POTUS pomps

John McCain had the foresight to exclude Trump from attending his funeral. Somehow I doubt he would have had McCain included him. If he had attended it would have been in extremely poor taste even for Trump who twice maligned him; once saying he was not a war hero since he was a POW and then by not immediately firing a low-level staff when she made a very tasteless joke about McCain's cancer. That was McCain though, the “bulldog” as he was called at the Naval Academy, decent grace in life, spiteful from the beyond.

Either George H.W. Bush had no resentment towards Trump for personal remarks, or it was an oversight on his part. At the funeral in D.C. (Bush probably traveled more in three days dead than he did in the last month alive) Trump and Melania took the end of a pew by the Clintons, the Obama's and the Carters. His oldest son and the 43^rd POTUS sat across the aisle with the family. It was evident how the arrival of the Trumps changed the tone of the funeral—on that pew—from somber and sad to somber and awkward. As Stephen Colbert later remarked Trump was the only man who could bring a funeral down.

Ruminations

George H.W. Bush got it, or tried to get what was humanly possible. He saw 1,000 points of light where most see half that. He saw the flaws in supply-side or “trickle down” economics. As a vice presidential candidate he called Reagan's plan “Voodoo” economics. His death marks the end of an era, a genre of Republicans who call out the fraud, the myth that tax cuts will pay for themselves and the surplus will eventually be seen by the middle and lower classes. Of course after the election, when showed footage of himself saying Voodoo economics, Bush told reporters he was kidding and supported Reagan's policy. In 1981, weeks into his presidency, Reagan passed an Economic Recovery Tax Act providing a massive cut to his voters. Sensing rising deficits, he and his administration soon began trying to roll back the cuts. A light point in the “Shining city on a hill?” So many symbolic metaphors to play ring around the truth.

From his years as the youngest wing-man in the U.S. navy, his service in WWII, to POTUS 48 years later, Bush has been described a a decent man who disliked the dirty side of politics. In 1967 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Houston's 7^th district. He was the chosen by Nixon to be Ambassador to the United Nations, a year as chairman of the Republican National committee, a year as the Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China. In 1976 Bush was appointed by Gerald Ford as Director of the CIA. In 1980, Bush competed with Reagan in no less than 33 primary races, with Reagan losing all but four of them. By May, “the great communicator” had collected more than enough votes to win his party's nomination. His operatives wanted Bush to drop out. He refused to quit, hanging his hopes on being the only option as a running-mate. The rest, as someone said, is history.

Trump had a stunned and longing (as far as his ego could permit) if not soulful look. What good words, if any, would people say at his funeral. He couldn't even get half the Democrats in congress to come to his inauguration. Sure, Don, Eric, Ivanka, Tiffany, Barron, Jarrod, maybe even his ex-wives will have some choice words. I'm sure a Republican or two will remember him well. A few clever Democrats, former presidents, may find a way to wrap flattery into the truth as people do to eulogize people with absolutely no redeeming qualities. He will get the full treatment, the pomp, the circumstance, the flag he once hugged, out of the countries tradition for a passing president. He did look pensive though in that pew, inches from presidents who never would question such a thing, all of whom are secure in their legacy. Trump was the outsider and it showed. The juxtaposition was glaring. Inches in proximity on that front pew, yet a canyon between the two men (Trump and Obama) in their values, their integrity, their approach to and respect for the job. This was the first, and hopefully only, funeral for a former POTUS Trump attended. Frankly, I'm surprised and at the same time pleased that we went at all. It must, in the contemplative silence of his pew, rubbing elbows with those who have signed productive legislation, who have left balanced budgets, be awkward, even embarrassing. After all the narcissistic smoke clears and it dawns that he may not be pope, when Trump realizes that this is one event he can not turn into a me moment, he is left defensless; humble, human, receptive to epiphanies.

The timing is right. It is enough to almost make someone (not me) feel a soupçon of sympathy for the guy. It bears all the elements of a Shakespearian trragedy. Mueller is getting closer by the day as Cohen and Manafort sing their way to prison. With Democrats taking the gavel in January in the House of Representatives, Trump's legal prospects for 2019 won't begin well. At the funeral it sure looked as though he was visited by the ghost of memorable presidents, touching a nerve that he never knew existed. Now he is in that stage of Nixon's presidency where the talking walls are closing in, only Trump's don't talk because he does not drink, which may be listed as a redeeming quality.

Children of the Futures

I watched The Wonder Years. I liked That 70s Show. And now I watch The Kids are Alright. They remind me of my youth, of really the last generation to grow up without being able to communicate something in ways other than verbally. We did not have bike helmets or seat-belts or laws that dictated we wear one. I remember making our own games that weren't fixed on a video screen and conned you back to the store to buy the next level. I remember games that lasted until parents called you in for the night. They did not leave you addicted and a slave to a screen. We grew up riding our bikes, riding unbelted in the back deck of a station wagon, conquering things like fears. We were learning and discovering things that no video game has ever replicated.

The 70s kids weren't the rebels their predecessors had been, that they had to be. There was some hippie, counter-culture drippings, but I get the sense that 70s kids were not a shock and did not reject the status quo like kids of the early 60s did. By the time we grew up, the offspring of Boomers or—in my case—the preceding generation, the world was changed. In 1968, when many Gen Xers were toddling about, the country was bursting with violence and set on a course of change that would last at least until bumpers read that disco was dead and the doors of Studio 54 closed for good. Parents did not fight it, freak out when their child wanted to grow their hair or become vegan. Change was acceptable all through my generation, and some parents—more than others—even encouraged it. By 1965 it was pretty well known, at least in liberal households—that Vietnam was an unmitigated disaster, a moral detour. Unlike parents of the Boomers, who may have seen serving your country as noble under any circumstances, kids in the late 60s-early 70s were left to make their own decision. Many parents, even if not openly, hoped that there sons would not be drafted, have their lottery number called, or even pass the physical.

Generation X (1965-1981) succeeded the Baby Boomers (1943-1964). The millenniels (1983-2001) succeeded Gen X. It stands out to me, to be glossed over by history, that the Boomers first implanted a counter-culture in society. They changed politics, they won civil rights for blacks, for women, for 18-year-old people to vote. In more recent history, it was the millenniels who got out the vote, who backed Bernie Sanders by the thousands in the 2016 primaries. My generation, X, is not known for civil action, for working within or without the system to change it democratically. Certainly a large part of the generation laps over, touching either end. But, as a whole it is never noted in the scripts that report the way change has unfolded in America. Perhaps this is a reason I've heard us called the “slackers.” The millenniels gathered up the slack—that we left—with their technologically advanced culture, with the technology we lacked, rejected, or still choose to reject. The time frame of births from the mid 60s to the earl 80s was known in much less explicit terms as the “latchkey Generation.” There wasn't the zealous parental monitoring that was dolled out to millenniels like pez. Mothers were going back to work as the second wave of feminism was taking root. I remember my sister and I literally wearing keys around our necks in junior high school. In kindergarten, in 1970, when I came home I was instructed to go over to the neighbor's to wait the few times my mom's and my day didn't sync up.

Biology and religion

The average family in the 1960s had 3.7 kids, marginally bigger than the 3.14 in 2017. One of the innovations to come out of that decade was the birth control pill. Women could have a career ad a family. The pill gave them a choice in the situation of being denied or terminated from a job because of being pregnant. The Kids Are Alright portrays a strict Irish-catholic family in the 70s, having begun their family in the 50s. Over the course of two decades they had a total of eight kids. Obviously that matriarch dose not and can not, bound by religion, use the pill. Expained in the pilot episode is that the oldest son “came home from college.” One can deduce from this that he avoided the draft with a college deferment. In liberal circles, the longevity of the war, the uncertainty of a future, was alone a motivator to work to end the war. Mothers did not want their sons to have to deal with that, coming of age and having an imminent notification to serve in an immoral war predicating their futures. The father on the show often talks of his service in WWII as though it was a rite of passage. The Catholics are a dedicated bunch and, with the powers of Christ in their corner, almost robotically, without logic, go wherever their government asks them. All wars had conscientious objectors, resisters, and those who just plainly chose the latter of the Darwinian concept of fight or flight. None so much, though, as Vietnam. From 1960 to 1975 roughly 170,000 men received CO status from service in Southeast Asia. The decisions the Xers had to make are often brought to the table, portrayed in television. On a episode of All in the Family, also set in the 70s (made in the 70s), Mike brings home a draft dodger who moved to Canada. The ultra-conservative, Christian Archie can not comprehend this level of disrespect, of questioning of the government. He and his friend served in WWII. Archie's friend, however, lost a son in Vietnam. He could live with Mike's friend's decision. I think the gap that fought “policed” in Korea made questioners out of the next generation. War, the eternal aggression and need to show off our military might in the world, was vested. The game was over and then the papers were released. In '71 a generation read how its predecessors had been lied to since 1945.

Catholics, strict ones, must have only believed in procreational sex in the 70s. Consider the mother on The Kids are Alright. With as many crosses and crucifixes on walls as some Jews have Mezuzot on door posts, any bedroom will have the fear of God judging your every move. She procreated at least eight times before her biological clock detonated. So am I to believe that the Catholics of the old school just prayed the woman was fertile when the did the deed, got pregnant, abstained for 9 month, and started the process again? A process hat continued until God shut down the oven for good, “divine sterility.” Do the math. Figure a woman in the 1950s gets married, a virgin, at 17 to 18 years old. Her first night puts a bun in the oven, breaking the seal. The irony here is that 50 to 60 years later a liberated woman may take a while to break the seal on an actual oven. Figure the biological clock is ticking and those Catholics, God love 'em, are making all the hay they can. Let's say until age 41. That's 23 years of procreational sex back in the day. No surgeries, no prophylactics. Its all about the unborn child, the next generation. And that is how you get .5 of a kid.