All our heroes are flawed, one way or another...mostly, we tend to overlook those flaws...
at least for awhile....
When I was a boy, I went to Sunday School almost every week where I learned about God and Creation and Jesus and his disciples and it has pretty much stuck with me all these long years.
I also went to school, pretty much five days a week from September ’til June. At that time, in almost every classroom in every school all across this country of ours, there hung a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the head of the democrat party and the by God savior of this nation.
And then, this demi-god died. The railroad tracks were lined with people who doffed their hats and bowed their heads as the train bearing his coffin to Washingtod passed by.
His place was taken by Harry (the buck stops here) Truman who put an end to World War II by dropping two atom bombs on Japan. Theorticians and wannabe intellectuals can debate forever about Churchill and Stalin and Eisenhower and Montgomery and all the rest but the people knew that Harry S Truman stopped the damn war. And then he went home. To Independence, Missouri, where he walked the streets as a normal man.
We humans are fond of picking our heroes to pieces, exposing the clay feet that support the idealized statue so, over the years, the myth of FDR has been debunked. He was, after all is said and done, a man. With feet of clay. Damn! Ain’t that a big surprise?
Still, it doesn’t seem to stop us from seeking our gods amongst ourselves. We tend to idolize entertainers, movie stars and athletes and such, but, like barnyard fowl, when we discover a weakness, we gang up on the offender and destroy them.
They deserve the punishment. They mis-led us. Or we mis-lead ourselves which makes us even angrier and someone must pay. Not us, of course, but someone.
Once upon a time, I voted for Bill Clinton. Bill was, and is, a charmer. A seller of snake oil, a pitchman for the greatest sideshow this country can offer. And I voted for him. Only once, mind you, because I couldn’t bring myself to countenance his lies. A lot of people voted for h im because, it was after all, a guy thing to lie about women. And since it just could not be the fault of our chosen god, we opted to destroy the object of his affections, Monica Lewinsky, a naive youngster whose crime was simply to be the wrong time and place.
And now we have Obama, the ‘black’ savior come to part the sea of prejudice and thwart the bad guys. And his lies, egregious and many, are forever captured on video for all the world to see, to either judge or ignore. Our choice. And Hillary, on his coattails, attempting to re-create his success.
The rationale, that I heard from a neighbor, is that George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction over a decade ago and that seems to be justification enough. It doesn’t seem to matter that there has never been proof that George W. actually lied, only that he professed to believe what he was told.
Ah well, once upon a time, I believed in FDR and the democrat party…but then, I grew up…..
It ain’t easy getting old and I do try not too judge too harshly those innocents who believe that the fault is not theirs, cannot be theirs, must then lie elsewhere…let us blame the wealthy, the rich, those who force us to load that barge and tote that bale so that they may so that they may dine on caviar and oysters…
As for me, an old friend told me the other day that if and when I chose to visit, she’d fix me cornbread and brown beans, fried potatoes and maybe a slice or two of fresh tomato and a hunk of onion…
~30~
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