Musings of a Dumb Ass

Musings of a Dumb Ass......... Time........ and its effect on the present............... I used to feel pangs of exhaustion approaching at a very rapid speed when some old man would start talking about 'what's wrong with things nowadays' and think to myself how he just didn't understand the world that he lived in any more and the way he wanted it was just a return to what wouldn't work anymore. Now I find myself the old man in the world which seems absurd to me, with the young completely comfortable with all that is so bothersome and not worried about what to me is so disastrous looming in our future. There are things that remain the same. Name calling of our elected officials for instance. With so many years to draw from ( I can recall Harry Truman as our President), I can remember at some point in time someone in hearing distance referring to all The President's as 'stupid', or 'dumb' at some point or other. That is self deprecating on our part and simply not so. There have been no stupid or dumb President's of the United States. There also have been no President's whose wish was to harm The United States in any way. Another constant is the belief that each one was doing something for covert and secret amassing of personal wealth. The record will show that throughout history no President has ever left the White House with the kind of wealth hid away that was possible to have gotten away with by ulterior motives. Our society and civilization (and I DO think the American way is a civilization aside from the rest of the world) has opportunity for an elected president to lose his way. This is power while they're in office, and even more dangerous is legacy building. Legacy is what we leave behind that make us hero's or villians, or ahead of our time's, or possibly thought of as visionary's and so forth. Given such an incredible opportunity to direct history, most President's have walked away leaving confusion in the arena of success. In my lifetime, while Harry Truman is credited with stopping world war two by dropping 'the bombs' on Japan, we now have guilt over it, and the same Truman is said to have failed in Korea. Eisenhower just didn't do much in his presidency except preside over a peacetime recession that had a very pleasant atmosphere ( the 50's). Kennedy wasn't as popular in life as he was in death. I remember very well those who took issue with him , and there were many. His handling of the civil rights movement wasn't popular with the masses, and his inability to control the peoples behaviour was duly noted at the time. The attack on Guantanamo Bay Cuba was an absolute disaster but on the other hand he stood eye to eye with the Russians and won, but created an enemy that remains today just 90 miles off our coast, Cuba. If he could come back and change his legacy, he would probably remove the advisors on Vietnamese soil that Eisenhower placed on the ground and wash his hands of that entire situation, but he expanded on it instead. Lyndon Johnson was a legacy chaser of the nth. degree. If he could call his time back, there certainly would have been no Vietnam. He would likely change his thinking on his plan for a 'great society' and the working mans taxes and big brotherism would probably not be so oppressive today. Nixon would rethink his handling of the economy that still suffers today because of his handling of it and his stubbornness in standing by the crooks who broke into Watergate thereby leaving him known as a 'crook' and costing him his Presidency, would surely not unfold as it did, if he could do it over. Ford was looked on as an idiot, and much of the time appeared to be so, but he was never elected and brought into the office by a dark period and consequently, no personal power or respect in his satchel, especially after his first official move was to pardon his predecessor who many thought should go to jail, me included. Jimmy Carter was a Presidential disaster who now is viewed as a statesman and sought after for opinion. But.... his Presidency was one of economic uncontrollability, military limpness, lack of power, no foreign policy, allowing the likes of Iran to hold hundreds of American hostages thumbing their noses at us day after day, month after month, while the rest of the entire world watched us wallow around in the pool of nothingness that bad leadership produces, ...... then he gave away The Panama Canal that is run primarily by the Chinese now..... Oh well. Ronald Reagan was one who could only have been criticized by those party wonks that will criticize simply because their 'guy' isn't in charge, because he brought us respectability in the world and allowed us to dream again. George Bush Senior gave us a relatively do-nothing time other than engineer a near perfect war in which he done exactly as promised from start to finish. President Clinton was a new generation of dishonesty that we will pay for in total forever in moral degradation, an economy that was false at the time and still is, and taught us that the 'big guys' really don't have personal obligations and should take care of their own even if it kills them..... and made us love it till the last day and we still beg for more. That brings us to Dubya. He has done nothing I like, broken every rule that I value, leading us to potentially the darkest time possible, and will certainly have a legacy that stands out. But he ain't stupid, he just lives in a bubble and can't see out...... I do hope we survive as the greatest of the great..... and now I'm the old man who exhausts those around him about what's wrong with things nowadays................