Monday Morning Music Ministry

10-17-16

Once upon a time there was a president named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. No… I will start this story earlier, and in another way.

Once upon a time there was a different America. Different than we know now. Not only different presidents and candidates, but different manners and morals. Different standards. You and I could go back in time and might recognize places and relate to interactions. But it is possible that Americans of earlier times, if they could materialize in our midst today, would be lost and bewildered.

U. S. Grant, the superior general and inferior president, was known to like his cigars and whisky. After a dinner with a group of generals or politicians – those details are lost; but a group of men who enjoyed after-dinner cigars and whisky – one man rose and proposed to tell a story or two. He signaled that the humor would be bawdy (“purple,” in the day’s parlance, meaning naughty) by announcing, “I see there are no ladies present.”

Grant reportedly said, “No, but there are gentlemen present”; and told the man to leave. The good old days. Can you imagine?

Theodore Roosevelt, exuberant hunter and woodsman and cowboy, was sometimes photographed and frequently caricatured in informal attire, however was respectful of the dignity of the presidency. He chose frock coats and top hats. He hated newsreel cameras.

But almost every day the weather allowed, he played tennis on White House courts. Other presidents had “kitchen cabinets” – unofficial advisers and confidants who met in friendship or for policy brainstorming. TR’s was on the tennis court. Yet not one photograph exists of TR playing in his tennis whites.

At the end of his term the Tennis Cabinet met for one last time, and TR was presented with a gift from the assembled friends. Finally they were photographed as a group… in formal attire. Dignity (even if readers from 2016 think it was irrelevant) was important.

Now I will mention TR’s distant cousin, FDR. The nation knew that Franklin Roosevelt suffered from polio; that he was in braces, unable to walk, barely able to stand. He had run – sometimes literally – for vice president in 1920, hale, hearty, handsome. But then polio struck.

Common knowledge it was, but he seldom was photographed struggling with crutches or arm-braces. Occasionally a news photo showed him tightly, and awkwardly, gripping a podium. Or when sitting with Churchill and Stalin at a wartime conference, his leg-braces could be seen peeking between his pants-cuffs and his shoes.

Dignity on his part; respect on the part of photographers and newsreel cameramen.

Fast-forward to 1976. I covered a George Wallace rally in suburban Chicago during the Democrat primaries. “The Fighting Judge” was the victim of an assassin’s bullet four years previous. Paralyzed from the waist down, he was dependent upon wheelchairs and assistants.

In those days the press’s role had changed – on a track toward today’s blatant partisanship. Wallace was viewed with opprobrium by most of the liberal media for his earlier segregationist stands, as was the incumbent president, Nixon, for a variety of excuses and justifications.

At that rally, a few photos were snapped during the speech. And then reporters and news photographers gathered at the hall’s exit, where a car would meet Wallace, who waited in his wheelchair. When the car pulled up and opened its door, Wallace’s aides did what was necessary and routine. Nowadays these maneuvers can be effected differently, but that night, two men joined arms to raise Gov. Wallace like a bundle of bones, from underneath, and awkwardly trundled him into the seat of the car.

It was inelegant. Embarrassing, clearly, to Wallace. Which is why the assembled photographers of the press corps instantly snapped their flash photos for every nano-second of that clumsy scene. I never did see any such photos on front pages… but the reporters seemed intent on making Wallace uncomfortable.

My point is not so much about presidential dignity, itself (remember that Lyndon Johnson surprisingly lifted his shirt to show a gall-bladder scar; and Jimmy Carter chatted about his hemorrhoids), but more about society, that it has changed. Our culture is cheapened; we have lower standards; manners and morals are endangered species.

“F Bombs” are dropped with total-war intensity. Movies are replete with filthy language and filthier behavior. Young girls in malls are heard talking in ways that once would have embarrassed stevedores. Plotlines of TV shows deal in topics once too “delicate” to raise in family or social circles; that is, in private. Athletes who denigrate the flag are stoutly defended; athletes who affix slogans to their shoes, supporting the police, are threatened with suspension. An upside-down world.

In politics, which, traditionally, closely follows and carefully leads the normative values and aspirations of society, cutting-edge outrages now are indulged. Onetime taboos – for instance, allowing men into any public restroom where little girls might be – is suddenly decreed to be a Constitutional Right. And, as with monarchs or tyrants of old, is allowed with a stroke the pen, a punishable crime if violated.

In this year’s politics we have a candidate who is endorsed by “Evangelical” leaders and immediately salts his speeches with hells and damns. Instead of issues, we hear discussions of sex allegations about him, and about a former president. The latter’s wife, a current candidate herself, is cast as an enabler, almost a harridan persecuting the putative victims. Whether true or half-true, these become part of the evening news, press conferences, dinner-table conversations.

That other candidate continues the march toward re-defining customarily deviant behavior. Discovering “rights” in the same manner as the incumbent president, her new discoveries routinely offend traditions, always under fraudulent banners. Inventing “rights” for sexual deviants or criminal aliens is to dishonor those who fought for racial justice, female suffrage, and other civil rights.

So Hillary would enshrine privileges for “women” with male accessories, and pedophiles, into the Constitution. She would continue her predecessor’s crusade to denigrate Christians at home and abroad. She frequently boasts of her early, and continuing, passion for vulnerable children, yet evinces no second thoughts about the killing of viable children sucked from wombs in their ninth months, and murdered by a blade to the bases of their skulls. Suddenly, in Hillaryland, these children are “formerly vulnerable.”

Debates and speeches seem to be ghost-written, now, by headline-writers of supermarket tabloids. What, in 2020? Spitballs and water-balloons at 20 paces?

Our current level of discourse has been cheapened, I believe irretrievably. All these things I have mentioned – and myriad others – are, none of them, splotches of toothpaste that possibly can be put back in their tubes.

Are we on a slippery slope?

Rather, a vortex in the unfortunate toilet-bowl of contemporary life, almost flushed away completely. And deserving of it.

Anyone who teaches something different is arrogant and lacks understanding. Such a person has an unhealthy desire to quibble over the meaning of words. This stirs up arguments ending in jealousy, division, slander, and evil suspicions. These people always cause trouble. Their minds are corrupt, and they have turned their backs on the truth.
I Timothy 6: 4,5a NLT

They prove the truth of this Proverb: “A dog returns to its vomit.” And another says, “A washed pig returns to the mud.”
II Peter 2: 22 NLT

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