no dan quayle

Lloyd Bentsen is dead. He used to be our Senator. In fact, he was the very first political figure to whom I wrote a letter about a political issue. That would have been around the turn of the decade between the 1970s and 1980s. I wrote in support of Amtrak. My letter fulfilled some sort of merit badge requirement, back when we thought that the Boy Scouts were merely teaching citizenship and before we knew they were a gay-bashing, fundie front organization.

Later, Lloyd Bentsen was the first Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate I refused to vote for. 1988 was the first Presidential election in which I was eligible to vote, but I couldn’t bring myself to vote for either Bush père or Dukakis. And back then we still had the luxury of pursuing a stubborn independence. Maybe someday, when things aren’t so polarized, and when the American government no longer spies on its citizens and distrusts free speech, and when environmental protections have been restored and our health care system isn’t killing us; maybe then I can wander drunkenly back into some off-the-chart third party and live out my dotage in the kind of ideological purity I enjoyed when I refused to vote for the top of Bentsen’s ticket in 1988.

He was a bipartisan moderate who defeated both the left (Ralph Yarborough in the primary) and the right (Congressman George Bush in the general election) to win his first Senate term. He wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t a disaster, either. He belonged to a different time. He once told us he knew Jack Kennedy. He served with Jack Kennedy, he said. Requiescat in pace, Senator. Say hi to Jack.

spacedark