Pretty Fly for Poli-Sci

We've got some time between now and the Inauguration-another relic of our agrarian past. For voters in Western Europe, elections were and, for the most part, still are, held on Sundays. We've been using the first Tuesday in November since practically the Founding of the Republic, I've been told, out of deference to how we worked the fields and had to struggle to get to polling places where we could make our marks. Heck, it wasn't until the Twentieth Century (you remember that, right? That was when we won the Cold War and waited for the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Wait until we rewrite the history books, my friend-heck with that, wait until someone tries to read those history books) that we moved the Inauguration from March back to January.

Now things happen at double-click speed, especially mistakes and second guessing. It hasn't been a week since the Presidential election and the only reason we don't technically have any Monday-morning quarterbacking yet is we haven't had a Monday. I can't wait, how about you?

So how do you get one of these elected leader gigs, anyway? If you decide to become an engineer, for instance, there are formalized courses of study, curricula of skills development, proficiency examinations and board reviews and certifications before you're street legal, so to speak. You just don't buy yourself a pocket protector and a slide rule (I'm old-it predated a calculator, trust me on this one).

If you desire to be a surgeon or a lawyer, the same situation applies. Let's face it, you don't go to a physician and NOT read the diplomas on the walls in the examining office-that's why they're posted. You don't have an attorney who hasn't studied the law help you draw up a will or draft a contract. Hey, here's a joke one of my doctors told me: what do you call the med school graduate who finished last in his class? Plaintiff. Shecky Greene called-he wants that joke back.

Yes, there's much to be said in all walks of life for enthusiastic beginners, but when we come to the place where the road and the sky collide, the discouraged experts always go home with the milk money from those just "want it real bad and don't know how to get it." The poor, if the Beatitudes are to be believed, will inherit the earth-assuming those currently in charge of it have left anything.

Politics is the art of the possible sounds vaguely reassuring until you realize who said it and what happened when he applied it. But to return to my not too subtle point, what's the path for learning the process of politics and how do we decide who, as a person, or what, as a party or ideology, is the one-and why do we choose to use the definite article when an indefinite one may be more appropriate? Where do we begin and where does it end, and how will, or would, we ever know? Here in Norwich, CT, we can, in season, go see Double A farmhands of the San Francisco Giants who toil in the summer sun of Dodd Stadium-all in the hopes, sometimes realized, sometimes not so much, of making it to the Major Leagues.

How we do this for the leader of the Free World, the most powerful person in the history of the planet, the President of the United States? And while you're thinking about that, here's something perhaps the President-Elect has already started to wrestle with and will every day he is in office: how does the President of the United States, in light of the hopes, dreams, expectations and demands each of us has invested in him, hope to succeed?

"Our preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred dollar plates.
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the President of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked."
-bill kenny