General Magoo

I ran into an old friend while I was out biking this summer.  She and I had taught for years in neighboring classrooms.  Last fall I resigned from teaching so we had a lot of catching up to do.  Within minutes though the sky opened up and we scrambled to the safety of a park pavilion to wait out the storm.  

After discussing the office politics of my former workplace and getting each other up to speed on our personal lives the conversation was drawn almost inevitably toward politics.  Our president has been characterized as a “disruptor” and a “chaos candidate.”  I guess we got what we should have expected.  A lot had happened since we last spoke.  But I wasn't sure how my friend felt about the new administration.  She's a very religious person and the evangelicals have been siding with the president so I treaded lightly.  Regardless of where she stood I didn't want to offend her.  It turned out I shouldn't have been so concerned.

We discussed the president’s recklessness, his bullying, self-promotion, vendettas and divisiveness. My friend is a genuinely decent person, not a faux Christian and definitely not one to debate politics or argue for the sake of it.  I remarked that the president was magooing his way from one crisis to another oblivious to the damage he was doing.  I made up the verb magooing in reference to a cartoon character from when I was a kid. Mr.  Magoo was an old man, nearly blind, but that didn't stop him from insisting on driving. I thought my reference to the show was actually funnier than the show itself and she seemed to agree.

But it's even worse than that, I said. It’s like he's magooing around in the General Lee - another reference to the tv of my youth.  The General Lee was a fast car from the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard. The car was famous for the  Confederate flag emblazoned on its roof. I loved watching The Dukes of Hazzard when I was a kid. It was a tweenage boy’s dream:  car chases, Daisy Duke in her well . . . daisy dukes, and more mischief than a kid could ask for.  Back then I didn't think much about that big Confederate flag or what it stood for. It was just Southern - like Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Allman Brothers.  The Dukes weren't klansman or white supremacists or neo-nazis. They were just a couple of good old boys, never meaning no harm . . .

When the rain briefly let up we walked over to her car to say goodbye. Keep in touch was all we could say. You never know when paths are going to cross again.  I made another joke or two then got back on my bike just in time for the storm’s angry return. I pedaled into the rain as the Dukes of Hazzard theme song played in my mind, “someday the mountain might get ‘em but the law never will . . .”