Present at the Creation

Her life with hateful snares pursue,/You swore to love and cherish.

The recollection of Dean Acheson's voice was that of encyclopedic reassurance. He and Franklin were in charge, and the lend lease program would buttress Winston's tenacity to survive the crippling blows of Hitler's aggression, but in the late eighties, stifling boredom, raising the hew and cry of "I am not a historian," the events of the second world war were best left to Ronald Reagan's senility and his Vice President's competence in the Oval Office. We're a stupid people, Americans, letting a third party candidate like Ross Perot split the seams, handing over the reigns to the Clintons, who could not imitate JFK's protective smokescreen, and then lurching, badly, on the basis of our vaunted electoral college, to the Texan branded son of the more astute father, who was so incompetent we anointed a mixed race messiah who, instead of actually being a movement president, relegated himself downward. Barack became the [black] president who engendered [white] buyer's remorse, but we are forbidden to phrase it that way, and Clinton fatigue transmuted into Sex and the City marketing. The *historic* vote should have crowned a woman before a half-Kenyan. Indeed. Hillary is virtually a default empress in anticipation-- of what?

We've been here before. However much contempt I have for our primary two party system, and the centrist, self-absorbed bubba liberals that the Clintons are, the breach of protocol over her email account should serve as a dire warning about how Orwellian we've already become. It is a breach of ethics that the most important member of the cabinet used a private server in her diplomatic correspondence? Classified information, however juicy, shocking, sobering, brutal, or realpolitik, is still data. That is all it is. Threat assessments, secrets about deliberate poisonings, conspiracies, plots. That's it. Whatever Madame Secretary wanted to conceal, she did so for the reasons government officials world over dread transparency. It is nothing new, regardless of ideology. We do not look too closely at how things are run outside of our own spheres of knowledge. The majority of us with our enfeebled souls sublimate it. We write books, distract ourselves with theater, culinary arts. If we were all involved, the world would come to a standstill, much like parliamentary debate in the Oireachtas. IRA guerrillas killed British soldiers so that Ireland's legislators could argue with delicious impotence over the empowerment community integration offers hospital patients who clog facilities for lack of home health care packages.

Are we electing Hillary to a third Obama Clinton term? Or is it the Washington press corp?