“Presidents”

Guest Post by Eric Peters

All of a sudden (or so it seems) there are “presidents” everywhere – as if all of them were elected administrators subject to regular popular referendums – i.e., elections. Like the “president” of Ukraine, for instance. He is in fact an autocrat, a jefe – as they call them in Latin America – who has selected himself to remain “president” of a country that he rules over by decree.

Probably eternally.

We used to call such anything but “presidents” because there was a time when honest language was still valued because a sufficiency of people understood that dishonest language devalues discussion – and things more important than just that.

How can one have a discussion that isn’t mere rhetoric without both sides recognizing – and demanding – that language must be honest; that the meaning of words must not be permitted to shift while pretending the words being used still refer to the same thing?

The answer is, of course, that discussion is not possible when the meaning of words is altered by one (or both) sides so as to change the nature of the discussion without openly acknowledging it has been changed.

This is what’s happened with regard to “presidents” – though that is merely one example of too many to count.

It is a word used to confer legitimacy on that which isn’t; to imply an office as opposed to the chief figure of a regime.

The youth are not old enough to remember that, at one time, only the relatively free countries – as the United States was, once – had leaders who were afforded the honorific of president.

The Dear Leaders of the world were exactly that. Or perhaps they were Maximum Leaders. Sometimes, just Soviet Leaders – as in the case of the leaders of the old Soviet Union. Sometimes they were premiers, as in Kruschev – who was one of the leaders of the old Soviet Union, which the youth may not remember.

Rarely were any of them styled presidents – with the exception of the el presidentes of Central and South American banana republics, which were understood to be exactly that. There was honest derision in that because everyone knew these el presidentes were not like the president of, say, the United States but a parody of the latter.

Now we have become them. And it’s no longer funny.

“Presidents” abound, everywhere – including where there is as much “democracy” as there is “free speech” on Twitter (never mind the rebranding; changing the label on a can of cat food does not turn what’s inside into tuna).

As, for instance, in Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeev.

Nonetheless, we are expected to speak of these Maximum Leaders and Dear Leaders and jefes using the honorific, president – as if they were deserving of it. This includes the “presidents” of this country. They are nominally still subject to periodic public referendums, but once selected – typically, by a minority of the public by the way and so much for “democracy” – they act as autocrats and jefes, ruling by decrees they like to call “executive orders.”

As if that change of verbiage changed the meaning of rule-by-decree.

But they are no longer executives, in the constitutional sense that presidents of the United States for the most part once tried to be  or at least pretended to try to be. That sense being an administrator of the laws passed by Congress. Of course, Congress has passed along its sole legal power (under the Constitution, at any rate) to pass laws over to the permanent bureaucracy, which issues what are styled “regulations” that have the force and effect of laws but are much harder to repeal or even amend.

And the courts now write laws, too.

These are styled “rulings” and “case law” – so as to efface the fact that we are no longer talking about statutory law, which ought to be the only law that matters if the law is to be limited and subject to those approved by popular referendum, via elected representatives. As opposed to the arbitrary (if Talmudically justified) interpretation of the law by judges who are subject to nothing.

It makes one pine for the honest authoritarianism of Dear and Maximum leaders; of jefes and premiers.

It may not have been easy to live under the thumb of such but at least one wasn’t expected to pretend it wasn’t such.

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