Trust me, let me be dictator on Day 1
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Sept. 26, 2024 – As history’s first people’s republic, founded upon the assertion of lofty principle rather than the assertion of lethal power, the birth of America is a miraculous, if not an immaculate, event.
The establishment of government of the people, by the people, and for the people requires a population of citizen-founders ready, willing, and able to carry the dream of personal liberty down to the ground of reality.
The fact that so many Americans know reality only as a type of TV show, has the potential to transform the American dream into a global nightmare.
The insanity of inherited wealth and arbitrary power, as practiced in the Spanish, French, Dutch, and British empires, produced the founding generation of Americans, in the eighteenth century. It has has been succeeded by a flood of lies and half-truths that pour through the screens and speakers of popular media, in the twenty-first century.
Perhaps as much as half the public believes what they are repeatedly told to believe, even though their eyes, ears, and nose tells them its baloney. Too much TV, especially for the pliant, unformed minds of infants, toddlers, children, adolescents, young, and uneducated people, does violence to truth by jailing reason in a labyrinth of Jabbewocky.
How else could people born with the freedom to govern themselves come to believe the outrageous lie that government is the biggest problem in their lives? If our credentialed class of medical and legal experts are too timid to diagnose what hobbles us, our dream of Liberty will wither and die.
What is a MAGA rally but a loud cry for help, a national suicide note?
Ronald Reagan transformed government from being the tool of the people into being the weapon of an imaginary bogeyman. At a press conference in 1986, Reagan accelerated America’s descent to madness with the best joke Peggy Noonan ever wrote for him: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Had the Gipper told the truth, as Knute Rockne would have, he would have said, “I’m from GE, and I’m here to pull the wool over your eyes.”
He was so handsome, and such supple putty in the hands of his corporate sponsor, that his “aw shucks” demeanor hypnotized the non-reading public. Had he read Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, even just the part about government being of, for, and by the people, his innate goodness should have transformed him into a free man of the people, rather than a paid corporate pitchman.
One of his pre-GE roles was as a monkey’s co-star in Bedtime for Bonzo. Since his re-baptism as a republican in 1962, so much starch has seeped out of the republican backbone that today they’ve fallen for another screen idol. Not one from the silver screen of Hollywood, but from the tiny screen that leaks even into tiny palm-sized devices.
Already convicted of dozens of felony crimes in a trial seen on TV, now he begs to be made dictator “just on Day 1,” as he awaits sentencing, with dozens more felony charges yet to be faced.
If our founders had the divine foresight to see the leviathan TV would become, they would have preambled the Bill of Rights:
A well-educated public being essential to the security of a free state, the right of the people to dumb-down with TV shall take effect upon the completion of housework and homework.
Wouldn’t you agree, dear reader, that it is better to keep TV tycoons inside TV’s vast wasteland, than to watch their treason and high crimes stream from the witness stand?