Dr. Ben Carson, presidential candidate and amateur self-help motivational speaker, was re-explaining his positions to Andrea Mitchell. He always sounds so calm and measured, especially if you can’t hear his actual words. We were driving back from Marietta. We could clearly hear every word and had plenty of time to listen to the entire interview.
Dr. Carson’s leadership is purely speculative. It is all If Only. If Only he was in the room with the armed assailant. He would have led the charge against the gunman unlike those hapless victims who must have just waited for their turn to die. If Only the Jews and gypsies had had guns. The armies of the Third Reich which rolled through France, Poland, etc… would have been held off by tailors with pistols. If Only…
Dr. Carson’s odd fixation with slavery, guns, and Hitler have ceased to be amusing. I reached for Joe Jackson’s new CD, Fast Forward.
I’m hitting fast forward
Seems like we’ve gotten kind of stuck
Time to get out of town and try to
Set the controls for sometime in the future
When people will be happy instead of
Getting dumber and getting scareder all the time
Scared of their own shadows and scared to take a fall
Either miserable with millions or dying for a dime
Desperate to live forever or lucky to live at all
Oh to hit fast forward. But how far in the future do we need to go? If we skip ahead two weeks, will we find that the Republicans have decided that the Speaker of the House, the second in line to succeed the President after the Vice-president, should be a strong leader who actually believes in government? If we skip ahead thirteen months, will we find that the election results are as clear as 2008 or will we be facing the turmoil of 2000?
How far is far enough? While some of us pine for an idealized future, others dream of an impossible return to the 1950’s and a past that never existed.
But today we have Ben Carson and Donald Trump. And for a moment of sanity, Joe Jackson.