A very nice lectern

Most of us like nice things. There’s nothing wrong with this, we deserve whatever pleasure we can innocently derive from life, and if a well-made coat or pair of shoes make you feel good about yourself, they are worth whatever you pay for them.

Sometimes you get what you pay for—a $70 bottle of wine can be revelatory when you are used to drinking plonk; a $700 bottle can seem mind-expanding. Owning quality can be its own reward; when you get to a certain stage in life you might, like Bruce Springsteen, want “beautiful guitars in every room.”

But the thing about acquiring things is that while they may supply a frisson of pleasure upon receipt, the feeling never lasts. Studies have shown that, except for special circumstances, things don’t really make us happy, at least not for long. Usually they give us a spike of good feelings, and we pretty quickly return to the pre-acquisition level of satisfaction. Neuroscientists have a name for this phenomenon: habituation.

This is why some people never seem to get enough; they are always chasing the dragon that provides a transient burst of pleasure. They are voracious. They are perpetually unsatisfied.

Being perpetually unsatisfied does not seem like a roadmap to happiness (the Buddha will tell you happiness is the banishment of desire) but few of us have the will or character to abstain from want. So there emerge gurus and preachers who will tell us God wants us to be rich and enjoy the fruits of our success. The Prosperity Gospel both encourages the impoverished to imagine a better life for themselves and answers the prayers of the elite by reassuring rich folks that financial success is indicative of moral character.

I don’t think Jesus will return wearing Ermenegildo Zegna bespoke and a Rolex, but I’m hardly an ascetic. We have nice things: some jewelry, lots of art, tour issue golf equipment. We have a luxury rider in our homeowners policy. I’m not non-materialistic. (Karen is; some items in her closet predate me. She doesn’t want presents; she’s always looking for ways to get rid of things.)

The satisfied may be happier, but it’s the unsatisfied who run the game. People who want are the ones who strive for high office and power, who push for prizes and fame. I’m driven, and don’t always know by what. My best guess is that I just want to prove myself worthy of attention. We can’t help our pathologies; that’s why they’re called pathologies.

So the question arises: Who needs a $19,000 lectern? Well, in the scheme of things, $19,000 is not all that much money. Some people would consider it a trivial amount. If the State of Arkansas paid $19,000 for a lectern (and was reimbursed months later by the state GOP), why should we care? And can we even trust the report?

Let’s proceed carefully. Some of you may remember a shocking 1984 report by the Pentagon’s inspector general that alleged the Department of Defense had purchased a hammer for $435 and toilet seats for $600 each. As it turned out, the hammer was actually $15. But the contractors spread their engineering expenses evenly over all the individual items they sold to the DOD, a bookkeeping convenience that had no effect on the overall price. So the research and development costs of jet engines was divided among every part in the order, adding $420 to the price of the hammer and the toilet seats.

So was the $19,029.25 for more than just the lectern?

Maybe—and maybe it’s none of our business, if the Arkansas Republican Party had actually paid for the lectern. But they didn’t. The $19,029.25 lectern was purchased with a state credit card, and the state GOP only jumped in to reimburse the state after Matt Campbell of the Blue Hog Report dragged the “custom podium” (as the Governor’s Office inaccurately characterizes it) into the spotlight.

Maybe it was a mistake and the GOP meant to buy the lectern for the governor all along. Mistakes are made all the time. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders seems not to care much about the lectern and dismisses all this as just political gotcha-ism performed by meanie radical leftists who want to make her look bad and hurt her feelings.

Maybe my opinion of SHS is relevant here: I don’t think she’s a serious person. After all, she worked for Donald Trump, who has never been a serious person. I believe she is engaged in the politics game primarily for the pursuit of power and fame, with monetary gain, which tends to gravitate toward these qualities in this country.

I don’t think she’s much better or worse than most of the mediocre graspers who fill elected offices in this country. There aren’t a lot of profiles in courage on either side of the aisle. One of the inherent problems with our republic is that the people least suited to a career in governance are the ones most entranced by the trappings of office—things like $19,029.25 lecterns, security details and flying private.

Sometimes the people we elect to represent us actively despise us — they think we’re suckers and losers and that they are entitled to use our money for their aggrandization. In a way they’re right. We vote for them, sometimes for dumb reasons, often because we’re presented with a slate of bad options. (Karen does not want to run for office. If nominated, she will not run. If elected, she will not serve.)

I don’t believe Sanders is on the same order of grift as someone like Bob Menendez; like most of us, she just likes nice things. And she’s not going to be satisfied with the governorship of a podunk state like Arkansas (from which she couldn’t even source a decent lectern/podium), so she’s not going to derail a promising career in tribal politics by using the purchase of an overpriced music stand to distribute some of Arkansas’ wealth to buddies who might be potentially useful to her down the road. She’s too smart for that.

Right?

People are looking into that. And they’ll find out—though whether there would be any consequences for incompetency or malfeasance is an entirely separate question. It might turn out to be another $435 hammer.

What I wonder about more is whether the governor derived any happiness from her new lectern. And if she’s habituated to it yet.