best and the brightest?
nobody said it better
words come back to haunt

At the Trump Inauguration in 2017, it was reported that after the Inaugural address of the New President, according to three people who were present, Former President George W. Bush gave a brief assessment saying, “That was some weird shit.”

The Trump years …

The COVID era …

The Biden / Trump Debate …

Nope there aren’t any better words.

There was a term that was used by the author, David Halberstam, to describe the Kennedy / Johnson Administration.

The best and the brightest.

At least that is how the book was titled.

The Best and the Brightest.

When in fact, it should have been titled, The Best and the Brightest?

Mr. Halberstam would later write that the phrase “… went into the language, although it is often misused, failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended.”

In other words, in describing the Kennedy / Johnson Administration reaction to Vietnam, Mr. Halberstam was saying, THIS IS the BEST and THE BRIGHTEST?

THIS is the BEST THEY CAN DO?

Instead it became a badge of honor.

That these people WERE the best and the brightest and they were there to serve.

Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, sure.

Ironic ain’t it?

This election cycle the irony flows thick and fast on both sides of the aisle.

THIS IS the BEST and THE BRIGHTEST?

THIS is the BEST THEY CAN DO?

That is some sad shit.

On the other hand, something did come through to me lately and that is a sense of hope.

Yes, I did say a sense of hope.

Not that the problems presented by the current political cycle will be solved but that have become magnified out of context.

The people involved in politics today, the best and the brightest, are just too small to be of concern unless you are a 24 hour TV news station and you have to fill 24 hours of news so these small people become big.

If the HEADLINE is big enough, the NEWS IS BIG ENOUGH said Charles Foster Kane.

Well, maybe, the sky isn’t falling.

Well, maybe this just a bump, a bad bump.

I am remined the movie The Adventures of Baron Munchausen where the ‘elected official of the people’ forbids anyone to go outside the city walls … ‘as the Turk is out there’ and when finally Baron Munchausen sneaks outside the gates, the isn’t anyone there at all.

The good news is this election will be over in 4 months.

The best news is that we get to do this again in 4 years, and maybe this time, the best and the brightest just might show up.

We DO have to get there and to get there we will, as President Bush put it so well, go through some weird shit.

But I am confident, get there we shall.

all the realm shall
be in common when I am king,
… as king I will be

Be brave, then, for your captain is brave and vows reformation.

There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny.

The three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it
felony to drink small beer.

All the realm shall be in common, and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to
grass.

And when I am king, as king I will be —

Jack Cade in Henry VI, Part 2 – Act 4, scene 2 by William Shakespeare.

Big Bill wrote that 1591.

Jack Cade’s rebellion against Henry VI took place in 1450.

On Thursday, either of those two guys who want to be President could use the same lines.

Promise bread and circuses or fire and destruction and base that promise on that it will happen when … when I am king, as king I will be —

About Mr. Cade, Wikipedia says, On 12 July, 1450, in a garden in which he had taken shelter, Cade was overtaken. In the skirmish, Cade was fatally wounded and died before reaching London for trial. As a warning to others, Cade’s body underwent a mock trial and was beheaded at Newgate. Cade’s body was dragged through the streets of London before being quartered. His limbs were sent throughout Kent to various cities and locations that were believed to have been strong supporters of the rebel uprising.

live in a world with
more and more information
less and less meaning

In his opinion piece on the upcoming elections in Great Britain, I’ve seen all the ‘landslide’ polls – but they can’t tell us what’s really going on in this election, Mr. John Harris writes about political polls and polling, saying:

” ... So, for want of any other excitement, they have turned to another source of fun: opinion polls.

Has there ever been a campaign so dominated by them? For seven or eight years now, the most powerful polling companies have been developing so-called – and yes, I had to look this up – multilevel regression with poststratification (or MRP) surveys, which contact tens of thousands of voters, calculate results based on a range of granular demographic details, and result in findings that can be sifted constituency by constituency. The fact that YouGov used this method to unexpectedly predict 2017’s hung parliament has given it an air of quasi-scientific magic; now, the publication of one such poll after another is greeted in some quarters with a huge level of expectation.

The result is postmodern news that a certain kind of 20th-century social theorist would have loved. The Conservatives, the Telegraph screamed last week, are on track to “slump to just 53 seats”. The Labour party, it said, was predicted to win a mind-boggling 516. Here, it seemed, was full-blown Starmergeddon, and the advent of a one-party state. But no one had voted and nothing had actually happened. Nor, by definition, could anyone be certain that the predictions were in any way accurate. “‘We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning,” said Jean Baudrillard in his 1981 masterpiece Simulacra and Simulation. In this election, that distinction hardly seems to matter.

Let us boil that down.

Multilevel regression with poststratification surveys, based on a range of granular demographic details, and result in findings that can be sifted constituency by constituency has given it [polling] an air of quasi-scientific magic.

I like that.

Who knows what questions were asked and how they were asked and in what order where they asked.

Tell me what you want to hear and I will design a poll that produces results that back it up.

Mr. Harris closes his article with, “We should treat all those polls with deep scepticism; the best thing, in fact, may be to marvel at their arcane machinations, occasionally recognise their prescience, and laugh.”

I would laugh long and hard if polls in America didn’t make me want to cry long and hard.

But here is what I find so interesting.

When his wife lost the election in 2016, former President Bill Clinton mused that it was just like Brexit.

Unexpected.

The Brits went went did something totally stupid and did it in a totally stupid way.

Now it looks like the British electorate is trying to set things right.

Who am I to doubt.

The polls all say so.

it’s better the truth
should come little by little …
they ate knowledge too fast

I told and he listened. After that, I wished to tell all the people but he showed me otherwise. He said, “Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you may die of the truth. It was not idly that our fathers forbade the Dead Places.” He was right—it is better the truth should come little by little. I have learned that, being a priest. Perhaps, in the old days, they ate knowledge too fast.

Nevertheless, we make a beginning. it is not for the metal alone we go to the Dead Places now—there are the books and the writings. They are hard to learn. And the magic tools are broken—but we can look at them and wonder. At least, we make a beginning. And, when I am chief priest we shall go beyond the great river. We shall go to the Place of the Gods—the place newyork—not one man but a company. We shall look for the images of the gods and find the god ASHING and the others — the gods Lincoln and Biltmore and Moses. But they were men who built the city, not gods or demons. They were men. I remember the dead man’s face. They were men who were here before us. We must build again.

From By the Waters of Babylon, a post-apocalyptic short story by American writer Stephen Vincent Benét, first published July 31, 1937, in The Saturday Evening Post as “The Place of the Gods” according to wikipedia.

Also according to wikipedia, “Benét wrote the story in response to the April 25, 1937 bombing of Guernica, in which Fascist military forces destroyed the majority of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. This story took place before the creation of nuclear weapons, but Benét’s description of “The Great Burning” is similar to later descriptions of the effects of the atomic bombings at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. His “deadly mist” and “fire falling from the sky” are eerily prescient of the descriptions of the aftermath of nuclear blasts. However, the “deadly mist” may also be a reference to chemical weapons in World War I, particularly mustard gas, a feared weapon of war that Benét’s generation was very familiar with. The story was written in 1937, five years before the Manhattan Project started, and eight years before there was widespread public knowledge of the project.”

Turns out the problem wasn’t bombs or poison gas or atomic weapons.

The problem … was us.

will have to repent
for the fears, apathy of
the children of light …

… history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

Our generation will have to repent not only for the acts and words of the children of darkness but also for the fears and apathy of the children of light.

From the book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story by Martin Luther King, Jr., (San Francisco, Harper San Francisco, 1958).

In a column in the New York Times, Thomas B. Edsall asks the question, ‘How does this process of generating tolerance for authoritarianism work?’

In answer, Mr. Edsall quotes one Adam Parkhomenko who wrote:

“Evil intentions are floated.

Reactions are assessed.

Weaknesses are exploited.

Intentions are repeated.

Wrongs become desensitized.

Scapegoats are named.

Opposition is divided and conquered.

Power is grabbed.

Distractions are created.

Dissent is squashed.

Then, with the groundwork complete, what was once considered unthinkable becomes reality.”

And when it is all over, our generation will have to repent not only for the acts and words of the children of darkness but also for the fears and apathy of the children of light.