John Adams' White House Benediction
The Washington Post had an article today -- an Opinion piece, rather -- titled,
"What would a 2024 Trump coup look like? A new paper offers a worrying answer."
One of the Reader Comments said,
----------------------- "Somehow the guys who wrote the Constitution and built this type of never-before-done govt had this naive notion that all who served in govt would be honorable, or that there would be enough of the honorable so as to keep the scum from screwing it all up."
When I read this, I thought about two things.
1 was a famous benediction which the second U.S. President, John Adams, wrote in a letter to his wife:
"I Pray Heaven To Bestow The Best Of Blessings On This House and All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof."
These words were engraved in the mantel of the State Dining Room. Jacqueline Kennedy highlighted this during her Tour of the White House on CBS in 1962.
The second thing I thought of when I read that Comment was --
Last week I heard or read where someone said, "Social media was a good idea, but people ruin everything."
People ruin everything.
This could be said to be true of other things besides social media--
religion
political parties
representative democracy.
_________________________ As I had been contemplating social media at the back of my mind, when I checked Netflix today and the 2010 movie The Social Network, about how Mark Zuckerberg started what used to be called "the facebook," was on, I watched.
They show in the movie how someone says to just call it "Facebook" -- "it's cleaner."
(Similar to--
'The Saturday When the Rabbi Went Hungry'
vs.
Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry)
---------------------
The screenwriter of The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin, also wrote Charlie Wilson's War.
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