It’s good to have a mensch
I, like most of you, I’m sure, was riveted to the television this past Wednesday watching the presidential changing of the guard.
Watching it, I couldn’t help but harken back to an anchorman who goes way back to when I was yapping about sports on local television in San Francisco. His name was Roger Grimsby, and he was then the news anchor at KGO-TV. He had a ditzy film critic on his show whom Grimsby despised. She would generally end her segment of the show with a sophomoric joke that inevitably made him cringe.
One time, she ended her report by saying, “Do you realize Roger, that if (actress) Tuesday Weld married (ex-baseball star) Rick Monday, she’d be Tuesday Monday?”
To which Grimsby unblinkingly replied, “And if you married anybody, you’d be gone.”
That line came back to me
on Wednesday when I watched Melania and Donald Trump board Air Force One for the last time. They’re gone!
As I mentioned in a previous column, I grew up without political conviction, so I can’t pretend to be all-knowing about what the next four years will be in comparison to the previous four. But there is a given for me when it comes to the most powerful seat in the world. I want my president to be a mensch.
Now, I realize that’s not a word you would generally hear in an introduction of the president of the United States. Nowhere in the song “Hail to the Chief” is there a lyric that describes POTUS as a “mensch.” In fact, to the best of my knowledge, there are no lyrics in that song.
But I think that right up there with smart, savvy and worldly, and possibly right after “leader of the free world” should be the phrase, “and a real mensch.”
Perhaps a translation would be in order here. A mensch, in Yiddish, is a good person. A stand-up person. A grownup. Three things I think should be asked when any aspiring president of the U.S. is filling out their employment application for the job. It should read: Name and address, education, employment history and mensch (yes or no), in that order.
It was obviously neglected in the 2016 election and you see what we got?
I can’t tell you that I’ve been personal friends with any presidents. I’ve never had a sit-down dinner at the White House nor smoked cigars at a card table with any of our leaders, but I have been in one-on-one situations with former presidents Barack Obama, Bush (both senior and junior), Bill Clinton and even the dreaded Richard Nixon.
You don’t have to even be in proximity to Obama to know that he’s a mensch. I was at a private event with George W. Bush and, while we might have been a considerable ways apart politically, I came away from there thinking, “This is a guy I’d love to have a couple beers with and watch the Super Bowl.” He was a mensch. So was his dad and Clinton, whom I spent time with at a tennis tournament. Both mensches. OK, Nixon, not so much.
Watching the events of Wednesday, I came away feeling better than I have in a long time. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are mensches.
It just seems that for the past four years we have lived in a country defined by red and blue. A mensch doesn’t have a political party. A mensch isn’t about politics. Mensches come in every sex, size, race and class. And it’s nice to have two of them sitting in the two biggest chairs in the land.
I’ve missed that.