Ben Sasse’s Brilliant Example for Republicans

I have always suspected that the bluster and disdain for the overwhelming majority of Republican voters and party-machine operatives and all, that there were still a remarkable number and percentage of bona fide Republicans of all classes of the so-called Mainstream American Society who were reasonable and more than intelligent enough to fully recognize and appreciate the fact that former President Donald John Trump did not represent the caliber of the best or the most ideal leadership that America had to offer both our Great Mega-Nation and the rest of the global community at large, in terms of socioeconomic and sociocultural development.

So, the recent resignation of Senator Benjamin Eric Sasse, the 51-year-old second-term Republican from the State of Nebraska, in America’s Mid-Western Region, did not come as a surprise to me at all (See “Sen. Ben Sasse Officially Resigns from Senate to Become President at University of Florida” UPI News 1/9/23). Personally, however, I would have loved to see the Yale University doctoral degree holder in American History stay on to fiercely fight off the toxic political environment created by the pathologically narcissistic Queens, New York City, born tax-dodging billionaire realtor and former President who was twice impeached by Congress but unsuccessfully prosecuted due, largely and primarily, to Republican political opportunism, to heroically ensure that this country, that was built by genocidally enslaved Continental Africans, fundamentally speaking, as well as other socio-politically marginalized non-Aryan and non-European people, as well as, of course Indigenous or Native Americans, did not relapse or regress back to the brief but psychologically blistering and morally inexcusable barbaric era of Trumpian Neo-Nazi Fascism.

But then, I am also equally mindful of the fact that there is that old maxim that says that: “If you cannot beat them, you might just as well join them.” Now, what the foregoing maxim means is that over the course of the eight protracted years that the former Senator spent in the proverbial Upper-Chamber of the United States’ Congress, Dr. Sasse came to the grim and excruciatingly painful recognition and realization of the fact that there was a diddly little that he could do to help effectively arrest the fascistic Trumpian Juggernaut which, clearly under the patently false guise of spearheading an American Renaissance or Golden Age, was actually fixated on Making America Half-Enslaved and Half-Liberated Again. In the memorable and the immortalized words of France’s 19^th-century patrician scholar, sociologist, philosopher and thinker, Count Alexis De Tocqueville, the Trumpian “Devolution” was certain recipe for disaster, as it were.

Increasingly, like the savvy African-American waiter in the Eddie Murphy-starred politically comedic film, “The Distinguished Gentleman” (1992), Senator Sasse became sharply and uncomfortably aware of the fact that he may very well have inadvisably bargained himself into the wrong profession. Perhaps his studies and research into US Political History and his great remarkable knowledge of the great achievements of the luminary likes of Presidents George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, to name only a few of the most obvious, had woefully misled Senator Sasse into believing that he could really make a heck of a seismic difference to contemporary American Culture and Civilization. Alas, he would shortly come to the equally bitter realization that the proverbial Christocentric prophet was revered almost everywhere around the known universe, except among his very own people and his own state, in this particular context.

As a scholar and a thinker of quite remarkable stature, Dr. Sasse well appears to have found his real calling early on in life. He would head Midland University as well as teach at the University of Texas. Still, the then quite young and generously talented son of Gary Lynn Sasse, a high school teacher and coach, and Linda Dunklau Sasse, a homemaker, decided to expand his intellectual and ideological horizons by trying his hands at politics, if, indeed, there were any such expression. It very well may have been withering disillusionment of traumatic proportions borne out of the wistful realization that politics and statesmanship were, after all, not really the twin siblings that he had been woefully misled into believing that they were.

Not surprisingly, his very bold and courageous decision not to be taken cheaply for granted by a hopelessly power-drunken Donald Trump drew a few ear-grating but clearly feeble sparks from the self-exiled Chief Resident of the Mar-a-Lago-island estate in Florida, which is also where Senator Sasse and “The Mafia Don” appear to have come into the closest proximity. Perhaps much too close for the comfort of either man.

In what clearly appears to be his utter disappointment that the now-President Sasse, of the University of Florida, Miami, was too classy to kowtow to the whims of the democratically deposed US Chief-of-State’s vacuous pretense to great sociopolitical and, perhaps, even heroic significance, the putative Republican Party Albatross took to his so-called Truth Social website to troll Dr. Sasse in the following characteristically intemperate terms: “We have enough weak and ineffective RINOs [i.e. Republicans In name Only] in our midst. I look forward to working with the terrific Republican Party of Nebraska to get a REAL Senator to represent the incredible people of that state.”

I seriously doubt that the now-President Benjamin Eric Sasse of the flagship University of Florida, Miami, cooly and comfortably salaried at $ 1 million-plus a year, plus other perks and benefits, really gives a hoot which “super-credible” Nebraskans this 76-year-old porn-star consorting satyr is poised to conning next.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
April 17, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]