Don’t Panic. Amend the Constitution.
About Life, the Universe, and the Presidency
Last night, I was visited by the spirit of Douglas Adams, the famous author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who passed away much too early.
He was livid because he had predicted it — not the machines, not artificial intelligence, not even technology, but the theater.
He was angry that we were wasting such a chance. He had warned us that the people who most want to become President are exactly the ones who should not. Not because they are evil, but because they are willing. The desire itself is diagnostic.
He also had a solution.
To stay in the spirit — no pun intended — he proposed the addition of a 42nd Amendment to the United States Constitution.
I protested that there are currently only twenty-seven amendments. He dismissed this with a flick of his hand, impatient at the reminder that 42 is the ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. When I attempted to raise the obvious follow-up, he waved it aside; we never understood the question anyway.
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Then he dictated:
Section 1. Any President who demonstrably functions more effectively as a national distraction than as an executor of enumerated powers shall be deemed in violation of the Office’s implied seriousness.
Section 2. For purposes of this Article, “distraction” shall mean sustained public fixation on personality, provocation, or performative conflict exceeding measurable policy consequence.
Section 3. “Actual power” shall mean that which persists regardless of election outcomes.
Section 4. Congress shall have power to enforce this Article by briefly paying attention.
Section 5. This presumes neither malice nor incompetence. It merely observes that when spectacle becomes the primary output of the Executive Branch, something curious has occurred.
Either the President has become extraordinarily skilled at theatrical misdirection, or the public has become extraordinarily eager to be misdirected.
He did leave one warning: removal from office might, in fact, remove the wrong variable.
Because if the presidency is functioning exactly as designed, as spectacle, as lightning rod, as theater, then removing the actor changes nothing about the stage.
And then I woke up, with the uncomfortable suspicion that the haunting had not been about the President at all.
