In most countries the best and brightest go into politics. Here in the US they go into business. To quote Gore Vidal, "Why be a senator when you can buy Congress?" No, our politics attract the dumbest and the dullest. Take a look at who gets elected. They're all fuckin' stupid. They're dedicated to agendas for immediate change, but they're not capable of thinking far enough ahead. They don't think of the consequences for their actions. They only care that they did something. Let history figure out if it was good, just so long as they're remembered. But their worst feature is their devotion to traditional family values. (One man, several wives and a bunch of concubines?) They can't adapt to change.
Pop quiz, hotshot. Who was the last *great* president we had?
Biden? The jury's out still, but I'm doubtful. Trump? Don't make me laugh. Obama? He was mediocre and business as usual. Bush II? He was a nightmare. Clinton? He's a horrible person, but he was a good president. Not great, though. Bush I? He was the embodiment of a facepalm. Reagan? He was an actively shitty president who sold us out to our corporate overlords, but because he knew how to deliver a line (when will Hollywood stay out of politics?), so no one noticed. Because of him we have the current housing crisis, which is actually a *money* crisis, but . . . not now. Focus.
Carter? He was ineffectual. Ford? He was ho-hum. Nixon? He was a great *politician* but a godawful president. LBJ? He endorsed the American Nightmare(TM). JFK? He could have been our worst president. He wanted to escalate in Vietnam, not deescalate as most think. A lot of people would put him at #1 with a bullet. Him or Lincoln. Instead JFK was pretty but useless. Ike? He was more motivated to golf than to govern. Truman? He fucked us so royally that it took us 40 years to unfuck it, and we technically didn't do it on our own. Special thanks to the Soviet Union for being polite enough to economically collapse, thus letting us win the Cold War.
FDR? Yes. Now we're talking. He was the last great president. He gave us the American Empire even if his successors squandered it for literally nothing. RIP America's Greatness (1945-1950). He was such a great president that he essentially became our dictator. Not our first. That would be Lincoln. (A story for another day!)
Despite this laundry list of losers, we somehow think our presidents know best, that if they weren't smart they wouldn't be in charge. Given 45's excessive stupidity, this is a disturbing thing. Because Trump is worse than ignorant. He is *willfully* ignorant. He's the opposite of Tyrion Lannister: he does not drink and he does not know things.
We all know the quote about those who don't remember history and what they're condemned to do, but what if you *never* knew history, so it's impossible to remember it?
Remember when he said that the Founding Fathers won the Revolution by seizing the airports? That wasn't an isolated incident. The reason he was impeached the first time was because he sought Ukraine's help in finding dirt on Joe Biden's son in exchange for military aid. Col. Alexander Vindman was present for that conversation, and it was he who reported his concerns to the NSC, hence us knowing about it. He told us about a few things that Trump didn't understand about history. Apparently Trump didn't know about WWII:
Retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and Trump impeachment witness Alexander Vindman mocked the former president on Thursday for what he saw as the Republican’s limited historical knowledge, after Trump seemed to describe just learning about WWII history during a recent campaign stop.
Here's a few other things he has trouble with. He just learned Lincoln was a Republican. He thought Canada burned the White House down and even asked Justin Trudeau about it. And, well, here's a good quote from, of all things, Business Insider:
Merkel explained to Trump at the G20 summit that she participated in antinuclear protests in East Germany in the 1980s and that her colleagues in West Germany opposed stationing US missiles in Europe, the book says. The German leader "patiently and even humorously laid out all of this and how the risk of a US-Soviet nuclear war had been the all-encompassing topic of her youth," Hill writes.
Trump's conversation with Merkel "was the first time" he had "ever listened to the Europeans' perspective on the 1980s and heard why US-Russian arms-control negotiations were important to them as well," the book adds. "It was clear that none of this had ever occurred to him before," it says.
But what I truly like is this quote from John Kelly:
"He leaned over to me and whispered, 'The problem is the president doesn't know any of this,'" Kelly said, according to Hill's book. "He doesn't know any history at all, even some of the basics on the US."
I understand that I'm an oddball. I am not a historian, but whereas most of my fellow Americans have an aversion to the topic, I'm drawn to it. We must not have a president ignorant of history. We had Trump for four years, and we lucked out. He didn't fuck anything up beyond repair. But if he gets his second term, all bets are off. What's he going to do, run for reelection? If he "won" three times, why not go for FDR's record of 4? Or perhaps he can beat it with 5? Could he resist such temptation?
I know this seems petty compared to the other awful shit he's done, but history is more important than most realize. It tells us how we got into this mess, which is helpful when trying to find a way *out* of this mess.
A US president *needs* to know history. Don't put this clown back in the Oval Office.
No comments:
Post a Comment