ONLY DRIVEN ON SUNDAY
I guess there's a
little "used-car salesman" in all of us. It must be human nature. "This
beauty was owned by my brother's grandmother and she only drove it to church
on Sunday." What a creampuff. So after taking delivery of this gem you
realize later that the odometer's been rolled and it has a salvage title as
a "flood-recovery". If you're like me, you go back to the dealer with a
rocket launcher but most of us would continue on, jaded and bitter. We just
seem to be hard-wired to present things in their most favorable light, and
if the most favorable light isn't rosy enough, we call in lighting experts.
So it is in life and these days, more than ever, in politics.
This is why last weeks "resignation" tendered by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld,
comes as no particular shock in the wake of the Democratic sweep of the
mid-terms. All media was, and is, abuzz with the implications and
ramifications. Surely, it is flagrantly political in motivation and was a
pre-determined event pending the outcome of the vote. The left is
up-in-arms. The right is playing it cool. The reality is, either party, in
the same position, would have done the same thing. The greatest casualty in
this whole debacle will be, as it so often is, faith. Faith that our elected
leaders put Country before self-interest. Faith that our worst fears about
motivations behind the war are ill-founded, that it couldn't be true. The
victor, last week, was cynicism.
I have long-since withdrawn any emotional investment I may have had in
either political party. I say either because the Libertarian Movement
doesn't really, in my estimation, qualify yet as a party. They have yet to
present a strong contender in any race, let alone win one, and are similarly
void of specific plans for problem-solving.
I vote. I always will I suppose. Yet I'm not usually too excited about the
votes I am casting. I am left feeling hollow by both parties and American
Politics in general. It has reached an all-time high, or low, depending on
your point of view. For Democrats, the scent of victory wafting in the air
will soon turn stale as it is time to perform and present actual solutions
to the myriad of problems before our Nation. I am not hopeful. For
Republicans, a well-documented return to traditional conservative values
might save the day. Having had the unfortunate liability of being in office
during 9/11, they have had to cope with business-as-usual as well as
conceiving and implementing an entirely new world order of security and a
war on terrorism. Hence, I am never too quick to criticize their
performance. Much of it, most of us agree, has been dismal. Much of it has
not been dismal. We will never know if anyone else could have done it
better, so time spent on that subject is wasteful, in my opinion. It would
be hard to argue that the world changed on Sept. 11th and the challenges
that faced our Nation from that point forward was all new ground. No doubt
about it.
Still, it's these events like last week that really take the wind out of my
sails. I want to know that, in a time of war, our President is making staff
decisions based upon job performance. It is unsettling to me to think that
had the mid-terms gone the other way, Rumsfeld would still have a job and
there would be a lot of back-slapping and high-living going on in the Oval
Office. And yet, what is one to think? And the Democrats are just as bad,
it's not a party-thing with me. It's a system-thing.
With each history-making turn like last week, cynicism grows. The public
shakes its head and snorts and business continues as usual. It's well-past
"becoming accepted". It is accepted. We, the taxpayers and voters, just
accept that it's politics. It is corrupt and positions are sought after and
held by people of low character. Power-brokers who routinely throw each
other under busses to survive, who would even sacrifice soldiers to prevent
a weakening of their own position. It is a damning assessment. Listening to
the President last week, explaining Rumsfeld's departure as a matter-of-fact
event...the result of some "long discussions"...I kept hearing that used-car
guy in the back of me head.
This isn't Bush-bashing. It’s politics-bashing. Like a transgression among
friends that weakens your trust in another person, it may not be the event
itself, but the resultant shaken faith that is hardest to get over. It takes
a long time to build trust, it takes even longer to rebuild. As our
President himself once said, or should I say, tried to say..."Fool me once,
shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."