Lucy(ed) Again?

By Patrick Hall

It is a familiar skit, brought to us from the imaginative mind of Charles M. Schulz, cartoonist and creator of the comic strip Peanuts. We have the determined, if not a bit naïve, Charlie Brown getting ready and kicking a football, held down by his sometimes-surreptitious girlfriend, Lucy. As the scene plays out, she encourages Charlie Brown to kick the football, and she “promises” to hold it in place while he takes a whack-at-it. Although Charlie Brown is somewhat hesitant, and rightfully so, that Lucy won’t hold the football in place as promised. Charlie knows from experience that Lucy has the habit of pulling the ball away at the last second, resulting in Charlie falling unceremoniously on his back. Charlie, nevertheless, has an undying trust or belief that this time, Lucy will hold the ball down and let him finally kick the ball. But Charlie always gets a good run at the ball, and on cue, Lucy betrays him by pulling the ball away and letting Charlie fall on his butt. We all know the scene, played out repeatedly in Schulz’s cartoon choreography. But inside, we all still hope that Lucy won’t pull the football away from Charlie. Hope springs eternal.

With the election of Joe Biden as our nation’s 46th President, many Americans, even those who placed him in office, mainly because they hated Trump’s mean-old social media tweets or the mindless refrains primarily heard from Democrats, that Trump didn’t act Presidential! Let me translate.

 Trump wasn’t your typical smile and give you BS Politian. Unlike Clinton,  Bush as well as the “King of insincerity, dissembling, subreption,  and double-speak," Barrack Hussein Obama,¹  Trump was a hard-nose, sometimes chafing,  individual from the business world. Unlike career politicians, Democrats or Republicans, he got things done and told you what he would do. Unlike Democrats and many “Controlled-Opposition” Republicans, Trump accomplished many of his goals without the Obama-like pretty-talk.

 In retrospect, he was an outsider, who Democrats and status Republicans had to destroy. Which, by the way, was the progenitor and life-blood of the Russian Collusion Lie.

Now that Biden is completing his first year in office, many of us are starting to feel like Charlie Brown. We've been willing participants of a massive bait and switch operation as a nation. To paraphrase the actor Tom Cruise, in one of his earliest acting roles in the movie Taps, “it’s a beautiful man."

Biden is nothing like the individual or the character of the great uniter, as was sold to us by the corporate media, NPR, academicians, and the armada of “guilt-ridden-I’m-struggling-with-my-white-privilege-suburban-busybodies." Joe Biden and his most (qualified-person-of-color) running mate, Kamala Harris, were just dubious metaphors. Biden was good-old uncle Joe from Scranton. Kamala was a perfect example of what happens when you choose “identity over competence.”  It is what I warned about in an article I authored three decades ago, dealing with the downside of unfettered Affirmative action.  

As I tried to articulate 30 years ago, affirmative action became a public policy windfall for middle and upper-class blacks like Kamala Harris, college-educated white women, and foreign nationals with the right skin color.²

 But in his defense, Biden, like many within the Washington DC political class, is mostly about gathering and acquiring power. The endless Wuhan-Covid restriction and lockdowns went from 15 days to slow the spread….to threatening Federal, state, city workers with mandates.   To quote one clinical psychology, “things often get to a terrible place, one tiny step at a time."  
Once again, we went from 15 days to slow the spread to we’ll fire your butts if you don’t comply. The political class and their minions went from their15 days mantra to calling people anti-vaccers, science deniers, or climate deniers.

Oh, excuse me! I meant to say that the same people who constantly try to intimidate you into accepting their secular dogma or catechesis regarding climate change have adapted the narrative or politically-controlled semantics to accuse you of being an anti-vaccer, or you’re not following “The Science.”

We have all been Lucy(ed).  

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1. Please see…     A Deafening Silence
 2. Please see..    Patrick A. Hall. Against out best interests: An ambivalent view of Affirmative Action. American Libraries  Vol 22, Issue 9. October 1991.

[Patrick Hall is a retired university library director. He is a graduate of Canisius College and the University of Washington, where he received three advance degrees. He has published in Freedom's Journal Magazine, America, Commonweal, Headway, Journal of Academic Librarianship, American Libraries and others. He currently volunteers at a local VA hospital in the town of Erie, Pa.]