There was once this barbaric tradition, here, of Church Folk gathering at a crowded little buffet place after church. This restaurant, Furs, was crowded not because the food was so great (at times it reminded me a high school cafeteria) but because its process were so low. Low enough that the chain vanished from Ourtown a few years back. But, during its heyday, most Church Folk could be found congregating there after Sunday service, services they often groused about going too long, only to then spend hour upon hour gossiping at Fur’s.
In this mix, you could always tell who the pastors were. They were the guys, most often the pot-bellied guys, wearing their hats. These men would get out of their fancy cars, just a s often ungracious, stereotypical Cadillacs and so forth, who would then don top coats and hats for the twenty-foot walk to the restaurant door. Being a guy who’d die naked if they’d let me, I could never understand why these pastors insisted on bringing these heavy coats and gregarious clown-pimp hats into a restaurant only a few feet from their car. It’s not as if these men had to march across the frozen tundra to get there. The wives would, just as often, put on mink and ridiculous gold lame “crown” hats, a quizzical display of prosperous bling considering going to Fur’s on a Sunday usually told the world what a cheapskate you were.
Inside, many of the pastors would remove the heavy coat—which they wore just to show it off—and go through convolutions of finding an empty chair or such they could park their folded armor into before seating themselves—with their gregarious hats on—to eat dinner. Many, to my direct observation, did not even remove their hats when they prayed over the table. It was like a convention of Insecurity Anonymous, these people behaving like ten-year olds in desperate need of external validation. And, I’m not talking ball caps. I’m talking large, gregarious fedoras, some with bands and feathers and such. Pimp hats. Some of these men having removed their top coat and even their suit jacket, rolled up their sleeves, and dug into fried chicken and mashed potatoes while still wearing a large eyesore of a felt Fedora. Those were the pastors.
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“Barack Obama has grandly failed to lead the nation emotionally as well as rationally,” Newsweek's Jon Meacham wrote. “What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country. Like all of us, Obama has the vices of his virtues. He is cool and steady, but can seem cold and remote. He is thoughtful and thorough, but can appear eggheady and out of it. He appeals to the intellect, but often fails to make the visceral case for something.” Meacham’s engaging essay, The Trouble With Barack, is well worth the read. It is, despite my choice of quote, here, quite positive of the president, making the case that the conservative right’s scare tactics present a distorted view of Obama, presenting him as an extreme liberal when a sober review of the president’s record fins him just slightly right of center (including the president's health care reform ambitions, which Meacham describes as "just to the right of those of Richard Nixon").
But I agree with Meacham’s assessment of the president’s biggest failure thus far: to lead, to inspire. He’s been, for the most part, the Negotiator-In-Chief, wasting enormous amounts of time working within a Pollyannaish view of Congress—specifically the Senate—and, from what I can tell, wrongly assuming these men and women are, in fact grownups. The sheer vitriol going on in Congress, on both sides of the aisle, paints a picture of a deeply insecure gang of children. The sheer level of childishness—from petty agendas to dirty tricks—going on in the face of the worst economic crisis this country has ever faced defies description. These folks seem concerned exclusively with their own reelection chances. Their focus on the coming midterm elections inhibits every choice, every decision, as conservatives bank hard right and liberals move to the center, nervous about being blamed if things go wrong.
Well, guess what, Sherlock: things HAVE gone wrong. And we DO blame you—all of you petulant, snotty-nosed children running the country. Democrats: you absolutely will get voted out of you fail to act, to do what we voted you nitwits in to do. Democrats spent eight years tip toeing around conservatives. Now we’ve thrown the bums out, but the Dems, idiots that they are, are still tip-toeing.
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