Rainbow Stew

When a President walks through the White House door‘

And does what he says he’ll do,

We’ll all be drinking that free bubble up

And eating that rainbow stew.

Merle Haggard was anything but a political thinker—or even a particularly good songwriter—but his 1981 hit song “Rainbow Stew” summed up the common wisdom of disgruntled Americans.  In another song of the same  year,  he offered a list of the  signs of American decline:

“I wish coke was still cola
And a joint was a bad place to be
It was back before Nixon lied to us all on T.V.”

It’s a strange wish  from a man who smoked marijuana and abused cocaine for long periods of his life.

The reference to Nixon is no better than a cliché to maintain credentials in the entertainment business.  Most Presidents lie to us all the time.  Television simply gave them a wider and more gullible audience.  Remember Eisenhower’s declaration that the United States did not send spy planes over the Soviet Union?  Or—and this a personal favorite— when Carter intoned, “I will never lie to you.”  What had he ever done but lie?  His identity was a complete fiction.  The nuclear scientist, friend and disciple of Admiral Rickover, turned simple peanut farmer.  The reality was that he had worked on a nuclear submarine, Rickover could not recall him, and his family ran a substantial peanut business.

Imagine what whoppers FDR or Lincoln might have put over, with the assistance of television.  But we must not sell those prevaricators  short.  With the limited resources they had, they lied their country into tyranny and disaster.

When “Rainbow Stew” was released I jokingly claimed that Merle had borrowed my Second Law of Politics, which states:  Whatever a presidential candidate  pledges as his primary commitment(s), he will do the opposite.  I do not mean he will simply fail, I mean consciously pursue an opposite course.

Among the many examples I cited were Woodrow Wilson’s and Lyndon Johnson’s promises to keep us out of war and FDR’s  pledge to get government off the backs of American business.  Of course one can point to Regan’s promise—still believed by his faithful adorers—that he would cut spending and reduce the size of government.

Admittedly there have been decent men who promised little and did their best, but Franklin Pierce is a forgotten man, wh0 comes last in every poll of American "historians," while Calvin Coolidge is treated largely as a joke.  And Coolidge was President a hundred years ago.  No, these days we get only confidence men run by political machines dominated by the wealthiest, most powerful and least scrupulous plutocrats in the country.

Our national  “leaders” are fictions tied to PR slogans.  Remember Barack Obama’s promise of “hope and change”?   And “Middle Class First”?  Biden’s “Build Back Better”? Or Bush I’s “Kinder, Gentler Nation”?  Ask the Iraqis about that. Or Manuel Noriega.  Or the Serbs whom he threatened with the  military action that Clinton later carried out .  He also  supported the boycott that prevented hospitals from receiving vital medicines.  I talked to doctors in children’s hospitals, who were despairing over the deaths of children from diseases that were treatable with routine medicines,  and I once ran into a merry band of smugglers coming back from the far East with treasures, including medicines.

Although it is hard to think of two Presidents more dissimilar than the reserved patrician who did nothing without scrupulous attention and preparation and the cowboy real estate developer, who never found a handle he would not fly off, but the presidencies of Bush I and Trump round two have at least two things in common.  Both Presidents, confronted by a Latin American dictator who refused to follow orders, authorized a kidnapping and arrest on charges that may have had validity per se but were a fragile basis for a flagrant violation of international law.  

Noriega and Maduro were both  accused of involvement in the illegal drug trade.  Americans must have been shocked to find out that members of a ruling class should use and profit from illegal substances .   The CIA, after its entrepreneurial investment in opium in Vietnam and the promotion of opium growing in Afghanistan, was hardly in a position to point the finger.  And Joseph Kennedy, the founder of our own American “royal family,”   made much of his early fortune as a partner with organized crime in the illegal liquor business, and, fittingly, each generation since has  included notorious druggies, such as JFK Jr. and the current health czar.

And both Presidents started a war in the Middle East.  The best we can say for Donald Trump’s war is that he has better  grounds than Bush I’s defense of Kuwait, a province of Iraq whose very existence was owed to the greed of British oil interests.  Anyone who even glanced at General Gallois’ book, Le sang du pétrole, will understand how devastating the war and illegal embargo were to the civilians of Iraq.  It is scarcely ironic that at least part of the motivation for Desert Storm came from international petroleum interests.

The skeptical reader will retort that the apparent volte-faces of American Presidents were due to changing circumstances, and the skeptical reader will have a case but only up to a point.  Such an argument rests on the naive notion that successful politicians are ordinary people who do the best they can to be faithful in their dealings but often come up short.  That is simply not true.  As my old friend John Shelton Reed one pointed out, the pols and bureaucrats one meets in Washington were, early in life, student body presidents or at least student council members.  If they were not “born cross from the womb,” they had turned crooked before their 18th birthday.  Like the kidnappers and blackmailers they so resemble, they make promises they do not intend to keep.

The President still has many otherwise intelligent and honorable defenders, who would like to explain away his decision to attack Iran by citing the sins and crimes of the  Iranian regime, beginning with the taking of American hostages, moving onto Iran’s support (at one time backed by the United States) of Islamic terrorist movements, its oppression of women, and its terrifying crackdown on dissidence.  Does anyone seriously believe that Donald Trump was unaware of Iranian crimes when he held out the promise of an end to wars? 

Some go so far as to defend the President as an honest, even naive businessman, who has never grasped the duplicity of politicians or the necessity of telling the occasional fib.  There is some truth in that.  The crookedest Wall Street stockjobber is an honest man compared with a small town mayor.  Anyone who wishes to grasp at so elusive a straw has obviously not read Trump’s own ghost-written book, in which he give detailed accounts of how he snookered potential investors.   

But there is an element even more sinister in presidential duplicity.  Like anxious adolescents, they must be eager to please, eager to curry favor with the tiresome masses of people who actually believe  their votes make them the real sovereign in this great democracy of ours.  Now, it is true that in every election a large number of voters look upon their candidate as a demigod whose word is law.  In some cases, as with Republicans who voted for such unlikely human specimens as Bob Dole and John McCain, it is loyalty to party, but in other, far more dangerous cases, they have faith in the hero  who will lead them out of the wilderness into a Promised Land, where it will be morning again and again and again.  Admirers of Charles Schulz will recognize the parallel with Charley Brown and Lucy with the football.

Presidential candidates or their political advisors know what their potential voters want and glibly promise the impossible: lower taxes and less government, social justice and opportunity for all, immigration reform and a solution to crime.  In any society governed by rational and middling honest leaders, these goals would not be difficult to meet, but le us suppose the impossible, the cabinet meeting in which the Homeland Security Czar proposed a sweeping plan to eliminate drug trafficking, criminal gangs, and street crime.  Imagine the consternation, both from powerful men  who have followed the example of Joseph Kennedy and the even greater alarm of bureaucrats whose expanding power and income depends on ever higher rates of social dissolution, conflict, and crime!  The recently deceased Umberto Bossi said many offensive things, but the most offensive was his statement, obviously true, that the Italian party-state welcomed mass immigration because the troubles created by Third World immigrants—crime and welfare dependency—were the best excuse for expanding the state’s—by which they mean their own—power.

So when a president promises peace or an end to illegal immigration, he knows full well that peace, in modern times, is only a waiting game to be played between wars of conquest and that mass immigration means increased governmental infrastructure and cheap labor for donors who ask income is derived from  agribusiness, construction, food service, and dozens of other business sectors.  When Donald Trump promised he would bring peace, he might have only meant  that he would not pursue war for the sake of war, but he knew quite well—the man’s a fool but not stupid—that when war was the best means of serving the interests of supporters, allies, and his own vanity, he would not hesitate.  

Thus the Presidents who reverse course are not simply responding to changing circumstances, because if they did not know that circumstances are constantly changing, they could not play any practical role in public affairs.  No, it is not circumstances that give them the lie, but, as Dr. Johnson used to say of such men, “They lie and know they lie.”  

Postscript:  I have said it before, and I am saying it again.  I voted for Donald Trump, and my wife and many friends voted for him three times.    I did not expect much good to come of his election, but the promises—which I assumed he would break—to restore order in the cities, regain control of the border,  drain the swamp, and keep us out of the brushfire wars we like to start and then blame the victims, these were promises that a rational man might endorse without expecting any of them to be kept.  So far, he has done better on the first two than I had any reason to expect and lived down to my expectations on the rest.  This post was written on a train rocking on rough tracks down the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy, and will undoubtedly need some correction and revisions.

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