A major reassessment is needed. We really do need to free our minds from conventional wisdom. All of us have been underneath a massive weight of propaganda our whole lives and much of what we think is true is false – even those of us who have done the most to break free are still largely working on the assumptions that there was some logic and decency behind the actions controlling our society this past century or more.
Trump sparked massive Establishment outrage when he placed his name on the Kennedy Center. They acted like someone had urinated on the Washington Monument. The fact that the Kennedy Center had decayed and was a mere slush fund for the Left didn’t matter…Trump was the person violating all decency by putting his name on it! But even in the debate back and forth on it – I think it is enormously funny – everyone was missing the part about whether or not there should be a Kennedy Center.
JFK was very much a Greatest Generation/Boomer phenomena. That is, it was all an act – the appearance of excellence masking a sordid and rather incompetent reality. But now the Greatest Generation is almost all gone and the Boomers are aging out. I was born in late 1964 so I’m the very tail end of the Boomers…and I’m sixty one. The Boomers who really set the tone were born fifteen and twenty years before I was…and they are pushing or over eighty. That is, there aren’t a lot of people left who care to defend that time period. Once upon a time, “where were you when you heard Kennedy was shot?” was a meaningful social benchmark…I wasn’t even a gleam in Dad’s eye at the time. You’d have to be at least 72 to have an even partially connected memory of it. To have it be really meaningful, you’d have to be eighty or more. And now we can look back and wonder just why so much angst was invested in the event?
Sure, it was a shock and, yes, significant questions persist to this day about just how it happened and why. But as for the man, himself, there isn’t much to say. A mediocre junior officer in the Navy during WWII massaged into a very media-driven political career where the showmanship far outstripped the statesmanship. My Dad was a Democrat in 1960 but he voted Nixon that year on grounds that JFK was a lightweight (though Dad had reservations about Nixon as well). That towards the end we have indicators that JFK was waking up to the fact that he was a mere facade is neither here nor there – before he could do anything to buck that reality, he was dead (and might be why he died)…and the actual legacy is not too great. Impelling us on to the Moon shot was significant but almost all the work was done after he died. Other than that, we have the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the totally blown Cuban Missile Crisis, backing down on the Berlin Wall and our increasing involvement in Vietnam as what Kennedy left us. However you slice it, this isn’t the stuff of Eternal Flames. Or Kennedy Centers.
I’ve long thought about writing a booked called Unserious Men – it would be about all the leaders of the West since prior to WWI who have simply run us up on the rocks over and over again…and who are for the most part highly honored to this day. But just taking it from the American perspective, I rate our successful Presidents since the Civil War as these:
Grant, Cleveland, McKinley, Coolidge, Reagan and Trump.
That’s it. The rest ran from incompetent to malevolent (and often both). A series of people who worked the system to climb the greased pole and wind up in the office of the most powerful man in the world. Not people who thought seriously about what was best or what theory should govern action…just work it. Fake it till you make it. Get the brass ring no matter what. They weren’t alone, of course: for each one who made it there are a dozen who twisted and turned mightily trying to climb that pole but failed in the end. On the other hand, the men I rate as successes did have a theory and wanted to see it implemented…and their political efforts weren’t directed towards getting themselves into office, but their ideas into reality. Huge difference.
One might say that we owe some respect to those who managed to get into office. I say, no. The office is a place of respect…but if a disreputable man enters it, then it is besmirched and it can only be cleaned by casting out the dirt. That is, saying what the occupant was. Defining our terms. Not letting our sense of politeness or nostalgia allow things to slide. When Trump put up those insulting placards on Biden and Obama’s pictures, that was a necessary purgative. Sure, it was also Trump’s sense of humor…but Biden and Obama are not the good guys. In office they were cruel, greedy, spiteful and incompetent. They poisoned American politics…perhaps beyond cure (though we still hope for a cure). And for no other reason than narcissism…they both of them thought they were the greatest men alive. But to be bi-partisan here, I also have great disdain for W these days…the man took the loyalty of the GOP base and simply turned his back on it. We stood up and fought for the guy for eight years. Trusted him. Invested in him. Thought he was at least trying to do the right thing. And since he left office he’s had plenty of nice things to say about the Clintons and Obamas, but when the Clintons and Obamas call us racist Nazi traitors…dead silence. That also poisons American politics…it is a grave act of omission. It is consent to having Obama poison us. And once you’re part of the conspiracy in any form, you’re totally in the conspiracy…even if you didn’t mean to be.
And it is all over the place. You take a look at the massive corruption Walz has presided over in Minnesota and you know that it wasn’t just him – it was everyone who worked with him. They all knew. And then you realize that this type of corruption has been going on for decades…so that means when the GOP had total control of the government in, say, 2005, it was going on and nobody did anything about it. Which means the GOP knew and was in on it as well. I recall that when one of Peter the Great’s ministers was caught stealing he sentence the man to be knouted (beaten with a thick leather truncheon) and it was common soldiers who did the beating…after a time, Peter ordered it to stop but the soldiers, drenched in sweat and breathing hard from their effort (they had gone at it with a will), said, “just a bit more, Little Father: he stole the bread out of our mouths!”. That is the sort of attitude we have to start taking towards these people…that money wasn’t just a figure on a balance sheet…it was your grandmother’s in home care that was denied, it’s that decaying bridge at risk of collapse, its your brown-out for lack of up-to-date power lines, it is the wounded veteran waiting ten years to get benefits, it is the peeling paint in your local school…it is your sustenance that was stolen, kicked back and remitted to Somalia and Mexico.
The condition our country is in isn’t an accident. It was deliberate. It was brought here by people who think they’re better than everyone else and this gives them a license to steal and to not care about how many people who die in the process. They need to be beaten within an inch of their lives…not given a statue. And until we start treating them as they deserve, we really can’t break the chains they’ve bound us with.






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