No, I spent most of my adult years either finding oil, or when we did that too well and crashed the price, in a variety of other jobs. As for the incoming jobholders, they made a raft of promises on the way to their positions, let those promises which were the stuff that got them elected be the checklist by which their progress is measured.
If that's the checklist, they'll be going off the checklist before the swearings-in. ;)
No, it is a sad state of affairs that in the last fifty years the people have forgotten they are the holders of the power in this nation. Perhaps that really began with all the "Camelot" nonsense treating JFK as "American Royalty", but somewhere in there we seemed to forget that these people are our employees, not our rulers.
It didn't begin with JFK, even if there hadn't been a concurrent Broadway musical in the past to give the syndrome
under FDR a nickname. And the precedent could even have preceded FDR, though his advent as a presidential
candidate does seem to have stirred a vast passion for looking toward a president as a kind of king or even saviour
rather than a chief executive.
Perhaps, but the Communist New Left of the '60s wasn't all 'burn baby burn' and 'get the kids stoned', there was a purpose, and that purpose was the seizure of power from a distracted and somnolent people. They succeeded wildly, because we now live in a surveillance based society where virtually every transaction can be tracked, in some cases down to the groceries in your basket, where government power arbitrarily intrudes into every facet of our lives.
That didn't exactly begin in the New Left era, either. It's sometimes forgotten but FDR himself angled toward what
we now call a surveillance society to a certain extent.
Winston Smith would have had it easy. A few mouse clicks and done. Even now, if that was the goal, a person's existence would be easier to erase than ever if the government wanted that so, and their records could be altered at will.
Smith would have had it easy enough prior to today. He'd have been enthralled with the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon
wiretappings, not to mention George W. Bush's Patriot Act.
We could analyse and review the syndrome nigh unto death and nothing would change. You're not going to stop the
pursuit of the presidency as an elected monarchy until you begin to change people's minds about gazing upon the
president as a king and the White House as a palace. One of the saddest ironies today is that a man who wrote one
of the best books I've ever read arguing against the presidency as an elective monarch, F.H. Buckley (the book is
The Once and Future King; Mr. Buckley is no relation to the family of William F. Buckley, Jr., by the way),
came out, poor man, in support of a candidate who was nothing if not an aspiring monarch of a sort---Donaldus Minimus.
