Just When You Thought it Couldn’t Get Any Worse

Is there no baseline qualification for national elected office?

By Tim Clark

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

H.L. Mencken

On February 14th 2018 a gunman armed with an assault rifle entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and killed 17 students and teachers. I’m not sure why he did it, and I’m not sure I care. I tried to follow the story, but the tragedy was too strong, the emotions too intense. I was too busy crying for the victims to take much pity on the assailant. I’m not saying he wasn’t pitiable, I’m sure there was some terror in his story that drove him to the madness, but I never found out what it was.

For one thing, I was following the story of the survivors who were trying to negotiate the stubborn madness of the US capitol. I watched in awe as the children who had faced such terror attempt to compete with the NRA donations and bizarre letter ratings for votes in the Houses of Congress. It was an admirable, if doomed, drama.

In March 2019 Marjory Stoneman Douglas survivor David Hogg was in Washington for another round of “thoughts and prayers.” He knew it was futile, but he had seen too much to quit.

As he walked from one empty gesture to the next he was confronted by Marjorie Taylor Greene.

She followed him, at one point allegedly telling him she had a gun. Eventually calling him a coward.

He has seen so much, been through so much for his tender years. And, he was facing kind faces, empty words and rehashed, reheated cliches dredged up from the DC warehouse of hollow slogans. He was a dreamer tilting at windmills, but he wasn’t a coward. Of course, she somehow seemed to make the disturbing connection that she was brave because she was carrying a gun. Here come those tears again.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse. Marjorie Taylor Greene is now Representative Greene from the reliably Republican 14th District in Georgia.

It’s been reported that Representative Green believes the 9/11 attacks were a hoax. She allegedly believes Barack Obama is a Muslim. Ms. Greene has put forth a theory that the plane wreck that took the life of John F. Kennedy Jr. was a deliberate act of sabotage by Hillary Clinton. She has made the claim the Sandy Hook shooting was a “false flag” conspiracy to confiscate her cherished guns. While researching something online she made the fantastic “discovery” that the devastating California wildfires were caused by a laser in space.

Is there no baseline qualification for national elected office? Do we have no minimum qualifications? If there were video evidence of you following a child, or an adult, down the street, demanding answers about why they wanted to talk to members of congress, and threatening that person, which is the only reason to claim to have a gun, you wouldn’t be allowed to be a custodian at an elementary school.

Representative democracy requires a certain amount of accommodation, a willingness to accept the will of the people. It demands an acceptance of the norms of society. Ms. Greene would like to think she is in the vanguard of a new breed, a scorched earth, take no prisoners Uber American, a slam-bang, two-fisted humdinger. The logical evolution of the Tea Party. But, she is only a bully, threatening people and freedoms, she doesn’t care about liberty except hers.

To borrow a line from another well-established assault on the freedoms of democracy; “Are you left with no sense of decency…? At long last have you left no sense of decency?”[1] Muslims, Jews, Democrats and immigrants have become the new Communists. You need somebody to blame, I guess.

It’s difficult to imagine the apparatus required to pull off a con on the scale of the 9/11 attacks. There is a constant warning “if it sounds to good to be true, it probably isn’t true.” Now, we need to add “if it sounds to absurd and ridiculous to believe, don’t believe it.” How many people would need to recruited and coached and trusted to perpetrate that hoax? And in the twenty years since then not one of them has written a book and sold the film rights, and made a fortune. It sounds too ridiculous. Of course, maybe Hillary Clinton killed them all. And, all the people involved in stealing the election from Donald Trump, and all the people who were part of the southern states plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, and the people who were in league to shoot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and embroil the globe in the misery that was WWI and maybe Hillary was the person who poisoned Charles VI… Well, you get the idea.

I don’t know if Representative Greene really believes space lasers started the California wildfires or if it’s just a device to stir up resentment and get some votes and donations. I can’t say whether Donald Trump believes the election was stolen from him or if he just really likes being President. I do know it’s getting tiresome trying to decide if our elected officials are mentally impaired or morally unsound.

[1] Joe Welsh replying to, and discrediting, Senator Joseph McCarthy

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The story was previously published on The Good Men Project.

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About Tim Clark

Writing is a way of discovery. It brings focus to things, and it helps a person understand the thoughts that are otherwise unexplained. If life is history we should try to leave the world a better place. I contribute regularly to The Ugly Writers and The Good Men Project. and Enclave. And I am thrilled to be allowed to write a monthly column for TheWildWord.com. You can view more of my writing at https://lifeexplainedinaway.wordpress.com Besides that I am a proud father, a lucky husband and a full time employee, in central Ohio.