The unexpected resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, the first of its kind in over 600 years, has given rise to all sorts of speculation about the real reasons behind the move, and a glimpse behind the curtain of what hierarchy, coupled with power, can lead to.
Benedict’s stated reason for resigning was a decline in his
physical and mental resources, so much so that he believed he could no longer
discharge his duties. He is 85, his
strength has been ebbing, and apparently the Vatican tailors have had
difficulty keeping up with a persistent weight loss. Still, all previous Popes, dating back to
1415, have died in office. Benedict may
have been older and more enfeebled, but there remain questions as to why
someone who had the dedication and even the ambition to become Pope (and he
must have had it) decided to leave it all so soon after attaining the
apotheosis.
The back story, as covered extensively in the media, is a
more intriguing one of a Pope grown weary of infighting and a Church struggling
with internal politics, the toxic overhang of the pedophile scandals, and
efforts to root out corruption. A 2,000
year-old institution has a deep-rooted culture of how things are done. Some of this is for good; the Church has a spiritual
and pastoral mission. Some less so;
institutions may aspire to a higher calling, but, in the end, they are run by
men (mostly) and those men are more prone to human frailties. The spirit may be
willing, but the flesh is often weak.
Benedict hoped to tame some of the excesses, but in the end, he may have
succumbed to Newton’s Laws. A body in
motion tends to stay in motion. Acceleration
is produced when a force acts on a mass. The greater the mass (of the object
being accelerated) the greater the amount of force needed (to accelerate the
object). For every action, there is an equal and opposite
reaction.
If you will excuse the pun, the Catholic Church has a lot of
Mass. The Washington Post writer Jason
Horowitz had, in an longer piece an interesting observation and a quote: “A radical
transformation of the culture is unlikely. “We’re talking about people who have
given their life to this institution, but at the same time the institution has
become their life,” said one senior Vatican official. “Unlike parish priests,
who have the personal rewards that come with everyday contact, their lot is not
as human. It’s bureaucratic, but it becomes all-consuming.”
He
could just have easily been talking about Washington. We are living a great democratic
experiment; that people of differing views and economic priorities can sort
through them and self-govern. In the
secular world, it is as high an ideal as you can find. But,
the institution of governing, from the elected officials, to the lobbyists and
fixers, the party officials, senior bureaucrats, the fundraisers and the bundlers,
the pollsters and consultants--all have a vested interest in the status quo of
power. Power, to many of them, is more important than good governance. And they have the mass; it takes a lot of
force to change that.
Of
course, Senators and Congressmen are elected.
But, just like the Vatican, in Washington, fewer and fewer actually spend much time with
the people they serve. Even when they
leave office, they find homes influencing or commenting upon the bodies they
just left. “The institution has become
their life….their lot is not as human.”
There
is, of course, one person who can break this up, just a little. That would be the President, our secular
equivalent of the Pope--without either the infallibility or the reflexive
respect. A President can set the
direction. A President has the bully
pulpit. A President can speak to all of
us, for all of us. A President can be
what Flexner called George Washington; “The Indispensible Man.”
Just
before Christmas in 1783, George Washington took his leave from his officers, retired
from the Army and went home to Mt. Vernon, his Virginia plantation. He could have had any role he wanted, even
King, in the new country he helped create, but he chose to return to “his figs
and his vines.” When told of this
intention, his former enemy, King George, said “then he shall be the greatest
man in the World.”
Washington
knew what he was doing. The “country”
such as it was, wasn’t in the least bit cohesive or ready to be governed. The Articles of Confederation agreed to by
the Continental Congress in 1777 were loose, by design, as each former colony
hung tight to its sovereignty. The
country itself was anything but homogeneous; it was a riot of different ethnic
groups, different languages, different nationalities, different religions, and
different races. A King with little
statutory authority in a discordant kingdom would not be appealing. Washington would go home, he would see to his
plantation and his other assets, he would rejoin his family, and become the
Virginia planter and aristocrat that he was before.
This
didn’t last all that long. The
Washington we think of today, the man from the Gilbert Stuart painting, old,
decorous, wooden, is a sturdy myth didn’t exactly match the flesh. Washington was decorous, but he had very
little Sitzfleisch. He wasn’t the
kind of man who sat around very well, and after a few months with the figs and
the vines, and the slaves and smokehouses, the livestock, the barns and the
mills, he got a little bored.
He also
worried that, without a national goal beyond mere survival and the tending to
personal economic interests, all that had been won could be lost in just a
generation. He cast his eyes West (in
those days, “West” was past the Allegheny Plateau and into the Ohio Valley). His dream: a great nation needed to expand and
the Potomac (which ran through his own plantation) would be the great artery
for commerce from the seaboard States to the fertile interior. Washington himself owned huge tracts of land
out there, including virgin forest, bought from afar but based on his own
observations dating back to his service during the French and Indian War.
So,
on September 1, 1784, this wealthy national hero packed up a few things (including dinner linens and a silver service) and with
a small party, left his gracious estate. He set out through the backwoods,
over mountains, through rutted trails, on horseback, on foot, in canoes, past
sometimes hostile Indians, snakes (reptilian and human) and through all sorts
of tricks that an unforgiving nature can play.
The goal, to find a path to connect the Potomac to the West.
On
his travels, he saw confirmation of his concerns. The fertile bottom soil that had made
Virginia planters rich was now denuded of nutrients by the harsh effects of
tobacco cultivation. Forests that had been cleared to make way for farms no
longer had the root system to hold the earth in heavy rains. The country needed the West, needed the
animals, the timber, the land. Without
it, there would never be an American Empire, just a loose confederation of
States arguing over narrow economic issues and limited resources.
Washington
traveled 680 miles through the absurdly unforgiving terrain, visiting some of
his own lands (and getting into arguments with the squatters who stayed there
and refused to pay rents) drawing maps, keeping a diary of the smallest details
and always planning for a route for the Potomac. Near the end of his voyage, he sent some of
his party ahead, along with most of the remaining supplies (including the tents.) He rode southeast through the Alleghenies,
and crossed Briery Mountain in what is now West Virginia. There the path ended in an isolated glade,
without a house in sight. It began to
pour, and the great man, who had conquered the British, and could have been
King himself, huddled on the ground under his cloak, literally in the middle of
nowhere, getting soaked.
I
thought about this story when reading Thomas Friedman’s “How to Unparalyze Us”
in this Sunday’s New York Times. Friedman
finds all the impediments, the impenetrable forest of partisanship, the rutted
roads of compromise so easily abandoned, all the barriers that entrenched
interests can put up. But he sees clearly the problem. People and business needs stability and
direction to invest in the future, and they need optimism. We have to break out of the stalemate of
simply fighting over the allocation of finite resources, and move,
metaphorically, West. Congress, locked
in inter-party warfare and ever beholden to special interests, can’t do it. The
President has to do. Friedman says, “To have any effect, though, the president
can’t just say he is ready for “tough” decisions. He has to lead with his chin
and put a concrete, comprehensive package on the table, encompassing three
areas. First, new investments that would combine immediate jobs in
infrastructure with some long-term growth-enablers like a massive build-out in
the nation’s high-speed broadband capabilities. That would have to be married
with a long-term fiscal restructuring, written into law, that slows the growth
of both Social Security and Medicare entitlements, along with individual and
corporate tax reform.”
Personally,
I have doubts that “leading with your chin” is a good negotiating
strategy. The GOP has persistently
demonstrated that when Obama offers, they take, while denouncing the offer,
declaring it a new starting point, and demanding the other half. But, given that this is President’s Day,
perhaps George Washington’s example might not be such a bad one.
Briery
Mountain is now a restricted military area, but I think Mr. Obama could make a
few phone calls and get in. It is only about 200
miles from Washington, just a short hop by helicopter. Maybe he ought to make the trip, do some exploring, and
get rained on a little.
It
worked for George Washington.
MM
