Most folk like their adjectives sweet: fresh, joyful, mellifluous, or bright for example. I, however, prefer mine with a more savory tang: bittersweet, poignant, autumnal, or (my Scottish favorite) dreich. This has little to do with my tastebuds and a lot to do with my personality. My wife has a sunny disposition while my personality is a bit more saline. That’s just the way we are, like tall (me) or short (her). It’s in our DNA.
We’re not polar opposites, just different, the way Republicans and Democrats used to be. Over the years, we’ve learned to get along and when we differ, we differ respectfully. We practice the lost arts of compromise and civil discourse. We try not to react, but rather to listen and think before we speak. And you know what? Most of the time, it works! So what happens when it’s time for the sweet and savories among us to elect a President?
Maybe history holds an answer. The Presidential election of 1800 was a mud bath: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson went after each other like, well, you know who. Adams accused Jefferson of having “French manners,” a not-so-veiled reference to the atrocities of the French Revolution. Adams went further: if Jefferson became President, “we would see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution,” and that if Jefferson were elected, we would be “creating a nation where murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest would be openly taught and practiced!” Not to be outdone, Jefferson (via his personal political hatchet man James Callendar) called Adams “a rageful, lying, warmongering fellow;” a “repulsive pedant;” and “a gross hypocrite who behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous, hermaphroditical character!”
Jefferson to Adams: “Tyrant!”
Adams to Jefferson: “Half breed son of an Indian squaw sired by a Virginia mulatto father!”
Talk about negative campaigning. And these were two of our most revered Founding Fathers!
Fast forward to 1824: it’s another Presidential election, this time John Quincy Adams versus Old Hickory himself, Andrew Jackson. In that eloquent matchup, JQA was labelled a “pimp,” while Jackson’s mother was called a “common prostitute” and his wife a “slut.” Sound familiar? The point is maybe things in 2016 aren’t as quite bad as we think; maybe this stuff really is in our national DNA, our own extreme brand of political sweet and savory, if you will.
Let’s face it: we were born this way. We are a nation of contrary quarrelers and dissenters. We don’t play nice. We took issue with the King of England in 1776 and we’ve been taking issue with our political leaders ever since. Contentiousness and dissent are in our blood. When San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick recently took a knee during the National Anthem, was he any less a patriot than the Sons of Liberty who tossed the all that tea into Boston harbor? Revile him or defend him, but is Kaepernick not exercising his right to express his opinion like any other “good” American who lustily sings “O say can you see!” with hand over heart? But how quickly we choose sides! How we lunge to judgment about what’s right and what’s wrong! No wonder we end up polar opposites rather than simple complementary flavors on our nation’s political tongue.
Back on the homefront: assume for a minute that a marriage is like our political union. It’s born of love, has common goals, and seeks to ensure a better future for the next generations. It may even have its occasional tempests. But within its promise, there’s ample room for sweet and savory. I’d like to think our national union is capable of the same.
Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer with homes in Chestertown and Bethesda. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. “A Place to Stand,” a book of his photographs, was published by the Chester River Press in 2015. He is currently working on a collection of stories called “Musing Right Along.”
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