Collared and chained to one another, the peoples’ representatives goose-step their way to American mediocrity.
50 YEARS OF PARTY LINE VOTING
The blue and red dots visualize the number of cross-over votes:
Congress 1971
Congress 2021
What was once considered “the world’s greatest deliberative body” no longer deliberates at all. Both parties now vote party line over 90% of the time. You can elect any fool to do that.
We are all products of the sources of information we choose to absorb, and those sources have latched on to what every other species on earth has always known — fear sells.
The basic difference is that no other species would ever think of screaming fire in a theater if there were not an actual fire.
Pick your source for information, doesn’t much matter which one, watch for a bit and see if they do not tell you to be worried about stuff, often with who to blame or even hate. That is what sells. That is what builds audience and cash. We are all simply wired to pay attention, to tune in when someone says, “WATCH OUT!”
Hell, information sources have become so fear mongering that Americans can no longer agree on what is right and what is wrong.
Institutions that could only have been created by a free people for protection and justice, like the Congress, the FBI and Justice Department, are now seen as enemies by millions of Americans. If abandoned, replaced by what, by whom?
A leader of the French revolution famously said, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” In today’s vernacular it might be put: “I cultivated a mob and will follow no matter where they go.”
No, there is not much fun in it, but as in all past American epochs, and I believe with this one, someone in the mob will eventually stop, then someone else, then others and a sense of common commitment to each other will win the day. It is then that sensible leaders both conservative and liberal will be exposed and politically survive, stand on solid common ground, and turn us back to reason.
My work was my passion and I always had too much of both. It was about the 25-year mark of my life’s work when a spectacular left hook, I did not know I had, smashed into the face of my University of Arizona Director.
I worked all the time, all the time. It is when I finally decided to take a break and go on a holiday that she called. She was our National Director in the main office who also oversaw a director of one of our satellites in Arizona. A string of lies forced her to fire him but he would not leave the office, apparently unwilling to take directions from a “girl” and certainly not going to be fired by one.
My vacation abruptly ended, and I had a four-hour drive to load up a bit of steam. I walked into our satellite Arizona office and told a snickering nut case to pack up and go. He did not, suggesting he would leave at the end of the day and that was all there was to it.
The next few moments are a little foggy in my memory as they always are when anger holds sway. Although I do remember getting in his face and splattering out a slop pail of unkind words. As it turned out my slop was unkind enough to get him to take a swing that glanced off the side of my head. That is when to my total surprise I discovered I have a spectacular left hook. My spot-on accuracy changed his expression and the color dripping down his pasty white face.
As I headed for home, I was pretty upset about what happened and how I had handled it. It was not the first-time I let my anger rule my actions.
As I pulled into my driveway, perhaps the most interesting, accomplished person I knew was standing outside in his yard. At 93 years, he still had youthful good looks, was one of my closest friends and my next-door neighbor. As a poor kid growing up in the Depression with nothing much for parents, Jack used to shag balls for Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, once hitched a ride into D. C. and was picked up by Eleanor Roosevelt as he worked his way through school. After earning a Yale law degree, he found himself ducking enemy fire as a Marine gunner in the South Pacific. The only time I ever heard him say he was scared and ran away, was when he turned 18 and Jean Harlow asked him up to her bedroom.
As the years rolled by Chief Justice Earl Warren asked him if he couldn’t clean up what had become some very seedy operations at the U. S. Supreme Court. His portrait still hangs there in thanks to this day. He became the President of two major universities, chairman of MetLife, as well as a couple other major international corporations. Two U. S. Presidents would be included in his circle of friends and when he relaxed a bit, he might be found having a picnic lunch with actress Jean Simmons on the hillside of the site they had chosen to build the Getty Center. To me he was Forest Gump with a brain.
Anyway, there he was, standing outside as I pulled into my driveway, and I was about to hear one of the most jaw dropping, life awakening responses to a question I would ever ask.
Visibly unsettled, I walked up to him, told him all that had happened and then asked, “Jack, you have led so many efforts, been so successful in life, struggled and achieved so much on so many fronts. How did you managed it when you were forced to fight on your way up all those hills?
He just looked at me for a moment in silence, and then softly said, “Richard, I never fought with anyone.”
As an unsoiled, wide-eyed newcomer long ago, I worked in the U.S. House, then the Senate, and finally as an elected official myself. I quickly learned a couple of things. The first was this: Few politicians know much about the issues they represent you on. Unknown to almost every citizen is that thousands of bills are offered up in congress every session — some contain a thousand pages or more. No one sits there and reads them. You don’t, they don’t, so who is running this thing?
To answer imagine this: Let’s say you are Senator YOU and the final bell rings calling you to the senate floor to vote on giving a billion dollars to widget makers, the widget makers that do read the bills and often actually draft them. As you head for the door to go vote both your phones ring. You only have time to take one call. On the first phone is that real you, just a typical voter in your district concerned about how your money is being spent. On the other phone is that new friend, a widget maker who raised one hundred thousand for your last campaign, or pushed a few thousand of his minion widget makers in your district to vote for you, or perhaps spent a half million on his own trashing your opponent so you wouldn’t get blamed for it. Which call are you going to take?
Get it?
Sometimes there is a bit of a wrinkle when widget makers fight with gizmo makers. They both fight over your dollars and when that happens many representatives feel compelled to find ways of filling both wallets. As a gawky, googly-eyed new capitol staffer, I learned how that happens like this: As a young pup, my first job in congress was to read the cards and letters from home sent to my congressman and select the kind of canned response they should receive. (NO, they didn’t always read your letters, unless of course you are a widget or gizmo maker.)
The machinery back then to answer dozens of daily letters and machine sign (NO, those signatures on their letters to you were not always originals) responses to your concerns was noisy, so I worked at night after everyone went home.
Anyway, to my point, one night I opened a letter from a lady who was furious with my Arizona congressman’s vote to subsidize cigarettes. I had not known that and became upset myself. I stayed up a few extra hours to confront my congressman at the door as he walked in the next morning. His condescending glance at me told his chief of staff, who had walked in with him, to handle this kid. Which he did, pulling me aside.
No, he said, the congressman doesn’t really support tobacco growers, but he needed Senator Jesse Helms of tobacco-growing North Carolina to support the billions in tax dollars needed to alter the course of the Colorado River so that it flows through Phoenix and Tucson instead.
Now if you’re not selling cigarettes or real-estate in a bone-dry desert, you probably didn’t know anything about this. And that is just fine with those widget makers who do, and pump millions into congressional campaigns to get billions in return.
At any rate, that was some time ago, long before people became so exasperated that the grounds became fertile for a traitor like Trump.
This piece will take almost 1 minute to read, or in other words, roughly 7 times longer than your attention span.
Franklin, the Founder I would most like to have over for dinner, said something to the effect that the older he got the less certain he was of anything.
Richard Kimball, the person I most trust, has been confused about almost everything around me and all within it, as long as I can remember. As result: I have always been a listener, sitting quietly, soaking in the monologues of those I once knew certain, knew more than me.
But now I am old and have heard an awful lot and must say, I don’t care what you think or what you have to say.
Like all my age, I am done. As with almost everyone else I have ever known, I am only interested in what age and experience have left ME to prattle about.
Back in the 1980s I promised Presidents Ford and Carter, along with 38 other national leaders of their day, that I would not utter another word about politics or much of anything else controversial for as long as it took. I would then commit my life to creating a source of abundant, accurate, relevant, factual information we could all support and to which any conservative or liberal could turn in absolute confidence.
The result, of 34 “utterless” years? Twelve thousand, three hundred and eighty-eight days of corked, unstable explosiveness about my fellow man.
This is my announcement of my coming blather. If you want to follow my missives, know this: they will be eclectic, about the present and the past, a bit of humor, and a healthy dose about YOU, along with occasional chapters of the memoir I am writing called, “The Life and Times of a Nobody.”
What I write may please and anger you in equal measure and be absorbing to no one but me. But you are welcome to follow my musings on Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016 where you will get notified when I publish a missive, or simply go to my blog (richardkimball.org), or even better, just grab a beer, kick back in your Barcalounger, and smother up the real world with another run of Leave it to Beaver.
You will see that I have already published a half dozen short pieces, while I was testing this with a handful of neighbors and family.
Few things make one more miserable than that moment in an argument when you realize you’re wrong!
For that reason, two words have never been heard in debate, “I am wrong.”
Once you invest in a point of view, you’re done. In fact, research has shown that exposing people to contradictory facts only intensified their existing beliefs, making them more inflexible. You see this reality with participants on January 6th, opposing sides on the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, at your job and in your personal life.
If you want to be persuasive and impact someone’s misguided beliefs, you’d better start by agreeing with them. Only that approach can expose any unfrozen receptors and open potential for adjustment.
It sat unnoticed and motionless in a Jasmine I planted some years ago. I might never have noticed had I not used a garden hose to spray dust off the Jasmine’s vines — it flinched. It made the slightest almost imperceptible move when the water struck, making what had been invisible to me visible for the tiniest instant and then refroze as it had for weeks, even as I passed within inches to feed my two dogs underneath it each day. I could stand a foot from its face as it stared back at me resolute, unwilling to budge.
It took a week before I understood.
For many days now, I have been in awe of its devotion and patient, sheltering courage. It was like seeingdoves for the very first time. They may not have claws and fangs, but doves are damn tough. And now, as I look out my office window and see its two young peering from the vines, readyto test a first flight, I think how lucky they are that someone cared so — cared that they get this chance to fly.
