Politics is missing a higher purpose — joy
From cheers to tears in a dozen hours: How’s that for life’s essence distilled? At 10 p.m. on Sunday in Kansas City, Mo., the whole town was delirious over the come-from-behind victory of our Chiefs in the gaudiest show on Earth, the Super Bowl. To say that Chiefs fans waited a long time for this is like saying that Marcel Proust thought deeply about a cookie. But these are patient people. Once I lapsed into a daydream at a red light in Kansas City and missed the switch to green. I snapped to just as the light went from amber back to red. I shot a sheepish glance into the rearview mirror. The driver behind me, too polite to honk, actually waved — with all five fingers.
As a reward for its long suffering, the city has a team that is not only good but tremendous fun as well. Good teams are admirable but commonplace; a fun team is like finding $100 on the sidewalk. The great New York Yankees pitcher of the 1930s Lefty Gomez is credited with saying, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” Fans of a team that is both good and lucky enjoy a golden moment when they stop wondering whether their heroes will win. The only question is how. Rooting for the Chiefs has been the football equivalent of binge-watching James Bond movies. One week, the Chiefs are being fed to sharks. The next week, a laser beam is about to slice them in half. To capture their first NFL championship in 50 years, they dangled from a cliff by their fingertips before defusing a nuclear bomb.
So that was Sunday night. On Monday morning, my wife and I joined a large congregation at a Kansas City church to mourn the premature death of Jayme Brassell. You probably didn’t know her. Neither did I, really. She was the lady who had a hair salon where my wife went for blowouts. Then she was the person who not only did my wife’s hair but invariably raised her spirits, too. I could never tell whether the shampoo or the therapy was on the house; one price covered it all.
Eventually, Jayme became the woman who had to close her salon because there wasn’t enough room in her life for both work and brain cancer.
I discovered, during a profound service, that her life was filled, to an extraordinary degree, with family and friends — and friends who felt like family, and customers who felt like friends. Her 17-year-old son, in his brave eulogy, recalled that when the family lived in New York, his mother befriended folks who lived on the sidewalk. I looked around the crowded sanctuary and wasn’t surprised, because clearly she had a gift for making friends.
As we left the church, we bumped into an acquaintance and asked how she knew Jayme. She replied that the Brassell kids got their braces from the orthodontist she works for. And there they stood: the orthodontist’s office manager talking to the woman from under the blow-dryer. Imagine such a life, in which every office you visit, every client you serve, might someday fill another seat at your funeral.
The word “joy” kept popping up in that church, far more often than you’d expect after the death of a mom with three children still in school. And joy was the value that had painted a city Chiefs red only the night before. It was the thread that connected those 12 powerful hours, the track that carried us from the exuberance we shared among strangers to the mourning we shared among strangers. The vital, magnetic force of happiness, of community — of joy.
Aristotle got a lot of things wrong, but he was dead right in teaching that politics is not an end in itself, but the means to greater virtues. For Americans, those virtues were spelled out from the beginning: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of joy. Yet it is precisely this higher purpose that is missing from contemporary politics, which has become the very picture, the raw embodiment, of joylessness.
From one end of the political spectrum to the other, the common tenor of our public life is hatred, denunciation and struggle. Every path forward is to be strewn with the bodies of vanquished enemies, be they witch-hunting swamp-dwellers or rapacious billionaires. There are no policy disagreements, only fights for fighters who promise to win like winners. “Choose sides,” a disgruntled reader scolded me the other day, as though the key to truth is opposition.
Just because there are two parties does not mean there are two sides. Life is richer than that. Endless antagonism is a disease in politics, and widespread unhappiness is the symptom. The next great leader of the United States will be one who pulls the country together in some shared passion or purpose, like a city cheering its ballclub, and does it with the lightness that makes strangers into friends.