Who am I politically, and why

 

I’m pretty much of a political conservative, in my own opinion, although the Young Republicans kicked me out decades ago and not for being too old.  Actually I’m joking because I’ve never been a member of any political party, or contributed a penny to any, and I’ve voted for several presidents on both sides of the aisle.  I doubt if any party would have me, my ideology is simply too, ah, suspect.

 

I soured on politics very early in life.  This happened when the Democrats wanted Eisenhower to run for president on their ticket.  After he decided to run as a Republican the same Democrats started pointing out all the things that were wrong with him.  Now, in my case I didn’t much know one way or another, but I just found the whole attitude change too cynical for me and as a result I pretty much dropped out politically. 

 

This antipathy only increased when I learned that whether one party or the other was for or against something depended almost entirely on which of them proposed it first.  The subject did not matter…if the Democrats were for it then the Republicans were against it, and vice versa.  An ethical position?  Didn’t matter.

 

Oh, I later voted in presidential elections—after all, it’s the expected thing to do—but I was more influenced by what I thought about the individuals than their party affiliations.  For the most part I didn’t know much about any of their own political thinking, really.  Political parties never quite seemed to fit with me.  

 

I still pretty much am the same way.  I think party “platforms” tend to be somewhat of a joke, almost a pretense to which individuals pay lip-service.  I suspect I lean towards the Republican Party at present, although I think there are some Democrats markedly superior to some Republicans. 

 

I admit to being at the point where I seem to feel the Democrats have a marked advantage in numbers when it comes to some truly poor individuals, but I don’t think the Republicans have any advantage in any large number of correspondingly superior individuals.

 

HOWEVER, there has been a big change in my attitude since I moved to Costa Rica in 2000.  I essentially dropped out of politics as a young man because I took it seriously back then and their meretricious attitudes disgusted me.  I was living inside the forest, back then and I was far too serious about the trees.

 

Moving to Costa Rica gave me some perspective…I’m no longer a Californian, for instance, and never again will be.  As a result, I can look at California politics as well as Texas and New York and other places with the same amount of detachment…my ox isn’t being gored.  As a result I view myself as more of a garden-variety American from the country as a whole rather than from any one place.

 

More importantly, I’ve developed a sense of humor about it all, from somewhere not deliberately my doing…a sense of the ridiculous.  I’ll never be Will Rogers, but I can try.  Puck shook his head and said “what fools these mortals be”…and he wasn’t even specifically talking about politicians.  I start my day reading the papers and smiling, this often broadens to a grin and then typically winds up as a guffaw.  Most of these guys are clowns!

 

When you look at politics as farce then everything changes perspective.

 

I’m a fan of George Bush’s and I’ll tell you why: I think the two of us have a lot in common and we think a lot alike in many ways, although not in all of them by any means.

 

George came from a richer upper-class family than I did, but not really that much different by comparison.  In the places where I essentially grew up, from the one-room school with the kids all from the same family of Mexican train-track laborers, to the poor farm kids in a southern Utah town so small that none of them had even SEEN a railroad train-track before they graduated from high school, my relatively richer upper-class family status was never questioned.  True, I didn’t go to any kind of prep school, but, like George, it was expected I would go on to college…the only graduating senior in my class (a total of 14) who did.

 

Like George, I joined a fraternity and had one hell of a good time.  As he says, when I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish.  Right on!  I pulled fraternity pranks with the best of them…maybe I was even the best.  I burned down Sigma Nu’s fancy “pioneer days” fence one evening in a plan I concocted which called for two groups of us to arrive in cars driven from opposite directions, pulling up at exactly the same time, one to splash the gasoline and the other to light it, a very carefully-timed operation.  The fence burned and nobody ever knew who lit it, they never laid a glove on me for that one.  No, I have no idea at all how I convinced the others to participate in this stupid plan.

 

I just about got kicked out of school for another incident that really wasn’t anywhere near my deliberate fault, saving my bacon at literally the very last instant when I told the Dean of Men some kind of story he didn’t believe but couldn’t prove otherwise…I mean, the truth is that I was in fact guilty of the alleged offense, but it wasn’t really a fair complaint.  I was within seconds of being expelled when it came to me what to say, after which he told me if he ever saw me in his office again I was history. 

 

It’s still one of my life’s favorite experiences, though.  To make a long story short, we had left a formal party which required all of us to be wearing tuxedos.  My buddy, drunk out of his mind, got into a bloody fight with a member of another fraternity.  We hauled him back to our fraternity house for repairs.  Meanwhile, we had disturbed the peace of the 3 a.m. neighborhood and a wealthy alum stuck his head out of the window and chewed us out.  I told him where he could stick his head that would accomplish more than he was doing at the moment, an absolutely true statement I stand by to this day.  Anyhow, we had no sooner hauled Max back up the hill and gotten him inside our fraternity house when the cops arrived. We are talking about split seconds here.  I opened the door to talk to them.  Impeccable in my tuxedo, I asked the uniformed minions of the law if I could be of service.  Well, they said, with obvious unease, there had been a report of a fight in the area, did I know anything about it?  I looked at my friends, likewise spotless, and we indicated our complete ignorance of any such shenanigans.  Must have been one of those low-class fraternities like SAE or somebody.  The cops clearly did not believe us, but there we stood, not a hair out of place, dressed like they only imagined dressing once in their lifetimes, if ever.  They looked at us suspiciously and we smiled back calmly.

 

Behind the door, and I mean this literally, physically standing behind the door like a guy in a television comedy, was Max.  He was bloody from head to toe, his tux was shredded, he was a mess.  If the cops had asked to come in we would have all been screwed.  They did not, of course and we all collapsed with relief when they went back to their car.  But it was a magnificent tour de farce on our part.

 

On a third prank I got arrested and spent a night in jail, was found guilty of petty larceny and paid a fine…a HUGE fine in those days.  Plus ten days in jail, suspended!  And as for driving when, ah, under the influence…ah, George, you are such an innocent for a real fraternity boy.

 

So I know what fraternity life is like and what it is like to be young and foolish.  George is different from me in two ways: he liked being fraternity president, I never liked holding any office with responsibility attached.  And the second is that he sobered up and went straight.  He doesn’t drink any more and neither do I, but in my case I try not to drink any less (sorry for that old one).

 

I’m also a big supporter of Bush because my Marine Corps training made a believer out of me: loyalty is of primary importance and you NEVER dis your CO publicly, ever, or fail to support him.  You may think your CO is a cretin (some of mine certainly were) but that’s a subject only for very private conversation with very good friends.

 

I’m also one of those people who consider National Guard service to be honorable, although I did think back in the days of Korea that managing to get into the Guard significantly reduced your chances of actually being in a trench somewhere.  I, myself, tried to join the Navy for the same reason: like Kerry, I hoped to serve safely offshore and never get my feet muddy.  Others among my fraternity group joined the Air Force for much the same reason…they thought they were much less-likely to be killed at 30,000 feet.  (None of us considered going to Canada: that would have been dishonorable.  Avoiding getting killed as an Army dogface in Korea was only sensible, but there were limits to what was acceptable.  We believed in “death before dishonor”.)

 

I wound up in the Marine Corps because I failed to plan ahead; if I had, I certainly would have picked the National Guard, especially if they would have let me fly jets. 

 

As for George’s missing meetings, get real.  Everybody cuts classes.  I cut one of my college classes so badly that by the time I belatedly realized I was going to flunk, and started attending again, the other students were astonished to see me reappear…they thought I had dropped out.  The professor didn’t quite know what to do with me, either…he had an attendance requirement that I had totally violated.  But there were rules which allowed a solution, so we worked it out.  I begged and groveled.  He said if by some miracle I could get a passing grade on his final he would not flunk me.  I did and he gave me a D that I have always appreciated as one of my better grades.  The class?  Political Science.

 

Same with attendance in the National Guard…you are required to attend so many hours a year (George was hundreds of hours over the limit during his flying years, only the surplus doesn’t carry over) but there are provisions for making up missing hours before you get your discharge, and he did, so that argument is a non-starter.  Bush put in more total hours than the majority of National Guardsmen do, and he didn’t owe any by the time he left.

 

George also learned what it is like to try to run a less-than-successful business.  My first real estate corporation essentially failed, despite making me more money than I ever have made since, although the reasons are too complicated to explain here as well as probably too boring.  Just the same, we went broke and closed our doors.

 

Did Bush get help from friends when it came to making money in baseball?  Well, sure…I don’t know too many successful business people who don’t have friends who help, nor do I know many people too proud to take a helping hand when they need it. 

 

Anyhow, I don’t see Bush as being all that different from myself in a lot of ways and as a result of a lot of our experiences.  He piloted a jet fighter, darn him, I envy him that.  And he quit drinking, I almost envy him that…although I’ve gotten a lot better, I no longer carouse the bars like I used to do.  And he’s much more of a committed Christian than I am, certainly nothing there for which I can fault him even if I don’t plan to emulate him.  I grew up among some pretty fanatical extreme Christians…my own grandmother, the world’s nicest lady who wouldn’t harm a soul, was a devotee of Aimee Semple MacPherson and the Angelus Temple in L.A., She was a holy roller and spoke in tongues, but she never once attempted to thrust any of her beliefs on me, only her hope that I would be a minister eventually.  Frankly, in my opinion Bush is pretty tame stuff compared to the splintery Christian sects I encountered during my early life, finally winding up with the Mormons in still-pioneer-days Southern Utah in 1948.

 

No, I don’t think Bush is perfect…in fact, I’m no longer quite as certain that I am, myself.  But I do think we do the best we can, given our handicaps, and we come from different directions on some things.  I have to laugh at Frank Sinatra when he sings “mistakes, I’ve made a few, but then again, too few to mention”…I mean, Frank, what a howler!  I’m not even going to dare to try to write mine down until I feel perched right there upon the edge.

 

I’d feel the same way about Bush if he was a Democrat, though, which a lot of conservative Republicans complain that he resembles far too much for their liking.

 

But I like Joe Lieberman, too, a man who a lot of liberal Democrats complain resembles a Republican too much for their liking.

 

I’m not a party politician.  If Schwarzenegger told me tomorrow he was a Democrat I’d still be for him.  If Schumer said he was a Republican I’d still be against him.  If McCain said he was a Republican I’d still be suspicious.

 

In the course of 72 years I have voted for more Democrats than most young Democrats and more Republicans than most young Republicans.

 

It’s why I view party politics as farce and do my best to see the humor in all of it.

 

When Kerry and Pelosi and Dean put on their three stooges routines I can almost fall on the floor, I laugh so hard.