I’ve had a fabulous time sailing and camping. Nature provides the sanity we monkeys so desperately need. After a few days of sailing (with no more gopher interactions) I was relaxed and ready to reflect on what is becoming the second year of madness.
My thoughts turn to succession. One of the greatest strengths of America is that no president can screw up longer than eight years. (This wasn’t a problem until Franklin Delano Roosevelt welded his ass to the big chair. Thank God he finally died.)
Hmm… lets go on a tangent for a bit: FDR won his fourth term as an aging and physically frail man who hid his declining health from the populace. Toward the end he was barely able to perform his duties. Sound familiar? Does one suppose there’s anything we can learn about this in 2021?
Anyway, America created the 22nd amendment to limit any one person’s power. Taking action to limit dangerous (and successful) power grabs is what adults in functioning societies do. A republic (for those who understand the definition) can be stable.
Nothing is perfect. FDR’s twelve year, four election, powertrip, steamrolled the system. America rebounded but our system has, once again (hopefully temporarily), failed.
Something went amiss in November 2020. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. Even if you hate Orange man and got every political event you desired, you know it wasn’t clean.
We watched America’s every four years attempt to obtain “the consent of the governed” and assure peaceful succession fail. Don’t pretend otherwise. We all know it. The election failed to do what elections are supposed to do.
Does it have to burn us to ash? Maybe not. Bad succession is going to happen sometimes.
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What’s great about history is that events of 1,000 years ago aren’t clouded by emotional bullshit of the participants. I get a clearer understanding of the succession following Edward the Confessor’s passing (1066, England) than I have of Nixon’s resignation (1974, United States). Nixon’s denouement is too close to the hearts of Boomers and “journalists”. Fond memories of when they were young and virile and righteously (?) ruining a man they detest are too delicious to fade to mere facts. Fifty years have passed but aging eyes see youth through rose colored glasses. Their heroic inner story has been told and retold until the details are worn smooth. It’s a symbolic koan that may be false recollection.
I am Gen X. I neither voted for nor protested against Nixon. It’s been 50 years and I’m absolutely sick of hearing the story. A handful of Boomers got high in the mud at Woodstock and somehow this defeated “the man” and now “the man” is that very group. All this is supposed to mean something to me. Why? I grew up in a different world. There was the shadow of complete nuclear annihilation, AIDS, the war on drugs, a shitty economy, cars that sucked, and the leviathan state was growing then too. Tie wearing mas transit riders in DC imposed a fucking 55MPH speed limit on every Wyoming rancher.
That’s my time. As every Gen X person knows, nobody gives a shit about my time. But it’s why I don’t fret over Watergate. The corruption I’ve seen in my life makes Nixon’s half assed spying seem pathetic. Hillary or Obama did more shit by breakfast than Nixon’s “Plumbers” pulled in a lifetime. Nobody cares. That’s the point, memories should be personal and not mass media product shoved up some other generation’s ass. I had a walkman, a mullet, and a truck that ran on leaded gas. They were all awesome… to me. It was a great time… for me. Nobody else cares and I know that. That’s why I don’t bitch at Millenials to genuflect to my world (which they never experienced).
The Nixon thing will be clearer when the Boomers are gone. Right now seemingly every damn one of them played a key role… in everything. Obviously, that can’t be true. Most folks were just going about normal lives. Nobody wants to admit they spent the “summer of love” working at a cement plant; so nobody tells that story.
Thus, events as fact are probably very different than the story’s feeling. In the story a “movement” defeated villainous Nixon. Who knows? I personally can’t imagine journalists as the good guys. I know they think they’re a force for good and maybe that was true 50 years ago but I just can’t see it. I don’t even have books with the truth of 50 year old events. Maybe if I live much longer than every Boomer, some brave historian will write an unbiased history. And maybe I’m a Chinese jet pilot.
[Editorial note: if what I said about recent history being bent, folded, and spindled in memories of the living seems odd, consider this: Joe Biden in January 13, 2022 made a speech where he fondly remembered his arrest during the civil rights movement. As far as anyone can tell it only happened in Biden’s mind.
A grown man telling stories at a podium about something that didn’t happen to people who don’t believe it. It’s creepy! Maybe I’m an outlier but I won’t even lie about the size of the fish I caught. When Biden tells barstool stories about danger-thug Corn Pop it’s as real as the news from Lake Woebegone.
While campaigning, Biden talked about black Americans in Wilmington Delaware in 1962 as if they were Kalahari Bushmen. He says children in Delaware in 1962 were fascinated by the golden hair on his white legs. Creepy! As if people in Delaware in 1962 hadn’t seen a white man? Delaware is not Nigeria.
Incidentally, I do enjoy the comedy gold of the Corn Pop story. It reminds me of Al Bundy’s “four touchdowns for Polk High”. Fictional Al was a shoe salesman loser who actually made the touchdowns. Real life President Biden was a lifeguard in Delaware. Over the years he’s elaborated his brief stint in a generic high school summer job into a gang war. It’s both hilarious and pathetic. As a teenager I sometimes stacked hay bales. Shall I make up a story about the bear I wrestled in the hay fields?
Anyone who makes up elaborate stories about high school is someone who peaked in high school. This was the point of Al Bundy’s touchdowns.]
I think you want the 22nd amendment for presidential term limits. The 27th slightly restricts the ability of congress to give itself an over the table pay hike.
Dammit. I’ll check and fix.
Good to see you back on your stump preaching to the unwashed and unvaxed. Men of your sort are few and far between in today’s environment!
Nixon resigned in 1974. He took office as president in ’69.
Fixed.