I was in Washington yesterday, wanting to check up on how well the truth is doing at the White House. (The most recent of six earlier visits appears here: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/12/19/1725701/-Workplace-Safety-at-the-White-House-Part-6?_=2017-12-19T06:49:26.644-08:00 )
It turned out, of course, that the truth is not doing at all well at the White House.
Still, it was only daybreak. Soft lights shone in the windows. There were no tourists around, no vehicles visible on the barricaded street. It was almost possible to picture a happier time, a time when vile characters didn’t roam the grounds, when the president was not a monstrous nullity. FDR, for example. FDR had been president for no more than a few minutes when, on March 4, 1933, he announced - in his inaugural address, the ‘only thing we have to fear is fear itself’ speech - that “this is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.”
FDR would say it’s still that time. I tried very hard to imagine him, but FDR wasn’t there.
Nor was Francis Bacon, who lived in the 17th century, and couldn’t have visited the White House even if he wanted to, but was nonetheless a savvy guy. Francis Bacon once said: “Truth is the daughter of time.” Let’s hope so. The passage of time might yet allow truth, battered and bewildered, to come back to America.
For the moment, however, the beautiful ‘daughter of time’ is just one more daughter the current pig of a president has deflowered.