What Would Will Say

Hi if you’ve responded and many have, while I am working on the next current one, here is something I wrote and had published by a small paper in N.H. last year, The Keane Sentinel, circulation 14,000, whose readers I had the good fortune to share this with.

Well, I know this takes you back a year and a bit more — hard to believe isn’t it that a year ago we laughed our heads off at the impossible, beyond plausible chance this would happen to us, to our nation. But it did.

So, anyhow, not to digress, along about January 2016 I went back and looked at things Will Rogers had said about politics and stuff and I wrote this and The Sentinel published it. But since pretty much everyone I know is not a  Sentinel subscriber, I thought I’d share it with you now, while I work on the next current issue post. Hope you enjoy  it, I sure enjoyed writing it; and, re-reading it just now, discover it remains pertinent on a day when  the nearly incomparably ignorant Ben Carson confused the Middle Passage with immigration:

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Looking at the 2016 presidential race you have to wonder: What would Will Rogers — who said just about everything worth saying about American politics in his time — say now about the 2016 presidential race and the state of our politics?

Rogers, actor, writer, raconteur and political observer, died too young in a plane crash in 1935.

Donald Trump would not have surprised Rogers, a sage man, who in his time witnessed the likes of Huey Long and Father Coughlin.

Still if he could meet Donald Trump now, is it likely Rogers again would declare, as he did in 1927, “I never met a man I didn’t like.”

Every day it seems ever more likely that Jeb Bush, who has raised over $100 million, in the end would have to agree with Rogers when he observed nearly 100 years ago, “Politics has got so expensive that it takes a lot of money to even get beat with.”

Rogers, a plain talking look-you-in-the eye kind of guy, spun his cowboy lariat and wisdom on stage, on the radio and in regular columns.

As an Oklahoman you might guess he’d line up with the National Rifle Association and its legions in Congress. Not necessarily so.

“When the Judgment Day comes civilization will have an alibi, ‘I never took a human life, I only sold the fellow the gun to take it with”,  said Will ever so wryly in 1929, leaving us to wonder what he would say today to our gun-rampant nation.

In his beliefs, Rogers stood for democracy, a democrat with a small “d,” who famously announced, “I am not a member of any organized party – I am a Democrat.”

That’s not something Sen. Bernie Sanders, self-declared Social Democrat, can say as he seeks the Democratic Party nomination without ever having been a member of Will Roger’s party or done much at all to elect Democrats.

When Rogers said, “There ain’t nothing that breaks up homes, country and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs,” he could not have anticipated Bill and Hilary Clinton, who, between them, have written at least three personal memoirs.

From his vantage point in 1932, Rogers said, “This would be a great time in the world for some man to come along that knew something.”

Clearly, that man is not Dr. Ben Carson, who has the temerity to run for president when each day crystallizes that he knows next to nothing of history, government, governing, public policy, international geography or the conduct of foreign relations.

In fact, looking across the entire Republican field as one GOP candidate after another rushes to jump off the right edge of the world without looking, this observation by Rogers is especially salient:

“The American people are a very generous people and will forgive almost any weakness, with the possible exception of stupidity.”

Or, like me, if you vote in New Jersey, by now you wish that Chris Christie would heed Roger’s advice and just “Never miss a good chance to shut up.”

But enough about would be presidents. What of Congress, then and now? Anything changed? Not really.

“Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate; now what’s going to happen to us with both a Senate and a House?” Rogers asked and answered his question when in 1930 he wrote, “This country has come to feel the same way when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.”

And to all those in Congress who now call for force in Syria, they can think about this: “The United States never lost a war or won a conference.” But then Rogers didn’t live long enough to experience Vietnam, where we lost a war but won a conference, or Iraq, where we lost our way entirely.

If there is one thing the Oklahoma sage said that sort of sums up the state of the world and politics today it’s this one:

“An onion can make you cry, but there has never been a vegetable invented to make you laugh.”

Today’s presidential candidates can make you cry. Wouldn’t it be great to find even one you could laugh with instead of laugh at?

We should all wish Will Rogers could be here now to put this straight.