There’s a Late Byzantine feel to America these days: corrupt leaders stealing what they can, infrastructure crumbling, people dying in the (flooded) street, distant losing wars far away, governmental torture, waste, fraud, internecine disputes among the leadership.
When the levee broke, any illusion one might have of even minimal competence in this administration washed away with it. I lead a privileged life, not least because I have tenure in a law school, which gives me both the time and the obligation to think about how we can organize our society so we live better. But it doesn’t take that luxury to understand just how badly the United States has been abused by the people currently in power. How, I keep wondering, can I most effectively stand up for decency, for a government that makes lives better, that protects the weak, children, the elderly, that stands for something better than torture and cutting taxes on multi-millionaires today so that we can incur more debts that inevitably will become taxes borne by my children tomorrow?
I live far from the centers of power. How then to respond to this mess in Washington from out here in the hinterland? I think it’s primarily a function of temperament. Some people will dream or plot revolution; some will join cults. Many will say it’s hopeless and cultivate their gardens. Others will turn to drink. And some others will do something a little more productive. Me, I’m a pretty moderate and bourgeois guy at heart. The system hasn’t been bad to me, and while I see warts in it, I also see virtue. I especially like American ideals of freedom and justice, of a government of laws, of protection of liberty (and yes, thus of property), of a mutual commitment to live and let live so that each can engage in his or her own pursuit of happiness. It’s our leadership’s colossal failure to live up to those ideals, to be even half of what we could be, to instead be such a lead weight on the nation, that gets me so steamed. I’m not your cultist or revolutionary. I don’t have a green thumb. And I can’t really hold my liquor all that well. That leaves electronic pamphleteering and organizing.
I’m aware that one of the biggest reasons we’re in such a pickle is that we have serious problems with our electoral system. It’s not just that money talks much louder than it should; nor is it simply that most of the major electronic media outlets are owned by radical right-wingers. Several are transparently managed in a politically biased manner which relies on a combination of lies, distraction. and suppression of inconvenient people and facts. Combine all that with the terrible voting system and, perhaps worst of all, serious systematic gerrymandering and you get the Congress we have: a body in which the large majority of members are elected for life, or nearly so, at least so long as they truckle properly to the sources of re-election cash.
But if you persist in caring, and you won’t drown your sorrows in a bottle, nor host clandestine meetings, politics is the only game in town.
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