Grand Pa's Republic
All of his life, the Tennessee Mountain Man has heard the call to exercise your right to vote. Even fighting in one of the country's wars was not sufficient in the eyes of many. Voting was some how more than a right, it was a constitutional requirement of any and every son of the United States.
That worked well while America's back room whiskey swigging, cheap cigar puffing, wheelers and dealers enjoyed an illiterate voting public. Then along came Sam! No... not the cartoon character, Yosemite Sam, nor the gunslinger immortalized in song, but our Uncle Sam. The uncle fed prodigiously by President Lyndon B. Johnson in pursuit of the Great Society.
Forget a chicken in every pot! What America needed was a new car in every drive, money in the hands and pockets of everyone to buy the junk food they craved... forget the government cheese. Every day of his senior years the Computer Man's maternal grand pa asked grand ma for some jingling money, and having received same set off for the county square.
Grand pa made sure he had in his pockets his sharpest folding knife, his old old pocket watch which he set at noon everyday with the sounding of the surrounding factory lunch whistles, a stick of cedar for whittling, a twist of King-B for chewing, and a little pocket change for jingling... grand pa was now prepared for his day, indeed for the remainder of his days.
Wearing his worn out gray felt hat, grand dad would set out walking down the street. The state had long ago taken his drivers license and his children had finally taken all of his automobiles. Not that anyone wanted them. The last one the computerman recalls had the startling ability to be hand cranked. One need not necessarily be concerned with the state of the battery. It represented the old man's last ditch effort at his brand of freedom and to have a car no one would take from him. It didn't work. He was simply not safe on the road nor was anyone on the road with him safe.
As he walked along his way, grand pa jingled the little bit of coins grand ma had provided for his pockets and sang old book songs from the Hardshell Baptist Hymnal. You know... they only sang the notes, not the words... yours truly never understood that, but I digress.
Upon arriving at his destination, grand pa took a seat along side the other old timers gathered outside the Jackson County Courthouse in Scottsboro, Alabama, just before dawn, and producing his pocket knife and a newly split piece of cedar that cost him two bits he began to smooth off the edges of the stick preparing for a full day of "visiting, reminiscing, conversation and piddling". Oh! The smell of that cedar, and the sound of his booming voice which reverberated around the square.
What does grand pa have to do with anything? Well, he was not always an old man ignored by most and simply forgotten by others. No, grand dad, a Justice Of The Peace in his day, was one of those back room shakers and movers in one party or the other in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. He knew the system inside and out. He was a ward captain. He decided who run for what office and made sure however he had to, including a little well placed hooch - and just maybe some of that walking around or as he called it jingling money, who got elected.
Grand dad used to say he was a republican for one reason and one reason only. I just can't remember what that reason was. Shades of the old man, I suppose. What I can be sure of is grand pa's generation never conceived of super delegates for either party. Not withstanding the republican and democratic parties are both private entities, and as such they can allow and restrict membership as they see fit. They can nominate and withhold as they wish. They and they alone decide who their power base, movers and shakers, and insiders are.
What has this to do with a democracy? Not nearly as much as grand dad had to do with politics in Alabama. As the Tennessee Mountain Man perceives the democrats since the days of LBJ to slide more and more toward socialism and the republicans to move more and more to fill the democratic shoes of yore he feels the need for independent involvement in the American Political process. A painful and foreboding journey to be sure.
Grand pa, although a self professed republican, always believed President Lyndon Johnson to be on the right track although improperly executed. He long wanted to abolish the electoral college in favor of the popular vote - the nemeses of professional politicians. Today, I often wonder how many times the old man has rolled over in his grave considering how dumb Americans have become as the state has spent more and more to educate the masses. It seems, the more we learn about less and less, the more we dumb down.
Along with the computerman, grand pa's question, today, I believe, would be "super delegates!... where in heaven's name (like that phrase? It stops the holier than thou crowd's sausage grinder dead in it's tracks!) did my republic go?".
Burk Pendergrass, J.D., a Cherokee Indian and Viet Nam Vet specializing in computerman website design and remote online computer repair
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