REDOLENCE
I miss the election fervor.
Suddenly, it seems too quiet. The air is free of insults being flung right and left and hitting mostly people in the center each of whom harbors a hint of whatever the one side is accusing the other of being.
We are, as a nation a strange amalgam of diverse peoples often irked by contending views and appreciations who,most of the time, feel it proper to subdue any actions to change things too radically. Election time removes those barriers, at least in a vocal sense, and we find ourselves saying things we never thought we'd ever express; doing some unusual maneuvers and, at times, shocking ourselves and our peers.
There is a continuing warp and woof in the weaving of our election process time after time. I don't actually recall the campaign which put Woodrow Wilson in office but I do remember the aura of pungent displeasure expressed by many people well after that time concerning his set ideas about the place of the League of Nations in our future.
Later on, about the time of the sudden demise of our leading news magazine of that time “-”The Literary Digest”-by reason of polling the political postulation and naming the wrong man as being the winner elections took on a expansion of the senses.
From the Harding days comes a whiff of scandal which has, since that time, has permeated the political parameter in a manner not unlike the the theory of aroma therapy. We talked of personal scandals; of the Tea-Pot Dome oil affair and other such
evidences of poor judgment at various governmental levels. Evangelist Billy Sunday did his loudest and best to blame all such things on the Devil launched tabernacle terror throughout the land to confute, or, at least, confuse his satanic majesty.
With President Calvin Cooledge, things simmered down somewhat, and enabled him to spend a lot of his time in north woods retreats. He held the record for the most days-off, I think, for a long time but it has probably been upset by now with traveling Oval Office facilities having become what they are. The appearance of Herbert Hoover was quiet but his years became a continuing time of world wide economic transformations we have never known before or since. The “aroma” of the elections of that era are not pleasant at all. That time set my personal political clock. I witnessed the death, in many ways, of what had been called “yellow”journalism and saw the rise of “pinko”papers to follow. I came of voting age when Russia's “five year plans” were new endlessly, when Franco evolved out of the Spanish in-fighting, Il Duce and then Adolph Hitler and his counterparts. The FDR elections were phenomenal. Herbert Hoover was demeaned and Al Smith made “RAD-e-oh” a permanent part of the proceedings. I heartedly disliked the idea of a 3rd term but voted FDR , my Commander-in-Chief, over businessman Wendell Wilkie.
And, on and on ... into modern times.
Election time has been more volatile than I would have thought now that I have scanned my personal feeling about those past. Just last week I wrote about being glad it was all over for 2004.. Then, just a few days later I find myself missing the presence of election time sensitivity to our political needs. There is a special aura about election time, I now find, which comes to us as a fragrant, sweet smelling and valued reminder of evocative pressures from within us telling us what we wish - some day - to become and be for all Time.
A.L.M. November 11, 2004 [c609wds]
