RECALL We have all done it.
We have called our public servants "politicians" until the very moment of their death when they became "statesmen." The timing of that event calls for additional terms: such as "late","former,"greatly missed","one-time", even "beloved" on occasion. As a rule, however, it happens rather gradually -this change of life which comes with death.
It can be embarrassing,too. Perhaps you, too felt; a bit edgy recently when bundles of praise unloosened in the media concerning former President Gerald Ford. I always though him to be a pretty regular guy -a bit slanted to sports - but likable and friendly did not care for the media tendency to make him appear to be a stumbling muscle-bound misfit in politics. He was pictured as a clumsy playground participant. He was said to bump his head getting in and out of aircraft, he fell from platforms, and a once-President of the United States said Jerry Ford must have played "a few too many football games without a helmet." I cringed when I heard that one for the first of many times.
Last week it became "all sweetness and light." Jerry Ford was widely praised as a truly honest and upfront man. About time, too.
There is an "underground" set of words used only by those among
us who are charged with keeping track of everything president or other political official might do or sag which can be "read" as a indicator of that which they may be thinking.
So much of my memory of political campaigns over the years seems to be colored by things I'd rather not remember. I disliked the insult and injury he nation inflicted on another honest,upright man- Herbert Hoover - who served our needs well man ways. We have been been reading just recently long accounts of how this man same much of Europe from starvation and complete ruin.
We hurt in petty,little ways,too. "Boulder Dam -truly a remarkable engineering feat - was renamed in his honor "Hoover Dam" but the name faded away unused. Have you noticed, too, that the Florida Cape which was re-named in honor of Jack Kennedy is, once again, called "Cape Canaveral?"
We are entering another national election campaign era which always brings up this petty manifestation of meanness one to the other. It need not be.
Think back over our leaders and from a long list you will have
difficulty finding three or four who seem to have escaped such vilification when in office. Such a list of shortcomings now runs the gamut,too.
Isn't there some way wherein we might elect "statesmen" who, when they die, become "politicians?"
Andrew McCaskey Sr. amccsr@comcast.net 1-24-07 [c459wds]
