I am indebted to Michael Gilleland who owns a blog called Laudator Temporis Acti for the bracing piece of common sense which follows:
Leeches
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?),
Antepenultimata (New York: The Neale Publishing Company, 1912), pp.
306-308:
That I should give my hand, or bend my neck, or uncover my head to
any man in mere homage to, or recognition of, his office, great or small, is to
me simply inconceivable. These tricks of servility with the softened names are
the vestiges of an involuntary allegiance to power extraneous to the performer.
They represent in our American life obedience and propitiation in their most
primitive and odious forms. The man who speaks of them as manifestations of a
proper respect for "the President's great office" is either a rogue, a dupe or a
journalist. They come to us out of a fascinating but terrible past as survivals
of servitude. They speak a various language of oppression and the superstition
of man-worship; they carry forward the traditions of the sceptre and the lash.
Through the plaudits of the people may be heard always the faint, far cry of the
beaten slave.
Respect? Respect the good. Respect the wise. Let the
President look to it that he belongs to one of these classes. His going about
the country in gorgeous state and barbaric splendor as the guest of a thieving
corporation, but at our expense—shining and dining and swining—unsouling himself
of clotted nonsense in pickled platitudes calculated for the meridian of Coon
Hollow, Indiana, but ingeniously adapted to each water tank on the line of his
absurd "progress," does not prove it, and the presumption of his "great office"
is against him.
Can you not see, poor misguided "fellow citizens," how
you permit your political taskmasters to forge leg-chains of your follies and
load you down with them? Will nothing teach you that all this fuss-and-feathers,
all this ceremony, all this official gorgeousness and brass-banding, this
"manifestation of a proper respect for the nation's head" has no decent place in
American life and American politics? Will no experience open your stupid eyes to
the fact that these shows are but absurd imitations of royalty, to hold you
silly while you are plundered by the managers of the performance?—that while you
toss your greasy caps in air and sustain them by the ascending current of your
senseless hurrahs the programmers are going through your blessed pockets and
exploiting your holy dollars? No; you feel secure; power is of the People, and
you can effect a change of robbers every four years. Inestimable privilege—to
pull off the glutted leech and attach the lean one!
