Shaken, Not Stirred: Election.

Jim Bond

Shaken, Not Stirred: Election.

#ShakenNotStirred.

A blog by Jim Bond.

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Pretty soon, it’ll be over. Well actually, it won’t.

Regardless of what the election results are Tuesday night, we will usher ourselves into yet another expansion of “politics of personal destruction”. My greater concern, again, regardless of the outcome, has to do with a Thomas Jefferson quote: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

I fear some may take this aphorism literally.

Crooked…unfit…liar…corrupt…con-man…unhealthy…lock-her-up! Yes, it’s been bumpy. But that’s who we are as a nation. We inherited it from the British. Look at Parliament. House of Commons Speaker John Bercow was once called a “stupid, sanctimonious dwarf” by Simon Burns. Transport Minister Burns later apologized…to dwarves.

Thirty years ago, Tony Banks said Margaret Thatcher was acting “with the sensitivity of a sex-starved boa-constrictor”.

Weakest link…pompous sod…dimwit, are some other British-isms. Look up some of Winston Churchill’s quips if you want a couple of hours spent in delicious humor.

We followed in the footsteps of our national parents during presidential elections. The 1828 campaign between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson included charges of bigamy. Jackson accused Adams of being a pimp.

So, nothing really new, except perhaps the British-isms carry the benefit of a slightly elevated vocabulary. And somehow in our colonist’s mind, anything delivered in a British accent automatically elevates the speaker’s IQ by at least 10 points. (Upon reading this earlier in the week, a British friend was insulted that the elevation was only estimated at 10 points).

Ah, but wait! I recently ran across a series of televised interviews between Noam Chomsky and William F. Buckley on Buckley’s Firing Line TV show in the late 1960s. Here was discourse that was so ‘high-falutin’ that you need a dictionary to understand them.

Where has that gone? We have devolved to the size of one’s hands, the state of one’s nap schedule…deplorables…(his) books all end with Chapter 11, (actually, that was a pretty good burn, requiring a nano-second of thought before you got it).

It’s too late for this political season, but perhaps if we all try really hard, out of 325 million people, we can come up with better leaders. Individuals who possess a high degree of intellect and civility, leaders who truly want to serve our country out of a sense of altruism and honor. Don’t we really want someone who is better than we are? Smarter than we are? More emotionally mature than we are?

We’ve had such leaders in the past. Shouldn’t we have them again?