223. "You get the government you deserve."

There's one thing wrong with that wonderful reminder to voters in a democratic country, "you get the government you deserve": it can't be said to those who voted against the majority that produced the government.  Like now, to a Massachusetts liberal suffering under the fiscal thumbs of House Tea Partiers.  "You think I deserve this?"

Tough enough under ordinary circumstances but here the dessert-serving group weren't even a majority, and what they did is not even democratic.  Their majority in the House is a result of Republican gerrymandering (the popular vote in the 2012 election of House members went to the Democrats by 1.2%) and their typical action, stopping funding by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, is a result of a procedural quirk, a leftover from a pro forma budget gesture of 1917.

The polls show that as a nation we're very unhappy with them, with approval of Congress down to 12%, disapproval up to 85%, and more than 70% of those strongly opposed to the job congressional lawmakers are doing (Washington Post/ABC).  So they're rascals, right?  From what you hear in street interviews they're that and more:  "religious nuts," "one-issue extremists," and the old one, "dirty politicians."

Depressing, isn't it, to have such people gaming the system, playing the quirks.  Differences in a democracy are supposed to be worked out, fought out, fair and square on the floor of the legislature.  Lose there and a representative is supposed to go along gracefully until his next chance to fight.  In the designated arena.  That's democracy.  Not slinking around with a wrench looking for a place to jam the machinery — machinery you have yourself already set, or allowed to be set, in motion, for God's sake.  

I can't stand it.  I'm a democrat (and Democrat) about to die of depression.

No, I won't die, nor will the masses of depressed people all around me.  We know that we, unlike the Egyptians, have a fixed, absolutely irremovable, election coming up.  And we have, in our aural memory, another good old American expression to cheer ourselves up with: "Throw the rascals out!"  Straight from the citizens who threw out Boss Tweed and the Teapot Dome gang and the Whisky Ring.  The majority the polls tell us of will assert itself.

How comforting, the thought of those rascals being thrown out, head over heels behind Boss Tweed.  The majority triumphant. 

How comforting, and now, apparently, how vain.  The majority has already shown how it's going to act, and that, in 2014, will be to keep the rascals in.  Ninety percent of them.  That's the percentage of incumbents they returned to office in 2012, when the laments over the terrible 112th Congress were as loud as the laments over ours, the 113th.

"Yes, but voters then didn't know what we know about these machinery-jammers, these district-slicers."

Ah, my friend, you have forgotten.  The jamming and slicing, and making a party of it, were already on display.  John Boehner had his (or the Tea Party's) thumb on the fiscal artery as surely, with his intentions as surely known, in April 2011, as he has now.  There was a partial shutdown of the government, remember?  With a bigger one narrowly averted in August.  What more was there to learn about these rascals?

The general electorate certainly appeared to have learned what it needed.  Hell, going into the 2012 elections you'd have thought that to be an incumbent legislator was to be one step from the tar pot and the feather pile.  Congress's favorable rating was only a little higher (15%) in the Gallup poll than it is now.  Teapot Domers, here they come.  And how many Congressmen got thrown out?  One in ten.  A rapscallion here, a scallywag there.

So, comfort-seekers, get used to it.  Americans, no matter what they tell the nice polling lady, no longer throw rascals out.

55. Reading the Bible: A Sermon

Preached to a recognizable American political/religious group, 13 Aug 2011:

 

Brothers and sisters, I heard last night that you are angry. The television man said that you hollered at your Congressman for letting the debt ceiling be raised. Is that right? Are you as angry as the New York Times reporter — the one the television man gets his news from (8-12-11) — says you are? Are you? Are you? [great roar, "Yes!"]

In that case, watch out, brothers and sisters. Take a minute to read your Bible. Do you know what it says about anger? Do you? Do you? [silence] It says (James 1:19), "be slow to get angry." It says (Proverbs, 14: 29), "Those with a hasty temper will make mistakes." It says — listen carefully, brothers and sisters —it says that "your anger can never make things right in God's sight" (James again).

Do you want to do right in God's sight? I wonder. Who are you angry at? Your Congressman, of course, because he didn't fight hard enough to hold down spending. Maybe at those senators who won't hold down spending your Congressman's way. But most likely you're angry at President Obama, who's behind all those Democrat spenders. Is that right? Is that right? [great roar, "Yes!"]

What does it mean, "to do right in God's sight"? Have you asked yourself that? Have you looked into your Bible? Really looked into it? Paid attention? Close attention? Have you? Have you? [silence]

Sure you have. You've just forgotten. Doing right in God's sight is doing what Joseph did in Egypt. He got the message from God that seven lean years were coming, preceded by seven fat years. And what was he supposed to do during those fat years? Lay up! Lay up! Food of the field, food in the cities, corn like the sand of the sea, into the granaries "against the seven years of famine, that the land perish not."

That's what you do in fat years, lay up. Our fat years were the 80s and 90s. What were you doing then? About the deficit. About Social Security. About all the entitlements that are killing us now. Did you think twice about a trillion-dollar war? It would have been easy then for a President to reduce spending. Plenty of money, jobs easy, no recession. Did you read your Bible thinking fat years in Egypt had no connection with fat years in the United States? Did you think God's message had nothing to do with you? Did you expect him to communicate in some other way? Great Heavens, brothers and sisters, you stand in front of the world holding up the Bible. When in God's name are you going to look into it? Are you going to rely on me, just me, or some preacher on television, to tell you what's in it?

Well, since that's the way it is, I'm going to tell you. I'm no Jeremiah or Isaiah, I'm a frail reed, but I've got their message, and they give me strength to deliver it. It's this: you have sinned in the eyes of the Lord, sinned to high heaven. You sinned then in your profligacy and you sin now in trying to blame somebody else.

Now you might have missed the first sin but I don't see how in the world, if you had read your Bible, you could have missed the second. The Bible is full of scorn for those who try to shift the blame. There's Adam, a worm squirming under God's gaze: "This woman whom thou gavest to be with me, SHE gave me of the tree, and I did eat." There's Aaron, claiming that the "mischievous" people made him make a graven image. "They gave me the gold and out came this calf." What do you know, out came that calf. There's Saul, trying to blame "the people" for denying God "the best of the sheep and of the oxen" on his sacrificial altar. And finally there's Pontius Pilate washing his hands to show that the blame for Christ's death falls on "the multitude."

You (help me, Jeremiah) are Adam and Aaron and Saul and Pontius Pilate. Why? Because you are trying to avoid the personal responsibility you're always out there making so much of.

And you know this. You know in your heart that you are guilty, and it's a burden to you. I can see it in the way you try to lighten that burden. You'd see it too if you would just go back and look at the way the Israelites tried to lighten their burden of guilt. They put "all their iniquities" on a goat (called "the scapegoat") and sent him "into the wilderness."

That's what you are doing. Your choice of goat varies but I see that your goats do have one thing in common: they all work in Washington. That's where the sin is. Not where you live.

And you know what? I believe that you love virtue and hate sin. And you have an intense desire to show that, to others and to yourself. That's why you are so strict about frugality and austerity and discipline, today's great virtues.

The thing is, your timing is terrible. And that changes everything. You want frugality just when imposition of it will damage the budding prosperity that you also want. Twenty years ago you could have had it, and been happy with your President. Now you can't have it unless your President, that goat, commits a lot of the sins you hate.

I have searched the Bible, brothers and sisters, for comparisons to what you are now, people who have betrayed the ideals of their religion, neglected their Holy Scripture, and acted like the pleasure-loving heathens they scorn. And who in their hearts know this.

That leaves you feeling guilty, doesn't it?  You're not as good as your grandfather.  Well, you'll show him, and his demanding spirit.  You may not have practiced the old virtues for a while but by God you'll come out for them now.  Twice as loudly.  You'll give these unfrugal Democrats the beating of their lives.

Of course it's the beating you should have been giving yourselves in the 80s and 90s.  Only with what psychologists call "compensatory exaggeration." You're the watchdog who, missing the stranger until he gets to the door, barks the place down. "See, I'm just as good at watching as I ever was."

The trouble is, that's a personal-virtue problem, with both you and the dog. And sometimes personal-virtue problems fit the nation's problems and sometimes they don't. Right now the fit is terrible. I mean to the point of your committing new and greater sins. If you bring the house down to save your virtue you've injured a lot of your brothers. The Bible has a lot to say about that, my friends, injury to brothers. Look into it, brothers and sisters. Look into it closely.

47. "Politicians suck."

That's what I heard Americans on the street, asked about the debt-ceiling crisis, saying all day yesterday into CNN microphones. They hadn't had a chance to read Terry Smith, the small-town newspaper sage I have quoted before. If they had they'd be saying, "There are exact causes of this crisis and we've got to distinguish those that are merely annoying from those that are imperiling the nation. I find X (a particular cause) most perilous and I blame Y (particular Republicans or Democrats) for introducing it."

If you're not talking like that you ought to get off the street. Hide when you see a CNN camera approaching. Americans can't appear before the world saying, "Everything sucks." They can't appear saying, "Politicians suck." Why? Because then they'd have to say, "Democracy sucks," and they can't say that because they'd have to keep adding "but sucks less than other forms of government" and on and on. There's no good way out of that language mess.

Smith finds the greatest peril in those pledges that 95% of Republicans in Congress have made "to never raise taxes anytime, anywhere or for any reason." This keeps them from accepting compromises that give them nearly all of the other things they want —compromises of the kind, I might add, that contending parties in other Congressional conflicts would have been glad to make, and that, in conditions so perilous to the republic, would have been embarrassed not to make.

The only people happy here might be teachers of Philosophy 101 classes. They have been given a wonderful example of "one-principle absolutism," the simplest of all solutions to problems of the good life and the just state.

It's a solution that pretty quickly fails the tests of experience. Take "thou shalt not kill" as your absolute and you fall before the Nazis. Take "no discrimination" inflexibly and your planes fall to the terrorists who get through. Take "unconditional love" unimaginatively and you're enabling the alcoholic you need to get tough with. History is full of failed absolutism.

How does flexibility and imagination do in history? How about the Swiss? There they are, a nation divided into three language groups, each in cultural sympathy with a surrounding country. By all historical experience they are a powder keg, waiting to blow up the next time their European brothers are engaged. What do they do? Suppress expressions of sympathy. Yes, abridge free speech, that most absolute of present American principles. Not that they don't like free speech; they love it. But they see that it, like every other value, has to be adjusted in the light of a greater value, like peace. It's an adjustment their history tells us to admire. How was it achieved? By constant, fatiguing attention to the compromises that had to be made.

So, might "pay attention" be the one principle we can call absolute, never needing adjustment? No, because human beings can't pay equal attention to everything. They constantly need to proportion it. There's no way to avoid adjustment.

Does this call now for a good scolding of the extreme Tea Partiers who forced the pledge? Of course, but no more a scolding of them than a scolding of the extreme ACLU members they see themselves opposing. They are actually brother absolutists. After 9-11 it was clear that the principle of individual liberty would have to be adjusted against the principle of national security. "No sir," said some members. "Not anytime, anywhere, for any reason." Refusal to adjust is not a measurable feature on the right-left scale.

43. The Struggle To Be Fair.

 

It's terribly hard to be fair to Tea Partiers, I know, but Theda Skocpol and Chrystia Freeland have apparently managed to do it, Skocpol in an academic study of their views and Freeland in an International Herald Tribune piece (7-8-11) grateful to Skocpol and her graduate students for their "careful parsing" of the Partiers' thinking. The thinking, it turns out, does not lead to the contradictions commentators have noted, like accepting Social Security payments while opposing Big Government programs. It's more careful, and opposes those programs only when they favor "people who don't work" — in their term, "freeloaders."

That's the Tea Partiers' main concern, and it accounts for their rebuff, at the polls, of the New York State Republicans who thought their main concern was the Big Brother state. The Tea Party had "fixed on an issue" they had neglected.

"Fixed" on an issue. The word tells us they made it their number one priority. But that's not what they were doing in the IHT headline for Freeland's piece. There they were "fixated." "A movement fixated on 'freeloaders.'" That tells us that they were preoccupied obsessively with the issue, that they were attached to it, yes, but in an immature or neurotic way.  The headline writer has slipped into unfairness.

The word "fixated" does not appear anywhere in Freeland's piece, nor does she suggest anything it suggests. If there were any put-down words in it she has weeded them out. I see her (and Scopcol, and her graduate students) struggling to be fair to the Tea Party right to the end. I know it's a struggle the NYT and the IHT are engaged in mightily. And this could be such a little slip.  Maybe little smacks in this direction were what the headline writer's mind defaulted to, maybe he (or she) was prejudiced, but on the other hand maybe he was essentially fair-minded and just needed two more spaces for a good fit, maybe he was tired.  In any case he thwarted the Post's effort to be fair.  The fact that sometimes our fairest and best newspapers can't carry that effort to very end shows how hard the job is.