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Read other letters about this article
which I commented on a couple weeks ago.
With minor grammatical changes:
Please, for the love of whatever we each hold holy or dear can we work on stomping to death the thought or phrase "my/our president". The U.S. President is The President... not my frakking president, not our president... just "the". He's an elected official... elected to do a job on behalf of citizens. Elected to job at which he is failing just as the last one did, miserably. This ownership of the president, this personal relationship with an elected CEO might have been developed in the early years of the republic and perfected by FDR in some of its darkest hours, but it has become such a dangerous tool in the hands of the authoritarian extremists. The number of people I heard referring to Bush as "our/my president", who we had to trust to do what was right, sickened me. People who spent 8 years puking at the very thought of Bush as "their" president and who called many of his acts criminal, now accept the same (or worse) acts from a president because he is person they want to claim as "theirs".There is only "The" President of the United States. I wonder if the servility would stop if people would stop claiming political leaders as their own personal saviors and start treating them as what they are: people hired to do a job.
...And who should be fired when they fail to do it - no matter how much we may personally like them.
The attitude from the Beltway class of state "priests and scribes" is that we should all abandon our skepticism and desires for transparency/accountability upon the altar of a unitary Executive. Well... so long as the Executive behaves as they wish him to behave; or at least behaves like the "cool" jock who beats the nerds in congress up. (Our major media pundits really do need a good shrink - I mean sweet Norma Jean, how obvious is the mental pathology that has a person praising and trying to be on the side of the type of personality and behavior that likely victimized him as a youth?)
Most of our congress-"persons" have adopted a similar attitude and style of argument. We all must obey "our" president and do as he wishes. I'm stuck conversing with colleagues and family members who mostly seem to fit the paradigms as well: support for "their" guy, irrational criticism of all acts by the "other", or massive frustration and cynicism so deep that they've largely just checked-out.
That's why I've started arguing the above. Hopefully, I can shake a few of them out of the paradigm they've chosen or out of their learned ambivalence and get them thinking independently again.
