Like U.S. Senator Chris Dodd before him, U.S. Senator Joe
Lieberman soon will be leaving the congress with 23 years of service under his
belt. Following his leave-taking, Mr. Dodd fell on a plush Hollywood
featherbed. Mr. Lieberman’s future is a question mark. His bitterest critics – they
are legion – suppose he will worm his way into a lobbyist position in
Washington because, as Willy Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks, that’s
where the money is. Like Senator Dick Blumenthal, who stepped into Mr. Dodd’s
congressional shoes, Mr. Lieberman is Jewish, and when his most hot-headed
critics wish to strike a death blow, they revert to stereotypical insults: Jews
are motivated by money alone; Lieberman’s principal loyalty lies with
beleaguered Israel rather than the United States, that sort of thing. Apart
from racism, the two oldest and most perduring prejudices in the United States
are anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, both of which still have lots of wind
in their sails.
When Mr. Lieberman appeared recently before the Middlesex County Chamber of Commerce in Cromwell,
“goodbye” was in his voice. No one, perhaps not even Mr. Lieberman himself, has
been keeping count over the years of his public appearances. Like his critics
within the progressive wing of his former Democratic Party, they are legion, though
likely falling short of those of Mr. Blumenthal, about whom it has been said
there is no more dangerous spot in the state than that between Mr. Blumenthal
and a television camera. Mr. Blumenthal attended the Cromwell event as a sort
of legacy pallbearer: Mr. Lieberman’s legacy in Connecticut politics and his
own, Mr. Blumenthal said, had been intertwined.
Mr. Lieberman is no stranger to political roughhouse. He
feels about the condition of the Congress pretty much the same way William
Butler Yeats felt about the world following the advent of World War I, when the
future provided only glimpse, seen darkly as through a glass, of coming
years:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Of course, what followed the First World War was the Second
World War, the Cold War, during which Stalin, “Breaker of Nations”, brought
into the Soviet maw much of what used to be considered Europe, the rise to
world eminence of communist China, now
Europe’s banker, the resurgence of salafist jihadism (السلفية الجهادية) in Arabia, the improbable rise of Iran as a nuclearized
power center in the Middle East, the imperiling of Israel by its enemies, who
are legion, the near bankruptcy of the United States under the weight of its
social obligations, the flat-lining of Europe under the weight of its social
obligations, and the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of Mathew Arnold’s
“sea of faith.”
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Mr. Lieberman is familiar with the sea of faith, as are most
Jews, Catholics and African Americans who, thank you very much, cannot easily
forget the sharp edges of their past.
The media was on hand to leave behind a record of Mr.
Lieberman’s appearance in Cromwell. And what was paramount in its mind? Whether
the world will survive the melancholy, long withdrawing roar of the sea of
faith, now no more than a breath of the night-wind? Whether the ceremony of
innocence has sunk permanently beneath the waves? Whether the Western center
will hold?
Not a bit of it. They wanted to know whether Mr. Lieberman
would endorse the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Congress, Chris Murphy.
Mr. Lieberman said, with what one must suppose was a
suppressed sigh, that endorsements were not much on his mind.
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