Sounds like Beagles is putting a tentative toe unto the Trump train, one foot on the platform the other on the train, as the beloved old song goes. He's not crazy about the engineer, but he likes the direction the train is going which would appear from the freehold to be uphill, after going downhill for decades.
Well I reckon I have been hearing that the country is going downhill for decades, that would be six or seven of them. If I care to extrapolate, and I do, I would reckon that complaining about the country going downhill has been going on since, well I suppose 1796 when we at last had two decades of history to rub together.
I wonder what decade Beagles would choose that marked the point where the train of state went from rolling upwards or at least level to go down into that loathsome valley for decades. I'm going to guess the fifties. The world was bright then. Remember how the sun used to shine when you got up early in the morning before the rest of the family and realized it was a summer vacation day and you stood on the sidewalk and in front of you a whole world stretched out from sea to shining sea? And those were pretty good years for America. We were still basking in the glow of having kicked ass in WW II, our exciting automobiles were the biggest and the best.
Into this garden slithered the Red Menace, amazing the hysteria this provoked. From the floor of the sunny frontroom on Homan Avenue I analyzed the political cartoons on the front page, and decried those vile forces that were opposing brave Joe McCarthy.
But for all that, there wasn't much red menace in the hood, everything seemed pretty good. The way we went downtown in those days was we caught the 55th street bus and it went straight east to Wentworth or maybe Indiana then turned north to go where the tall buildings were. We would roll down out windows and stick our heads out, looking up at the big exciting buildings.
But before we got downtown, a little east of Western, things would change. Black people would be getting on the bus, they would be walking on the sidewalks. We would cringe in out seats as they began to fill the bus. The word in the hood was that they all carried knives. Their neighborhood was crappy and dirty compared to out neat rows of bungalow on top of bungalow. Why were things like this? It didn't seem right.
A lot of people think it was the assassination of Kennedy when things changed. Maybe, the early days of Kennedy there was a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of optimism, idealism, and then it was gone justlikethat. The unpopular war started soon afterwards. Some think Kennedy would have avoided it the way he avoided WW III in Cuba. Maybe, it's hard to tell. But LBJ went for it in a big way. Americans were no longer marching together with enthusiasm and optimism and idealism into the next decade, and I don't think we have since then.
The party in power always loses in the off year election, though sometimes by more and sometimes by less. Obama was clobbered in his last off years. A lot of people thought it was Obamacare. People hated Obamacare, and the reps fanned the flames, incessantly braying about it as it were. Now that they have seized the reins of power and can accomplish their sacred goal of abolishing ObamaCare, they discover that most people don't want to abolish ObamaCare and only like 17 percent like their own version of ObamaCare. Mitch and the boys are cooking up some hot mess in the senate which they will unveil quickly so that nobody gets a good look at it just before voting time. Those Republicans whose states are not ruby red will be thinking about their off year elections.
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