Morning Thoughts: October 22, 2017

 It seems to me that each of us harbors competing impulses, let’s call them “the noble” and, toning it down some, the “unexemplary.”

Sometimes we carry them with us all through life, struggling daily as their battles rage within our hearts and minds. If we’re lucky, the—to borrow a phrase from Abe Lincoln—better angels of our nature prevail, or at least they prevail enough to get us through.

For some, the battle turns negative later in life, a phenomenon both sad and ugly to watch. History provides good examples. I once looked into the very room where Robert E. Lee, after enjoying a most exemplary military career well into late middle-age, made the decision to betray his country and participate in a murderous and barbaric effort to perpetuate slavery.

And damned good at it, he was.

Likewise, after a long and distinguished career in the military service of his country, General Douglas MacArthur seemingly lost his balance and forsook his duty to the president and people of the country, even to the point of threatening a nuclear war, or World War Three, by outright disobedience.

More modern generals have had their balance tilted by sexual desires, or a plain preference for cruelty.

Those few, the unfortunate few, who fall to the “Dark Side” after years of admirable duty, threaten to undermine the standing of their fellow officers and troops, deepening this American tragedy.

This week, a political puppet stated, in a national setting, that it is inappropriate for us mere mortals to question a four-star general, after that general himself had pretty much stated in coded terms, the very same thing, and employed falsehoods in the process.

That, my dear friends, (and pardon my “French”) is beaucoup conneries. There are more than 50,000 names on a wall in Washington D.C., many put there needlessly by the failures of a previously highly effective four-star general named William Westmoreland. Oh, that someone had questioned him, and others before him, with greater vigor.

It is only my personal opinion, and ad hominem attacks will not prevail against it, but I believe that our current president doesn’t understand the extent of the structural damage that occurs in promoting such a lapse of moral balance, a changing of allegiances Anakin Skywalker-style so to speak.

Professional wrestlers do it all the time, after all.

I’ll just close with the words of Sir Francis Bacon, perhaps a better moral guide than Hulk Hogan:

“He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.”

Let us all root for the better angels.