War Or Something Like It

A couple of studies over the past few years have detailed what it takes to be happy. What's been found, apparently, is one must be able to either be ignorant of or block out certain aspects of life on this planet in order to achieve happiness. For example, you could spend all your time thinking about world starvation and live a thoroughly unhappy life or ignore it and be happy. What that basically means, to me, is happiness and stupidity are intertwined in ways we probably don't want to think about too hard. It might bum us out.

The thought came into my head tonight as I talked politics with this girl I'm madly in love with. I've got this cute little blond in my life, 4-years-old, smart and sassy, goofy to a fault. It's kind of hard for me to break that goofy down and throw in real life misery for her to contemplate, but tonight, it was appropriate.

Here's how it went down - she has been "studying" presidents, as it were, learning about the office and about some past ones. The Animaniacs song about the presidents is on rotation in her iTunes cue. So when George W. Bush hit TV tonight as we were flipping channels, I stopped and told her "this is our president right now." That segued into how long he will be president and that his daddy was also president.

I give myself credit on not interjecting too much of my personal bias against who Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister so artfully nicknamed President Mondo Fucko. When she asked "is he a good president" I calmly explained that I didn't think he was a very good president because he has to make all sorts of decisions and one of his decisions was to start a war when he didn't need to. We had just watched "The Chronicles of Narnia" the week before and I think, in her own kid way, my daughter started to understand the nature of war by watching pixels in the shape of centaurs and talking Jesus lions run at each other with swords drawn. She got that it was "bad" and that people died and that makes her sad. So she doesn't like George W. Bush either, even though I'm not diluting myself into thinking she understands the issue all that much but is, instead, parroting daddy.

Then she drops this little nugget. "If he made it so people die, he should die too."

Hmm. Again, not great political thinking (although on par with Bill Kristol and Ann Coulter as far as I'm concerned), but she had a point. He made it so people will die and didn't have to, so he should suffer some sort of comparable fate - it's enough to make you stop and think about presidential accountability as a whole. The reason I'm fairly content right now in mid-management is there's little pressure about the decisions you make. If I had to make a decision that would send people to their deaths and cause the death of many many others, sweet Jesus would I feel conflicted about it. Fear, trepidation, making sure I had my FACTS STRAIGHT and all this would flood into my mind - people will die, certainly, when I make this decision. People might die in other ways should I make a different decision, but this decision puts their death on my ability to interpret data and act in our country's best interest.

I would think, in other words, that if I sent someone to die, I should be held responsible. Out of the mouths of babes, huh?

For the record, I told her that you shouldn't wish people dead, and I seriously mean that. I don't wish any harm on GW Bush. I just want to see him thrown in jail and be held accountable for his shitty decision making, or breaking the law, whatever comes first. But dammit all if she didn't stumble upon a point about accountability that I'll take with me a little bit. And one I wish President Mondo Fucko had explored a little more.