The People Who Shot Liberty Valence: A Comedy

Part of the current political problem is its humorlessness, so humorless it’s funny, the tension between The Trumpers and the Non or Anti-Trumpers, as acted out the other day at a family reunion and recounted by a fellow member of The Committee of Anonymous Patriots, of which I am a member, who was in attendance and provided this confidential eyewitness report:

Mother and Father-in-law v. Niece and Nephew. Neo-Conservatives who love Mexican Food (Trumpers) and Quasi-Liberals from Oregon who voted for The Rights of Salmon to Spawn Freely squared off last night in Las Vegas, NV after being advised by other family members “not to go there.” The atmosphere quickly soured, the ‘discussion’ leading to tension, bad feelings, and gross misunderstanding…(End of Eyewitness Report).

 How could it have been otherwise, I concluded? Humorlessness was the inevitable outcome, which is funny actually, the humorlessness of it and the impossibility, rather the improbability that either side was actually well informed enough to have a cogent, adult, historically correct, contextual argument to present, hence the additional comedy, of which humorlessness is now playing such a huge role in the national dialog.

 Later the same night I unwound by watching the movie, ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence’, a western directed by the legendary John Ford, prepared the see the humorlessness in it—violence, lawlessness, guns, a feckless government leading a confused constituency—and instead laughed my head off!  I wasn’t really watching a drama set in the American wild west in the late 1800s—a morality tale of good and evil, right and wrong, the people versus the governmental mob in Washington D.C.—I was watching the stage set of the 1964 Republican National Convention with James Stewart and John Wayne nominating Barry Goldwater for President of the United States.