I write this from my bunker somewhere safe from the electioneering that – regardless of your politics – falls upon deaf ears on the first Monday in November.
I’m ignoring the texts and emails and burying myself in work and other activities, including re-reading Russell Kirk’s A Program for Conservatives for the umpteenth time in preparation for an essay I’m submitting to a freelance client.
Not that Kirk’s counsel will fall on whomever emerged victorious from Tuesday’s squeaker of an election. It’s fairly obvious that the closest to the White House Kirk’s name was mentioned in the past 25 years was from the lips of former Vice President Mike Pence. It’s fairly probable no other politician during this timeframe even has a clue about who Kirk was or what he wrote.
Alas and alack. Ain’t that a shame, sang Fats Domino.
Ry Cooder made a case for John Lee Hooker as president years ago, which I wrote about in another publication a couple months ago. I stand by that recommendation, even though the Hook shuffled off the mortal coil some time ago.
As long as we’re elevating deceased genius musicians to public office, I’d recommend John Prine for, at the very least, a cabinet position. Elsewise, I’d pay good money to see Prine deliver the nightly news in his own inimitable, poignantly comic, fashion.
Since I mentioned Ry Cooder above, I might as well discuss Don Van Vliet aka Captain Beefheart, whose debut album Safe as Milk features Cooder on guitar. The dada elements of Beefheart’s lyrics could come in handy for a presidential press secretary. Hooker would be well-served by Frank Zappa as his chief of staff and his pygmy pony as the Secretary of Transportation.
I confess everything written thus far is silliness, but you deal with this season’s lousy choices your way, and I’ll contend with them in my own. I give you my strained version of The Righteous Brothers’ Rock and Roll Heaven Redux [Politics Edition].
I also give you Cicero, quoted by Kirk in the above-referenced book, published in 1954 and revised in 1962: “Long before our time, the customs of our ancestors moulded admirable men, and in turn these eminent men upheld the ways and institutions of their forebears. Our age, however, inherited the Republic like some beautiful painting of bygone days, its colors already fading through great age; and not only has our time neglected to freshen the colors of the picture, but we have failed to preserve its form and outlines…. [O]ur customs have perished for want of men to stand by them, and we are now called to an account, so that we stand impeached like men accused of capital crimes, compelled to plead our own cause. Through our vices, rather than from happenstance, we retain the word ‘republic’ long after we have lost the reality.”
The ”ancient ways,” Cicero wrote, are “so lost in oblivion that they are not merely neglected, but quite forgot.”
Keep in mind that the Roman Empire at large still had a few more centuries in the tank before it collapsed, but Cicero’s warning was prescient.
“Shape without form, shade without colour,/Paralysed force, gesture without motion” are T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men. And we, men and women alike, are hollow men, the stuffed men, forming prayers to broken stone.
“This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Okay, maybe the end of the world isn’t imminent with the victory of one or the other goofball at the top of this year’s ballot. But it’s certainly been a race to the bottom these past few decades for those of us that have been paying attention, hasn’t it?
As Kirk wrote 70 years ago: “[T]he summer indolence of the age of optimism is long gone by.”
Bruce Edward Walker ([email protected]) is a Morning Sun columnist.
