One Utah

The George Bush administration has just finished experiencing one stage of what Aristotle termed “Hubris.” The Greek masters of comedy and tragedy told the story much better. Flying into the sun until your wax wings melt and you plummet to earth, and land miraculously, on an aircraft carrier in full battle-dress, never mind that you, and your Vice President ran away from serving their country at war, is only momentarily ecstatic. After that, there’s Hell to pay. And that’s hubris.

Saint Ignatius Loyola, a great soldier and badly wounded, in jail for months with savage wounds, and subject to deep deep depression, built an entire and brilliant spirituality around this very concept. Rather than talking of depression, he used the Aristotelian Golden Mean to see people, including himself, as basically healthy, not sick. And that beats the crap out of the psycho-babble we hear used so viciously today, to label people, permanently, as sick sick sick. St. Ignatius told himself, and all of the world since, as he formed the Jesuits along military lines, or at least metaphors, that the return to the Golden Mean could be done simply and profoundly, by recognizing, every moment of the days and sleepless nights, that every high, departing from the Golden Mean, the horizontal line of normal spiritual and psychological compassionate detachment and disposition would be followed, inevitably, by a similar low. Proportionately exact.

This really helps. I know. I suffer from sleep deprivation, after being savaged with Western medicine for 15 years.

Now, my dear sweet sisters and brothers, my fellow Jeffersonian devotees, citizens all. Let us not crow or we as sure as night follows day, will eat crow. That’s hubris. I’ve personally watched White House after White House, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt through Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to George Bush do this. And Bill Clinton, big time! And Jimmy Carter, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, who also, almost, gave us MX. Which would have destroyed the American West. And possibly, just possibly, caused a nuclear war. That’s why I voted for John Anderson, a Republican congressman who ran as an independent, and a splendid human being, who would have made an incomparably better President.

The only president, recently, who avoided this, by his natural grace and peaceableness and humility, was Gerald Ford. A vastly underrated President, in my book. And Dwight David Eisenhower, whom I’m proud to say I voted for. Though my grandfather voted for Adlai Stevenson and loved him dearly. Me too. Tough choice. That grand choice of choosing between two absolutedly spendid human beings. But I like Ike. And I sure as hell miss him now.

But hubris comes with life. Mortality. Part, I suppose, of Original Sin. Maybe the very origin of the Apple. It comes with being human. Unless grace is so present with you, think Gerald Ford, that everybody underestimates you.

And most surely hubris comes by being elected president and residing in the White House. Especially if one is born with a silver or platinum or gold spoon in his mouth. As George Bush certainly was. And, sans the White House, at least by election, on a much much lower level of Provo, Utah life, as I was, long long ago. It’s long since changed to old iron spoons, but that’s another story.

I beg you. Be Americans, not members of the Democratic Party, FIRST. Or Republicans, first. We’re the followers of George and Martha Washington, Abigail and John Adams, Thomas and Martha Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, and Alexander Hamilton. And James Madison and Mr. Monroe, and John Quincy Adams. And much later, Abe Lincoln and Mary Todd. Every one of us. Republicans and members of the Democratic Party. And isn’t it sweet to see CNN and occasionally, even FOX and Mr. Bush learn to say “Democratic Party,” and not “Democrats”, as if it was such a foul taste that he had to spit it out? Enough of my own hubris, always so close to shooting me into the center of the Sun.

Fellow Citizens. We have two critical years ahead. And for now, at least, our President, my President, is George Bush. For now… .

In two years’ time, I suggest a dream team of some party that calls itself Whigs, or the Mind Your Own Business Party, or Don’t Tread on Me. Or Libertarian. Or best of all, a truly AMERICAN PARTY. I suggest we begin to think of such a ticket. Collin Powell? Or has he been silent, or complicit, in too many lies? I know him. We couldn’t be better led. I just don’t know how badly he’s tarnished. But I do suggest we all learn to forgive and forget damned fast, lest we all be judged as we judge. Think John Kerry.

Do you really mean to tell me, CNN, whom I’m coming quickly roundly to hate, that this military hero, who came, finally, near the end of his campaign, truly to be a great campaigner, is really TOAST? For a mangled joke? There must be some big money, and I think it’s Clintonian, trying to crucify Kerry. Follow the money, honey, and you just might find the Senator from New York.

I truly don’t know. Possibly Senator Clinton would be a good president. But John Kerry dead in the water? Are you kidding me, CNN? Please please tell me YOU were mangling a joke. Or is CNN, now, a joke? As some beautiful vacuous talking head told me this morning that “John Kerry was dead.” Just where, CNN, do you get all these young pretty men and women with not a trace of a brain? Now, there I go again.

Since Duns Scotus said, and I profoundly concur, that every comparison is diabolic. Yes. What about Nancy Pelosi as Colin Powell’s running mate? We won’t care too much about who’s on top (no sexual innuendo intended. Really). Mitt Romney? Or, ominously in this theocratic state that time, and for the moment God, seem to have forgot, was all that crazy stuff about a constitutional amendment to ban both gays and polygamists from ever being allowed to marry, a conspiracy between church and state? This draft amendment, so necessarily aborted. Or if you will this hideous birth, this bastard child of some dark dark soul, so obviously doomed from the moment of it’s misconception (talk about the value of Roe v. Wade!!!!), was this most vicious assault on civil liberties that I’ve seen in seventy-one years of pretty rugged life, just a cannonball loaded with buckshot, simply meant to clear the decks, by mass murder, for the new Master and Commander?

So Romney could make his John F. Kennedy speech, sans a Mormon Al Smith, by already having others tell the world that Mormons hate polygamous folks and gay and lesbian folks? A speech you’ll hear, count on it, somewhere and sometime soon, and be, unbelievably, believed? I truly don’t know. But I damned well intend to find out, from the horse’s mouth, if that’s the right end of the horse.

Well, their I go, shooting right up to the sun. I seem to do this with every preachment. Time to sleep. I love you all.

Ed Firmage, your fellow citizen.
Salt Lake City, Utah, US OF AMERICA.
LONG MAY IT BURN AS A BEACON OF JEFFERSONIAN LIBERTY!

This entry was posted Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 4:05 pm and is filed under George W. Bush, National Politics, Peace, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.