In the ruins
Idon’t want to vote for anybody.
This feels like a moment of clarity. If anyone is going to save us, elevate the everydayness of our lives and relieve our malaise, it’s probably not going to be a politician. We have designed for ourselves a political matrix that discourages all that is bold and innovative and healthy and honest. Good people go in, decide to settle first for incrementalism, later for personal profit. They tell themselves they did what they could. They may well imagine themselves as leavening agents, but the swamp mucks up their plans.
I don’t blame them, even when their cynicism is apparent from the beginning, even when their vanity and egoism are overt. What other line should talentless folks with irrationally high self-esteem pursue? When people will tell you with straight faces that ethical agents should act only in their own self-interest and greed is given moral cover, it’s game over. It’s not a difficult sales job.
Still, I did vote, for a couple of reasons. Because some things are better than other things and because there are people I want to vote against. Because there are some people who would just as soon you and I not vote. Because while I think that principled people should not be shamed for thoughtfully refraining from casting a ballot, I am at heart a romantic who agrees with Atticus Finch that real courage is when you know you are licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.
Maybe futile courage is just a kind a faith that lays on your mind better than surrender when you are trying to sleep. Whatever gets you through the night.
None of this stuff is new. Our psychic condition probably isn’t that much different than when they called us serfs, peasants and kulaks, though thousands of years of incrementalism have undoubtably improved. Things went wrong when people stopped paying attention to what was real and difficult and complicated and started attending to 10-second sound bites and reality TV and news as entertainment. (Let anyone in your mind for a couple of hours a day and they’re going to colonize it, dittoheads.) When people started thinking that reading real books was “pretentious.”
Maybe it started to go wrong when Catholics abandoned the Latin Mass.
But the truth is there was no golden age, no time when sensation didn’t trump sense, when fear and hate weren’t the preferred levers of those who would move the world.
A man I love wrote these two paragraphs 50 years ago, before Richard Nixon revealed himself as a common gangster:
The old Republican Party has become the Knothead Party, so named during the last Republican convention in Montgomery when a change of name was proposed, the first suggestion being the Christian Conservative Constitutional Party, and campaign buttons were even printed with the letters CCCP before an Eastern-liberal commentator noted the similarity to the initials printed on the backs of the Soviet cosmonauts and called it the most knotheaded political bungle of the century — which the conservatives, in the best tradition, turned to their own advantage, printing a million more buttons reading “Knotheads for America” and banners proclaiming “No Man Can Be Too Knotheaded in the Service of His Country.”
The old Democrats gave way to the new Left Party. They too were stuck with a nickname not of their own devising and the nickname stuck: in this case a derisive acronym that the Right made up and the Left accepted, accepted in that same curious American tradition by which we allow our enemies to name us, give currency to their curses, perhaps from the need to concede the headstart they want and still beat them, perhaps also from the secret inkling that our enemies know the worst of us best and it’s best for them to say it. LEFT usually it is, often LEFTPAPA, sometimes LEFTPAPASAN (with a little Jap bow), hardly ever the original LEFTPAPASANE, which stood for what, according to the Right, the Left believed in: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, The Pill, Atheism, Pot, AntiPollution, Sex, Abortion Now, Euthanasia.
I am heartened that more than a few of you will recognize the words of Walker Percy. The book he wrote them in, Love in the Ruins, is a popular and very funny novel, a would-be bestseller about the imminent end of the world as perceived by failed physician and unreliable narrator Dr. Thomas More, who claims “collateral” descent from his namesake, Sir Thomas More, a Catholic humanist beheaded by a king seeking expedience exception, the author of Utopia. Percy’s Tom More is living in what was at the time of the novel’s publication the future, southeastern Louisiana circa 1990. In what More believes are the end times.
But More could maybe save it; he escapes from an institution to test a device he’s invented, a pocket-sized “ontological lapsometer” that works like a stethoscope to plumb the human soul. It can tell you why and how you are alienated from yourself. But it falls into the wrong hands, a Mephistopheles figure named Art Immelman who promises More a Nobel Prize and proceeds to abuse the device by using it to foment the sort of social chaos that More wanted to calm. Soon comes the revolution.
Yet the aftermath is not so bad. More is raising collards, doing some doctoring at the fat clinic, living in slave quarters, “barbecuing in [his] sackcloth.” He has his Early Times and he’s found love, and his friend Victor Charles has even asked More to be the campaign manager for his run for Congress “under the old rooster”, the Democratic Party before it was occupied by the Left.
“Why me?” More asks.
“I got the Bantu vote,” Charles says. “Chuck Parker’s helping me out with the swamp people. Max is working on the liberals. Leroy Ledbetter’s got the peckerwoods. You could swing the Catholics.”
“I doubt that,” More replies. “Anyhow I’m not much of a politician.”
I voted early. It’s a patriotic chore, one that’s not nearly so dangerous as many undertaken in our name. The least I could do. Tonight I’ll drink whiskey and play guitar. Keep Quentin Compson alive. It’s not so bad.
Like Ol’ Tom More I generally do what I please. He loved “women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth and [his] fellow man hardly at all.” Which implies he loved them some. Which will have to do.