Released by Homer Hirt …
By Homer Hirt
You uninitiated may think that penning a weekly column, particularly this time of year, is simple. You are WRONG, WRONG I tell you! Even the weather is a difficult subject. Every-other-day changes do not make for ease and fluidity, except for flood warnings. Flood warnings have a tendency to be fluid, for some reason.
So that leaves politics, which should be easy, but I have found that nothing there is new, just the delivery mode.
I have noticed Tweedying……excuse me…..Tweeting. This is a natural mistake for me, since I was once an officer on a U. S. Navy ship yclept “USS TWEEDY”. The ship was named after a deceased military hero, but it did not take long for us to be known as the “Tweedybirders”. We took this in stride, though, and wrote Walt Disney and got permission to use the Tweedy Bird (remember him and Sylvester?) as our symbol, and we graved upon our ship’s flag his image, rampant on a field of blue, and made up songs about him and sang them within the confines of various venues, such as downtown Norfolk bars.
But now we are engaged in a great civil war….only it is not so civil and it isn’t much of a war since it is fought on screens and with words and it is about politics and candidates who come and go like the wind…and call each other names like “old man” and “that woman” and …..well, you get it.
So it is time for me to enter the fray….but in a stranger way that tweeting and holding a finger up. I shall jump, feet first, without fear or doubt, by going back…..to Mark Twain and how he planned his political career.
But now politics is into Tweeting, and Facebooking and Friendlying and calling each other names, and apologizing the next day, which is against the John Wayne Rules. Remember, in the movie “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” John Wayne, under the screen name of Nathan Brittle of the Seventh Cavalry, told his young men “Never apologize….its a sign of weakness”. Now folks insult one another and then apologize the next day. They can do that all that they wish to…..but they will have to answer to Captain Nathan Brittle some day!
And now I, as a political hack, must fall back on Mark Twain, whose mother did not love him very much or she would not have named him Samuel Langhorne Clemmons. Whoops…..MY mother, Miz Rossie, named me Homer Balfour Hirt, Junior…
Let’s go back to the year 1907, when the great Twain was tempted to run for the presidensity (a Pogoism). Here are his words on the subject:
I have pretty much made up my mind to run for President.
I am going to own up in advance to all the wickedness I have done, and if any Congressional committee is disposed to prowl around my biography in the hope of discovering any dark and deadly deed that I have secreted, why-let it prowl.
I candidly acknowledge that I ran away at the Battle of Gettysburg…I wanted my country saved, but I preferred to have someone else save it. I entertain that preference yet…
The rumor that I buried a dead aunt under my grapevine was correct. The vine needed fertilizing, my aunt had to be buried, and I dedicated her to this high purpose. Does that unfit me for the Presidency? The Constitution of our country does not say so….
I admit also that I am not friend of the poor man.
I regard the poor man in his present condition as so much wasted raw material. Cut up and properly canned, he might be made useful to fatten the natives of the cannibal islands and to improve our export trade with that region.
There you have it. You have my permission to parse the sentences and match up each thought with a present day candidate if you must. I speak for myself, of course, but considering my age I will probably see Samuel before most of you and I will ask him if he objects.
Until that date……then Tweedy away to your heart’s content. If you Friendly us and do whatever it is folks do on Facebook, I will give you a tentative okay!
Lagniappe: “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
(Puddinhead Wilson ….as reported by Mark Twain)
