The Horrible and the Miserable
There is a dusty box somewhere, perhaps in my storage room,
or perhaps, somehow, thankfully, “inadvertently” discarded, and in it is a copy
of my Junior High School yearbook, circa the Nixon Administration. Along with the usual clichés and gruesome
pictures likely to send my kids into paroxysms of laughter is a “Most Likely To
Become…” page.
I was not voted most likely to be a CEO, or a corporate
tycoon, or a doctor, or a car mechanic.
Nor a rock star or a movie idol or quarterback. I didn’t even get something cerebral-but-drab
like accountant or actuary. Instead I
was picked most likely to become a politician.
I wouldn’t have remembered this at all if it weren’t for the little caricatures
that went with each job. Cool ones for
the cool guys with guitars, and actors with Dudley Do-Right smiles, and
athletes in helmets. As for the
politician, there was a gnome-like man, balding, a bit overweight, in a rumpled
suit, with his mouth open and his finger pointed towards the sky, ready to
speechify.
I’m not sure this was considered praise, nor why I was
selected for this particular “honor” but nevertheless, there I was, future
politician. The bad news is that the
caricature turned out to be remarkable prescient (except for chubby part.)
The truth was that I was a politics and history junkie even
then. I thought the two best jobs in the
world would either to be a doctor like Joseph Bell (Conan Doyle’s model for
Sherlock Holmes) or a Senator. Either
the acutely observant, or the acutely loquacious.
History tends to be defined by great men and women, but
American history is not just the story of the four up on Mount Rushmore, it’s
something really quite unique. In less
than 250 years, we freed ourselves from a great empire, conquered a continent,
won two World Wars, built an economic and industrial powerhouse with an
expanding middle class, became the indispensible country, and did it all while
working with a real democracy from the very onset. This last part is what makes us different. Other nations have risen to great power
guided by monarchies, aristocracies, or dictatorships—central organizing forces. We did it while being wholly self-governed,
through a combination of individually directed and collective efforts.
There is a peculiar genius in this. In effect, we created a gyroscope of
competing economic and political interests that often tilts in one direction or
another, but keeps spinning. We make a
great many mistakes; some acts of omission, some deliberate, more than a few of
which brought us no honor. We have
wasted stupendous amounts of treasure and lives. We have an unnerving propensity for
occasional violence. In a very short
period of time, with limited effort, I could list 50 things we completely screwed
up.
And yet, like the gyroscope, we keep spinning and moving, and
accomplishing, all the while moaning and groaning about how hard our lives are,
how horrible the rest of the world is to us, and how miserable our kids future will
be. Of course, there’s more than just
self-pity here—we need to blame people for the awfulness of our day-to-day
existence. And there’s always someone
out there who’s fault it is. The guy who
is richer than us, or the one who is poorer.
The moral scolds who want to tell us what to do or the libertine
dopers. The gun-lovers or the gun-haters. The “program for every problem” and the
“government is the only problem” crowds.
The list, and the opprobrium, is endless
And still, we keep moving, often with that great creativity that
flourishes best in an atmosphere of political and economic freedom when matched
with comparative stability. But we
aren’t a perfect machine, and there are times when our problems seem almost
insuperable and our leadership inadequate to meet the challenge. There is a terrific, understated moment in
“Children of a Lesser God” where the hearing and speaking Leeds (William Hurt
in the film) is so emotionally overloaded by the tension of communicating in
sign language with Sarah (Marlee Matlan), his deaf lover, that he literally has
to turn the noise off—by flinging himself down on the couch and turning on (quite
loud) classical music.
That’s very much where were are right now. Too much noise. The world is filled with invasions, lunatic
murderers, virulent diseases, and intractable poverty. And our leadership seems, well, just awful,
from Mr. Obama’s apparent isolation and passivity, to the opportunistic and
self-aggrandizing behavior of his opponents.
Our peculiar genius seems, at this moment, more attuned to pointing
fingers and barking at each other.
Every week, we seem to have a new challenge, and a new
demonstration of our incapacity to govern well.
Today, the crisis in the Middle East and the rise of ISIL dominated the
Sunday talk shows. Each featured one
Republican after another denouncing the enemy—Obama. They all want more manly
muscularity—each one reads from the playbook, spouting off platitudes as if
they were self-evident truths. Paul Ryan says “Obama must act decisively” and Kelly
Ayotte says containing ISIL “won’t cut it”
and Mike Rogers claims, “ISIL is one plane ticket away from the US,” Deep thinkers, all. My favorite is Senator’s
McCain’s “ISIL could have been prevented.”
Sure, if only an American President had been willing to go
to war in the Middle East with massive force, there would be no
terrorists. None. The entire region would be a happy, peaceful
land of freedom-loving capitalists.
We have to break away from this. We have to acknowledge that the enemy is at
the gate, and there’s no time for petty squabbling. Tom Friedman of the New York Times nails it
in this Sunday’s New York Times. “We’ve got to stop messing
around at home as if this moment is just the same-old, same-old — and our real
and tacit allies had better wake up, too. Preserving and expanding the world of
sustainable order is the leadership challenge of our time.”
Can
a democracy, where the constant struggle for power often obscures the greater
good, accomplish this? I still think
so.
Tony
Blair, upon the occasion of his last “Question Time” as his ten years as Prime
Minister drew to a close, said something remarkable, and oddly antique. “Some
may belittle politics but we know, who are engaged in it that it is where
people stand tall. And although I know it has its many harsh contentions it is
still the arena that sets the heart beating a little faster. And if it is on
occasions the place of low skullduggery it is more often the place for the
pursuit of noble causes, and I wish everyone, friend or foe well, and that is
that, the end.”
Not so horrible, and not so miserable? Blair might have made a good Senator. Of course, we split with those chaps a while back.
August
24, 2014
Michael
Liss (Moderate Moderator)
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