A Brief Study in Gentility

The only thing within lightyears of being slightly positive about DJTrump's unpresidency is that it affirms what we were told as children: anybody can become president. 

The first 44 American presidents had experience in military and/or public service.

Not only does #45 no have such experience, he has no idea what "service" means. He does get "public." It's the rabble that he governs. The American people, via the obsolete and archaic Electoral College, have put a buffoon who knows nothing about government in charge of it.

Robert Heinlein once quipped that "Vox populi vox dei" best translates as "My God! How did we get in this mess?" How very apt.

The Framers were Gentlemen, a term from British society designating a land-owning, low-ranking nobleman. In America it signified a man worthy of respect by reason of his honesty, good character, and integrity.

Signing the Declaration of Independence they swore, "we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." In an age when honor was everything, prized even more highly than one's life, that was saying something.

We still use the term "gentleman," but it has become degraded. As wealth in the United States came to be prized more than ancestry, America's richest men began to fancy themselves the nation's gentry. They built mansions in cities and summer "cottages"--palaces to the rest of us--in places like Newport, Rhode Island, and Hyde Park, New York.

Then came the trustbusters, WWI, the Great Depression, and WWII. Wealth was redistributed, redefined, and reallocated. New species of moneyed classes appeared: Hollywood actors, professional athletes, "celebrities."

Few vestiges of gentility remain in this country, and certainly not in the White House. The Poser-in-Chief can put on the trappings of fancy dress and ceremony, but he's still obviously a schlub. He has bad posture, looks terrible in a tuxedo, and doesn't know how to shake hands. His social skills are nonexistent, and polite conversation is beyond him. Completing sentences in extemporaneous speech is a skill his expensive schools never taught him. 

Facing an interviewer he leans forward, mouth agape, hands clasped between spread knees, far more resembling a horny adolescent watching a striptease than anything vaguely gentle or manly.

And this is the chief executive of these United States.


--- Diogenes, 8/26/2020