Because everyone needs a break from politics now and again…

Idioms, admittedly, are not meant to make sense when considered literally, and it is this obtuseness which makes their mastery such a trying challenge for all other than native speakers of a language. Even native speakers of a language can be driven to bafflement and bewilderment when examining an idiom too closely; if one is of a literary bent, and in the presence of those who have consumed more than the recommended dosage of alcoholic beverage, asking your companions to explain such sayings as “right as rain” can lead to all manner of lowbrow hilarity.

Speaking, so to speak, of alcohol, there is a saying - too drunk to stand up straight and piss - which seems, at first glance, to be of such exceeding clarity and obviousness of meaning that it, strictly speaking, seems to not be an idiom at all. As the sort of bookish and introverted individual who tends to socialize both infrequently and irregularly, my exposure to people so sufficiently inebriated has been, to no great loss, limited to very nearly the point of nonexistence.

Yet proof that this is indeed an idiom was demonstrated to me some time ago, when I had occasion to be at a social gathering of acquaintances – not even, properly, a party as such – where there was in attendance a fellow of no particular note, whom we shall call Nicholas. Nicholas, as near as I am able to determine, is a hippy, or at least styles himself as such, and in a presumably conscious effort to perpetrate the continuance of certain stereotypes best left, in my opinion, dead and buried in the Summer of Love, he travels nearly everywhere with a large wooden drum of vaguely African styling. The details of this cheap and poorly made instrument are not important to this story, except to say that it is about the size of a milk barrel, for those who remember such things, and painted black, save for it’s drumhead, which is white.

Nicholas apparently found the conversation at this gathering to be insufficiently stimulating for his young and chemically-numbed mind, or perhaps his freshly broken probiscus, of which injury he was never, in my presence, able to give a sufficient explanation for, was so painful, that he sought either stimulation or oblivion in overindulgence in alcohol. He got, in short, ratted, well and truly plastered on most of a bottle of cheap bourbon, and soon passed out on a couch, rather much to the relief of everyone in attendance.

If this last statement seems callous, please understand that Nicholas is a loud, boisterous, and generally just irritating waste of space when conscious, but when passed out didn’t even so much as snore, and was, if not unobjectionable, at least no worse than a waste of a couch. In any event, he passed out and was for some time happily forgotten by those in attendance.

That was, until he committed such a shocking act of social impropriety that, in certain rather small social circles, will most likely ensure his being remembered forever, or close enough as makes no difference.

In his impaired state, he was demonstrably oblivious to external stimulus. Alas, he was not so oblivious to internal stimulus, of which the needs of an overfull bladder must certainly be one of the strongest and most persistent. He never awoke, never – even in the mayhem that ensued – responded coherently to any sort of outside stimuli, nor gave any indication of even the slightest awareness of his surroundings. Yet he stood, steadily and unwaveringly on his own two feet, dropped trou, and passed a prodigal quantity of fluid upon the top of his nearby drum.

College students please take note: this is one of only a handful of social faux pas more heinous than passing out in the only bathroom of a stranger’s house with the door locked from the inside. Quite frankly, there are few things you can do with greater likelihood of antagonizing your host than to take a whiz all over their living room floor, and most of those are not fit to be described in mixed company. In short, it was a very bad thing Nicholas had done.

Though it was not long before Nicholas was informed that his presence in this location was no longer welcome, in the interim he – thankfully, for few things cause social awkwardness like a chap with his willie hanging out for all the world to see – did up his trou and collapsed back onto the couch in an alcoholic stupor. He then slept thru the cleanup campaign that ensued, which was an entertaining spectacle, as nothing shatters class barriers like everyone pitching in to clean up an altogether too organic manmade mess, and resisted various attempts to make him conscious of his actions. In the end, he was last seen, by myself, anyway, staggering unsteadily down the icy sidewalk with the assistance of a (I suspect now ex-) friend of his, mumbling incoherently to, one supposes, himself.

Is there a point to this overly long tale of overindulgence and bodily fluids? If so, it’s this: I have seen, with mine own two eyes, a boy so drunk he could barely speak, let along walk, a man so intoxicated he was oblivious to his surroundings, a nineteen-year-old with more than half a bottle of bourbon coursing thru his system, a juevenile delinquent wreck who by all rights should have been barely breathing, stand up straight and piss.

Funny thing, this English language of ours.

So, here’s the question for the day:

Let’s say there was a bad man, a murderer, who was in (federal?) prison from the late 1930’s to the late 1940’s, escaped, was the subject of a manhunt, made the FBI 10 Most Wanted List, and was recaptured in 1950.

With me so far?

Now, suppose you wanted to learn more about this fellow, and, say, wanted to make an FOIA request to the FBI about him. That’s what I want to do. However, in order to do so, thanks to the Privacy Act, I need to prove the subject is deceased, or can be “presumed deceased” (over 100 years old). Here’s the catch - I don’t know where or when he was born, or where or when he died. Even just finding a birthdate would be good, as I’m fairly confident he’d be over 100 today, and this exempt from the FOIA/PA restrictions.

Any good, fairly easy ideas on how to get his birthdate? I tried the obvious method - a FOIA request for any “most wanted” posters or other publicity/media materiel from the time he made the most wanted list… but the FBI won’t even reveal that (which, I like to think, would have his birthdate, or at least his age on it) unless I can prove he’s dead, which I can’t do without a birthdate… get the idea?

Any thoughts are welcome.

The office of President of the United States is one of immense and unequaled power. As Theodore Roosevelt once said, “A President has a great chance; his position is almost that of a King and Prime Minister rolled into one.” The constitutional restrictions on the powers of a President are few, vague, and prone to abuse. The interpretation of the role of President, according to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, follows two main schools of thought: First, that without specific grant of statutory or constitutional power, the President should, and indeed may, not act. Secondly, and quite contrastingly, that the President should act and exercise his power, authority, and influence to the furthest extent possible unless clearly prohibited or limited in doing so. Until recently, the former view has prevailed, but recent years have seen a definite and distinct trend towards the latter school of thought.

In 1960, Gottfried Dietze wrote of the aggrandizement of the presidency as a result of the office’s standing as a symbol of democracy itself:

“This aggrandizement, which by the standards of the Founders can only be called revolutionary, was most obvious during the most revolutionary periods of American Constitutional development, mainly during the administrations of Jackson, Lincoln, and progressive presidents; periods that were characterized by a growth of democracy.”

He points out that the election of President Jackson by almost universal male suffrage served to increase the de-facto power and stature of the presidency, and that Lincoln was the first heir to this new degree of power. Presidents of the first part of the twentieth century added to the democratization of the office, and thereby it’s power, by assuming, with greater or lesser success, the role of chief legislator. This hubris was not without it’s price:

“The increases of assassinations ever since the aggrandizement of the Presidency became obvious makes us wonder. Before the Civil War, none of the fifteen presidents was killed; four of [the first] twenty have been assassinated since then. We bewail the fact that over eleven percent of American presidents would be assassinated. A more proper evaluation of this dilemma would be offered by saying that the percentage of Presidents killed was zero before the aggrandizement of the Presidency, and rose to as much as twenty percent afterward. Furthermore, it should give us pause that in recent decades, the only objects of assassination were personalities such as Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy, whose strong desires to carry out ambitious social programs made the Presidency appear in it’s full strength, while Presidents under whom the institution appeared weak, such as Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, and Eisenhower, were not objects.”

In more recent memory, the last President to suffer a serious assassination attempt was Ronald Reagan, which nicely supports Dietze’s theory just above. His argument is not, however, perfect; it neither accounts for attacks upon Presidents Garfield and McKinley, nor those strong individuals who escaped attack, such as Wilson.

Every bit as important a factor parallelling the frequency of assassination attempts against incumbents of the office has to do with the role of the media in our society. One of the most important factors in the rise of the Office of President as a symbol of America itself is the relationship that exists between the President and his followers as it is filtered through the mass media. In their 1969 report on assassination and political violence in the United States, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence notes that Americans are not, or were not, interested in politics purely as politics, but required a degree of human interest to hold their attention. They state that the media in this country was “no longer controlled by partisan considerations” and containing “an absence of a rigid partisan tone in the depiction of the everyday activities of the presidency”, with the emphasis on “objective news reporting”. By removing the political and partisan aspects of the President from public view, and concentrating on the sacredotal, he then becomes a “guardian of national morale” and, indeed, a living symbol of this country, the personification of national character itself. Thanks to the media, no longer was the President a partisan occupant of national office but a symbol of American society.

There was a drawback to this approach, though; rather than concentrating on the politics of the Presidency, the emphasis was on the personality and character of the Presidency. For charismatic and likeable Presidents, this meant that their role as a leader of world affairs became coupled with the role of a likeable, apprachable, and altogether human individual, little different from one’s relatives or coworkers. This position leaves a President vulnerable to individuals who seek out out public objects upon which to displace their very private hatred in the guise of “public interest”. Harold Laswell noted in his 1969 book “Psycopathology and Politics”:

The prominence of hate in politics suggests that we may find that the most important motive is a repressed and powerful hatred of authority, a hatred which has come to partial expression and repression in relation to the father, at least in the functions of biological progenerator and sociological father.”

In the last decade the media has to greater or lesser extents de-emphasized the human-interest aspects of the Presidency and returned to a highly partisan emphasis on the political aspects of the office. Whether this has more to do with corporate consolidation of the news industry or the altogether unremarkable and occasionally repulsive personal characteristerics of recent officeholders I leave as an exercise to the reader.