My President

Franklin Delano Roosevelt – FDR – was the only president I knew until I was eight years old. 

He was more real to me than the God at  the First Methodist Church; God was abstract, FDR was a presence in the country's psyche, as real as the friendly, cultivated voice that came to the country over the radio every week during his legendary Fireside Chats. He was looking out for us. His chuckle was a promise. His laugh a rainbow.

When he died, the strong and hopeful and true flame that he had struck and nurtured  through calamitous economic depression and the most terrible war in history briefly sputtered but flared again, a tribute and a legacy. Even in the tragedy that is our government today, we can still catch a glimpse of the American dream that FDR so cherished for his countrymen and women. 

The State of the Union address of Donald Trump would have been to FDR a total profanity of the room and the spirit of that room where so many honorable and dedicated leaders have forged the national identity and reputation that this lying charlatan is so bent on diminishing and destroying.

Roosevelt was often vilified as a traitor to his blueblood class, a chastisement he readily accepted and actually reveled in, telling his wife Eleanor that if some of their friends had to make do with two cars instead of three, so be it.

I, too, am a class traitor in my way, albeit nothing Rooseveltian. I am an old white WASP male whose father could have been Dick Nixon's cousin. So when my heart danced at the sight of all those new female Congresswomen, a field of white daffodils, smiling, diverse, strong, and rocking to their contradiction of that fool at the dais, I was way off the old white male  reservation I'm supposed to be on.

And it is so fucking cool out here. There is fresh moral air and new and powerful ideas being delivered by strong women dead in the faces of the pruned-up old men who are tut-tutting them as socialists and even baristas. When's the last time any of these old fools made a cup of coffee if they even know how?

I think FDR would have gotten a big hoot out of these truly fresh women coming at a misogynist president who has never before met a woman he doesn't think he can charm or buy one way or another. To these women, Trump has the charm of a tarantula and his money stinks as bad as his breath.

FDR had as a working partner a true feminist in Eleanor, a tireless worker for all that is good and lasting in the American spirit. She personally wrote a daily column syndicated across the country and was constantly traveling and teaching the Roosevelt brand of participatory democracy. She too was a willing class traitor.

Franklin Roosevelt has always been my President. Truman, Ike – even JFK –

have held the office but not in the deep and personal and trusted way that  still resonates in my old white mind and memory.

Trump could never be a class traitor because he has no class.