It's a Smoot Point

Ever since Aristotle and Plato conducted dialogues about philosophy. . . and even before that, when Moses and Aaron were trying to figure out how to get the hell out of Egypt . . . and even before that when the builders of Babylon were trying to figure out how to build their tower. . . humans have been talking about their problems, how to solve them, who’s to blame, and who’s in charge here. When Cromwell and his crew of renegades were striving to wrest power from KIng Charles, with their rebellion and their rump Parliament, as they were trying to figure their way around the problems of the day and deciding what should stay and what ought be cast away. . . When Jefferson and Franklin and John Henry and all those independently-minded patriots were debating how to effectively manage their revolution, to eject our new Republic away from the old monarch-weilding fuddy-duddy King George. . . and ever since Lincoln v Douglas and Lincoln v Jeff Davis. . .

and ever since Edison and Tesla were arguing about DC v AC at the Chicago World’s Fair; ever since William Jennings Bryan carried his cross of gold, rhetorically decrying the gold standard and Republican power-mongering . . . ever since William McKinley was re-elected at the dawn of the 20th-century . . . the century I was born in the middle of. . . ever since Kennedy debated Nixon, and Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury and Kent State, and ever since Woodward and Bernstein consulted with Deep Throat. . . ever since Jimmy Carter drawled his way out of Georgia and then the Hollywood rhetoric-master Reagan took the helm and told Gorbachev to tear down that wall. . . ever since Bill and Hilary talked their way out from under the Little Rock and hit the big time, and all that ‘90’s silicon-sliding world change was whirling and twirling through Time and Newsweek and CBS and NBC and ABC and 1,2, 3 times as many mouths flappin’ their jaws online, and keyboards pecking in time, and Jim Croce said “you can keep the dime” and Bush v Gore and then Obama and along comes the golden boy who could fire shots on 5th avenue and nobody notice. . . he could dog-whistle his proud toys and hist oath-peelers and his 3dissenters. . . . . . and ever since Biden was debating while his opponent blew the whistle to call a halt toAmerican Law, while maybe a few other Americans happened to be watching something besides their little pocket screens and maybe even reading, goad-forbid, the Times or the Post or whatever rag floats your boat, maybe even book or two, . . . and all of that that’s been going on, even right up to now when the guy in charge is dragging up old tariff strategies, even though it is common knowledge the Smoot-Hawley tariff was enacted back in the ‘30’s and it facilitated the great depression. . . even though all that stuff happened back in the day, now the golden-haired bronx bomber wants to cram tariff flotsam down on the currents of world trade and American prosperity, floating floozie flotsam from epstein island to New York harbor to San Francisco bay, all along the watchtower at the midnight hour and what was formally our finest hour at Normandy Beach and Guadalcanal is now being tossed into the trash history history that nobody reads about any more because they’re all gazing at screens in their new digitized American dream, as Vlad the Mad slowly creeps past Kievan lands to steal the Euro Union away, like his predecessor had so slyly slidden the nazi third reich thugs through Sudetan borders past Czech borders while the world looked the other way and even now, y’all, while the American Union’s still stuck in—read ‘em and weep, — an insurrectionist fray . . . but hey . . . it’s just a Smoot point anyway. I can’t imagine what Josh Hawley would say about it. I think I saw Josh on a video walking across the hall, but I digress. Now I think that’s all, folks, and, as has Ringo had sung it back in the day: “Now the sun turns out his light. Good night, sleep tight. Dream sweet dreams”. . . . but I awaken wondering, where’s Abraham, Martin and John when you need them? Glass half-Full