Candy is dandy, but Lacour
...
J. Brandon Lacour
"The summer is over, the harvest is in
and we are not saved" -- Jeremiah the Prophet.
Well, folks this is it for me. This is
my last little political diatribe before traipsing back to the city of
my birth for winter break and hopefully eighteen hours of uninterrupted
sleep.
I had hoped I could be writing some sort
of conclusive evaluation of the 2000 campaign by now, but as the old saying
goes "If wishes grew on trees..." I'm sorry -- I really don't know how
that saying goes, but you get the picture. So, with or without a president,
we shall all go staggering and bleary-eyed into the real start of the next
millennium.
Journalists of various characters spent
last December writing all the disposable epitaphs for the twentieth-century
that we'll ever need. I suspect at least a few of them will dust off these
articles for 2001, if only for good measure.
But ignore them, I say. Will our country
prosper one iota from sitting through some hackneyed montage of politicians,
celebrities, empty-hearted paeans to the World War II generation, and the
Summer of Love, smeared with the glib promise that "no matter what's in
the papers, things are getting better, yo."
Which is, of course, nonsense. Time magazine
will probably run another profile on how great our technology is and how
it is the key to the future. Maybe they're right; I used theM.D. Anderson
Memorial Library's microfiche machine for the first time this year, and
spent the remainder of the day feeling prosperous and sunny. That's me,
though -- even my toaster mystifies me.
For a real epitaph for this century, I
think of the various people I've talked to, the rag-tag army who belong
to the generation who emerged from the chaotic 1960s and lived to see the
end of the Vietnam experience in 1975, and felt for a brief moment in history
that they were on the threshold of some real change.
After the end of the war and the end of
Nixon, the future was wide open. The forces of old and evil had been vanquished
and there could be some real work done addressing poverty, civil rights
and a chance for true democracy. What happened?
There was no real change, at least not
in form similar to what people were promised and hoped for. Then to add
to the frustration they find twenty years later, an alleged flower-child
running the White House, who is significantly less liberal than Nixon.
It's a sad thing to hear 1960s radicals say, that after Clinton and his
Clintonoids, they miss Nixon. In all fairness, Nixon did have a much more
liberal policy toward drugs, the working-class and individual rights; though
he is now lying in rest with a stake through his heart, in that level of
hell reserved for Nixon and other politicos, including Roy Cohn and possibly
Lyndon Larouche.
This is probably the 20th century's political
epitaph and state of the nation address. For those of you confused by the
specter of Ralph Nader tearing through the country, preaching liberal balm
for the nation, this is probably part of his rationale.
History is a strange business. It's hard
enough to get a grasp on the big names, but even harder to understand the
nameless mass of people moving through history. It's much easier to bandy
about the names of the major league politicos than to begin to address
the concerns of the plebeians.
This is progress, people, and this is the
end of this century, at least. For starters, we still have no new president
and this intolerable political future. The summer is over, the harvest
is in.
As for me, I'm heading off to New Orleans,
to my home, my friends, my family, my dog, and the handicap ramp my father
built for said dog--wait a minute, can any of this be true? Is it pure
fiction? I wonder.
