Not really. A few days ago my mom and I had a couple hours to kill before I
took her to the airport, so we sat down to solve all the world's problems, which
we accomplished, you'll be glad to know. Among our topics were the uselessness
of politics, on which we might not have agreed entirely, and so-called
conservatives who are squarely within the liberal
tradition.
That night I dreamed I was running
for president. I figured I can't be either Democrat or Republican, so I must be
one of those hopeless third-party candidates whose main function is to help the Democrats
and Republicans ignore people with unpopular views, so I might as well speak my mind.
I gave a very angry campaign speech in which I screeched about "the abandonment
of the liberal tradition" and advocated a return to values that amounted to
socialism.
The next
morning I laughed about the absurdity of all that and thought it might be an
interesting exercise to imagine what I might do as
president.
It's a military job: the
president is "commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States." So
the first order of business would be to find something else for a lot of well
organized, well equipped, and highly motivated people all over the world to
do. Just think of all the good I could do! This would be a sort of "beating
swords into plowshares" (Isaiah 2:4), and, adjusting for advances in technology,
I could do that more literally. I could paint the tanks John Deere
green (or, out of respect for my
father-in-law, Farmall
red). I could
cropdust the planet before breakfast, just by giving the word. I'm not sure what
good use a Hellfighter missile could be put to, but there are probably some
oceanographers who would love to get their hands on a couple nuclear subs and
some very good cameras. The military has in all ages of humanity always had
the best toys, and I, as president, could use them to feed the world and advance
human knowledge.
Think
I could get away with it? The reason I couldn't, beyond simple
unelectability, is that people wouldn't stand for it. We may get real mad
about what the president or Congress does, but we really do get what we allow.
In reading
For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against
Hitler,
* I was surprised to learn how responsive Hitler and his government were
to German public opinion (before the war, that is). So lesson one from this exercise might
be a particularization of this principle: the problem (of American militarism or the relative non-use of American
resources to feed starving people, for instance) is not rooted in the politicians but
in us. So the challenge is not to elect the right
people (there's that problem of unelectability again), but to become the right people.
The pix on this page are MicroSoft clipart. Text is copyright� 2007 by me.
I opened this page and
the ads on the right were "Military Jobs...," "Old News Articles about Pres
Mckinley...," "Military Veteran Jobs at RecruitMilitary...," and "Looking for
Jobs in the Military?..." Not bad, eh?
*Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against
Hitler (New York: Oxford, 1992).
