Poorly Written Propositions Unveiled

By Evan James

Proposition A14

This proposition is not only so haughtily written and bitchy that it will lower the self-esteem of voters and give them a complex, it will also, by allowing disco-era cultural memorabilia and ideologies to flood the public school system, throw the children of California into a rhythmic fashion crisis, and they’re already so burdened as it is. It will leave their parents no right to protest the replacement of the pledge of allegiance with Patrick Juvet's disco classic “I Love America.” You can already see the helpless California mother, her face twisted into a mask of concern for the moral fabric of generations to come, struggling for words when her eight-year old son comes home with a dog-eared copy of Sappho Was a Right On Woman. “Mom,” he’ll ask, his voice a heady cocktail of brainwashed innocence, “what is self-actualization?” The mother will sigh and lean over the counter, her body twisted into a Rodin sculpture of concern, but just as she crouches down to give her progeny a good verbal lashing, a rude off-screen voice will talk over her with its own explanation of what self-actualization is and why it should remain out of our schools. As this pious mini-drama of a proposition draws to a close, we’ll be left with nothing more than a lingering sense of how faithlessly written and deeply flawed it all is.

Proposition 72F

Here we find a proposition so perversely written and deceitful as to provoke a frenzy of eyebrow raising and clucks of incredulous pity for the proposition writers of the world. It is a troublingly imperfect and redundant energy bill, rendered in language so florid and Byzantine as to drive the average voter to the nearest public library to request a copy of Proust for respite, leaving us with a shortage of both energy and available copies of Swann’s Way. After trudging through this proposition’s seething nest of dangling participles, misplaced modifiers, and generally underhanded nouns and verbs, we’ll all be left feeling like fat and foolish tourists on a European tour, taken in by gypsy sleight of hand on the Rue de la Paix and left with no traveler’s cheques, no conversational French language skills, and certainly no renewable energy.