“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys,” political satirist P.J. O’Rourke once wrote, and feeling good about government “is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.”
You don’t have to watch many cable television talk shows nor read many stories in the morning newspaper these days to appreciate the wisdom of those words in O’Rourke’s best-selling book, “Parliament of Whores,” published by the Atlantic Monthly Press.
Try though we may to find a feel-good aspect of the endless national debate concerning government’s ever-encroaching role in our pursuit of happiness, there seems to persist about the land a general sense of foreboding — a presentiment of coming catastrophe.
And why wouldn’t there be? We are bombarded daily by the news media with wall-to-wall doom and gloom that only a card-carrying curmudgeon could cherish. The barrage concerns everything from doubts about Obamacare and bank bailouts allegedly much larger than originally made public, to projected multitrillion dollar deficits, corporate greed, rampant unemployment and an illegal-alien problem that seemingly grows worse by the day.
President Barack Obama, still in full campaign mode, takes to the road to continue to sell a 2,700-page health care bill that he has already signed into law. As he addresses Mainers at a Portland rally and speaks of “fearmongering and overheated rhetoric” by opponents, Republicans — convinced that the legislation is a national disaster-in-waiting — prepare to go to court to fight what it sees as unconstitutional parts of the massive bill.
Meanwhile, a national Tea Party movement that advocates a pox on both parties’ houses works to accomplish a clean sweep of Congress as a start in returning the country to its alleged center-right comfort zone.
Where, in better days, the electorate might have looked upon the communal glass as being half full, it now considers the possibility that it may be half empty. Barbarians are at the gates, and the ship we were hoping might soon come to our rescue founders in a sea or red ink. Mixed metaphors aside, there’s no use worrying, because nothing is going to turn out OK.
And yet, a flip of the calendar page offers time-tested antidotes for warding off our malaise. If this is freshly arrived April, Major League Baseball’s long-anticipated opening day is at hand. Mighty Casey may strike out at a crucial point in the game to cost the home team victory, but there will be joy in Mudville nonetheless, for we know that it’s a long time until October and one game does not a season make. Or break.
If this be April, the dissipation of our vague feeling of despair lies only days away in the Masters golf tournament to be played on Georgia’s spectacularly beautiful and flawlessly groomed Augusta National Golf Course. Reportedly, the toughest thing for tournament officials to consider is the question of who will play the early rounds with Tiger Woods in his return to golf for the first time since being exposed months ago as a serial wife cheater.
Because of the Woods factor, event organizers must take care to prevent professional golf’s first major tournament of the season from turning into a media circus. Some golfers may want to be paired with Woods, but most probably want to avoid it like the plague.
Golfer Geoff Ogilvy, who will play in the Masters, told The Associated Press there is a part of him that would like to be paired with Woods and an opportunity to have what he called “the best seat in the house” for the anticipated melodrama. On the other hand, he said, “There’s a part of me that [says] if you truly, truly, truly want to win the golf tournament, surely you want to stay as far away from [him] as you can.”
That seems great advice for the rest of us. If we truly want to keep the current spate of doom-and-gloom politics and its practitioners from driving us nuts, perhaps we should hang a “Gone Fishing” sign on the widescreen television and stay as far away from the turmoil as we can for a spell.
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone.