Open Comedy Season on US Presidents may have started with LBJ, but it kicked into high gear with Richard Nixon.
Today’s late night “comedic” television hosts depend upon scandal, impropriety, criminality, stupidity, and licentiousness in the presidency for their daily joke grind. Sadly enough, the net result of this hunger for jokes about our perceived leader deficiencies have turned the late night shows into the only places where millions of Americans will make their choices for president in the next election.
Maybe, that’s OK. The more we move deeper into becoming a culture of people who depend upon Twitter over reading as our medium for communicating facts and ideas, well, maybe that’s all we deserve. Let’s everybody just base our votes upon what we got out of the material we heard on Letterman, Leno, and Kimmel. Maybe we’re just starting to get exactly what we deserve: Some clown, Democrat or Republican, male or female, white majority or ethnic minority, conservative or liberal, whomever/whatever – that all share one thing. – They each exit office with their own pockets full, a lifetime system of support and protection looking after them, a new library for all the books and records about them that no one is ever going to really study and read, and with a red sail into the sunset of happily ever after sealed by a reservation card that is left at the White House door on their way out for some relative by blood or marriage to take a leg up run at the same office in the near future.
We’ve had scandals and jokes about the presidency forever, but never anything so engulfing as the job done on pols today by the principal exposure media of television and the Internet. It’s just too bad that it doesn’t seem to be shining anyone toward dealing with the fact that all politicians seem to prefer to avoid serious action on taxation and spending, education and opportunity for all, immigration and border control, balancing the budget versus increasing the national debt, and entitlement versus equal opportunity.
We can build incredible bureaucracies with enough people there to write 13,000 word reports on each difficult subject the government does cover, but that doesn’t mean anyone, including the President or the Congress that approves these actions, is going to actually read what’s in the reports that portend to explain everything about what’s contained in a new law or piece of legislated social action. That job is going to still fall to the same phone bureaucrats whom you can’t reach in human form when you have to call to find out why you cannot, on Medicare, for example, sometimes continue to see a doctor who once saved your life for important treatment of a new problem.
Maybe it’s best that we can laugh prior to sleep. Otherwise, we might have to drown in our own tears.
Have a great Wednesday, everybody. I’ll feel more optimistic tomorrow – just as soon as I can get my “wall of denial” about really serious stuff back to its normal sky-scraping level.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
March 6, 2013 at 2:23 pm |
Great article. Since you have a Nixon bobblehead photo in this article, I was living in Mass. when he was elected. Mass was the only State that did not have majority vote for him. Someone became rich by selling “Don’t Blame Me, I Am From Massachuesetts” bumper stickers.