QUESTIONING: Puritans Rule!

I am speaking very loosely indeed on this one, as the situation is in early days, and more will emerge, no doubt, of details that will skew the whole picture one way or another. Probably both.  

David Petraeus did a bad thing, he cheated on his wife, a thing to deplore.  Not an unusual thing, not among husbands, not among leaders of nations, not in the history of the world.  Pretty damn common, actually, and it was a very common thing to do. A very human thing to do.  

David Petraeus has served this country well, he is a man of greatness, in many ways. His contributions to American, to the world, perhaps, have been of note, both in his military service, and his work heading the CIA.

Only in America, this nation that grew from some life-hating seeds of Puritan ethics and judgementalism, does such a man have to commit professional and political harakiri for this kind of error in judgement.

Clinton did it, then lied and tied the country in knots for a while.  He's doing okay.

Roosevelt did it, and probably everyone around him knew it, likewise, John Kennedy, but the nation only found out years later. The nation handled the news.

A number of politicians in more recent years have had affairs that were discovered, and while some of them walked away from their careers in disgrace, and lost all credibility with their public, others said, simply, Yes, I did it, it was dumb, I was dumb... and held onto their careers.

I wonder--Should this man be dismissed from his post, because of this exercise of deplorable judgement in his personal life? Suspended for a while, maybe, to sort out with his wife and family and himself, to get back on track.  Can we afford to give up one of the leaders who has shown much better judgement in other areas, and kept us on track as a nation? It is not as if we actually know him or his wife or the Other Woman, or any details of the situation.  

A revelation of impropriety may expose many areas of corruption in a person's life. Or it might be a complete anomaly. I am thinking, at this point, anomaly. Time will tell.  

I would not have accepted David Petraeus's resignation quite yet.

CELEBRATING: This Time...

When my daughter woke me this morning with the news of the election results, I felt a literal lightening off my heart.  

I am more than happy, I'm delighted that Americans leaned just far enough my way, that I am celebrating this morning, instead of angry, resentful, disheartened, dismayed...

I'm sorry that so many others are feeling that way today. 

Smart or right or helpful, or not, we have become so tightly polarized to Parties and particular ideas and people, that the day after Election Day is not just an 'oh well' day for those whose causes and candidates lost.  I don't think it is helpful.  On the contrary, we remain angry and polarized for some time, even all the way to the next Election Day.

How do we all, winners and losers, take that gracious step back, and see in clearer focus that one man, one idea, one term or two, cannot destroy this nation? We have so many safeguards, and we have so many voices, so many opportunities to shape our world, and it is ideas and beliefs that impel us one direction or another: there are few absolutes in the world, and even fewer in a society like ours that is founded on freedoms of belief and speech.

Our success as a society and as a nation lies in our ability to work with what we have, whether it is natural, cultural or personal.  We are weakened when we expend our energy fighting against what we have: King Canute stood on the shore all day, ordering the sea to retreat until he prevailed. 

Sure, the tide eventually went out, it always does--but what a waste of a day!

I will try to remember all this, next time the tide turns again, and my guy, my causes don't do so well.

SIGHING: If campaigns could only tell the uncorrupted truth,

If all, or at least the vasty most of us, could see through the blandishments and manipulations, the contrivances and devices made to persuade, designed to trip alarms and get us acting from fear instead of fact...  If only we all knew how easily our feelings and minds are managed, because of the many things we don't know, but think we do... If we could see our own susceptibilities and guard against their exploitation...

But, no.  

I am sure it was the same in Pericles' Athens, and in the Roman Republic: that votes are to be gotten by whatever means, vote and voter are nothing sacrosanct: the process has little truth in it, except that we are, in the end, stuck with reality.

COMMENTING: Vote for Substance

Some of us have committed our votes already, gotten it out of the way. Why wait? I knew long ago that nothing was going to change my opinion of the only viable choice, and subsequent events, words and debates could not influence my vote further.

Some of these things I have asserted before:

No president we ever elect will be perfect or ideal.

No president will ever be best in every arena he or she must enter over the four years of the office. 

Sometimes, we must look most at who we believe will do the least damage, or who has the strongest principles, or the most or least objectionable advisors. We can observe how one may be of greater or lesser influence in the world around us: we may be a large part of a continent, but we are not an island, isolated from all else passing on the planet.

The next President will not have nearly the power that we are misled to believe, to fulfill the promises of campaigning: It takes Congress and others working with or despite the President, and the sense or lack of it, of the American people, to determine how our economy will function. A President cannot pass laws alone, or decide all policies alone. 

A body of antipatriots has proven its ability to sabotage the best offerings of a President, standing by its own stated declaration that their entire effort from the day of his election would be aimed at defeating him in the next. 

We are all witness, aware of it or not, that a single truth out of original context, and spoken of by master manipulators, such as the people who 'handle' candidates, and candidates themselves, can become lies.  Lying by misquote, by manipulation of truth, is the hallmark of campaigning, especially by those who lack substance of their own.

Campaigning for office is not the office itself.  Persuading voters to vote for them is a candidate's job, but as we've seen this very week, it is not the job of the office itself. We've seen the President be President when and where we needed him to be. His choice in that matter, to drop the campaigning in order to do the job that is his for at least one more week, shows what we can count on in the future.

We have spent four years training a man of integrity, to do the job, we have some notion which way he will jump on a problem. And many of the things that are not as better as we'd wish them to be, were never in his power to make that much better. He announced from the beginning the intent to be everyone's President, not just his own Party's, and that in itself was refreshing.  He did not appreciate, I think, just how cemented-in-place were the partisans he had to deal with, how much power they had, to sabotage, create obstacles, and lie, without accountability.

From a lame field of dogmatic irrationalists, America was offered... one of them.  Not one in that field has the capacity or qualifications to be President.  That candidate has been 'handled' this way and that, to appear qualified, to appear truly willing and able to represent the whole American public.  And a lot of people--about half of the voting citizenry, it appears--are buying into it, because it is so much what they want to be true.  

If that candidate wins, he truly will represent this nation which seemingly and appallingly is passing from a democratic republic that we call Democracy, to a land of Idiocracy, where ignorance is celebrated, science and knowledge are despised, and entertainment inspires more votes than political realities.

Yes, I voted for Obama.  There is no other rational choice. 

I am not a Democrat.  If the Republicans ever put up a rational, capable candidate with integrity and substance, he or she just might get my vote. But this time... they have not done that. Not even close.

PONDERING: Why Vote?

I have been thinking about why I still get passionate about my electoral choices, and what really does matter, with who we elect to high office. Some say it won't make any difference, one is the same as the next.  But it does matter.

Whoever is President gets to shape the Supreme Court, should any vacancies occur.  That can matter.

The President speaks to the rest of the world, establishes, and maintains the presence and image of this nation among other nations.

The President makes decisions that shape our course into the future, and into history.

Who is President can shift the balances of our potentials as a nation: whether we will remain competitive in the sciences, for instance, with the rest of the world, and in other areas of education: the past 50 years, while we have rested on our laurels as walkers-on-the-moon, assuming that our scientists would keep us first, the educating of the next generations of scientists have been sliding, and we are no longer first, whether we know it or not.

Who will we go to war with next, and for what?  When will we bring our fighting troops home?  How will this nation reward those soldiers, when they come home wounded, exhausted, mentally and emotionally battered? The President will decide a lot of what kind of nation we will be, and choose what battles we fight, in the world and at home.

We have had fools for President before.  The history of the Presidency can supply a list of flaws and blind-spots and misguidance from its very beginning.  In every election season we have had idealists, crooks, visionaries, puppets, fanatics, dreamers, hard-headed, large-hearted candidates... and some of them, we've elected, and the nation has survived.  But survival is not what it's about: It is about what and who we are, what we stand for, what we strive for, what we allow and what we don't.

And I think most of us who are passionate about who's running and who wins, who takes on the challenges and uses his (or her) truths and beliefs to shape the national path, we care about those things. 

No President will ever be the best person for the job, in everyone's eyes.  We don't need perfection. We don't even need the same qualities all the time. The job isn't the same from season to season, so we need one who can adequately answer the needs of the immediate and foreseeable times.  We don't need perfect answers, either, for that matter: We need steps in the most positive direction. We need someone we can trust...  Not to be unchangeable, but to not lie to us.

We need a President who is likely to get us into the least amount of trouble, as well as one who can get us out of the troubles we are already in.

That's what we are voting for.  That's why so many of us still bother to vote.

That, and because if we give up the privilege of voting, we give up the privilege of complaining about the results.

HISTORY REDUX: The Infamy of the Borgias

I have finally reached that time in life when I mention a name, a person out of history or even the current events and common knowledge of my own generation, and am greeted with a blank stare, or an almost prideful declaration: Never heard of em!  As if it is some kind of proof of youthful superiority to be ignorant of the Older Generation's icons.

When I was a kid, everyone knew the name and deliciously dreadful reputation of Lucretia Borgia! I mean, she was only one of the most notorious wives out of Renaissance history, a poisoner of numerous husbands and lovers! Right up there, she is, in the annals of Uppity Women, with Elizabeth Bathory, Marie Antionette, and Medea. Oh, yeah, and Livia Augusta, the wife of Augustus, and mother of Tiberias, who was the next Caesar mainly because Mommy poisoned off all the other candidates.  (Since Tiberias was only a stepson of Augustus, and he had a number of better blood kin in mind, this took some doing.)

Isn't popular history titillating?  What does it matter, if it isn't quite true?

Yet, Lucretia (properly Lucrezia, pronounced Loo-cretzia) was not the woman in those stories.  Her own, actual story is  far more engaging, a story of great poignancy, of tragedy and eventually, once freed of the encumbrances of family, personal vindication.

Her father was Rodrigo Borgia, also known to history as Pope Alexander the Sixth.  He was not a good man, he was one of the most corrupt of the Popes, but this can be said for him: He loved his children! Besides Lucrezia, his golden girl, there were Gian and Cesare (pronounced as John, and Chez-ar-ay) who come into the tales of the family, though there were a throng of natural children which Rodrigo happily acknowledged.

The Borgias' reputation has come down through the centuries, popular history painting them as among the most vicious power-gamers in our troubled world. In actual history, Rodrigo and Cesare were the real players, Gian being taken out early (popular history blames Cesare, but historical logic and what evidence there is, suggests someone else murdered Gian.) In 1500 AD, people were not nice, in fact, they were just as not-nice as they are now. Possibly, we judge them harshly by our modern standards, but it may be that the Borgias pushed the limits, even then.

Niccolo Macchiavelli wrote his famous treatise on getting your own way, THE PRINCE, either about or for Cesare, and   in admiration or some form of mockery: opinions vary.

Lucrezia's great flaw was, it has been said by biographers, "a fatal acquiescence." 

But is even that slight redemption fair? 

She was a woman in a society that regarded women as childlike pawns and was herself a huge pawn because of her family's place in that society. As a member of this family, her life was privileged and indulgent: the Borgias made their own rules.  Rumors of incest and illegitmate offspring rose like weeds around a few actual facts. The evidence, though, remains circumstantial.

Possible, even probable, though, is not quite the same as true.  Truth is, we don't know if she gave birth to the son of her father, or if the child's paternity, even maternity lay elsewhere. It would be interesting, if the various Borgia remains could be tested for DNA proofs.  

She was married off at 13, that marriage later annulled by her father's decree, so she could be married more usefully elsewhere, for the family. There are, as always, various versions, but there is the opinion that she loved her husbands while she had them. 

One of them, when she was called upon to give him up, and warned that he was doomed, Lucrezia carried out a plan of her own to warn him away from his planned murder. He fled, but eventually, the Borgia men succeeded, and she was heartbroken when he died. 

Her third husband, the Duke of Ferrara, had to be bribed and threatened, before he consented to the union.  He'd heard things. Lucrezia was 21 then, in1501.  Her father was over 70, and perhaps was looking to his mortality, and her future. Not that it was his plan to die any time soon...

In August of 1503, according to some historians, Rodrigo and Cesare attended a dinner to which they had invited themselves, Cesare providing a gift of wine to the host,  Cardinal Adriano Castellesi. 

This Cardinal was a political problem, and they had ways of clearing such problems: The Cup of the Borgia was a euphemism for death in those days, and there are references to a poison they are said to have invented, called cantarella. It's making involved arsenic and a dead pig.  

Did they attempt to poison their host, with a great disregard for all the other guests, as well?  Or did they all just get sick from a bug that was going around? That's also a theory many historians cleave to.  The known item is that everyone got sick, and some went home and died.  The host survived the illness, living another 16 years.

Within a few days' time, Rodrigo was a fascinatingly disgusting corpse, and Cesare, bed-ridden for some time, was too weak to protect his own interests, so lost his position of political and social power, eventually spiraling down to a sordid end.

Lucrezia, by all accounts much loved by both her husband and the people of Ferrara, lived until 1519. She died at 39, of a difficult childbirth, and was mourned as The Good Duchess.

COMMENTING: Obamacare, Another Helmet Law

Someone in DC is trying to tell ME, an American, what to do!? String 'im up!

Okay. Fine. It's grand to be an American, to be a citizen of a nation built on freedom of speech, freedom of belief... probably the greatest degree of personal freedom in the world. We, in America, have the best chance of long, healthy life, the greatest personal liberty to do and be nearly anything we want, and happiness—material, consumer, entertainment joy--delivered non-stop, never mind having to pursue it. 

Our sense of entitlement to all these things is enormous. It's The American Way!

So, when someone tells us that we must buy health insurance, what an outcry is heard in the land!

But the fact is, it is not just about a personal freedom or choice. It is a community, not a personal matter. Every time an uninsured person uses an Emergency Room for their only health care, the community pays for it.

Every time someone who has not been able to afford regular health-care becomes so ill that hospitalization is the only option, the community pays for it.

We have to earn and pay for a driver's licence in every state; we pay business licence fees and taxes to run a business in most communities; we are answerable to the community to obey laws, whether they suit us or not. We are not absolutely free even in America, to do and be whatever we want, at the cost of community stability.

So, yes, this is another: a law, a tax, a mandate, right up there with helmet laws, an imposition on the individual right to risk their own health and life.

Sure, who does it hurt, to decline to wear a helmet while you hurtle down the highway at 80 mph? It's your brain, your pain. Right? My son and his friends, here in Colorado, see someone riding without protection, and sneer, “Organ-donors.” 

Okay, well, that's practically a service to the community, right?

But someone has to clean the brains off the street. Someone has to pay the cops and emergency responders, and the coroner. And someone, whoever was driving the other vehicle, has to live with the trauma of the involvement with causing a death. Maybe the 'victim' has no mother or father, no siblings who care, no friends to be devastated by the death, but there are people, real people who are affected by it, whose lives are altered.

You can choose to not care, you can impose your irresponsibility, you can just let someone else pay your bills. There are, sadly, those kinds of Americans, too.