EVIL

 Sometimes I feel like I'm beating a silent drum but, hey … a malignant dictator has been ruling my beloved country since, as he promised, the day he took office. He has continually trashed and degraded every promise of hope and tradition we have built in this country of such promise. He is a nasty, vile, and degenerate person who rules the country for which I gave up four years of my life.

That bothers me.

There are six elected officials, elected to national office, in my state who have chosen to become politically “joined at the hips” with this creature, enabling each of his antics with their silence. A majority of our state officials frolic behind him shouting hosannas.

This bothers me.

But, people I once knew as kind, generous, patriotic, and righteous souls laud his every act because he has attacked, or promises to attack, people they don't like or ideas they don’t agree with. Many of those ideas come straight from the mouth of the Galilean. Cult members support each destructive move as long as their enemies are in the line of fire. Good people now praise evil and worship the evil one.

That's what really bothers me.

Growing Up Southern

There was a saying back home when I was a kid. If you said So-and-So had “Snakes in his boots,” it meant he lied a lot. I guess now you would say “he has snakes in his Gucci’s.”

I was thinking about this recently while I was reading through The New York Times. A couple of reporters had counted and added up, apparently, all the outright lies our current president has told in his first ten months in office. It turns out, he is the “Whopper King,” and we aren’t talking about cheeseburgers, or anything else you might imagine. We’re talking lies. Wow. The Times counted them up and even unleveled the playing field in his favor when comparing him with his predecessor. The current’s tally didn’t count mere exaggerations. The former’s even included stated intents that didn’t come to pass.

Even so, the tally was 103 in ten months for our sitting president. Many are still being repeated, both by the originator, or by his robotess press secretary. (Snakes in her Christian Louboutin’s)? By comparison, the previous president racked up a total of 18 in eight years, making him a raging amateur in the Annals of Prevarication. Further, unlike The Whopper King, Number 44 didn’t repeat falsehoods once they were disclosed. Joseph Goebbels would have been aghast. He said that’s the way to make falsehoods believed, and he knew what he was talking about.

My sainted mother would have had a thing or two to say about all this. “Somebody has snakes in his boots.” That’s what she would say. She used to say that about an uncle (by marriage) of mine, a man known for lying as well as, during infrequent periods of employment, spending his pay on liquor while his wife and children went without. This was my earliest cognizance that there were those who would turn their backs on the most dependent of those among us for our care and support. I call them “The “Anti-Beatitudes” crowd, and, personally, I don’t agree with their politics, but what the hell?

Anyway, once, this uncle was doing some work hauling slab wood for my father. It required the wearing of boots while in the field and he kept his pair on our back porch at night.

Oh yes. You can guess what I did. Early one morning before “Uncle Sorry-Ass” showed up for work, I initiated a reconnoiter to check out the veracity of this bit of southern prognostication. I was a little shy of four years old, I guess, and already showing a bent for investigative reporting. Sainted Mother caught me, questioned me, and forbade any repetition only a minute or so before the owner showed up for his boots. I had completed my analysis, though, and am sorry to say that the boots in question were unoccupied by any form of reptile, at least that morning.

I was never a strong devotee of mythology thereafter. Further, there are those among us now whom I wouldn’t trust if they told me my name was Jimmie.

Is It Just Me? October 23, 2017

Am I the only one who wishes the president’s press secretary would tone down her rhetoric? Or learn to read history?

Every time I read chief of staff Kelly’s statements from his “press conference” last week, I get a little more uneasy. “General John” came about as close to hinting at the justification for a military coup as a person could get, in my opinion. If you think it is beyond the reach of our country, read the intro to Robert Caro’s book on LBJ, Master of the Senate. His introductory section on the history of the Senate covers the explosive return of General Douglas MacArthur to the United States after being fired for rank subordination and nearly getting the U.S. into a land war with China.

It’s a scary account and possibly the closest we’ve come to a coup in the country’s history. A few cool heads in the United States Senate interceded and calmed the waters, as could have General John if he had chosen to. The general had a great opportunity to deliver to the country a healing message, a message of fellowship and harmony. Having served his country honorably, and having lost a son in an American battle, he carries much weight, and justifiably so. He could have used it compassionately and wisely. That would have gained him the blessing of being called a peacemaker as well as a soldier.

Instead, he divided us further and disparaged, with outright falsehoods, the service of an elected legislator of our country.

Our leaders, other than the occasional Joe McCarthy, didn’t use to do that. We disagreed but carried on our live without ad hominem attacks on anyone who disagreed. That has increasingly become the norm. The public arena has become more like a World Wrestling Federaltion affair than the Senate of Dale Bumpers and David Pryor. What must our young  people be thinking?

And now, we don’t need a political sycophant telling us that it is inappropriate to question a four-star general, or any other high-ranking official.

I guarantee you that I’m going to start paying closer attention. I trust you’ll join me. In the meantime, we can all wish for a press secretary who reads history and perhaps understands it.

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.