — or for that matter, one in the conservative Orange County — does my vote really mean anything?

That image of fake “real America” is even more perpetuated and perhaps satirized by the movie Swing Vote, where the Presidency of America comes down to one single vote of a older, white, small-town, beer drinking, neglectful single parent, trailer-park-dwelling, fly-fishing redneck who cares less about who the next President is than where his next beer’s going to come from. The idea of the movie seem to suggest that the vote of the people matters, if the vote comes from “real America”.

It’s another form of the “ownership society” in that the electoral power (= wealth) is obscurely distributed to a select few, and yet the image of those select few somehow represent the rest of the country when they in actuality do not….