Carl Sandburgh, the great American pundit/poet and Lincoln biographer coined a phrase: “The past is a bucket of ashes,” which came to mind on reading of Marco Rubio’s decision, to run for the U.S. Presidency, in the next national election, in 2016. As the New York Times noted, Rubio stressed his youth, with a verbal swipe at “leaders of the past,” and declared generational war, which is the last thing our nation needs, at this crucial moment in its all-too-tenuous-history, as a people’s democracy. If ill-will and insult are the sum of the character medicines we can bring to bear on the growing virus of our disunity, then our future as an exemplar of its opposite is in serious question. It also lends little caustic comfort to admit that our own lack of persistence has added more heft to its impetus. The most immediate effect of this appears to be a small stampede by self-certified savants, quick to avert any hint of evidence that Rubio’s rush to impertinence against elders might reveal his latent lack of confidence in traits, still tinged with smart-aleck snippets of adolescent angst.
What really nettles this pundit is the vehemence with which partisan politicos pounce on a proven performer’s polish, with demeaning digs, that Hillary doesn’t even deserve and they’re unable either to verify or sustain. So much for current electoral hypocrisy that doesn’t add up.
There are other contradictions too, that bend believability out of shape and cry for correction. How about a Cuban official’s pitch for an international light-up of the still vaunted Havana cigar, on MSNBC-TV, aired just before a gripping ad against smoking, that shows a cancer patient and his little daughter in a hospital setting and warns those still hooked to quit. What does that do for the world-wide Cuban hype, to exploit their prowess in medical services and health-care?
Still other riddles threaten inflated dimensions of our dint we’ve overblown. Sad but true, a once un-smirched paragon of ‘Simon-pure’ reportage has sunk to selling half-truth hysteria, to hype headline superiority and hang onto its frayed and fading renown. The top-of-the-heap New York Times has hired two of Dick Cheney’s purple-pen pushers of Haliburton half-truths, from the ink-scarred Iraq War days. Their chore, to boost Rubio’s bid, by flinging an eight-year-old mud pie they pitched at the Clintons, before Hillary was in her State Department post; hoping its stain can now soil more darkly, on a second try.
Stay tuned for more poisoned-pen vitriolics, most surely in the offing, from efforts to palm off this teen tyro of the brutal Batista back-lash, as a newly minted miracle-maker, for misfit migrants to ‘made-in-America’ possibilities.
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