Buck it!

At the recent White House Correspondents’ Dinner where it is traditional for the President to roast journalist and vice-versa, Obama revealed that he is often asked what is on his bucket list. Obama named a list and responded with “Buck it!” Parental permission advised if Googling the term!

Moviegoers will recall a Rob Reiner movie called The Bucket List, with two terminally ill men on a road trip to do their wish list before they kick the bucket! “Bucket list” meant those things we hold dear and would do everything within our powers to perform before we keel over!

The “buck it” phrase is reminiscent of Harry Truman who displayed a sign on his desk clearly defining the line of responsibility. “The buck stops here,” it said. He made final decisions, one of which occurred three months after he assumed the top WH office and let loose the power of uranium fission and plutonium implosion over the skies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Oswald C. Brewster, an engineer who helped separate the uranium isotope, changed his mind about the bomb after Germany’s defeat. He wrote Truman: “This thing must not be permitted on Earth. We must not be the most hated and feared people on Earth, however good our intent may be.”

Brewster’s lone voice in the wilderness proved prescient on this side of the nuclear arms race. We may not be the most feared people on Earth but being the most hated is close.

Ironically, the absence of any word of remorse by Shinzo Abe in his address to Congress is reminiscent of the U.S. absence of contrition after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Neither love nor hate of what Franklin Delano Roosevelt began as the New Deal that defined a broad-based coalition in politics and enlarged the federal government’s role in U.S. affairs is the intent here.

It is to underscore decision making in the American understanding that is based on “We the people,” and if formal structures of governance no longer reflect the will “of the people, by the people and for the people,” and the exercise of voting on elections too lengthy between intervals, a recourse to a “parliament of the street” accommodates warm bodies on the front lines. Either method is very red-white-and-blue.

FDR died a good 70 years ago in 1945, and the third VP, Missouri farmer Harry Truman, ascended into an unfamiliar role. FDR was such a decisive figure that Garner, his VP for the first two terms, turned against him when FDR acceded to a third term, getting indecisive liberal Henry Wallace as VP.

This is neither to glorify FDR and/or Harry Truman. It is to remember that popular referendum do not always hold water, e.g., the vote against casinos on Saipan. Nor decimating the turtle eggs and the tutut on Tinian and Pagan per the EIS’ design a decision that popular choice will unmake. The EIS hearings are genial to local opinions but uniformed personnel will exercise the “buck stops here” option, regardless of local sentiments.

The parliament of the street may be the only local remaining recourse. Buck it!

© 2015 Saipan Tribune