We will look back upon this period a Dark Days for our Republic…but I am optimisitic for better days ahead. (Though that doesn’t mean it might not get worse afore it gets better!)
]]>I don’t know that it is the individual so much as the group around that individual that has the greatest effect. Alone, an individual can’t wreck the havoc that the efforts of a host of followers. The Shrubbery, by virtue of 9/11, has been able to make radical changes to the US, and there is no organized opposition to his actions.
]]>Goodness knows what he feeds himself, though. Is he on the sauce again? Is he still taking steroids? Do his doctors pump him full of meds to get him through the day? There has to be something. Stella of course will not diagnose long-distance, but she has remarked during Bush’s speeches and other public appearances that his gestures and tics are those of someone either seriously ill or strongly medicated. And for many years it was her profession to know about such things, so I tend to believe her.
I’ve always pooh-poohed the “great [wo]man” theory of history, believing instead that the confluence of ideas and available technologies shaped the times more than even the most strikingly unusual individuals… unusual for good or for ill. But the more I read of England’s King George III and our own monarch, whose royal highness manifests itself more vigorously every day, the more I think I may have been wrong in my belief.
(Aside: a decade or so ago, there was a local musical group in Houston’s Montrose, an all-male group called The TestosterTones. Top that name if you can!)
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