#389 Hulk and Bulk

I was reading this article about the year the sixties started. Calendrically it was 1960 or 1961,but culturally it was 1964. In 1963 President Kennedy was assassinated, ending the innocence of the furious fifties, and in 1964 the Beatles arrived on our shores, ushering in a decade of cultural frenzy. In 1964 the young, brash and talkative Cassius Clay beat a lumbering and listless Sonny Liston. In 1964 they introduced the Ford Mustang, giving sports cars to the masses, particularly young independent women, and in 1964 President Johnson called for and got the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed him to increase troops in Vietnam from 17,000 to 184,000 in the course of that year. The stage was set for a cultural upheaval of mind-boggling proportions. The effects are still felt today, not least by conservatives who bemoan the sixties as the time all those pesky civil rights laws got not only passed but enforced. The privileged status of white patriarchs for the first time seemed in real jeopardy. But that was then and this is now, and watch any congressional press conference and you’ll see the patriarchs are still firmly entrenched and sharing what appears to be the approved look. You know, silver hair, televangelist receding hairline pompadour, blue suit, blue and/or red tie, slightly bloated double-chinned face. I saw William Bennett on TV and was struck by how much he resembles Rush Limbaugh and by how much he resembles Carl Rove and by how much they all seem to resemble each other. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Every group ought to have an identifiable look, it just all seems so, well, overstuffed. Like God took a rib from a human being, added it to a Barcolounger and said, lo, I make for thee a helpmeet and I will call it, a Republican. But that’s not fair and balanced. There are plenty of overweight Democrats too. William Bennett could go toe to toe with Ted Kennedy and trade him paunch for paunch. Maybe it’s the congressional food service—food on the hill so laden with rubber-chickened calories that poor lawmakers have no choice but to make pork by the barrel. Maybe that’s what they mean by the layers of bureaucracy. Maybe when they go to those thousand-dollar a plate fundraising dinners they figure they need to eat their money’s worth. Fiscal conservatism does demand a basic philosophical commitment to frugality and thrift. The hard thing is, when you’re a lawmaker you have too many things happening at odd times to really settle into a schedule. And as everyone who has ever been on a diet knows, regularity it the key to sticking to the regimen. That’s why big politicos scare me. Cause diets and budgets are the same. Both require hard choices and both require fiber, moral and otherwise. Let’s hope they have the moral; the other they can get from that other sixties breakthrough, over-the-counter Metamucil.
America, ya gotta love it.