a bonobo humanity?

Onya, Ben!

Having just read the US Special Counsel’s indictment against that thing wot once was Prez, or 165 pages of it at least (I keep hearing that it’s 180-odd pages, so where’s the rest?), I must say I’m not at all surprised. I mean I keep hearing the media using phrases like ‘bombshell after bombshell’, as if old Drivelmouth has changed a jot since he was Young Drivelmouth (and before that Baby Dribblemouth). So all the lies and threats and pathetic bluster catalogued in the indictment just reinforced my disgust and astonishment that this lump of faeces was allowed to become the leader of the world’s most powerful, and therefore potentially dangerous, nation on Earth.

I was, however, very much heartened by a quote that Jack Smith took from one of the USA’s most enlightened 18th century figures. But before presenting it here, some background.

I’ve written before about how politicians are public servants, not our bosses, and that they shouldn’t be put up on pedestals, and be given special powers – massive immunity, massive pardoning powers, power to shut down the government, power to keep themselves separate from the elected body (the Parliament or the Congress), power to surround themselves with their own unelected courtiers, shut up in a White Palace, power to select Judges and Justices, and Secretary of This or That, at their own whim. And this strong feeling I had about an ‘I alone can fix it’ four-year-dictatorship, and the danger it entailed, not least because of the effect such massive power has upon weak minds such as that of Old Drivelmouth, this strong feeling came rushing back to me a few years ago when I heard about France’s President Macron’s retort to a teenager who was presumably criticising some policy or other to Macron’s face – ‘call me Mr President’. Of course, this was an improvement on having the lad hung drawn and quartered in public, which would once have been the case (and that’s no joke), but still, I was white with rage at Macron’s effrontery – and immediately had him skinned alive in my mind, such is my own anti-authoritarianism.

And so, I come to the finest line in Jack Smith’s indictment, which had nothing to do with Old Drivelmouth’s specific crimes.

“In free Governments,” Benjamin Franklin explained, “the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors [and] sovereigns.”

GOVERNMENT’S MOTION FOR IMMUNITY DETERMINATIONS, p92