The word counter I use informs me that a college level vocabulary is required to fully appreciate this. It’s a shame I didn’t graduate.
There’s a scene in the 1993 thriller The Fugitive which I revisit from time to time. It’s when U.S. Marshal Tommy Lee Jones nearly runs smack into an armed Han Solo after chasing him through the catacombs of the Death Star. Solo, played by a breathless Dr Richard Kimble, professes his innocence over killing Greedo, prompting Jones to respond to the incredulous fugitive, “Frankly my dear I don’t give a damn.”
In my defense, if you watch enough movies they tend to blur together; just another after-affect of a Covid lock-down marathon. The famous line is of course “I don’t care.” Delivered by Jones with defiance even as his hands are raised in surrender, audiences loved him for it.
My theory is that they still had the 1992 Republican primaries in mind, when George Herbert Walker Bush, perhaps taking his cue cards too literally, clunkily told a crowd in New Hampshire “Message: I care.”
We all know what happened next: Bill Clinton cared more. “Make America great again,” he said in speeches, though he didn’t think to put it on hats. It’s a line which he knew went down well, as Ronald Reagan had successfully employed it in his slightly more verbose version “Let’s make America great again.” As children have been asking since time immemorial, or at least as long as they’ve been impatiently sat in the back seats of cars, are we there yet?
I’ve been following politics since professing my distaste for Richard Nixon on the Noble Elementary school playground to a fellow first grader. One of us may or may not have ended up in a puddle after that.
In some ways Nixon is looking pretty good right around now. His proposed healthcare plan was arguably progressive; updated for 2020, I wager he’d be more humane to the uninsured than Biden, whose pockets are stuffed with gold from the industry. He spoke in sentences you could diagram. He was mature in his dealings with China. He created the Environmental Protection Agency — though note that he liked to have the air conditioner on while sitting in front of a roaring fire, an eccentricity I approve of in theory if not practice.
Make no mistake, he would be terrible for all sorts of reasons. Arch foe Hunter S. Thompson called him “evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it… utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency.”
Seeing as we have no saints as candidates, I’d almost be willing to overlook a few character flaws to avoid four more years of scenes out of Scanners (spoiler alert: heads literally explode), or the purgatory of a Biden administration.
Though I didn’t vote for the incumbent, I have some idea of what it’s like to be a Trump supporter. I voted for Brexit four years ago. This also put me in the vilified majority. Meddlesome Russians were hauled out then, too, in a bid to discredit the democratic result. Nixon, who made his early reputation baiting reds, would be proud.
Once you’d outed yourself as someone who had the temerity to just say no to the European Union, fear and loathing supplanted civil discussion.
Remember “Talk to the hand”? Thought to be hilarious, it was a less polite way of saying let’s agree to disagree. It became popular around the time Bush was losing to Bubba. English author Lynne Truss later used it as a title to her book ‘Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today’. (Bloody used to be a swear word over here — quite a rude one at that.) Thanks to social media, our hands are doing much of the talking.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, Tommy Lee Jones for president. Granted, his only political credentials are that he was Al Gore’s roommate in college, but that still makes his resume longer than Trump’s when he took office.
His “message: I don’t care” moment has to be taken in context, as he clearly cared about justice. He strikes me as being no nonsense. He was great in Men In Black, and God knows enough of us are wearing black these days, though it looks better in a suit than a mask.
Now please excuse me while I go rewatch No Country for Old Men.
