12 And The Media answered and said again unto them, “What will ye then that I shall do unto him whom ye call the President of the United States?” 13 And they cried out again, “Crucify him!” 14 Then The Media said unto them, “Why, what evil hath he done?” And they cried out the more exceedingly, “Crucify him!”
Unless you are on the far-end of the narcissistic personality bell curve, you’re probably aware that if your job was to manage a company with 300 million employees that does business with over 6.5 thousand million people, you couldn’t guarantee success. You’d do your best, but you’re only one man, and even with a great staff, there’d still be way too much out of your control. Yet every 4 years, Americans pick just such a man. It’s one of only a handful of jobs left that doesn’t require 5 years of experience in the position to be qualified to apply…. “Ah, I see you worked as the President of Nicaragua from 2010-2014. What would your boss say is your greatest weakness?”
The political process is set up to effectively ensure that only monied, suave sociopaths get the position. One of two major political parties will handle a good chunk of the logistics in the application process. And once they get the job, there’s a massive system in place that acts with a fair amount of independence from the president/manager. The president is in the weird position of both having massive influence over the political machine yet little in the way of direct power. Gone are the days of the head of state having direct control over people with weapons. The greatest military might in the world is staffed by voluntary enlistees who work for no promise of spoils of war and actually pretty terrible pay. We’ve come a long way, and it’s impressive that the system is stable at all.
The system of support is why someone with no experience being president can step in and not cause the whole thing to fall apart. Factoid: 3 US presidents (Taylor, Grant, and Eisenhower) had never held public office before being elected (all were army generals prior to election), yet the country survived all of their tenures as well as it had survived any other. The president doesn’t have enough strength on his own to completely ruin anything–although in the era of nuclear weapons I do have to concede that possibility to an extent. He’s just one man. A lot of other people have to be involved before things start going badly.
The corollary is that the president is also limited in his ability to do good, and for the same reasons. He can make things better or worse to a degree, but he’s not God. He’s the head of the bureaucracies, which is an insane power to give someone. Who on Earth can make an informed decision about who should run the world’s largest military, multi thousand million dollar social security and welfare systems, departments of energy, environment, health, space, etc.? It’s an almost absurd proposition that there would be even a remotely satisfactory way to pick even one of those jobs. Yet every for years, we task a guy with doing it. And he doesn’t just hire them, he’s the manager too; it’s on him when those guys fail. We also give him the power to veto federal legislation, and make him the political figurehead of the entire nation. He can have countries bombed if he wants too.
The arguments can be made that the president either has too much power or too little, but I’m making a descriptive, not prescriptive argument here. No man could possibly succeed well at all of these tasks. But all of us think we know what he should have done/be doing. We judge, perhaps even correctly, but we do so without the inconceivable burden of being responsible for the consequence of our decisions, right or wrong as they are.
For the president’s tenure, he is both hated and applauded by factions of the populace. He his praised and condemned often for things he has no real control over, or anyway things he did not do by himself. No one man can control the economy, for example. The president is not in the business of loaning large quantities of venture capital or forcing business to shut down inexplicably, but the president will be judged by the public. He did this. He has done great things, that at the name of The President every knee should bow. He has done terrible things, crucify him. Either way the president here is our proxy for God.
If God is in control of the world, then whatever happens is His doing. Good or bad, there has to be a reason. The general solution has been that piety and virtue will yield benefits, while apostasy and vice will cause ruin. Either way, this means there’s a way to control the world: there’s a system. When things are going well, it is right we give thanks. When things go badly, we must atone for our sins. We’ll need a sacrifice. In the days of antiquity, animals would suffice. Christianity really upped the ante and raised that not just to men, but man as God incarnate. But Jesus hasn’t come back yet, so in the meantime, we have to make due.
So we designate our national manager. Failure to manage. Heap all our sins on him; he can take them. He has to take them. That’s his job–one of many. Then we condemn him. The media will provide us our sham trial. Justice is served. Crucify him. Tetelestai. We can start over anew. This time it will be better. Barabbas for president!