Democracy Repackaged (In A Flexible Membrane)

 American poet John Godfrey Saxe said, more or less, 

“Laws are like sausages, they cease to inspire respect
in proportion to how much we know about how they are made.”

I knew about pork barrel politics, 
where not only is the ballot not secret 
but those in power openly procured men's votes* 
with cured meats presented for them to eat.

Bur rarely had I thought that the legislators
would take the meat processing further,
where passing of a law became like making a sausage. 
And the skin of the intestines of an ox or a sheep,
or a goat if the law was written on vellum, 
became the prefered means of disguising 
a multitude of sin and compromise.

We are what we profess to believe in. 



*women got the vote in in 1920, long after the ballot became secret.
It cannot have been pleasant for women to have neither the vote,
nor property rights, and to be de facto the property of their husbands
and fathers, but those very husbands and fathers were hardly 
the free agents that having vote suggested they might be.