On being of good cheer
Feb. 26th, 2008 12:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nancylebovWhen I just posted about an out(r)age, my tone was rather chipper, and there's a reason.
Earlier in the current administration (may its name be wiped out), it seemed as though a lot of my friends were despairing. America was on a vertical slide to dictatorship, though with some question of whether it would be mostly theocratic or mostly plutocratic. The country was in the hands of Rethuglicans, and membership in that party (past some date after which people Should Have Known Better) was proof of incorrigible evil.
After a while, it occurred to me that the country was showing signs of resiliance. Even a very bad administration isn't the whole story about a nation, and a political party is not completely defined by the people in charge of it. America has a lot of both individual and structural resistance to going completely bad. This was perceptible even before the balance in congress tipped.
So, while you can look at that news story and be primarily focused on how disgracefully the current administration is behaving, what I mostly see is that neither the public nor members of the administration's own party is putting up with it.
Earlier in the current administration (may its name be wiped out), it seemed as though a lot of my friends were despairing. America was on a vertical slide to dictatorship, though with some question of whether it would be mostly theocratic or mostly plutocratic. The country was in the hands of Rethuglicans, and membership in that party (past some date after which people Should Have Known Better) was proof of incorrigible evil.
After a while, it occurred to me that the country was showing signs of resiliance. Even a very bad administration isn't the whole story about a nation, and a political party is not completely defined by the people in charge of it. America has a lot of both individual and structural resistance to going completely bad. This was perceptible even before the balance in congress tipped.
So, while you can look at that news story and be primarily focused on how disgracefully the current administration is behaving, what I mostly see is that neither the public nor members of the administration's own party is putting up with it.
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no subject
Date: 2008-02-26 10:20 pm (UTC)No, our country will always be able to come up with new and interesting variations on the POTUS. People only hope that the next one will be "just like <my-favorite-potus>" (hey, there's a sitcom in there somewhere... dang, Ray & Bill are both deceased! Oh, well...). They're invariably disappointed; however, the learning curve of the herd is very close to flat, so they just keep on hoping...
(Of course, this is not to complain; we could always end up with a chimera, a POTUS that combines the attributes of prior POTUSes (POTI?). Everyone would hope for a combination of all the good stuff (the charisma of Reagan, the courage of Kennedy, the wisdom of Lincoln, etc., etc.), but we'd probably end up with a combination of the bad stuff (the morals of Clinton, the personality of Nixon, the determination of Carter.... oog)).