There was humor in the news even as the Cold War was heating up. While Soviet guards glared menacingly into West Berlin from Check Point Charlie and half a million fresh Chinese Communist troops massed north of the Yalu River separating North Korea from Manchuria, news footage showed legislators in a massive wall-to-wall brawl slugging and bashing and biting each other on the floor of the Taiwanese (Free China) Parliament. Yes, they were violent, but the people they represented were free.
In the 1930s the board game Monopoly lifted Americans' spirits higher than the Great Depression could reach up to pull them back down. Bitter arguments involving multi-million dollar marketing strategies would break out in the boardroom of the game's manufacturer, Parker Brothers. Old Man Parker would quiet things down by banging his gavel on the table as he implored, "Gentlemen, gentlemen. It's only a GAME!"
Washington needs somebody right now to bang a super-gavel and implore, "Ladies and gentlemen, it's only the last hope of the free world, the only country that can stem the barbarian tide and save civilization again. A little civility, please! The worst thing that's happening has nothing to do with Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS or even the super-lies about Obamacare. The worst thing going on is, we used to have friendship across all aisles. We had civility. We had collegiality. And warmth. And we're losing it. We don't like each other any more."
For decades, centuries, America had a virtue many foreigners couldn't believe and Americans never thought of. Political differences rarely had the power to interfere with friendships, or even marriages. Tell it to the Greeks, the Bulgarians, the Albanians, all of them, and get ready for horse-laughs in a hundred accents. This was a tremendous strength, an All-American glue that kept us together all the way from the city council meeting to the battlefield – it's a terrible thing to lose and this is a terrible time to lose it.
We don't need millions of "David-and-Jonathan" relationships, but a few more like Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch and Democrat Sen. Ted Kennedy would be useful. A sleeping volcano, call it Mt. Hypocrisy, blew its cone in the Senate last week when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid imposed his nuclear option. What followed was not like those NFL moments when opposing players help an injured opponent to his feet. It was more like one of those moments when fist-fights continue long after the referee has blown and re-blown his whistle.
TRENDING: 'Art of the Deal': How Trump turns COVID issue into 'win-win'
Now the Congress of the United States is free-falling toward blood-sport. I feel more qualified to preach than practice. I solemnly and soberly feel the sinking of Super-Ship-Obama and once-innocent Democrats suddenly realizing, "Hey! Wait a minute. This isn't what I signed on for!" is causing pell-mell havoc among Democrats who can't decide whether to jump ship or try to reshape the face of the Democratic Party as it transmogrifies from a thoroughly respectable political engine into the most terrifying tool of tyranny we've ever known. There's still time for REAL Democrats, the ones we grew up with, to apologize, regret, maybe even "admit they tried!" and then form the Apology Caucus in the House and Senate. Breathes there an American with soul so dense that, during the 50th anniversary observances of the assassination of the revered JFK, did not pause to realize that John F. Kennedy would not be welcome and would surely not be allowed to speak at a Democratic Convention these days. "Right-to-Life"! Big tax cutter! Hit the road, Jack!
You know all the sitcom-style jokes about parents not wanting their children to marry Catholics, or Jews! A good friend of mine sent his mother into nervous prostration when he announced his intention to marry a woman of the same religion, Protestant. Moreover, they were both Lutheran. Why, then, all the nervous prostration? Well, she was GERMAN Lutheran and he was NORWEGIAN Lutheran!
What gave America that magical glue? I don't think the Lord looked down one day and said, "These, my good American children, shall be blessed with Unity Glue." I believe the public schools, before they started doing more bad than good, helped us unify big-time. So did the military. Free enterprise helped.
I pine for the "Old America," the America of a Catholic convent in eastern Pennsylvania about to initiate its novitiate nuns into the order, which is, literally, "marrying them to God." As the sunlight was rocketing poetry in colors through the stain-glassed window and the organ flooded the day with holy melody and the proceedings were about to begin, who should arrive but – according to local legend – four ultra-orthodox Jewish men decked out in their "stremels" (fur hats), black kaftans and side-burn locks.
It was post-Vatican II, so the Mother Superior didn't scream, but she did address the newcomers and say, "Please don't misunderstand. You're most welcome here. We're just curious to know what draws you to this marriage of our young nuns to God?"
One of the Jewish gentlemen replied, "We're on the Groom's side!"
|