If you want a president to ‘run the country,’ you’re missing the point

By David McElroy · May 27, 2011

You can tell just how warped people’s assumptions are when they speak of which presidential candidate is going to “run the country.” There are few political phrases that irritate me as much, because it reveals a pervasive belief that “someone has to be in charge.”

I was reminded of this again Thursday night when I saw comments on a Ron Paul website from random people in the public urging him to run in 2012, comments obviously left before he announced a couple of weeks ago. One of the comments said:

“I lean to left of center politically but I would vote for you to run the country as I believe you represent the fiscal common sense our nation requires.”

If you want Ron Paul — or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney or anyone else — to “run the country,” you miss the entire point of what this nation’s government was supposed to be all about. But the fact that so many people do want this is yet another indication that we have to start something brand new — maybe many brand-new things — in different places for freedom to have a chance to grow again.

You run your own life. People are supposed to run their own companies. The government is supposed to have a very limited, defined role that provides a few essential services. A president is supposed to run the machinery of government that provides those few services. He’s not a puppet master. He doesn’t run your life. He’s not supposed to run businesses. He’s not supposed to run schools. If the role were what it really ought to be, being president would be no more exciting than managing a public utility. (And that’s even if you still believe in the state at all.)

It’s an indication of what people want today that they do want someone to “run the country.” They want someone to give them jobs. They want someone to give them health care. They want someone to make other people behave the way they want them to behave, even in their own homes. And they want someone to make sure that other people pay for what they want.

Children have their lives run by someone else. Adults run their own lives. Which are we?

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Something small just made me happy. The specifics don’t matter, but I found myself smiling and I felt a kind of warm joy filling my heart and mind. In that brief moment of ecstasy, I felt the irrational desire to talk with a particular person. It wasn’t a calculated thought or a rational want. It wasn’t even that I wanted to tell the person about this particular thing. I simply felt ecstatic joy — and I somehow connected that feeling to this person. I can’t explain it. If we’re wise, we’ll pay attention to such moments, because the instincts of our hearts and minds often know more truth than our conscious and rational brains do. The same thing can be true in moments of great pain and suffering. If we pay attention to who our hearts are drawn to in such moments — of extreme joy or extreme hurt — we learn something about ourselves. I don’t know why. I only know that our gut instincts sometimes understand deep truths about ourselves that our rational brains haven’t yet figured out.

It started out as a satirical joke, but some friends liked the idea, so now it’s a real Facebook profile picture frame. If you’ve never heard of Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, let me explain. One of the dumber elements of social media is that it allows people to publicly signal their goodness and virtue to others — without actually doing anything of substance. So you see photo frames around profile photos saying things such as, “Moms Against Racism,” as though they’re standing up against those evil moms who are in favor of racism. It’s meaningless virtue-signaling and it deserves to be mocked, so I made a frame and published it on Facebook’s frame system today. If you go to your own Facebook profile picture and add a frame, then search for Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, you can select it. About a dozen of my friends are using it so far. It’s just fun satire — at least until Facebook decides it “goes against our community standards.” Or something. It’s just a fun way of mocking something that deserves to be mocked.

When I first told you about the project that would become DavidMcElroy.TV, I thought it would launch by mid-May. Since today is the last day of May — and I’m still not close to launching a finished product — here’s a brief update. The graphic above is the latest rough mockup of the format, but it’s still subject to change. Even the logo isn’t yet set in stone. Motion graphics are really difficult when you’re starting from scratch. Sunday night, my camera stopped recording, so it has to be sent off for repair. I have an older camera that I’ll keep using for testing, but I can’t launch without the better one. The audio system developed a low buzz this weekend that has me puzzled. I’ll be taking all the equipment over to the home of a local audio engineer who’s volunteered to help me figure out what I’ve done wrong. On top of all that, my on-camera performance seems to get worse with each test I do. There are days when I think I’m crazy to be attempting this. And in truth, I probably am insane to do it, but being crazy has never stopped me before. I’m at least a month away from launch and it could be a few months. Thanks for being patient — and thanks for all the support and enthusiasm for the project that you’ve sent my way.

I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

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