I contend that those of us raised in the irresponsible sixties are, in a large way, still dealing in drugs, the same as college kids and Mexican cartels. That’s just an educated guess. We’re no longer college age, smoking pot and dropping acid. We’re responsible people. Our drugs of choice—or addiction—are the countless wonder drugs hawked by the pharmaceutical companies between the bursts of evening news and other entertainment each night as we kneel and pray to our God of Knowledge, the television. Frankly, the commercials are more frightening than thinking about kids smoking pot in their dorm rooms.

I have the sneaking suspicion that the drug companies know when I’ll be watching. It’s an uneasy feeling. The commercials seem to appear between the denture cleaners, reverse-mortgage and “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” commercials. I don’t think they’re aiming at young people with these. The commercials always begin with a problem that I have, or that I think I might have, or that they have convinced me I have.

The drugs always seem marvelous enough. The commercials usually begin with old people hacking and coughing, trying to get out of a bathtub, lying on the floor or generally not feeling well. And by the way, all four of those things could be me, depending on the time of day.  As the advertisement continues, we are witness to their miraculous recovery.  Along toward the end, however, we are quickly and carefully informed of all the things that might go wrong: Heart attacks, mood swings, hair loss, erectile dysfunction (better known as the pesky “I’ve fallen and can’t get it up” malady), strokes, suicidal thoughts, cancer and death may occur, not to mention irritable bowel syndrome. I don’t know about you, but it makes me think that if I take that drug, I may end up with something worse than what I had in the first place. I seriously think Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton may be on some of these drugs.

They are very careful to tell me when not to take their drug; don’t take Panacea if you are pregnant, planning on being pregnant, diabetic, lactose intolerant, suffer from chronic something or other, if you generally feel tired all the time, if you think you’re having memory lapses, sudden redness or irritation, or if you’re allergic to any ingredient in Panacea. That last one always puzzles me. Why would I take something if I’m allergic to it? That’s like saying “don’t shoot yourself in the head if you don’t like shooting yourself in the head.” I suppose they have to say something. They paid for the commercial time.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as a drug-dealing society. But it takes only a brief glance at television to realize what we really are. Two things about this scare me: The fact that we do a lot of drug-dealing and the fact that television is our indisputable source of knowledge. Both have lethal consequences.

I try not to watch these commercials.  They cause me to have sympathy aches and pains and I am convinced they’ve discovered another of my ailments. I wonder if they have a drug for hypochondria.  I had one in college.

 

How do you start your day? I really enjoy my mornings. I have a comfortable chair.  I have coffee.  Give me a few more years and I’ll enjoy sitting on the porch.  I enjoy my mornings without a television, newspaper or computer talking to me.  I’ll admit I’m on the computer right now, but I’m the one doing the talking, and that’s an important distinction; I’ll get to that in a moment.

You see, I retired five months ago.  I worked for fifty years so that I can have mornings like this.  Now don’t get me wrong; I like to see what you folks are doing and what’s going on in the world, but I don’t need to spend my day hearing about it.  I’m not for sticking my head in the sand, but it’s entirely possible that a minute or two in the sand would have a cool and calming effect. It might be better than Xanax.  I don’t claim to be smarter than anyone else about this but, being retired, I do have time to sit and think without somebody in my face trying to influence me.

Take this election process, for example.  Every day for the past year, I’ve been faced with an incessant buildup to an election that won’t take place for another eight months.  If I chose to leave the television on, or to spend my day on Facebook, I would be hearing about it until I go to bed tonight.

We didn’t used to need a two-year election process. Back in my day (young people, forgive me for that phrase. I get some perverse pleasure out of saying it), but back in my day, we knew who the candidates were. They made speeches and it was reported. We felt intelligent enough to vote.

I don’t think we are the prime beneficiaries of the two-year election/primary process. I think it’s someone else. When you want an answer to something like this, follow the money.  The true profiteers of the extended campaign and shortened news cycle are (drum roll): the media who bring it to us. There are billions and billions of dollars being spent for those commercials. We’re only halfway through the primaries.  There are two conventions down the road, followed by the buildup to an election.  After the election, the media begins to tear down the king they have created.  It’s nothing but play in a sandbox, writ large and encompassing years of our lives, while the media makes off with billions. It’s time we might have spent enjoying our friends.  Living with a candidate every day, every hour is dangerously similar to being married to someone who gets to do all the talking. Familiarity can breed contempt.

Who’s at fault?  You tell me. All I know is that broadcasting to me every hour about who said what reminds me of that creepy little guy in school who always whispered in my ear about something somebody said. Seems to me that if we get away from that creepy little guy and think for ourselves, we’ll generally arrive at a calm and rational idea.

My parents were Republicans. After four years of college in the sixties with hair down to my shoulders,  getting married, having children and working for a living, I eventually got there. But things changed, and I suspect it was merely another form of that creepy little guy from the schoolyard.  I don’t call myself a Republican these days.  I’m sort of like Reagan; I didn’t leave the Republican party; it got late, the party lasted too long and I kicked them out.  So now I’m a political orphan, looking for a leader. I want a leader with unbending conservative values and an ability to warmly engage those who disagree on methods. I can’t deny the fact that a lot of my friends are progressive in their thinking; we disagree on almost everything.  But we disagree well.  Two friends with agreeable manners can make progress without a pickaxe.

I like my presidential debates without reference to the size of a candidate’s hands as a veiled reference to the size of his reproductive anatomy. I’m no prude. I can swear like a sailor if I I’m angry or feel the need. Three points:  1. Shouldn’t have happened.  2. Anybody who feels the need to respond to something like that has a deep-seated insecurity about something and 3. Like a fight in football, it’s always the second swing that gets the penalty. Who mentioned the subject in the first place? Whose campaign staff advised their candidate to do a hand job on his opponent? And yes, I’m sorry I said that and I promise never to do it again. When I was a child, I spoke as a child. I defended my misbehavior with “But Johnny did it.” And my mother would always say “if Johnny jumped off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff?”

Maybe the reason we get so angry these days about politics, disrupt speeches, lose friendships, and have our feelings bent out of shape is because someone has been whispering to us, hell bent on creating discord.  Maybe if we stuck our cell phones in our pocket, turned off the television and started listening to our friends, we’d have calm and rational ideas. So maybe the real questions are these: Who won’t leave us alone? Who won’t stop talking? Who wants us to fight? Who is it, whispering in our ear?

I’m a pretty good driver. I keep my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel. I try not to use a cell phone when I’m driving. I kick the tires occasionally, make sure the mirrors are set correctly and change the oil religiously. I can enter an interstate highway smoothly. I know how to parallel-park. And I’ve always been a safe left-turning driver until a few months ago when the city of St. Joseph changed that procedure into a heart-stopping life or death game of chance with this new flashing left-turn arrow contraption.

Maybe it’s because old habits die hard–just like old drivers–but I liked turning left the old way. Here’s how it worked before: If an intersection didn’t have a left-turn signal, then you simply waited for a gap in the oncoming traffic and turned when you had a fleeting chance of living through it.  A green left-turn arrow meant “OK, you can turn left—the oncoming traffic has to stop.” When the green arrow went away, it turned into a green round light, which meant “Turn at your own risk.” Yellow lights technically mean “proceed with caution,” but any driver knows they really mean “Hurry! I’m about to turn red.”

Flashing lights are designed to get my attention. So when I see a flashing yellow left-turn arrow, it may be saying “safer driving statistics” to some traffic engineer, but to me it is shouting “Hey you! Hurry up and turn left, because I’m about to turn red!”

In all fairness, most of us are used to making a left turn with no help whatsoever. I think an intersection with no left turn signal is less dangerous than this flashing yellow thing trying to entice me into suicide by stupidity.

I have a question that I like to ask when somebody wants to change something: “What’s broken?”  Tell me, in specific terms, exactly why we’re changing something that seemed to me to be working perfectly well. What was wrong with the old way of turning left?

They say the new way is safer. That may be true. The odds of getting broadsided will go down significantly after we’ve killed off half of the driving population. I suppose I’m all right with that, so long as I’m in the half who have a pulse when it’s all over.

 

 

I had cataract surgery on both eyes over the past month, and only now can I finally get back to writing. The actual procedure took only about ten minutes or so, and it was painless. The hard part was figuring out the eye drops.

They gave me three different kinds of eye drops. Two days before the surgery on my right eye, I was instructed to take two of them four times a day, and one of them once a day. Then, about a week after the surgery, I was to stop one of them altogether, and change one of the others to once per day, and the other one to twice per day—for a month. Now, before I finished with those eye drops, they did the surgery on my left eye. So, two days before the second surgery, I had to start putting one of the drops in my left eye once per day and two of them in my left eye four times a day, then quit taking one of them in a week, and change one of the others to once per day and the other to twice a day a week later, while I was still trying to remember what to do with my right eye. I was constantly standing in front of the bathroom mirror shouting “Which is the one I take once?” And my wife, Saint Mary, would re-explain it to me. It was so complicated, I couldn’t help but think the government was involved.

In addition to the eye drops, I was instructed to wear a cover for my eye at night. I guess they thought I would have a bad dream and poke myself in the eye. I thought it would be a really cool black eye patch, like a pirate? It wasn’t. It was just a clear cover and I had to tape it all the way around my eye before bedtime. I looked like that dog in The Little Rascals.

And speaking of dogs, in the middle of this complex, incomprehensible eye drop fiasco, Joe The Dog hurt his eye. He came in the kitchen, pawing his face. I stared at him (as best I could through the eye cover) and his right eye looked all droopy. I told Saint Mary that I didn’t know what he had done. I said it looked like he had poked himself in the eye or something. So that was an expensive trip to the animal clinic, where the veterinarian looked at him, shrugged and said, “I don’t really know what he’s done. Looks like he’s poked himself in the eye or something.” He got paid for saying that.

Joe The Dog was miserable, and we paid an additional fortune for—you guessed it—eye drops. These were to be administered twice a day. That night, Joe lay in his bed and I sat beside him. I had the eye cover taped on, and Joe stared at me. I looked like Spanky and Alfalfa’s dog. He looked like Marty Feldman.

I’m better today. I can see things without my eyeglasses and colors I haven’t seen in twenty years. The eye cover is gone, and I’m down to eye drops twice a day on only one eye. Joe the Dog takes his last eye drops today, and feels much better. I believe we’ll both pull through.

I posted an opinion on social media the other day about my city’s suggestion that we franchise our trash hauling service. That was sticking my nose into a political issue—something I try to avoid with these essays.  But sometimes we see things which our experience tells us are bad ideas, and we feel like we owe it to our friends and neighbors to give them pause and time to think carefully.

One reader said that I was “vilifying” the idea by calling it socialistic and that I sounded like a “crackpot.”

What I actually said, or tried to imply, was this: when we give up our right to choose our trash haulers—when we allow the city government to decide who they will be and how much it will cost—we are submitting to a socialistic order.  I don’t know about you, but I tend to vilify things that seem, well, villainous to me.

Right now, if I don’t like the job my trash hauler is doing, I can march out there on the driveway and say “Hey you!  You’re fired! I’m going with somebody else!”  Now I probably won’t do that, because he’s giving me really good service and an excellent price.  But I still like holding the cards.

If I relinquish that right to my city government, I lose a little piece of my freedom.  And I’m all about freedom.  If the city gets to make the decisions, and the price goes up or I’m unhappy with my trash hauler, then I don’t get to march out there and fire him.  Well, I could, but he would just laugh at me, because I wouldn’t be in charge anymore.  The cards wouldn’t be in my hands, and I’d feel helpless, impotent and very resentful.

I don’t think I’m a crackpot.  I just looked up the definition of socialism.  Here’s what it says:

 “A political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.”

In other words, franchised trash service is textbook socialism.  I’m not a crackpot.  I merely pointed out that the pot is about to crack.

Every time we ask our government, be it Washington D.C. or local city councils, to “handle” things for us, we surrender a little piece of our freedom.

To quote T.S. Elliot: “This is the way the world ends; not with a bang, but a whimper.”

I have tried to keep these essays on the light side and to try not to not venture into areas and subjects which cause our “passions to strain.”   To mostly make you laugh and hopefully to make a little point now and then, here and there.

With the passing of my mother yesterday, I don’t find it in me to be funny today.  But here’s a note from my old friend Bill Clark.  He’s one of the funniest guys I know, and one of the few who can actually make me crack up.  He did it again yesterday.  So he’s pinch-writing for me today:

My thoughts and prayers are with you all as I learn of the passing of your dear Mother. I remember growing up with you on East Seventh Street while you lived next door.

Many memories of moments shared with you and your brother and I having fun getting into trouble. On one occasion we must have really made a mess and your Mother was beside herself.  She yelled and told us to

“Go to your room right now!”

I meekly said,

“But I don’t live here.”

And she said,

“Go to your room anyway.”

Most all of the memories of her are really nice as are all of the memories of your family. We do have stories and for some, they still can not be told.

I just wanted to say, I am so sorry for your loss but at the same time, she lived a very long and good life.  She certainly enriched my life as did your whole family. Just wanted you to know that you are loved and appreciated as you prepare to celebrate her life and share memories. . . . you will remain in my thoughts and in my prayers as you grieve her passing. Your old neighbor and almost family, Bill 

 

I stopped in a local fast food restaurant the other day.  As I was eating, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said “Excuse me, I think you dropped this.”  And a hand was holding a discarded wrapper from a drinking straw.  Huh?  What?

I looked up to see the face of an old friend, Larry Koch.

Larry was the director of Data Processing which begat Management Information Systems which begat Information Technology for Methodist Hospital which begat Heartland Health which begat Mosaic Life Care.  During this entire time, he kept the same name.

When I moved to this city in 1983, I was looking for a job.  A friend wrangled me an interview for a job as a computer operator at Methodist.  I was nervous, because I needed that job.  I was 33 years old.  I had a wife and a seven year-old daughter and a new baby on the way.

So that’s how I met Larry Koch.  He sat in his office and bounced a tennis ball down to the floor and off the wall and back into his hand as he talked.  If any of you have ever seen a movie called The Great Escape, this was like being in the cooler with Steve McQueen. He asked me a lot of pertinent questions about my knowledge of computers.  I just kept watching that tennis ball and answering yes to all the questions, which was a damned lie.  I’d never seen a computer.  At the end of the interview, he caught the ball and stopped.  He looked me straight in the eyes and said,

“You play softball?”

I let way too much time pass before I answered, but I said yes, and it wasn’t really a damned lie because I did play softball.  Once.

Well, he hired me anyway.  I think he knew I didn’t know anything about computers, but figured I wasn’t a complete idiot. I proved him wrong on that, and that’s what this story is about.  I’ll get there in a minute.  Sometimes, it’s better to hire someone who knows nothing.  That way, they learn it your way. Sometimes hiring a smart person who thinks he knows everything ends up being a situation in which you realize you have hired a smart person who thinks he knows everything.

Within a year, I realized Larry Koch was one of the smartest people I’d ever met.  And when I realized it, I started doing a lot of listening.

So when I saw him the other day, we did a lot of reminiscing. And I had the opportunity to tell him how many “Larry Koch things” I’ve adopted.  I won’t list them here, but they are just really great advice for living and leading.

Thinking about Larry made me remember the night I proved to him that I was an idiot.

I was a new computer operator and I worked the third shift.  For those of you who don’t know what third shift is, it’s the shift where you work all night and go home and put aluminum foil on the windows and rugs against the door so you won’t hear the baby crying and try to get some sleep.

The medical center computer operator ran the huge, mainframe computer—all night long.  I had been trained, and worked alongside other operators, but the time came for me to handle it on my own. Alone.

I think I’d been doing the job for a month or two, without major issues.  I’d gotten in some jams and had to call Joe Schmidt (my boss, who is another really funny guy and deserves his own story), but I’d never had to call Larry Koch (Joe’s boss).

Then, one night, something happened, that made me think we were having a problem .  I was there all alone.  In that place, if you were new and didn’t know everything yet, it could get stressful.   I knew I had to keep that mainframe computer running.  I had no idea what was attached to it or how.  It was a hospital, right?  So if this thing were to actually go down, maybe life support systems and oxygen and God knows what all would fail.  And I remembered Schmidty saying “We don’t let it go down.  That’s something we just don’t do.”

There was a room outside and separate from the computer room.  It was where the backup power system was located.  All operators had a key to it, but as Schmidty told me, “You don’t want to be in a situation where you have to go in here.”

On one entire wall of that room was a rack with about six million 12-volt car batteries, all connected.  That was our emergency power.  On the opposite side of that room was a huge thing that filled the entire wall.  I don’t know how to describe it to you.  It filled the whole wall.  It had dials and meters and levers and gears and pulleys and lights blinking on and off and it hummed and rattled and buzzed and vibrated.  This was not something you would want to touch.  It was a huge something that I didn’t know anything about.

Right in the middle of this huge clicking, whirring monstrosity was a red button.  When Schmidty showed it to me, he pointed out that the red button had a plastic cover over it.  You had to lift the cover out of the way to push the button.  It had three red labels above and below.  The label above said DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON and the one below said DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON.  There was a third label that said IF YOU PUSH THIS BUTTON, CALL LARRY KOCH.  And Schmidty pointed out the cover and the labels and said “You don’t want to push this button.”

So I can’t really exactly explain how it got pushed.

It probably happened because I got all worried and panicky and thought maybe patients were dying upstairs as a result of my incompetence.  Maybe I was a little upset.  But here’s the thing:  When you’re the only person around and the button is in a locked room and you have the key and the button has labels all over it telling you not to push it and a plastic cover that you have to lift out of the way to push it, well, you can’t blame anyone else.

You can’t say “I don’t know, somebody must have broken in there in a fit of rage and pushed it” unless you want to take a crowbar to that door to bolster your story; they gave you the key.  You can’t say you tripped and accidentally pushed it. You can’t say you momentarily lost your mind, because they don’t want people who momentarily lose their mind to be running the computer, you see.  And why were you in there anyway, supposedly tripping over things?

Methodist Medical Center no longer exists.  The thing doesn’t exist, because the room is gone.  And the room is gone because the entire hospital building is gone.  Along with any evidence. All I can tell you, at this late date (and not being certain that the statute of limitations has run out) is that all the lights went out and came back on and that plastic cover was up and those six million car batteries started clicking and glowing and humming over and over again “You. Are in Big. Ass. Trouble.”

 It was about three in the morning and of course that made it so much easier to dial Larry Koch’s phone number.

Well, Larry Koch answered the phone and came in at three in the morning, and never asked me how the button got pushed.  Didn’t even lose his temper.  In fact, he really didn’t mention it at all.  He fixed the problem and went home.  Maybe he figured I had already beaten myself up. Maybe that’s why he’s one of my heros.

Nobody died at the hospital, or at least not as a result of me, directly.  It turned out that my fears were unfounded and the oxygen wasn’t connected to the life-support which wasn’t connected to the computer.  A couple of business reports might have bitten the dust, but nothing more serious than that.  I stayed with Methodist/Heartland for about ten years and went on to a really fun career involving, believe it or not, computers. I was promoted from idiot and was actually pretty good by the time I stopped.

I don’t see Larry often, maybe once every five years.  But every time I see him, he’s always grinning and I am always thinking he’s going to say, “Hey, there’s something  I’ve always wanted to ask you …”

 

The other day a group of my friends were playing the old game of “What’s the best book you’ve ever read?”

Having played the game before, I knew my answer.  I have read almost constantly for 60 years, so I have a lot of choices.  But Harper Lee wins, every time I think about it.  This diminutive southern lady published To Kill A Mockingbird 55 years ago, then never wrote again (or so we thought).

I don’t hold Harper Lee up in comparison with other great authors. There are  thousands of talented writers, and for each of their works there are another thousand arguments why this and that are better than this book or that one. And for all of those discussions, there is more than one “right” answer.

But I don’t care because Harper Lee is the writer who, more than anyone else, makes me experience the things she writes about.  I don’t care to stand on either side or any social issues Harper Lee addressed.  I simply love to read what she writes.  Every sentence, every paragraph, every idea is an immense pleasure for me, and that is all I’ve ever asked of any real writer.  I’m a writer too, and if I could be as good as I’d like to be, I’d be as good as Harper Lee.

Some years ago, we performed the stage version of Mockingbird, and I clearly recall my good friend and director Jeff talking to the cast during rehearsals.  He said (and I may not be quoting him directly here) that we could work on the characters and the deliveries and the dialects, but until we had a sense of the way time passed in Alabama in the 1930s, we’d never get it right.  He said something about how the sense of time in the South in those days was like “moving through molasses.”  And when he said it, I realized that’s what Harper Lee had already done for me. Within the first few pages of Mockingbird, she described her fictional Alabama childhood by saying “Maycomb was a tired old town when I first knew it.”  Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes a writer says it in a way that makes you think there’s just no better way to say it.

I suspect there are a lot of readers out there who feel the same way.  It isn’t an argument about “who’s best.”  Harper Lee is so good that we don’t even care about the argument; we just want her to write another book.

And, it turns out, she has.

You can read about Go Set A Watchman in a hundred thousand places on the internet, so I won’t take your time with it here.  According to those stories, she wrote Watchman first and it was rejected by the publishers.  One of them suggested she write about the earlier lives of these characters, and she wrote Mockingbird.  The rest was history.  Watchman was discovered relatively recently, and I can only assume that Harper Lee is pleased that it’s probably already on the bestseller lists.  That’s really not my point. If you want all the details, “Google it,” as they say in the vernacular of the instantly gratified.

My reason for writing today is to tell my friends who have loved Harper Lee and Mockingbird for 55 years that Go Set A Watchman is every bit as good.  It’s a gratifying story, just not instantly so, because nothing in the Old South is instant.

I would never serve as a “spoiler” to those who love to read her.  But I can’t resist one tiny paragraph (early in the book) just to let you know what you’re in for.  Here is Harper Lee as Scout returns home and enjoys needling her aunt:

“Atticus raised his eyebrows in warning. He watched his daughter’s daemon rise and dominate her: her eyebrows, like his, were lifted, the heavy-lidded eyes beneath them grew round, and one corner of her mouth was raised dangerously.  When she looked thus, only God and Robert Browning knew what she was likely to say.”

I didn’t copy and paste that.  I typed it, word for word.  And pretended, for a moment, that I wrote it.

To those of you who don’t care about Harper Lee or To Kill A Mockingbird, I’m pretty certain this exercise has been a waste of your time.

But to those of you who love her, it wasn’t a waste of mine.

I haven’t had time to carp and nitpick about trivial things lately.  My mother’s health and other major life-changes have beaten me over the head with lessons about what is important.  But I don’t give up easily.  Here are some things that bring me out of my chair, shouting at the television, even when no one else is home:

 There are at least three current commercials on television with “consumers” shown and a screen graphic that reads  “REAL PEOPLE–NOT ACTORS”.  I don’t know about the millions of other unpaid community theatre actors out there. Maybe I’m the only one who assumed he was real.  I choose to be offended by this. I know it’s unreasonable. Somebody make them stop.

 I’m against trendy, hip and stylish phrases, too.  We ought to be able to vote on these and get rid of them when they become annoying.  I start calling a phrase “trendy” when I hear it three times in five minutes.  Why does everyone in the media (politicians included) think the phrase “in his/her wheelhouse” needs to be bandied about?  I first heard it in the musical/entertainment world, but now I’m hearing it used for political candidates, so I know it’s catching on with unimaginative people.  Here are three alternatives for people who can’t seem to find a different phrase:

 He’s a natural at that. She cut her teeth on that. They’re already very experienced with that. He’s quite able to do that. She’s been doing that a long, long time.

Ok five. I couldn’t stop.  If we don’t refrain from over-use of trendy words and phrases, they will die the slow death of “awesome.”  And by that I mean that the original word will not mean what it used to mean.  Awesome can never again be used again to describe something that truly inspires awe.  It’s become just a nice polite word with which to respond or describe…anything.  We killed it.  Awesome.

 Here’s another thing: Has anyone else noticed the incredible number of political candidates, pundits and talking heads who have learned to start sentences with the word “look” ?  “Look, when the President does this…”  “Look, Congress isn’t going to…”  “Look, the economy’s in a tailspin…”  Watch any discussion panel or sound bite and start counting,  I don’t mind it once in a while, but repeated over and over, it takes on a condescending tone, as though the speaker feels the need to patiently explain something to me.  And wouldn’t “listen” be more appropriate?   If someone tells me to look, I expect to see something.  I want to see them pour a glass of water on their head, or pull a large bunch of bananas out of their coat.

 Finally, why is it necessary for so many political candidates  to tell me what they intend to do “On Day One”?  “I’ll tear up that agreement On Day One.”  “I’ll submit this to Congress On Day One.” Quite frankly, I’d prefer that the new President sit down in the Oval Office, find out where all the gears and levers are, listen to a few instructions and get settled.  Day Two is perfectly all right with me. 

 We all know that every candidate has been instructed by the experts and marketing test groups to say things like “On Day One.”  It’s an active phrase.  It’s not passive.  It doesn’t just sit there.  It means they’ll do something.   It’s so much better than “Oh, I’ll get around to it sooner or later.”  I think if I ran for office, I would promise to get things done on the day before Day One.”  The other candidates would start promising things a week prior to Day One, six months prior.  Eventually, they would work themselves all the way back to now.  And then, they’d have to do something. 

 

Because I am angry about other things in the news, I’ve decided to leave those subjects alone and to chew on Presidential Debates.  If that bores you, please realize that it’s aversion therapy for me.

I’ve been watching and listening to so-called Presidential debates for 55 years.  I don’t care what your political or party affiliations are, or seem to be.  Unless you are over 65, I have more experience and knowledge than you.  Don’t expect me to be impressed with your impassioned social media political diatribes, but I am grateful that you are excited.  If you find that irritating or arrogant, it’s all right with me. You’ll grow out of it.  And when you’re my age, you can say things like this to younger people and get away with it.

Here are some facts people may want to know or remember about these things called Debates:

1.       They are not debates.  Any high-school debate student knows this.  Real debate requires an initial premise or argument, followed by rebuttal and follow up on a specific subject.  There is a discipline and etiquette involved that requires logical thinking and a grasp of facts.  Now, here’s the important part:  Presidential debates are not the place to go searching for logical thinking and a grasp of facts.  What you will find there are “sound bites” pre-scripted by the candidates and their organizations to make the candidate look and sound “presidential.”  It is, in essence, theatre.  It allows voters the opportunity to suspend disbelief and imagine an individual as President.  It makes an impression. And maybe it’s important to point out here that it’s your impression.  It doesn’t mean they are necessarily good leaders.  And they are not debating.

2.       Presidential power is limited.  About ninety-nine percent of what you hear promised during a Presidential debate will not happen.  Other than “executive orders,” which generally affect government employees, a President can’t change things with a wave of his hand.  That requires a working and agreeable Congress, regardless of their party.  If you are truly interested in laws, policy and the effect they have upon you, inspect your Congressmen and Senators with a fine-tooth comb.  The President just pretends he is responsible for these things, and usually comes out for the curtain call.

3.       The real power of a President is in his or her leadership abilities.  Rather than just throw the word “leadership” at you, let me be specific.  They must be able to persuade other people (that means the Congress and you and me) to feel a certain way, or to take action.  To be effective as President, they must have the ability to motivate others.  They ought to inspire us, but that’s just a secret hope on my part.

I don’t like the way the political game is played today.  The people I see in the political news do not resemble my friends here, in my city.  That’s probably because I know these people and care about them.  Some of my very best friends support political ideas that are completely opposite of my own.  But the things we really want are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  In many cases, our disagreements are simply a difference of opinion about how to get those things.

So: as far as Presidential debates and elections go, support the person you feel can do the best job of motivating other people.  It might also be wise to note that Lincoln didn’t “look presidential.”