2 25 00

You know the old saying…."The more things change, the
more they stay the same." Well, you couldn’t have picked a better thing
to use as a description for this continuing saga we call the political election
process, could we? I am an avid reader of historical novels. If I can find
something in the way of history written with a story, I’ll do everything
possible to get a copy and stay up all night long to read it. To me, history is
fascinating. 

As someone once observed…"Those who don’t know history
are doomed to repeat it." I just finished up a book of 700 pages on the
French revolution. There was a special on the tube some months ago and I
realized that I knew very little about what happened over there in the late
1700’s. After I finished, I was still confused. Everyone was after everyone
else’s throats or necks, as it was in those days. It seemed no one trusted
anyone else for anything. Somehow after I finished off that tome of dullness, I
ended up with a political novel about our government in the early
1800’s. 

Let me run this by you. Here is a novel about the leaders of our
country. We have John Adams who hates Jefferson who hates Hamilton. Hamilton is
reported to be involved in a scandal with some woman and is being blackmailed.
Jefferson wants to get rid of Hamilton and leaks the scandal to the papers of
the day. Adams gets mad at Jefferson and recalls Monroe (Jefferson’s friend)
back from his position as the Ambassador to France. Everyone has their own
newspaper to funnel information to at any given time. In those days you could be
sued for libel even if the facts were true. Many of the papers were very careful
about what they said or didn’t say. 

The point of all of this is that nothing really changes, does
it? Look at the stuff we hear flying around everyday for the past year or so,
and will be for the next year or so. A lot of mud slinging, and very little
comment on the important issues that we face on a daily basis. Will social
security survive? How can the elderly afford medications? How can we improve our
schools? What should we do about the growing prison population? In the days of
John Adams, they didn’t even have a standing army. They didn’t want the tax
burden. Far cry from today isn’t it? What do we do with a tax surplus, if
there is one? Pay off the national debt? Give a tax cut to everyone? I guess the
thing that kind of defeats us about our system is the fact that we know that the
elected President can do very little about getting things done like he would
like to have done. 

They promise and promise all kinds of things to get elected.
Then once they get into office it seems they take the position of…"Well,
I don’t control the Congress and I can’t get them to do what I’d like to
get done." This is certainly true, but I believe we end up getting the
short end of the stick, since it’s us down here at the ground level that have
to live with the eventual consequences. In the days of Hamilton and Jefferson,
once you were finished with your stint as a politician, you were required to go
back and live in the district that you were elected. This way, if you had passed
some really dumb laws, then your neighbors got to rag on you at the store,
church or wherever for the remainder of your life. Not a bad idea, now that you
think of it. No, that idea probably went out of favor once lobbyists were
invented. There’s an idea for you isn’t it? You get yourself elected to the
congress of whatever and then you take money from special interests to pass laws
that benefit those you got the money from. Then after so many years you retire
and work for those who gave you the money. How is this? Politicians throughout
history have been doing this all along. 

Old Julius Caesar would have lived a long and happy life if he
had approved the budget for some new ships that Brutus had submitted. Napoleon
could have spent his final years traveling rather than in exile if he’d played
ball with the British. What’s amazing to me is to watch the behind the scenes
events unfold and see the various players shift from side to side. One day the
life long friend of candidate ‘X"’ announces that he’s changing his
support to candidate ‘Y’. Next week, they reverse again. It’s all very
confusing to me and too involved. I would do very poorly as a politician or a
diplomat. I find it difficult to lie to people. In reading history, this seems
to be one of the major qualifications to a successful person in that field. As I
said it’s all very confusing to me.