Sometimes I hear something about the President that I like. Usually not. Critics are everywhere, complaining about anything and everything. I get tired of hearing about it. I mean is anything going to change? You might think I am talking about the current President, but it could be any of the dozen of so Presidents I have been aware of:
- Eisenhower
- Kennedy
- Johnson
- Nixon
- Ford
- Carter
- Reagan
- Bush 1
- Clinton
- Bush 2
- Obama
I have been trying to come up with a model that will explain why there are so many things in America that are so screwed up, especially since we also manage to do a lot of things very well. Then juggernaut occured to me. The President is like the captain of an enormous ship, but it's not a Navy ship with clear cut chain of command, it's a democractic ship, and every order that the captain gives is debated endlessly on all levels. This ship has no real engines either. Everything is done by hand. There are a zillion people down near the water line, all paddling, most of them are paddling in the same direction. You can paddle in another direction if you like, but the ship already has momentum and has a heading. Paddling in any other direction is going to take extra effort. Even the steering is a big operation. There is no single wheel, but a giant tiller with 500 odd people pushing on it. Of course, they are not all pushing the same way. Only when you get more people on one side can you hope to change our course. With the way things change back and forth, it's not having much effect on our course. And what the captain / President says? Well, I'm not sure it's having any effect on these guys.
The Democrats get the upper hand for a while, and our course moves a couple of points to the left, then the GOP gets a majority, and our course veers a couple of points to the right. But you look at where our course has taken us over the last 50 years, and it's kind of wavy, but it has not really changed, we are still headed in the same general direction we have been going since WWII. Or maybe longer. I wasn't around then, so I can't say.
Juggernuat describes America perfectly. At first I thought it was a German word what with the hard J's and G's and all, but it's not. It's from India:
From British colonial era in India, witnessing the Rath Yatra (chariot parade) at Puri, Orissa. The festival features a huge annual procession, with a wagon of the idol (deity) of Lord Krishna. Pulled with ropes by hundreds of devotees, the wagon develops considerable momentum and becomes unstoppable. - Wiktionary.org
Also called Jagannath. an idol of Krishna, at Puri in Orissa, India, annually drawn on an enormous cart under whose wheels devotees are said to have thrown themselves to be crushed. - Dictionary.com
As a bonus, now I know where the concept of throwing someone under under the bus came from.
Update May 2019 replaced missing image.
The ancient Roman legal principle "falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus" (lying in one case, lying in all) means that if a witness could be shown to have told even one lie, he was not to be trusted = could be lying in all cases.
ReplyDeleteThus a Roman lawyer would try to discredit an opposition witness by tricking him into lying about a minor matter, then, quoting
"falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus", have all his evidence discreted. The witness was 'thrown under the omnibus rule'.
People who knew no Latin (e.g. americans) assumed it was referring to a real (omni)bus, starting with Charles Bukowski in a 1990 novel of his (I forget which one).