Surely, one of the most pernicious, disgusting and damaging ideas in American life is the concept of "role model." God save us from the role model.
Kids were supposed to idolize Babe Ruth, John F. Kennedy, and the whole idea of The President, as if these are ideal human beings to be emulated.
How much better we would be as parents to teach our children that no man is worthy of idolizing, that every man has weaknesses, and likely more weaknesses than strengths, but that each human being has the potential to do something so positive we can look past his many weaknesses and admire the good thing or things he has done and we can revere, not the man, but the accomplishment.
So when so many people said it would be wonderful if Hillary Clinton won because then little girls could know that one day they, too, could grow up to be president, I would retch. Whether she won and became President or not, every little girl can grow up to be President, especially if her parents are rich and driven. The fact is, as John Adams once said, "No man who ever held the office the Presidency would congratulate a friend on having attained it."
Women--some women--have railed against their perception of Donald John Trump as a man who views women as sexual objects. Compared to his predecessors, Trump is prepubescent, and now at 70, it's hard to say exactly how he views women.
Warren Harding, a man of limited intellectual capabilities who looked like Hollywood's image of a President, loved having sex with a teenager, Nan Britton, in White House closets. Lyndon Johnson had a buzzer installed in the White House so the Secret Service could warn him when Lady Bird was approaching, so he could get rid of whatever woman he was currently indulging, and John Kennedy, well you needed a program to keep track of the players in his sexual follies. Not that testosterone driven behavior is a bad thing, but it's no virtue either. Franklin Roosevelt had his Missy and Eisenhower his Kay Summersby. If power attracts women, and men have testosterone, whether he is David Petraeus or the paralytic FDR, the man will not pass up an opportunity. So what?
There are worse things a man can be than interested in women.
Woodrow Wilson was an unreconstructed racist who did not believe women had the intellectual capacity to be trusted with the vote, who sent federal troops to Colorado to kill striking miners. And Richard Nixon--gads! Talk about a bundle of pathology. Donald Trump's narcissism pales in comparison to the paranoid mess that was Nixon. George W. Bush was simply not bright enough to see the trap laid for him by Osama Bin Laden. Lyndon Johnson was not smart enough to see that Vietnam was a quagmire. Herbert Hoover was not smart enough to see the bankruptcy of the idea that Americans could lift themselves up out of the Depression by hard work without government action.
What we should extol in the man in the Oval Office, is not his moral rectitude, as we see moral rectitude, but his capacity to see through to what will work for the country, to navigate the ship of state past the land mines beyond what will sink it.
"The West Wing" encapsulated the idea of a good man in the Presidency, a fundamentally decent, loving, funny, intelligent person, Josiah Bartlet, an ideal which in real life has been approached only once in the last 100 years--by Barack Obama. Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, he only got the chance for a 2 year Presidency. He made the most of it, but the Tea Party cut the legs out from under his Presidency and he spent 6 years simply dancing around the obstacles the Constitution laid in his path. He could not even get Gitmo closed, hard as he tried. That blight on the history of the United States of America, that monument to our fear, our willingness to abandon principles, to say to the world, "We don't really believe in what our Constitution says." If Gitmo proved anything about the American Presidency, it was that the Oval Office is a very weak office. The founding fathers were careful to construct it that way, and after 227 years, the American President may be called the leader of the free world, the most powerful man in the world, but that only refers to our nuclear arsenal, not to the actual power of the office.
Kids were supposed to idolize Babe Ruth, John F. Kennedy, and the whole idea of The President, as if these are ideal human beings to be emulated.
How much better we would be as parents to teach our children that no man is worthy of idolizing, that every man has weaknesses, and likely more weaknesses than strengths, but that each human being has the potential to do something so positive we can look past his many weaknesses and admire the good thing or things he has done and we can revere, not the man, but the accomplishment.
So when so many people said it would be wonderful if Hillary Clinton won because then little girls could know that one day they, too, could grow up to be president, I would retch. Whether she won and became President or not, every little girl can grow up to be President, especially if her parents are rich and driven. The fact is, as John Adams once said, "No man who ever held the office the Presidency would congratulate a friend on having attained it."
Women--some women--have railed against their perception of Donald John Trump as a man who views women as sexual objects. Compared to his predecessors, Trump is prepubescent, and now at 70, it's hard to say exactly how he views women.
Warren Harding, a man of limited intellectual capabilities who looked like Hollywood's image of a President, loved having sex with a teenager, Nan Britton, in White House closets. Lyndon Johnson had a buzzer installed in the White House so the Secret Service could warn him when Lady Bird was approaching, so he could get rid of whatever woman he was currently indulging, and John Kennedy, well you needed a program to keep track of the players in his sexual follies. Not that testosterone driven behavior is a bad thing, but it's no virtue either. Franklin Roosevelt had his Missy and Eisenhower his Kay Summersby. If power attracts women, and men have testosterone, whether he is David Petraeus or the paralytic FDR, the man will not pass up an opportunity. So what?
There are worse things a man can be than interested in women.
Woodrow Wilson was an unreconstructed racist who did not believe women had the intellectual capacity to be trusted with the vote, who sent federal troops to Colorado to kill striking miners. And Richard Nixon--gads! Talk about a bundle of pathology. Donald Trump's narcissism pales in comparison to the paranoid mess that was Nixon. George W. Bush was simply not bright enough to see the trap laid for him by Osama Bin Laden. Lyndon Johnson was not smart enough to see that Vietnam was a quagmire. Herbert Hoover was not smart enough to see the bankruptcy of the idea that Americans could lift themselves up out of the Depression by hard work without government action.
 |
| Smart enough to decline the Presidency |
What we should extol in the man in the Oval Office, is not his moral rectitude, as we see moral rectitude, but his capacity to see through to what will work for the country, to navigate the ship of state past the land mines beyond what will sink it.
"The West Wing" encapsulated the idea of a good man in the Presidency, a fundamentally decent, loving, funny, intelligent person, Josiah Bartlet, an ideal which in real life has been approached only once in the last 100 years--by Barack Obama. Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, he only got the chance for a 2 year Presidency. He made the most of it, but the Tea Party cut the legs out from under his Presidency and he spent 6 years simply dancing around the obstacles the Constitution laid in his path. He could not even get Gitmo closed, hard as he tried. That blight on the history of the United States of America, that monument to our fear, our willingness to abandon principles, to say to the world, "We don't really believe in what our Constitution says." If Gitmo proved anything about the American Presidency, it was that the Oval Office is a very weak office. The founding fathers were careful to construct it that way, and after 227 years, the American President may be called the leader of the free world, the most powerful man in the world, but that only refers to our nuclear arsenal, not to the actual power of the office.
Phantom,
ReplyDeleteThe presidency may not, in all areas, render the office holder the most powerful person on earth, but I do think it provides more power than you describe..
In any case, I'm with the NYTimes-powerful or not-the 45th President of the United States isn't Donny- it's President Stephen Bannon...
Maud
M,
ReplyDeleteAgreed. Mr. Trump is not a President because he doesn't think policy, i.e. rules, laws, strategies, trying to change the nature of the nation. He's only interested in the deal, and business is not about values--the only value is the bottom line. He is really, in that sense, not interested in being President. But Mr. Bannon is: Mr. Bannon wants to see a nation without abortion, a country where borders are hermetically sealed, white men go to work every day with lunch pails, and English is the language and Norman Rockwell is the painter, and our Navy shows up in ports of call and the natives bow down.
America Great/White again. "Yas mastah, that's the 'Merica Ah remembers."
Phantom