Wednesday, July 18, 2012
There are always hubristic people whose reasons for wanting to be President of the United States seem to be only that they ought to be President. Ted Kennedy is the most notable of these people. Few actually get past the primary process & on to the November ballot. This year one will. We call him Mitt. Personally, I think he's a sociopath. I believe he was the kind of kid who would steal a candy bar from a store even though he could afford it, & when caught say he forgot about it, & by saying he forgot make that the "truth" of the matter, that he did not really intend to steal, by golly honest. Most of us would blush & stutter, guilty as charged. As an adult he does it over & over & over.
It's not just political. I flat out detest Mitt Romney. He's a compulsive liar. He appears to have zilch interest in the arts. The contrast with his father George is stark & troubling. I even think he betrays some good Mormon values rooted in 19th Century American idealism.
I wrote, "In my high school Mitt couldn't have gotten himself elected president of anything except the Jerk Club."
My step-brother, good & intelligent man I respect, commented, "you don't know that. In real life he might have been your best friend."
I commented back, "That's an impossible statement. Most of my friends wanted to get into my parents' liquor cabinet."
In reality, Mitt never would have attended our high school (my step-brother, who wasn't that at the time, was a year behind me). Mitt was too rich even to attend Pingry, the nearby expensive private prep school. My step-brother may also not remember home basketball games against Pingry, which I recall as screaming exercises in adolescent class warfare, not only by the hooting crowd, a significant portion with fathers working on auto assembly lines (earning a good buck too in those salad days for the UAW), but also by our basketball team, using jabbing elbows & insults. It would've been crazier if Pingry had a wrestling team, our school's speciality. There wasn't a whole lot of empathy for RICH FUCKING BOSSES.
I did have one fairly affluent preppy friend I'd known since kindergarten. Being an only child pushed him up a few economic steps. Large families were more the norm in our town in that era.. But one night he jumped into our backyard circular pool fully-clothed while singing "Kicks" by Paul Revere & the Raiders at the top of his lungs. Now he's a successful beer distributor in the midwest.
My step-brother at age 20 rode a big motorcycle & looked like an outlaw Abe Lincoln.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
It's not just political. I flat out detest Mitt Romney. He's a compulsive liar. He appears to have zilch interest in the arts. The contrast with his father George is stark & troubling. I even think he betrays some good Mormon values rooted in 19th Century American idealism.
I wrote, "In my high school Mitt couldn't have gotten himself elected president of anything except the Jerk Club."
My step-brother, good & intelligent man I respect, commented, "you don't know that. In real life he might have been your best friend."
I commented back, "That's an impossible statement. Most of my friends wanted to get into my parents' liquor cabinet."
In reality, Mitt never would have attended our high school (my step-brother, who wasn't that at the time, was a year behind me). Mitt was too rich even to attend Pingry, the nearby expensive private prep school. My step-brother may also not remember home basketball games against Pingry, which I recall as screaming exercises in adolescent class warfare, not only by the hooting crowd, a significant portion with fathers working on auto assembly lines (earning a good buck too in those salad days for the UAW), but also by our basketball team, using jabbing elbows & insults. It would've been crazier if Pingry had a wrestling team, our school's speciality. There wasn't a whole lot of empathy for RICH FUCKING BOSSES.
I did have one fairly affluent preppy friend I'd known since kindergarten. Being an only child pushed him up a few economic steps. Large families were more the norm in our town in that era.. But one night he jumped into our backyard circular pool fully-clothed while singing "Kicks" by Paul Revere & the Raiders at the top of his lungs. Now he's a successful beer distributor in the midwest.
My step-brother at age 20 rode a big motorcycle & looked like an outlaw Abe Lincoln.
