[IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE CALLED HUMILITY]
The other stuff caught on camera…well, one might say I slipped, but in the larger slippage context that was nothing. I made a mockery of my rhetoric with those antics, sure. It was, all things considered, quite disrespectful and even disgraceful. And yet, it was the eloquence and not the post-eloquence horsing around that really did me in.
I slipped when I hailed Mandela’s humility. Mandela once said ‘I’m not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.’ I slipped when I recalled that he admitted freely to imperfection.
I slipped when I said that like Martin Luther King he, Mandela, would give potent voice to the claims of the oppressed and the moral necessity of racial justice. I slipped when I threw in Mahatma Gandhi into my script.
I slipped when I recalled that he once said ‘prisoners cannot enter into contracts.’
I slipped most of all when I said ‘He tells us what’s possible not just in the pages of dusty history books but in our own lives as well.’ I made it worse when I said that Mandela prompts reflection, makes me ask ‘how well have I applied his lessons to my own life?’ And I painted myself into a corner by talking about justice, pace, reconciliation, poverty, inequality etc.
Now it’s all said. For a while the media will play with that hand-shake and those selfies. Sooner or later, I will be asked to put my money where my mouth is. I mean, I don’t believe a word I say so it would be silly to expect me to take my own advice. I will do my redemption number only if I am pushed against the wall.
Everyone knows that I am not a saint and that I am not even one that keeps trying. I do devilry both at home and abroad. I don’t say I am a saint but neither do I admit to devilry. No, not even to a teeny weeny impishness. I like the moral high horse and I ride it because that particular beast is a media construct. Need I say that the new golden rule is that those who control media make saints as well as devil. I am on the right side. No apologies. Now that I’ve slipped, I guess I’ll have to be saying ‘sorry’ at every turn.
Oppressed? Justice? I know how to spell those words. I guess that won’t be enough now. As for Gandhi, the man made his mark with ‘non-violence’. So far I’ve dispensed so much death and destruction that I don’t have the moral authority even to utter that Indian’s name. Shame.
Prisoners and jailers. I am a prisoner of circumstances. Rhetoric notwithstanding my presidential term can be called ‘Same old, same old’. The only difference to the world is that I varnish my lie better than my predecessors did.
Now I have to apply ‘The Lessons’ to my own life and by extension, considering that I am President of the USA, to my own country, or rather its foreign policy. No more drone attacks. No more phone-tapping. No more capitalism. Damn!