Waiting

The political news on the television grows more strident daily, empty-headed candidates posing with bland, slogans so utterly vague as to be meaningless, presented as brilliant insights,illustrative of the kind of representation to be expected from the empty-headed ones. Liberals protest,seeking approval to demonstrate general pique and dissatisfaction with the current officials failure to deliver instants total gratification unable to take the long view. The malady of youth and inexperience.

Learning to wait is an acquired skill is well understood by us older folk. The patience accumulated over a lifetime now serves. With nothing much to really do, one must do a lot of waiting. Waiting with style is a new art form.

There is the small waiting, like for a traffic light to change, now more easily tolerated than formerly but then there is no longer any urgency in where I am going or when I get there. Then there is the slightly more prolonged waiting, as in a doctor’s waiting room (appropriately named ) but here growing impatience can be forestalled by a good book. (Something I am now never without after viewing most M.D.’s magazine offerings (Yachting World, Golfing, Forbes, Fortune, a subtle “in your face”.)

Then there is the ultimate waiting which some of us try to embrace with patience and understanding, - at least resignation and dignity - while some hide in busy work, diversion and denial - as if the party was to last forever and that long sought - instant, total gratification somehow never arrived although we all waited for that in our own way - some quietly, some with growing impatience - but still waiting - but somehow it continues to elude. It is an illusion - the gratification is in quietude which comes from within neither instant nor total - but grows with waiting.

Dreams

Freud wrote that dreams have three basic functions; to review recent events, to review long term events and issues, and , to keep the dreamer asleep. Recently I have experienced a number of dreams which seem to have yet another purpose - to clean out the remote corners of memory as if a “spring cleaning” was in progress. Ancient, and seemingly insignificant encounters and concerns are dredged up and woven into some bizarre fabric or narrative. People encountered only once, people whose names cannot be recalled nor probably were never committed to memory, now parade across the mirror of my sleeping mind, clamoring for attention and assuming roles of importance, which never existed in my reality.

Rather than resort to Sigmund’s “Dream Work,” I prefer to improve my own understanding as the reason for the appearance of these remote “bit players” in my nightly productions. I suspect I am in the process of reorganizing many recorded understandings, imposing new insights on old confusions and rejecting analyses which served for a time but now seem incorrect, ersatz “band aids” which no longer serve their original purpose.

I think the engine for this reexamining, the prime mover, as it were, is a need to replace compromises with new , honest understanding, sweeping out old deals I made with myself for the sake of expediency, and replacing those data with a new, more honest understanding of old events and old decisions. In many cases my old memories, highly protective once, are no longer accurate nor correct recollections, and with the remove of the need to protect myself from painful realities of the past I can run the data through a new examination.

Just what all this has to do with the old, barely remembered, cast of characters I am unsure but I suspect it will fall into place.

Buchanan

This weekend C-Span 2, Book TV broadcast was a rare threat of the double barreled bullshit of Pat Buchanan; a fraudulent historian repacking the old Irish-American anti- British bias in his latest effort in demonstrating that Winston Churchill was the pivotal cause of World War II, and a simultaneous display of his so-called historical gun collection, a pile of bogus - glitzed up, gun-of-the-month offerings of the NRA - the ultimate sucker bait for those who never served nor carried a combat weapon and think they are buying “history.”

Firstly, as to the history, Buchanan displays a large wall of writings of other writers, many of them looking spanking new, dust covers undisturbed - the collection presented as his resources for his anti-Churchill offering. One would question whether Pat is old enough to actually read all of these tomes page by page, but they are clearly some of the sources for some delicate “cherry picking” which he quotes to support his bogus analysis of history. I could not have found a more flagrant example of the abuses described in Margaret MacMillan’s “Dangerous Games” subtitled “the uses and abuses of history”

For example, his comments on Hitler’s Mien Kampf; “of course it was full of anti-Semitic stuff, but it was badly organized, needed an editor.” Thus he dismisses the dire warnings of history, searching instead for some obscure reference which would demonstrate Churchill’s awareness of Hitler’s organizational skills as evidence of Winston’s culpability in causing the war.

Similarly, his so-called system seems excessively with triple checking the precision of quotes and punctuation in his “cherry picked” samples of scholarship that the overall significance, or lack thereof, of the tidbits he advances in support of his thesis.

All of this passing as the dedicated scholar, (his insider Nixon connections advanced collaterally to buttress is credentials of sincerity.)

The gun collection is almost a Freudian ratification of is ability of deception and self-deception, each glass boxed, engraved, and overly ornate and overdecorated piece a supposed duplicate of the piece carried by Rommel, Kaiser Wilhelm, and even a LeMat of “JEB Stuart”, the “cherry” of his collection. A more bogus book of the month club styled collection never existed. What a crock - he goes to some length explaining that a Walther P-38 is not a Luger, something self-evident to even a casual observer, then argues that his replica of the famous Ned Buntline, with it’s 12’ barrel was worn as a sidearm rather than a saddle gun. Yet here again, Pat puts himself forward as an expert, pointing to his glitzy, barely shootable replica collection as proof of his expertise - What a Bozo !!

Now appearing on TV as a noted historian and political pundit.

The Amnesiac Party

Some of the arguments advanced by certain members of the Republican party recently suggest that there is an outbreak of amnesia in their ranks.

Tax cuts for the very rich is advanced as a cure for the loss of jobs, a sure fire way to create new business and have a trickle down of wealth, creating new business and job opportunities in the process. Yet not too long ago, supply-side and trickle down economics, as advanced by David Stockman as Reagan’s director of OMB led to greater and greater deficits and was finally rejected by Reagan and later rejected by Stockman himself, has been completely forgotten.

At a recent news conference a Republican enthusiast, repeatedly asked the White House communications director whether the President would give Bush credit for the “surge” in discussing the end of combat activities in Iraq. Anyone seeking such acclaim for the “surge” must have forgotten Bush’s responsibility for causing the unnecessary war, manipulating the country and the press by withholding critical facts and arguing for the invasion of a country which posed no threat to America, all of which is generally now acknowledged, is either politically tone deaf or suffering from an extreme case of historical amnesia.

De ja vu all over again.

Critical Balance

During 50 years as a lawyer I have served as campaign manager for a Democratic state representative, a speech writer for a Republican U.S. Congressman and Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, a legal advisor to an Ambassador and a county attorney for a county commission. As such I have been involved in government on all levels, Federal, State and local and have seen both good government and misguided government in action and learned to tell the difference.

Good government requires a critical balance be maintained between competing factions and points of view. Vigorous disagreement and the airing of difference has been one of the hallmarks of our healthy democracy, with give and take and sensible compromise resulting in beneficial legislation and policies. Obdurate obstructionism, such as we have witnessed in our Congress for the last several years, serves no positive purpose except to paralyze government and lead people to the erroneous conclusion that our system is broken.

In their effort to make Obama and the Congress look bad for the last 2 years, the Republican party have pursued such a course of conduct, intent only on creating issues for campaigning purposes without regard to the needs of the people and the gravity of the crisis they have fomented and prolonged.

Arguing for bipartisanism while consistently refusing to participate in any realistic attempt to achieve compromise, arguing for capitulation as the price of cooperation and then blandly contending that the Democrats have “controlled” Congress for the last 4 years is the worst kind of dissembling.

With the inability to pass any legislation over a threatened filibuster without 60 votes, and faced with a consistent Republican refusal to do other than vote NO unless some crippling amendments are agreed to, and to now argue that the Democrats controlled Congress is the height of insincerity and deceit.

The country and its citizen’s deserve better. Until we restore the critical balance and the party out of power resumes the role of loyal opposition rather than seeking to win at any cost, we can expect little progress toward resolving some of our nation’s problems.