The Time Capsule: Global warming, Obama and Mark Twain
A serious problem our leaders in Washington, D.C., deserve credit for making remarkable progress on is global warming. We had another harsh winter. The east coast endured record cold and snow and now we’re having, yet again, a cold, wet spring. Polar bear numbers are on the increase. We get conflicting reports, but some tell us the planet stopped warming about 18 years ago, and for the last decade has been getting colder. Some of those who study this sort of thing believe climate is cyclical and we’re entering another “Little Ice Age.”
Al Gore and his followers can declare victory, and I wish they would. I’m ready to go back to real light bulbs and warm the place up.
Other things aren’t working out as well. Although we don’t have all the inside information, recent events indicate Barack Obama may have underestimated when he referred to ISIS as a “JV team.” Withdrawing from Iraq at a time and in the manner he chose might not have been the wisest option. The ISIS situation seems close to getting out of hand, and I’m not confident he’s the one to deal with it.
There are other issues. He seems to be another politician who made a long list of promises that haven’t been fulfilled. It appears, at least to me and a few friends, that race relations have gotten worse. Police are being targeted. Our military shrinks. The economy remains bleak. A multi-trillion dollar stimulus plan was implemented, and now more Americans are not working than are.
Our president vowed to fundamentally change this country, and has. If he could run for a third term I expect he’d change it even more. He can’t, though, so perhaps we’ll send the Clintons back to the White House. They’ll bring the same basic philosophy, move the country in the same direction, but be more entertaining. Bill is sure to be the same ol’ Bill, and if Hillary could help the family foundation raise $25 million while serving her country as secretary of state, she should be able to make even more charitable contributions as president.
One wonders what Mark Twain would say about all this. I have a friend who recently retired after a career as librarian, and in her experience, Twain isn’t read much anymore. This is too bad. He not only wrote the greatest American novel, he had insightful things to say about politics and religion.
Twain had his sarcastic one-liners: “Public office is private graft,” “An honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere,” “The political morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet,” and so on.
He better expressed himself in essays and letters, warning against putting one party in power for too long. This, he said, leads to “bad government and the sure and gradual deterioration of public morals.”
Twain had thoughts about party loyalty. “Look at tyranny of party—or what is called party allegiance, party loyalty—a snare invented by designing men for selfish purpose—and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves, are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honesty; unconscious of the fantastic contradiction. . .” and so on.
Shortly before his death he wrote that widespread political opinions were often worthless and wrong, and that “what little rag of value they possess is to be found among the old, rather than the young.”
Twain still makes a lot of sense.
Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.