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What About This . . .? 8.29.2013

By Wayne William Cipriano

When you are moving through a large meadow containing twelve gazillion musk thistle plants or so, popping off the heads and putting them into a bag and then pulling up the plant itself, your mind tends to wander.  There just isn’t that much going on that requires deep concen­tration.

I got to thinking about recurring reality in general and specifically recurring political reality.  Are you old enough to remember political reality in the early 1950s?  A lot of it had to do with the certainty that the Commies were coming to get us; some said they were already here.

Do you remember “Tail Gunner” Joe? (Joseph McCarthy, junior United States Senator from Wisconsin)  “I have in my hand,” Senator McCarthy pronounced many times, “a list of 178 Communists who are at this moment employed by the United State Department of State.”

Have you seen the present day junior United States Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, on television?  Have you heard him report that he has a list (number unspecified) of active terrorists in the United States that the Justice Department refuses to arrest?

Is it just me seeing the similarity in the claims or some other reason that seems so familiar?

Do those of us who remember Senator McCarthy and have seen Senator Cruz notice not only a philosophical resemblance between the two, but also, I swear, a physical resemblance?  Do they look alike to you?

Is this a trick of my memory, my desire to place a seemingly chaotic universe into some sort of order, some predictable consistency to detect a recurring reality here?

My cousin Billy, (the Sage of Connecticut) once said ‘history does not repeat but it does often rhyme from time to time’.  (Billy likes the melodic as well as the profound).

Do we see that rhyming in these two Senators?

Gee, I hope not!