We should not be spending the summer watching our democracy fight for survival in November. So, let’s have some fun right here and now. Let’s compare what used to be to what is.
For instance, in 1960 a family entered the White House like no family ever before. They were so photogenic. She was so beautiful. The children were so cute. Their whole family played together. President Kennedy even hired his brother as his Attorney General – for those who have forgotten, it’s the original Robert Kennedy – you know, the one without a brain worm.
For a very brief period, we had Camelot. At least, that’s what we were led to believe. The perfect family.
Unlike today, politicians got away with things that would be screaming headlines on Fox News or CNN.
We didn’t know that our president was, let’s say, hanging out with Marilyn Monroe. Any doubt on that matter should have been shattered when she all but had sex with the microphone while singing Happy Birthday to him.
But that was then, and this is now. Now we have a Kennedy running for office who most certainly does not seem like the reasonable successor to those golden days of yore. This Kennedy picks up dead bears while out falconing. Seriously, could there be a more “rich” thing he could have been doing when this happened? That he dumped it in Central Park and tried to make it look like a cyclist hit it, just adds more weirdness to the whole story.
But let’s move on from the Kennedys to President Nixon. You remember him, right? He was the guy who resigned rather than facing the humiliation of impeachment. In the 70s, being impeached meant something. Back then, apparently, politicians who were openly and visibly crooked, often had to pay for their crimes. Now we have a man running for office who was not only already impeached twice but is also a convicted felon who has been found guilty of sexual assault and speaks openly about grabbing women’s private parts.
Remember Gary Hart? He had to leave politics because he was seen in a picture with a woman on his lap who clearly wasn’t his wife. One of our current candidates was seen in pictures having a good time with Jeffery Epstein, a known pedophile. He’s still a viable candidate for president. Yep, the times they have “a changed”.
Felons run for office with a fair chance of winning. Sex offenders don’t care who knows until they get arrested. And husbands can cheat on their wives with no repercussion at the voting booth. I’m not at all sure that this is in any way progress. I realize that in the 60s this was all happening, and we just didn’t know about it. But now that we do, it’s not like politicians are cleaning up their acts as much as we are lowering the bar for them. In case you haven’t noticed, the bar is almost touching the ground at this point.
Those of us who were hippies in the sixties wanted to change the world. We wanted to bring sex into the open so that women didn’t have to marry the first man who impregnated them. We wanted to expose corruption because it would be the first step to eliminating it. We thought that the more we knew, the more open our society was, the better it would be. And that’s worked to some extent. Everyone who wants to get married can get married so long as they are consenting adults. Any woman that wants a child but not a husband just heads down to the fertility clinic. Having a baby “out of wedlock” is an acceptable path in life. Yep, lots of things turned out good. But those things that turned out bad, oh lord did they get really bad.
I feel like we are playing Limbo with our politics. We keep lowering the bar and our politicians keep finding ways to crawl under it and come up a winner.
Happy summer. And remember to vote while we still can. Because as one candidate so clearly said, vote for him and you’ll never have to vote again.