the cat with the hat

I read today that they are planning to erect a huge statue of former President Harry S. Truman at historic Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri. As one who is opposed to excessive government spending as a rule, I think I can look the other way at the $50,000 that congress has appropriated to help fund the statue. The other 400 large to fund the project is being raised by one of those “bleeding heart liberal” organizations that call themselves the Boy Scouts of America. I guess that is why the uniformed youths were selling popcorn in front of Wal-Mart yesterday.

The statue they are proposing erecting shows Truman waving his traditional Homburg hat. Truman was a haberdasher before he was a politician, and he almost always wore or carried a hat. Now, those of you that know me and know that I started writing this blog in protest of the tax and spend policies of the Bush Administration and of the United States Congress are probably saying right now:

“Jimbo, how can you let that 50 large slide by without gnashing your teeth, beating your chest, and if you’ll allow us to paraphrase Henry James, fall on Truman’s grave and weep for the passing of those fifty bills?”

To which I respond, wow, I’ll bet you have the passage highlighted in your copy of The Beast in the Jungle, where the protagonist finally breaks down and expresses his grief over his loss. While I respect your intellect, you people need to get out and party more.

But I digress.

Like me, Truman was, as my father always liked to say, “tighter than the nuts on a new bridge.” Old Harry would not have approved of spending even that amount of federal money for a monument—especially to himself. Truman was a man who knew himself. He knew what he was and he knew what he had to do and one of the things he spent his presidency doing was trying to get the budget back under control after we spent so much money recovering from the depression and the second world war. He was the last President we had who was not afraid to call himself a liberal. So, when you hear the tax and spend “conservatives” blame all our problems on the liberals, Truman is the man they are talking about (and me, I guess).

Years and years ago, the rock group Chicago had a song called Harry Truman, in which they lamented that the people in power were not the finest America could produce.

America needs you
Harry Truman
Harry could you please come home
Things are looking bad
I know you would be mad
To see what kind of men
Prevail upon the land you love

Sometimes it is important to look back and wish we could have leaders of the quality we used to have. Perhaps those days are gone, but if those radical hippie-types known as the Boy Scouts of America are willing to sell $400,000 worth of popcorn to honor the tight-assed old geezer, I guess I’m committed to buying a box. I’ll do it even though Truman himself would have probably said it was all nonsense and that we should spend our money and time trying to take back this country from those who are looting the treasury.

At least, that’s what we think in Jimbo’s world.