The first chilling possibility, which you probably haven’t even dared think about, is this: What if they are telling the truth? No, I mean, really. I know it is about 99 percent unlikely, but what if we actually are being governed at each end of Pennsylvania Avenue by a bipartisan complex of incompetents who have not the vaguest idea of what they are doing, who actively engage in crass and crooked things and then seem always to have no recollection, sleepwalker-like, of having engaged in them? What if we have in fact elected people who are capable of moving obliviously through rooms and encounters and corruptions and misfeasances and outrages, for all of which they have direct, hands-on responsibility, and who respond when the reality is shoved in their face: ““Golly, I didn’t know that! Someone should have told me. Was that guy across the table really on the 10 Most Wanted list? Is it really true that the investigation I was running wasn’t asking for any of the relevant material or seeking any of the relevant witnesses? How d’ya like that! I wish I’d noticed.''
Government by Zombie. I extend the ““they’’ here to include not just the Democrats and Republicans locked in conflict over each other’s current squalors, but also the ““reformers’’ of the Teamsters union and others as well who, when found out, take this weak, (one hopes) untruthful and, in any event, cowardly defense: ““No one told me. It was my assistants’ fault’’ (a Nixon special in the bad old days).
We are asked to believe that our leaders sat in rooms with people they didn’t know and entrusted hugely important jobs that had a lot of authority, such as that concerning White House security, to individuals they had hardly met. They claimed, in fact, that they never could be sure who had hired their security guy, Craig Livingstone. Did he just walk in off the street? We are told that some Republican leaders didn’t know they were violating the laws they had helped to write and that others didn’t understand they were getting funds with an expectation of giving favors in return.
The choice between portraying yourself as a knave or a fool has always been a basic dilemma for politicians in growing trouble. But I don’t recall a situation in which politicians on both sides were so abjectly willing to assert that they were paying absolutely no attention to the things that were right before their faces, missing every important signal and simply unaware not only of what others were doing, but of what they themselves were doing. It is, in my view, a part of the general, unashamed degradation of our politics by its practitioners that so-called leaders in both parties are prepared to offer this version of their governing reality, which they should, but don’t, find mortifying.
Now here’s a second horror. If you are old enough, you will remember that at some point in your bratty childhood, when you made a particularly repulsive grimace at the dinner table, your mother warned you that your face might just freeze that way and there you’d be unto eternity, looking like that and being remembered like that.
As more and more public officials– party leaders, legislators, executive branch honchos–pursue without apology or a trace of credibility their newfound role as spinners, dissemblers and public relations hacks, defending practices for which you know they have no use, I begin to think of that old warning. Men for whom I have had great respect–a John Glenn, a Carl Levin–who have contributed so handsomely to our public life seem willing to transform themselves night after night on television into unthinking, reflexive justifiers of just about any tawdry practice or self-evident untruth that their party leaders have been found out in. Well, it wasn’t so bad, or there isn’t conclusive proof, or the other guys did it too, or it’s not really the main issue, or something . . .
Will they and other Washington Democratic and Republican bigwigs suffer the irreversible fate that intimidating mothers once foretold for children who were a little too expressive on the subject of string beans? Will the public end up just seeing them and remembering them forever frozen in this much diminished political and moral and personal guise they have taken up with such ill-considered and incomprehensible enthusiasm?
And finally: are we (God willing) in a phase, or is this it–is this the new and lasting Lilliputian order of things? Look at the question this way. We all know that millions and millions of dollars, now being argued about, were raised by both parties and endless lobbying groups and others in the past couple of years by means and for ends that have occasionally bordered on criminality and reeked of corruption. Almost all on all sides have said that they did it only because the other side did and that they themselves had to stay competitive so as to prevail and thus be in a position to put their wonderful plans and programs and ideas into practice. The money was to help them win–and thus do ““good.''
So they won: the Republicans won the Congress, and the Democrats won the White House. Is this what they won to do? Is what we are seeing supposed to be the end that justified the monetary means? They raised all that money so they could behave like this? So they could turn Washington into the eye-averter, eyesore political scene it is becoming?
Where are the real leaders who will finally stand up and break through this national humiliation? Where are the ones with the independence and conviction and clarity and guts–and self-respect–to blow the whistle on their own side’s stupidities and cheatings as well as the other’s? Is there anyone out there whose accession to office was worth all that money? A great opportunity is there–only someone, maybe a few someones, had better seize it fast. You begin to get the feeling they’re about to lock the door.
