Montpelier
Since January, a large (and apparently growing) number of us Americans have been watching with a mixture of emotions the spasms of the executive branch of our government. Nothing in the past has prepared us for a situation like it. Some have described it in Victorian terms: through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole into an alternative universe. Psychologists have weighed in with Dr. Phil-style thumbnail analyses and predicted either the president’s personal collapse or a palace coup. Bible-believers have reckoned it as either the appearance of the Antichrist or the longed-for trumpets of the apocalypse, either possibility signaling the end of times. Solid supporters of the president out in the hinterlands are lauding his follow-through on his populist themes regarding the Mexican border, immigration of terrorists, swamp-draining, and vilification of the media and their “fake news.” But at the same time, they’re looking to their health care premiums, black lung benefits, Social Security income, Medicare and Medicaid, and thinking, “They wouldn’t. Would they?” Two items I don’t see them worrying about are federal aid to artists and public broadcasting; they’re considered “welfare for the elitists.”
Meanwhile, the two major political parties, who, like rutting cervids in mating season, have pretty much destroyed each other in the past year, are calling roll to see who’s still alive and ready for the coming struggles leading up to the next mid-term election.
What a mess! Fascinating — riveting, even — but a mess nonetheless. It’s not just big business and financial institutions that rely on stability and predictability, but unnumbered hundreds of thousands of regular folks who perforce must live productively only one calamity away from disaster, bankruptcy and dependency. To frighten old people with the threat of taking away Meals on Wheels, for example, even if it’s just a bargaining ploy, is pretty low.
At the center of the restive web that is the House Republican caucus sits the speaker, Paul Ryan. Assailed from the left and right of his own party for opposite reasons, he recently revealed a legislative agenda that he called “merciful.” Now, I’m no philologist, or even a linguist, but even I can tell that the items he outlined were about as merciful as a guillotine — a very slow, dull one. I was delighted to see a young Kennedy in the House — Joseph III — who brilliantly stated the case for the opposition. It may avail little, with the votes aligned as they are; but it was music to my ears to hear a young, liberal Irishman rebutting a conservative one — and on St. Patrick’s Eve, too.
Speaker Ryan’s proposed legislation is probably, in its less expensive items, only a stalking horse for matters he considers more important, like “tax reform.” As with magicians, you don’t look at the hand doing the magic. You watch the other one; that’s where the action is. His icy financial solutions to human problems remind me of nothing else as much as the writing of another Irishman, Jonathan Swift, dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin. Responding in 1729 to government inertia in its care for the poor and starving, his Modest Proposal suggested a way to secure a source of meat and relieve the suffering of the poor.
A very worthy person, a true lover of his country, … said that many gentlemen of this kingdom, having of late destroyed their deer, … conceived that the want of venison might be well supplied by the bodies of young lads and maidens, not exceeding fourteen years of age nor under twelve; so great a number of both sexes in every country being now ready to starve for want of work and service. Swift suggests that slaughtering the excess young people would be a winning proposition all around. The parents, relieved of feeding them, would make money by the sale; citizens could replace their venison; and the children would be spared the pains of starvation. It is not improbable that some scrupulous people might be apt to censure such a practice, as a little bordering upon cruelty; which, I confess, hath always been with me the strongest objection against any project, however so well intended.
Swift’s proposal was rejected, of course, as disingenuous and in poor taste, and it changed little, if anything. But at least he had shone a light on the cold inhumanity of the “projectors,” officials who proposed nonsensical ways of relieving the plight of the poor.
Of all the current dysfunction in our nation’s capital, probably the most serious item has been the death of truth: It’s now practically impossible to separate it from “fake news” and “alternative facts” propagated by “the dishonest media” — “the most dishonest people in the country, believe me.” It’s pure Joseph Goebbels: Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth. Tell an outrageous lie, and while the citizenry are inflamed by it, tell another to distract them. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” assures the Gospel of John. But where is it? It’s become as slippery as an eel, and none of us is sure when he’s got hold of it. Whenever in our past has The New York Times or The Washington Post felt the need to remind us that it works very hard to publish factual material? Yet that’s just what their web pages advertise.
Imagine what Mark Twain or Will Rogers would make of the buncombe that passes for wisdom in the capital today. Both of those all-American humorists, for all their tall and improbable tales, had a keen eye for the difference between probity and inanity. H.L. Mencken, too, who wrote, “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” I’d like to think we haven’t reached perfection quite yet, but it’s going to take hard work and vigilance to avoid it.
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
