Most satellites orbit the Earth at a height of 93 miles.
WORLD POLITICS 101
Keeping up with world events can be a full-time job. Those of us who just like to peruse the morning paper over coffee and a donut can find ourselves confused by international news—there is such variety in the different types of government from country to country… what does it all mean? Here are some of the basics.
THE SKY IS FALLING
Imagine waking up one morning to newspaper headlines announcing that the United States government had collapsed and that the president and his entire cabinet were stepping down and calling for new elections. It would be frightening. You’d probably expect chaos and lawlessness to follow. You might even wish you’d listened to your crazy neighbor—the one with the stockpile of ammunition and canned goods.
Well, in parliamentary democracies, governments “collapse” all the time—it happened, for example, in Canada in 2006. All it means is that the dominant political party lost control of the legislature. There are almost 200 countries in the world, and each one of them has a government that is organized at least a little bit differently from all the rest. The terminology that reporters use to describe what is going on in the world doesn’t always make sense to people who are familiar with only one system. So, for the discerning bathroom reader, here’s a social-studies primer to help simplify the world beat.
TYRANTS AND KINGS
Most countries in the world have some form of representative government, in which voters elect politicians to represent them in a legislative assembly. That doesn’t mean that they are always full democracies, just that some kind of political representation is built into the system. The least-representative governments: countries like China, Cuba, Syria, Vietnam, and North Korea, where only a single political party is allowed to participate.
Along with undemocratic, single-party systems, there are still a few absolute monarchies left in the world—among them Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Swaziland—where a hereditary king (or, in Qatar’s case, an emir) has complete control over the government.
First foreign head of state to address Congress: King Kalakaua of Hawaii (1874).
There are also plenty of countries where the mechanisms of representative government are mostly for show and the real power is a military junta (Myanmar, Fiji, and Libya), or a president without a strong legislature to check his power (Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, for example).
THE FREE WORLD
Representative governments tend to fall into two basic categories: parliamentary and presidential. The biggest difference between the two has to do with what social-studies textbooks call “separation of powers.” Under a presidential system (used in countries as varied as the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Sudan, and the Philippines), the executive branch of government is completely separate from the legislative branch. In the U.S., this means that the president holds power independently of Congress.
In a parliamentary government (like those in the U.K., Canada, Australia, Italy, Israel, most of Europe, India, Japan, and Cambodia, among others), the executive and legislative branches are combined. The executive (usually called the prime minister) is the leader of the legislative assembly (parliament). Think of the prime minister as a combination of the president of the United States and the Speaker of the House.
The prime minister is also selected differently from a president. A president is elected directly by the voting public to serve a fixed term in office (in the U.S., four years; in Mexico, six). Under a parliamentary system, citizens don’t get to vote for prime minister—not directly, anyway. The voters elect members of Parliament (MPs), and the leader of the party that wins the most seats becomes prime minister.
PARTY TIME
Not only is a prime minister not directly elected by popular vote, he (or she) usually doesn’t serve a fixed term in office. No one in a parliamentary system does—general elections aren’t held on a fixed schedule. In Canada and the U.K., elections are traditionally held at least once every five years, but there isn’t even a written rule that requires it.
Roughly 42% of people in the U.K. snore. (They probably keep the other 58% awake.)
So how does the system work? The head of the dominant political party becomes prime minister, and must then “form a government.” To American ears that probably sounds like what the founding fathers did back in the 1780s, but it’s actually closer to what a president does during his first weeks in office. Primarily, it involves assigning key cabinet positions to the appropriate politicians.
The tricky part is that it’s more difficult to form a government at some times than at others. In the U.K., there are two main political parties (Labour and the Conservative, or Tory, party), and one of them usually wins an absolute majority in Parliament. They are then able to form what is called a “majority government.” This means, in effect, that the majority party can run the government however it pleases without too much interference from the opposition.
In Canada, the last two elections have resulted in what is called a “minority government.” There are four political parties represented in the Parliament of Canada, but two of them (the Conservatives and the Liberals) hold more than 70% of the seats as of 2008. The Conservatives currently have more seats than the Liberals, but not enough to constitute a majority. Because of this, the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper must make policy compromises and court the votes of MPs from the other three parties in order to get anything done.
MULTIPARTISAN
Some countries have so many political parties that there’s never a majority government. The Israeli Knesset (their parliament) is a good example: Israel uses a proportional representation system in which citizens cast their votes for a party rather than for an individual candidate. The parties are then assigned seats in the legislature based on the percentage of the popular vote they received. In Israel, any party that gets at least 2% of the vote gains seats. And in the 2003 and ’06 elections, the 120 Knesset seats were divided between 12 parties. (Nineteen more were on the ballot but fell short of the 2% threshold for representation.) The party that “won” the 2006 elections controls less than 25% of the legislature. In a situation like this, government-forming becomes a trickier business. The leader of the party that gets the most votes becomes prime minister, and attempts to form a government by piecing together a coalition of smaller parties. Together, such an association can vote as a majority block, but, not surprisingly, these coalitions can be hard to hold together.
It took Apollo 11 about 72 hours to reach the Moon.
WHEN GOVERNMENTS COLLAPSE
Coalition governments last until the least-satisfied party involved decides to withdraw its support. This usually means that the prime minister no longer controls enough votes to get anything done. When this happens, most parliaments will hold a “vote of no confidence” in the prime minister, and the government is said to have “collapsed.” In most cases, this leads to the dissolution of parliament and a new round of general elections.
Several European governments collapsed in 2008. Belgium’s prime minister offered to resign when he saw that the five-party coalition government he’d spent nine months building was unable to work together on key issues facing the country. In Austria, an uncomfortable alliance between the two dominant parties ended when one of them pulled out of the governing coalition in a bid to force new elections. And in Italy, the 20-month old Prodi government lost a vote of no confidence and was replaced by a new coalition headed by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
LAME DUCKS AND MIDTERM ELECTIONS
Majority governments are more stable than coalitions and are usually able to call elections at a time that is politically advantageous for them—when they think they stand a good chance of retaining power. Sometimes, a prime minister can even step down and be replaced without new elections being held. This happened recently in the U.K. in 2008, when Tony Blair resigned as head of the Labour Party. Because the party still
controlled Parliament, they simply chose a new party leader (Gordon Brown), who then became the new prime minister.
To understand how this differs from a presidential system, compare it with what was going on in the U.S. in 2006: The Democrats took control of Congress—despite the fact that there was still a Republican president in office with two years left in his term. Under a parliamentary system, this couldn’t happen, because whoever controls the legislative branch of the government (parliament) also controls the executive (the prime minister).
Lucky or unlucky? March 13, 1998, was a Friday the 13th with a full Moon and a lunar eclipse.
MINISTERIAL VS. PRESIDENTIAL
Both systems have their pros and cons. Advocates of parliamentary democracy point out that it is more responsive to social and economic changes. If a prime minister makes an unpopular decision and loses his base of support, he faces a swift removal from office—unlike the American president, who can lose both popular and congressional support and still serve out the remainder of his term.
On the other hand, in situations where political coalitions are difficult to build and maintain, critics charge that parliamentary governments can be unstable. Italy is the most-common example of this: Since becoming a parliamentary republic at the end of World War II, Italy has had 62 governments in 62 years. To be fair, that doesn’t mean that there is no functional government in Italy, just that there is a high turnover rate at the prime minister’s office. (They’re still a highly developed modern democracy with the seventh-largest economy in the world.)
The relative stability of a fixed-term presidential system is not without its shortcomings, either. In the U.S., five of the last seven presidents have been forced to work with a Congress controlled by the opposition party. Critics complain that partisan bickering in such situations can lead to legislative gridlock—as it did in Washington in 1995, when the Republican-controlled Congress and the Democratic president (Bill Clinton) couldn’t agree on a budget and the federal government actually shut down all nonessential services for 26 days.
GOD SAVE THE QUEEN
The boundaries that define president and parliament can get even fuzzier. Some presidential governments also have a prime minister (such as France, Egypt, South Korea, and Russia), and some parliamentary governments also have a president (Germany, India, Italy, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh).
Highest number in the language of the Yancos tribe of the Amazon: 3.
And then there’s the Queen of England. The U.K. is a constitutional monarchy, which means that it is has a democratic government that evolved over time out of an absolute monarchy (see “The Magna Carta,” page 429). Over hundreds of years, the kings and queens of England gradually lost their political power to parliament. Today, the queen is a figurehead—she plays the same role in former British colonies like Canada and Australia—though she does so through an appointed governor-general who acts as her representative. The emperor of Japan has a similar job in his country.
READ WITH CARE
So when you read the paper or listen to the news, remember that no two governments are exactly alike, and that the word “government” itself can have multiple meanings depending on the political system being described. Kings, queens, presidents, and prime ministers play different roles in different countries, and “democracy” comes in different shades. The easiest way to understand international news stories is to check a current almanac or the Internet for background information on a given country. Give it a try and impress (or annoy) your friends with your informed observations about the state of the world. Oh, and vote for Uncle John for President in 2012.
MEEP MEEP!
Here are a few of the contraptions that Wile E. Coyote ordered from the ACME company in his futile attempts to capture the Roadrunner.
• ACME Atom Re-Arranger
• ACME Bat-Man’s Outfit
• ACME Female Road-Runner Costume
• ACME Invisible Paint
• ACME Iron Bird Seed
• ACME Junior Explosive Kit
• ACME Dehydrated Boulders
• ACME Little Giant Do-It-Yourself Rocket-Sled Kit
• ACME Earthquake Pills
• ACME Super Speed Vitamins
• ACME Giant Rubber Band
• ACME Jet-Propelled Unicycle
• ACME Instant Girl
• ACME Anvil
• ACME Triple Strength Fortified Leg Muscle Vitamins (Family Size)
Country with the highest percentage of its population in jail: the United States, with 3.2%.
THE ORIGINAL DUNGEON
MASTERS, PART II
Here’s the second installment of our story on one of the biggest game fads of the 20th century. (Part I is on page 393.)
GETTING ORGANIZED
As much fun as Dave Arneson’s game—Blackmoor—was to play, it still wasn’t very organized. It would have been difficult for new players to learn to play such a complicated and innovative game, let alone host their own sessions without Arneson there to explain everything. It took Gary Gygax’s organizational skill to boil the game down to a coherent set of rules that anyone could follow—complete with lists of monsters, character types (such as fighters, clerics, wizards), weapons, spells, and so on. But what rules! Gygax’s first draft was 50 pages long. After sending it out to a few dozen gamers for their input, he revised and expanded it to the 150-page version that became the first commercial edition of the game.
HIGH ROLLERS
It was at about this time that Gygax finally found a solution to a problem with dice games that had annoyed him for years: When two six-sided dice are rolled together, the odds of getting a 6, 7, or 8 are much greater than the odds of rolling a 2 or a 12. Gygax wanted the odds of getting each number to be the same. In the past, he had accomplished this by having players draw numbered poker chips from a hat. But pulling poker chips out of a hat was a bit clunky for a game that was going to be sold to the public.
Gygax found his solution while flipping through a school supply catalog. The common six-sided die is a regular polyhedron—a solid figure with identically shaped and sized sides (in this case, a cube with six sides). When he found 4-, 8-, 12-, and 20-sided regular polyhedrons in the catalog, he decided to use them as dice along with the conventional six-sided dice. (Dungeons & Dragons also uses 10-sided dice, but they’re not regular polyhedrons).
Plants with the smallest seeds: orchids. It would take about 1.25 million of them to equal one gram.
DYNAMIC DUO
At this stage, the game was known by the working title “Fantasy Game.” Apparently neither Gygax nor Arneson thought “Black-moor” was descriptive enough or had enough marketing pizzazz to work as the new game’s title, so that name was given to a scenario within the game instead. Gygax thought a two-word title would work best, so he wrote up a list of words that described or were related to the game—monster, journey, dragon, adventure, quest, dungeon, treasure, and so on—and paired them in different combinations. Then he asked friends and family members to pick the pairs they like the best. Gygax credited his four-year-old daughter with picking the pair that became the game’s official title. “Oh, Daddy,” she told him, “I like Dungeons & Dragons the best!”
FOR SALE
Finding a publisher turned out to be a lot more difficult than picking a title. When Gygax pitched Dungeons & Dragons to Avalon Hill, the biggest publisher of war games in the United States, they didn’t know what to make of it. A game with no opponents? No real winners and losers? No definitive ending? And what about all those weird dice? Dungeons & Dragons had strayed so far from its military origins that executives at Avalon Hill didn’t even recognize the game, let alone understand it. They passed.
Gygax decided that he had no choice but to publish the game himself. Together he and a childhood friend named Don Kaye pooled a few thousand dollars and founded a company called Tactical Studies Rules, or TSR for short. They printed 1,000 copies of the game, which went on sale in January
1974 for $10.00, plus an additional $3.50 for the dice. (Arneson received royalties for co-creating the game but did not join or invest in TSR.)
THE ADVENTURE BEGINS
Dungeons & Dragons caught on with college students first. It spread from school to school by word of mouth—it had to spread that way, because after printing the game, TSR didn’t have any money left to spend on marketing or publicity. Then it began to trickle down to high school and junior high school students, as the college kids came home and taught the game to their younger siblings.
Think your vote doesn’t count? Officially, George W. Bush beat Al Gore by 537 votes in 2000.
The first printing of 1,000 copies sold out in just seven months. When another 5,300 sold in less than a year, TSR ordered another 25,000—this at a time when Avalon Hill’s best-selling game ever had sold only 10,000 copies. As impressive as these sales figures were, they represented only a fraction of the total number of people who were playing the game. Bootleg photocopies of Dungeons & Dragons outnumbered official copies by as much as two to one in the early years. While this would have been a problem with other games, TSR didn’t mind, because these bootleg dungeon masters were introducing thousands of new players to the games. Many would go on to buy legitimate copies of their own.
SCANDAL!
By 1979 TSR was selling more than $4 million worth of games, dice, and other Dungeons & Dragons accessories a year, and sales were predicted to nearly double over the next 12 months. Then in August of 1979, a troubled Michigan State University student named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared into the steam tunnels underneath the school and was not seen again for weeks. Egbert was a Dungeons & Dragons fan, and rumors began to circulate that he’d gone into the tunnels to have a real-life dungeon experience. He was either still down there living out his fantasy, the story went, or had gotten lost or killed trying to find his way back to the surface.
Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader Page 54