This morning I discussed by email with my expatriate friend Paul the news that Jeb Bush is “actively exploring” a run for president in the 2016 election. My Tokyo-based “J” School friend, who teaches English there, pondered the wording of this news as if we really think it is news.
“I suppose ‘explore’ might be sitting around drinking beer and thinking about it. ‘Actively explore’ might be sitting around drinking beer and paying Karl Rove to think about it,” said Paul.
To which I might reply, were Paul, Sir Paul of the Beatles: I am the egg man, they are the egg man. I am the walrus, goo goo goo joob … Ah but alas I am not an egg man, though I was an egg boy, one time, selling eggs from laying hens and yard hens. Also, Paul is not Sir Paul. But it is important as to how concepts are presented when you aren’t just another joob running for president. Because three Bushes are directly related to a bird in the hand. The next thing you know, you’ve got a damned monarchy, which I pointed out to Paul. His reply:
“We probably should do it because then we could have Dukes and royal babies and shit like that — CNN would like that. The irony would be that the ‘King’ would eventually lose power and be a ceremonial inbred figurehead mostly attending charity balls, playing golf, and pardoning turkeys on holidays while trying to keep his daughters’ topless vacation pictures out of the press.
“I’m good with all this,” concluded my friend, signing as “Paul the Serf.”
It’s certainly an interesting way to look at it. Will we fight another revolution if Jeb I or Bush III or whatever we would call him, wins a presidency?
Or, perhaps, we can just go ahead and elect a Clinton wife in the less than royal manner of the Texas Fergusons — a.k.a. “Ma and Pa Ferguson.
Oh but Ma was humane. Many say “crooked as a barrel of snakes.” She was good about getting folks out of the slammer in Huntsville. My Dad once told me a story about a less than savory cast of cousins, one of whom was in Huntsville. Pop said this unsavory cousin’s mother hitchhiked all the way from San Augustine to Austin — 232 miles one-way — to see Ma and get her boy, our cousin, out of prison. Our cousin’s mother, also a cousin, was successful and perhaps even stopped off in Huntsville on the way back and picked up her boy before returning to the red clay, pine-covered hills of San Augustine County.
So with Republicans one gets royalty and with Democrats the result is cronyocracy? Things are never that easy. But three Bushes? One at a time was certainly not so great where George I upchucked on the leader of Japan and George II was swayed into igniting another world war in the Middle East. Yes, the House of Bush, it bothers me plenty.