Elections are the pinnacle of democracy and a time of dread. In America, we celebrate the right to engage in free and fair elections – so far – but cringe at the prospect of the other side prevailing. When we vote, we aspire to heaven but brace ourselves for a ride to hell in a handbasket. It has always been thus.
And that’s okay. It’s important to care. It’s also important not to assume Biblical violence should the opposition win. After all, there will be another election. Live and fight another day, as the saying does. I used to remind myself that, while I cared deeply about the outcome of elections, it’s not a disaster when the other side wins.
When the Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the 2000 presidential election, I told myself it was not the end of the world. While W was far from the brightest bulb in the marquee, he seemed like a decent guy (and still does). How much damage could he do? The answer, sadly, was a lot.
I didn’t realize how easily evil men like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz could override the dim, amiable guy Americans had elected President. I never thought a president – albeit one who was duped – would con the American people into going to war under false pretenses. I had seen too many of my generation sent to their death in Vietnam. Watching another generation sending young Americans to die for a mistake was almost too much to bear. I had told myself a Bush presidency could not possibly be as bad as my fears warned me. Turns out, it was worse.
There was no panic in 2008 or 2012. Barack Obama seemed like an easy winner in both elections. More importantly, I did not lose sleep over the prospects of a John McCain or Mitt Romney presidency. While I believed then – and still do – that the policies Obama favored were better for the country than those proposed by McCain or Romney, I had no doubt that America would survive either of them being elected President.
Then 2016 happened.
Like many of us – including national pundits – I didn’t think there was a snowball’s chance in Gila Bend of Donald Trump being elected President. After all, he was a clown, a con man, a fraud, and totally unqualified to serve in the Oval Office. He would be overrun by a Hillary Clinton landslide and slink back to “not reality TV” or orchestrating sleazy business deals.
Then the emails happened.
When I first learned that Hillary Clinton had been using a private email server that included official communications, my heart sank. I’d worked in the public sector and knew how sacrosanct public email servers were. While I understood that Clinton didn’t break any laws, I also knew that she had done something unnecessarily stupid and self-destructive. But I didn’t think it would cost her the presidency.
Then James Comey happened.
When the self-righteous Comey torpedoed the Clinton campaign with his infamous “Weiner’s laptop” announcement, I felt like I’d been kicked in the umpa-loompas. The polls were close and the last-minute undecided voters were breaking Republican.
And then Trump happened.
Okay, I told myself, he got elected, but how much damage could he do? I figured he’d probably mail in the job and leave actual governance to individuals who knew how to do it. He’d be a caretaker, I told myself, warming the chair behind the Resolute Desk until we replaced him with a real president.
And then shit happened.
Donald Trump, a conman and failed businessman whose claim to fame was fame, has turned into the most dangerous force in American politics. Certainly, our country has been on the brink before. We killed each other with relish during the Civil War. We allowed the Klan to dominate swaths of the country in the early 20th century. We fought each other in the streets in the 1960s and 70s. But we survived.
Now what happens?
No matter what occurs in next week’s midterm election, no matter how many Mark Finchems, Kari Lakes or (cringe) Herschcl Walkers prevail, America will survive, eventually right the ship of state, and return mature adults to governance. That’s what always happens – until it doesn’t.
The Founding Fathers, despite their flaws and limitations, managed to bequeath us a remarkably elastic political system that adapts, maladapts, and somehow resolutely stumbles forward. There has always been a special magic about America. Outgoing Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, Rusty Bowers, told the January 6th Committee he believes America is divinely inspired. Frankly, I think God is too busy trying to figure out how he or she got the dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers wrong to care a whit about human politics. But, Godly or not, there has been something historically special about the American experiment. Maybe it is divine. Or maybe, as they said in “Bagdad Café,” “the magic is gone.”
In which case I say, move over. This handbasket is crowded.
© 2022 by Mike Tully
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The Whiffenpoof Song
The choir assembled when Hell stormed the Lord’s Day on December 7th, 1941. It reconvenes every annual remembrance of that first gathering. Every year the choir grows. Those who join these days are gray, bent, proud and too frequently forgotten. But their voices, when mingled with those more ancient, reach the stars. We raise our glasses to the ones who didn’t make it through on this day, and they silently return our toast. Silently, that is, but for the echoes of an anthem of the Greatest Generation.
From the tables down at Mory’s, to the place where Louie dwells,
To the dear old Temple bar we love so well.
I hear it on this day, that strange echoing Kipling parody that Dad would break into three Cuba Libres after sunset. The song had the same resonance as his war stories, his matter-of-fact admission that caves were sealed on his orders, trapping Japanese combatants in a grave of dwindling oxygen. Dad said he never pointed a weapon and killed during the war. He merely gave orders and men died. The only weapon he brought home was a sword taken from the battlefield that hangs in my office. He never brought firearms home. My Dad, who hunted with weapons for sustenance in his childhood and carried weapons in the Pacific Theater, would not have them in the house.
Sang the whiffenpoofs assembled with their glasses raised on high
And the magic of their singing casts its spell.
When I was a boy, I imagined the whiffenpoofs some manner of secret society that met furtively at Mory’s, or the Temple Bar, or wherever Louie dwells. I didn’t know the song was a spoof of Rudyard Kipling’s self-indulgent “Gentlemen Rankers.” All I knew was that Dad must have emptied glasses while belting its verses in some local iteration of the Temple Bar, maybe in dusty old Tucson, maybe in a jungle best forgotten. Whatever the inspiration, his singing cast a spell.
Yes the magic of their singing,
Of the songs we love so well:
“Shall I Wasting” and “Mavourneen” and the rest!
We will serenade our Louie,
Til health and voices fail,
What a carpe diem statement! I think that is what grabbed me, young as I was, still unschooled in death and loss. We will serenade our Louie Til health and voices fail. Damn! Of course! Why not! Sing it now, sing it loud, sing it proud. We shall never grow old!
“Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end.”
– (Gene Raskin, recorded by Mary Hopkin, 1970)
The choir sings “the songs we love so well” every December 7th and every succeeding choir is louder and stronger than those that sang before. The Whiffenpoof choir has grown by more than a factor of ten since then and adds members every year.
And we’ll pass and be forgotten with the rest.
There are few of them left now, stragglers on history’s beach, keeping their memories and songs alive until they join the choir. It is fitting, I think, that they revered “The Whiffenpoof Song” and adopted it in tavern lore throughout the land. Fitting, because it is common-man self-deprecating, no longer an ode to the glories of soldierhood, but an ode to time spent with those we love, in whatever Temple Bar we love so well. This is what sanctifies The Greatest Generation: they celebrate their ordinariness. When they saved the world, they didn’t come home to raise hell. They came home to raise kids. They didn’t think of themselves as heroes. The heroes were the ones who didn’t make it back.
We are poor little lambs
Who have lost our way,
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We are little, black sheep
Who have gone astray!
Baa! Baa! Baa!
The Kipling parody of 1910 had a very different meaning after the two World Wars of the 20th century. War had made “black sheep” of the finest of the Whiffenpoof men. Unlike the regretful supplicants of Kipling’s work, the Whiffenpoof men had not joined military service because they were black sheep. Quite the contrary. They joined because they were Americans, and not all of them joined voluntarily.
My Dad sang “The Whiffenpoof Song” and I heard the echoes of regret and mortality in his song. We were all lost sheep, that is what he meant when he sang, and he sometimes seemed the lostest sheep of all.
Once, during one of my visits to the Memorial of the U.S.S. Arizona in Pearl Harbor, I watched an elderly Japanese lady toss a lei made of orchids onto the oily surface of the waters that barely cover the glorious old hulk. The flowered lei danced and bobbed in the calm Pacific as the oil from the wreck wrote mute rainbows in the waters around it. I quietly thanked the Japanese lady for sharing her prayer.
If you have not visited the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, I advise you to do so as soon as you can, because the survivors are dwindling in number. They will share the visit with you. They still make the pilgrimage, American, Japanese, and others.
But the ones who lived it are joining the chorus. Soon, they will all be gone and with them, the memory of what it was like to save the world. The sky will be filled with voices every December 7th but the land will be silent. The Greatest Generation will have passed and been forgotten with the rest.
As long as I have breath, I will salute them on this day.
Gentlemen songsters off on a spree
Damned from here to eternity
Lord have mercy on such as we!
Baa! Baa! Baa!
(“The Whiffenpoof Song” was written in 1909 by Meade Minnigerode and George S. Pomeroy)
© 2022 by Mike Tully
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