The real state of the union

The state of the union isn’t great. We’ve divided ourselves into fractious tribes scrambling after little hits of digitally delivered dopamine. We watch our own channels and our own shows and attend to our own intellectual mascots. We manufacture our own realities, dive down in rabbit holes into alternative worlds where we can be heroes, and keep our kids from going to college so they won’t be infected with liberal humanism (or at least not the mumps).

It should be clear by now that there are many Americas, some more comfortable than others. There is a class that the system and its apparatchiks work for, and the rest of us, despite the pretty words they bestow—cheap as Facebook clicks—don’t matter much. They talk sweet about high ideals, but high ideals don’t matter to them. Look at what they do. Look at how they bend and flex and make a show. But they put babies in cages in your name.

They don’t live by their high words. They don’t believe in anything much, other than what’s good for them is in the public interest. They’re not that much different from the rest of us that way, it’s just that they found their way in, and how can you blame them for that?

If you or I could have done it, would we have resisted? Their wine is better than our beer, and they get whisky we can’t buy. They get addressed as “Senator” or “Congressman” or “the Honorable.”

And they get to call their hustle “public service.”

They get to pretend that somehow it’s a sacrifice to sit on these committees and in these chambers and on these boards and in these hidden-away conference rooms where the things that must happen happen and the deals get cut. They pretend that they are doing it out of a sense of duty, that somehow they are forgoing other, better, richer opportunities, and not because someone whispered in some old man’s ear and the old man nodded his assent.

It is wrong to generalize, but some of them are deficient people greedy for the approval of others. A certain narcissism would seem to be required to stand for office, to straight-facedly proclaim one’s fitness to represent one’s people and invite the scrutiny of opposition researchers and common folk. Who do they think they are?

A kind better than those of us who struggle to hold our little lives together, who worry about checking account balances, health insurance deductibles and gasoline prices. Their America is of a different air and quality, a clubby lounge insulated from the consequences of bad decisions.

Other Americas are less comfortable; some are dangerous. Your America might be under siege. Your America might be threatened by sharia law or by a drag queen in a restroom. In your America, King David might be in the White House—God’s own chosen adulterer.

(Though don’t you folks ever get to the point where the prophet Nathan confronts the corrupt king? Cue Psalm 51: Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me. That’s one Tweet we’ve not seen yet.)

We can all see how things get perverted and how little principles really matter to the people who cite them most vociferously. Lamar Alexander is right, it’s on us—not on the people we elected to “lead” the country. They are not about leading; they’re about their next election, their next hustle. The evidence was there, but you don’t strike at the king lessen you know you can kill him. And who in your crowd are you going trust?

Besides, stay on his good side and he’s useful to your clients, and therefore useful to you. It’s not like you have to have the man over for supper; all you’ve got to do is kowtow and curtsy. It’s not fun, but he’s captured the imagination of the 18 percent and you can’t do without them in your own coalition.

H.L. Mencken once said that the only way for a journalist to look at a politician was “down.” I’ve always resisted this idea because Mencken was an unhappy, sour and ultimately dishonest writer; his influence on reporters and columnists is perhaps not as good as his imitators and progeny would have us believe. The cult of Mencken flatters itself by insisting that its cynicism is actually realism and that to believe in anything less tangible than the heft of a coin is to believe in fairies. The Menckenist assumption is that everyone is working an angle and that truth is largely irrelevant and that all we call noble is either a good show or a sign of inherent and exploitable weakness.

But the world is wearing me down. Maybe Mencken had a point. I think most people are OK when you take them on one at a time. All of us have mixed motives for what we do, and while the impulse for office-seeking is usually rooted in something other than a need to perform public service, most of us aren’t Gandhi (and Gandhi probably wasn’t Gandhi, either) so if you show up to work and don’t cheat too much maybe we can all get along.

But let’s not indulge fairy tales about how great we all are.

Some of us—a very few—might actually be great. I hope most of us are just run of the mill good people trying to get along in the world without hurting anyone, laboring under our own delusions and, if we’re doing it right, banging up against our limitations and trying to do better and be kinder, but often as not disappointing ourselves with the mildness of our efforts. And then there are a sizable number of just plain miserable bastards of various political stripe, nihilists and know-nothings and mean people.

So how’s the union doing? Well, you might say the union is a fiction, that America as an idea, as an experiment in self-government, as the “last best hope of Earth” is over. We have proved we’re just like everybody else, just as susceptible to the promises of strongmen and swindlers, just as scared and lazy as humans have always been everywhere. We’re only American by accident of birth, not because we’re among the elect. American exceptionalism is a myth.

We’re as capable as descending into the nightmare as any other nation.

Or, as Captain America said to Billy over that campfire near the end of Easy Rider: “We blew it.”

Go look out a window or at a screen and tell me that’s not obvious.

Sure, there’s a prescription: C’mon people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try and love one another . . .

But you’re probably too grown up for hippie music.