ON BULLSHIT, PART II - LEGACIES

leg·a·cy (lěg'ə-sē) Pronunciation Key
n. pl. leg·a·cies

1. Money or property bequeathed to another by will.
2. Something handed down from an ancestor or a predecessor or from the past: a legacy of religious freedom.

I said I would continue this discussion on bullshit. Since I began discussing Pumpkinhead's pimping of his own father for financial gain while shytting on everything his father taught him, that led me to thinking about the legacies our parents or our leaders leave us, and our responsibility to do those legacies proud. So, I write with the second definition of legacy in mind.

It is bothersome when those who had fathers or mothers in positions of power believe they are entitled to succeed them when they retire or die out of their position because they are biologically related; for some strange reason, as a means to distinguish themselves from their parent, the child inheriting his parent's legacy means that he/she has a license to ill and shit on what their parent stood for.

You may want some examples. Look no further than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s children. Out of the four of them, ironicially the oldest, Yolanda, was the only one who seemed to have full understanding of the legacy her father left with his activism, and fully embraced that. She spent her life living out his legacy, and never displayed a need to crap on it like used newspaper. Her baby sister, Bernice, on the other hand, plays at the legacy, but compromises it when it's convenient for her to do so (i. e. lead protest marches against civil unions, while her mother is leading protest marches in support of civil unions because that's what Martin would have wanted.) Martin III has tried to embrace his father's legacy, but it appears that Dexter has all but run away from it. But at least they haven't attempted to crap on it as Bernice has, especially under the unction and mentoring of snake-oil Bishop Eddie Long out of the ATL. They uninvited Harry Belafonte from Coretta's funeral, because Shrub was attending and Harry had already gotten into his grill.

Belafonte paid for their father's funeral back in 1968 and supported them until Coretta got things together to support her family and her husband's legacy. But Bernice crapped on her father's legacy when she dissed Belafonte, one of her father's closest friends and still, at 80, a stauch fighter in the battle for civil and human rights.

Get the picture? Maybe not, so I'll give you a few more.

Let's take the Man-Who-Wanted-To-Be-Senator, but he wasn't "white" enough for the "devils" in East Memphis. I took the liberty to peruse the voting legacy of Senior while first doing research for CBC Monitor's report cards. The difference between him and his son were such that one wonders if Junior wasn't just found on Senior's doorstep, having been left there by wolves. Again, he shat on his father's legacy as a congressman, because he was so ashamed of his father, and the family who gave him that name he consistently cashed in on when convenient, he tried to check out of the African-American race and voted the straight ReThug ticket in a way that made GeeShrubya proud.

All for personal gain. No wonder he's still referred to in DC as the "Ho".

Which leads me to GeeShrubya. While Poppy can brag he was President and Chief Spook in the CIA back in the 1960s, Shrubya can brag that he literally sent this country to hell in a handbasket and is still going at it. I won't go into all of his craptacular screw-ups, but he can at least brag he had the job four years longer than Dear Old Dad, and really established the Bush legacy as that of being spectacularly f-wads.

Some Congresscritters are in Congress as parts of legacies, too. Except, when you point to Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), at least he's not crapping on the legacy left by his uncles and now, his father. So, if he could get it right on the legacy thing, what happened to the others like Rep. Lacy Clay (D-MO), or Kendrick Meek (D-FL), whose parents were progressives during their terms in office, only to hand it over to their sons who consistently flirt with the DLC, and engage in bullshit like this?

If a Congresscritter's kid gets the job after his parent has stepped down, maybe we won't be so disappointed to expect the kid to be like the parent, and honor the legacy they left, when they get caught up in the "bling"of being an elected official and foolishly determine they should not be like their parents, even if their parents were right in their decisions and performance as elected officials. Their attempts to distinguish themselves from their parents indicates they're ashamed of what their parent stood for, and they intend to play with triangulation, circular firing squads, getting paid and selling out for personal gain while screwing over the people who elected them, in an attempt to not be like their parent, but their own person.

Some of them need to emulate their parent, because being their own person has them so full of bullshit that they feed to us and tell us it's filet mignon.

Bush is worrying about his legacy as President right now. Needless to say, I wish someone would spare him the suspense and tell him that not only he gets rated as Worst.President.Ever., but also, Worst-American-Whoever-Lived-in-This-Country status.

And you see the legacies of Mike Wallace get shat on by his weasel of a son schilling for Fox Noise, not to mention the legacies of Cronkite, Rather, Brinkley and maybe Brokaw get trashed by those more fond of their Beltway Cocktail Weenies and parties, than dedicated to do their jobs and report actual news. You don't have to be biologically related to those who created the legacies. But if you're going to follow in their footsteps, you damn well have an obligation to do no harm to the legacy and/or profession they left behind. The willingness to demonstrate partisan postering in media reporting rather than be objective journalists is a warning to us all that not only facism will come wrapped in the American flag and carrying a cross, but will use the media to advance an agenda all of us didn't sign on for. I remember when Cronkite and Rather reported the news; it didn't matter what political affiliation they had. Many journalists didn't even register to vote for fear of impacting their objectiveness in their professions; they were that dedicated to the ethics of journalism and the public's right to know what the hell is going on and being done in their name.

Timmeh, Hannity and O'Reilly missed that class in J-school, I guess.

Finally, there's the legacy that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi inherited. The seat she holds in San Francisco came from a rich history of progressive politics, first being held by the late Phillip Burton, and upon his death, his widow, Sala Burton held the seat until her death in 1986. Pelosi was part of the circle that got both of them elected, and they set the foundation for her to get that seat in the '86 election upon Sala's death. Until Nancy got those leadership positions, she led the way on progressivism and progressive issues. Now that she's House Speaker, she negotiated the compromise that stripped out the timeframes for pullout in Iraq, and then insults us by saying she's not going to vote for a bill that she helped negotiate.

The whole Democratic Caucus basically told us to go Cheney ourselves - well, maybe we need to think about giving Pelosi, Rahm Emmanuel, Steiny Hoyer and Chuck Schumer timelines for doing what we elected them to do or else they get deployed elsewhere.

Like off Capitol Hill and sent home in 2008.

Pelosi's disingeniousness reminds me of Lieberman voting for cloture on Sam Alito's confirmation to the Bench, but not voting to confirm Alito to the Supreme Court. The real issue was voting on the procedure that would have kept Alito from coming up for a confirmation vote; just like the real issue with Pelosi was to keep sending Bush that Iraq funding bill as it was, without any changes and let him keep vetoing it - not to vote against the bill, itself.

Ah, legacies. Maybe those who leave them, need to consider who they are entrusting them with, because rather than uphold them, they allow them to disintergrate into bullshit.