Kidnapping historical figures (and I don't mean Bill & Ted)

I was at work Saturday, orienting two consecutive pair of tour coaches loaded with riverboat passengers. This left me, understandably, with little time for loafing. I observed, between the two waves, that a colleague was bogged down at the counter with a talkative visitor. I delight in most talkative visitors, but not this type. He was... how can I put this... political. An archetypal liberal weenie, to be exact.

I didn't have the time or desire to get involved, but if I were at the desk, I never would have let him go on so long. When I'm in uniform, I am strictly apolitical. Speaking as a taxpayer, I am not paying federal employees to shill for the Democratic Party, and I'm certain that Democrat taxpayers aren't paying me to shill for Republicans. Visitors who want to talk politics get a brick wall, or conveniently sidelined onto more appropriate historical topics.

Later that day, my colleague and I were out of doors engaged in senseless acts of tallow chandlery when our friend wandered up the path. The conversation somehow turned to what Meriwether Lewis would think, were he transported 201 years forward in time. I posited that he would likely be very pleased to learn that The Oregon he had explored had been annexed to the United States.

The visitor, apparently the home of a one-track mind, said "Well, he wouldn't think much of George W. Bush." I'll leave it to you, the reader, to fill in the tone he used.

I'm pretty good at getting derailed conversations back on track, so I argued that Lewis would have been very familiar with the curent political climate, since the Adams-Jefferson campaign of 1800 is still called the dirtiest presidential campaign in American history, and Lewis became Jefferson's private secretary the next year. I also pointed out how delighted Clark & Lewis would be at the survival of the Republic, since their expedition came just 15 years after the Constitution was ratified.

But the whole time I talked, I was secretly astonished at the man's chutzpah arrogance. Just where did he get off assuming that a Virginian gentleman who had died in 1809 would magically agree with his political prejudices? The answer, of course, is that he simply assumed that any thinking person, or perhaps anyone not intrinsically evil, would agree with him.

And thus, he became another case study in Bush Derangement Syndrome.

(Ultimately, the joke's on him. If he'd stopped to think about it, he would've realized that Meriwether Lewis is an American colonialist par excellence, not content to force his slaves to rape the earth of Virginia for the sake of big tobacco, he led a bloodthirsty military expedition across the virgin wilderness, spreading disease and violence across the peaceful plains. Clearly, a Bush man if ever there was one.)

Comments

[Rex]

the people of that time were a slight bit more savage than todays man. At that time Lewis might have shot the visitor for talking that way about the President of the United States.

[Fits]

Nah. I'm today's man and I don't think that's too savage. Wouldn't do it, but wouldn't mind if someone did. Our feelings remain the same but the climate has changed considerably.

[Dan]

Heh. If being rude about the president were a shooting offense, or even a duelling offense, Congress would never have been able to muster a quorum after Adams replaced Washington, much less after Jefferson replaced Adams.

I think shooting's a bit much. It's more of a Hamilton-Burr solution than a Jeffersonian one anyway.