I used to attribute the phrase “The Wisdom of the Common Man” to the late Will Rogers, and for years I despised the man for perpetuating that sickening lie. Recently, I discovered that it’s likely that he had nothing to do with coining that phrase. So, I want to publicly offer my apologies to the man and his family, and I take back all my prayers to God that he give the bastard a few extra turns on hell’s rotisserie spit before tossing him on the plate for Satan’s ravenous horde.
With that one simple fabrication, probably tossed off by some politician as he stood before a slack-jawed assemblage of cousins – to one degree or another – as rapt as nature would allow for, with pencils in one hand and a paper ballot in the other, the seed of our inevitable demise was firmly planted, and abundantly fertilized. It’s been a long slide ever since.
If we buy the theory of the “wisdom of the common man”, that there actually is a wisdom in being ignorant of the less obvious ramifications inherent in action and reaction, then it must be the gifted among us that have been the downfall of our society. The “pointy-headed elitists” in their “ivory towers” “looking down on the rest of us with disdain”. These enemies of “common sense” who scoff at the kind of clear, unfettered analysis that the average person sitting behind a cup of coffee in a diner could offer to the wonks in Washington, if only someone would listen. After all, hasn’t it always been the common man that has scooped us out of the coals after some spaced out egghead leaned us all in a bit too close, trying to get more “data” on why the steaks were turning out the way they were?
Or is that just how the average common folks have always interpreted how these things have worked out in the end. I mean, who gets to write the history if not the majority left standing when the dust clears?
It’s been shown that most successful people have an IQ that hovers within a very specific range of the Bell Curve. Somewhere around 110 – 120. This area of the most commonly referenced intellectual potential metric is the realm of the C+ student. This level of inherent brilliance empowers the bearer with enough innate capacity to maneuver through the environmental challenges presented by most common endeavors, while limiting their ability to properly appreciate the totality of all that actually stands so
overwhelmingly against them in that endeavor. These blessed folks focus small, win small, and the small wins ad up to an eventual success, as they fail to take note of the true road that lies beyond what is directly beneath their leading footstep.
It’s akin to the bumble bee dichotomy. The poor thing is cursed with a body/wing aerodynamic configuration that makes flight literally impossible to achieve. However, since the bug has no knowledge of basic aerodynamics, it flies anyway. The C+ student, ignorant of the likelihood of failure, sees no obstacle to success, and therefore succeeds. It’s that good old fashion “5% inspiration – 95% perspiration” formula that Alexander Bell employed to such great end. Or was that Thomas Edison? One of those guys tried every conceivable way to get their damn thing to work, and only succeeded by finally running out of the other 10,000 alternative options. Laudable? Sure. Just so long as you’re not married to the blundering sot, and working two jobs to pay the bills while he runs off every cliff in existence instead of sitting down and getting inspired every now and then.
Speaking of which, maybe it actually is bad when one of these paragons of asses and elbows runs for public office, and succeeds at the only part of that job where they display an actual aptitude – the part where they get the other “let’s not over-think this thing” mooks to vote for them. Not that I mind a little entrepreneurial cliff diving, if that’s what it takes one to winnow out the choices in their professional life. I just have an issue when one of these action heroes drives us all off a cliff that was always there, but that the idiot was never capable of seeing. Or reflective enough to imagine could have existed. While, it may be commendable for any one of us to “take action”, to “go for it”, and to plan to “cross that bridge when we get to it”, to be honest, it’s a hell of a lot harder for an entire nation to pick itself up, dust itself off, and try, try again after cratering in a “well, that didn’t go as planned” moment, courtesy of a “learn through failure” leader, blessed with common wisdom.
When it comes down to it, if you think that leading a nation is anything like running a business, then you have no idea what it takes to lead a nation, and someone needs to derail you for your own good, and the good of the rest of us sharing this rock with you.
Right now, we’re being offered several choices for savior of our future, as well as the future of humankind on planet earth. The last choice we all made – well, it didn’t go as we thought it would, and we have some cleaning up to do. This time we need to think things through a little better, and make a more responsible choice. We have five choices at the moment. Five very different kinds of people, and we need to be clear headed as we look at them, and look at what kind of people they appear to be. This is not about issues, or about talking points. It’s not about one-liners, or how much money one has compared to the others. All that will immediately change as soon as they take the oath, and by now, as common folks with that vaunted common sense, we should all know that.
What won’t change after the inauguration is how they each saw their best shot at convincing us that they would make a great president. This one choice defines their ability to perceive things as they actually are, and react accordingly to that perception. In the end, this ability to realistically perceive and properly react is what will define them as a president, and determine our relative position in this deep hole when they pass the baton off to the next president.
So, what have we got here?
One believes that hunting down crippled companies and ripping them apart for profit on the international corporate organ bank gives him the right stuff to be our next president. Interestingly, he also believes that no one is capable of remembering what he says or does from one day to the next. So far, the mainstream punditry is doing its best to convince him that he’s right about this. Maybe I’m a genius, and that’s why his disingenuousness seems so obvious to me, but I doubt it. Pundits get paid by their corporate bosses to say what they say. I do know that much about reality.
Another believes that being subjected to the brutality of a sadistic opponent for years, without breaking (and this is only in reference to his long, harrowing Senate career, he also took it full-frontal in a VC POW camp) has toughened him up for life in the West Wing. Not that he’s got any ideas concerning how to improve the lives of 300 million people who disagree with each other on what that actually means. He does know how to take a punch. I’ll give him that much. I just don’t know how the rest of us gain from it. This isn’t a Rocky sequel we’re voting for.
Then, there’s one who truly believes that the universe is a mere six thousand years old, and that dinosaur fossils are a demonic gun planted at the existential crime scene where mankind became mortal through its rejection of a benevolent, but wildly vengeful, God. I’m not even sure how to add to this. So I won’t. I think it speaks for itself.
Then there’s the candidate who’s turned an adulterous affair into a meteoric political career. If what it takes to be a good president is to be willing to be pushed through opened doors by the bastard who humiliated you in front of the entire world, so that he can side-step the whole term limits pain-in-the-ass, then this one just might be the leader that we’ve been praying for. If not, then who knows what is trying to come to the table here. She’s done that left-right, wide-stance routine since she emerged from the wreckage of the last 8 year tilt-a-whirl, so it’s hard to know what’s driving her other than a need to get there. Wherever there is.
Lastly, we have the visionary. Well, he sounds like a visionary. He acts like a visionary. People say that when you’re in the same area code with this guy, that he makes you “feel” that visionary feeling that visionaries always make people feel. Like JFK. Or RFK. Or MLK. That kind of feeling that makes you want to figure out how BHO could ever be reconfigured to hang out with those other triple-character logos that give you that visionary feeling by just showing up in a page of print.
The issue here (and it’s a real issue, regardless of what the marketing collateral claims) is that this guy has next to zero national, and absolutely no international, political experience beyond making some good speeches. He’s never made a single decision that’s involved large scale ramifications. He’s never suffered a life-altering loss. Hell, he’s still got all his hair and the body fat percentages of a teenager. Basically, he’s too young and too precious to have ever lived enough to know what it’s really like to be alive, and subject to the whims of a cruel mortality. He’s scares me more than any of the others. Well, except for the guy who thinks that the sun rotates around the earth. That guy terrifies me.
So, what do we do with this crop of likely folks? Who do we look to for guidance as we choose the one that we’ll task with helping us clean up the disgusting mess that’s been gathering around us for the last 7 years? Frankly, we didn’t do so well the last time, so we’d best rethink how we do it this time around.
Maybe we should rethink the whole idea of “gut feeling” and that whole “wisdom of the common man” fallacy. Guts digest food. They’re not designed for much else beyond that. Go ahead. Google it. I’m not making things up here.
Maybe we should just wait for some arch angel to force our hand in the voting booth, like 30% of the population did the last couple times. I don’t know though. Apparently God doesn’t want us to succeed at doing anything more that going broke and sending our kids off to kill foreigners, if the results of that strategy are any indication.
To be completely honest, I have no solution at all. We may have blown past the tilting point quite some time ago, and it’s one of those falls that starts slow in the beginning, and won’t be noticeable until it gets into its arch a little. If so, then it doesn’t matter who gets the nod. No one can stop a fall like that if it’s already in motion, no matter what the campaign slogan says.
No empire has avoided the fall, and why should it be any different this time. It’s just a shame that it blew out as quickly as it did. Then again, everything happens faster now days. Maybe China’s reign will only be half a decade? But then, they don’t let the common man gum up the works in that juggernaut. Grease the works? Sure. Plenty of common folks tossed in to provide grease for the gears. But allowed to gum them up? No way. The whole society, to a man, woman or child, knows better than to even consider something like that. They may be common people, but they know that letting the average idiot impact anything beyond the walls of his own home is just plain foolishness.
