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| The City Mouse |
November 11, 2020
To the Country Mouse,
You’ve written quite a
bit – perhaps more than is necessary – about political personae, the various
masks politicians present to the public. Our next president, it would appear,
will be former Barack Obama Vice President Joe Biden. It may be safe to assume
that the U.S. Supreme Court will be reluctant to overturn the vox populi as
expressed in votes, however appealing the arguments pressed by President Donald
Trump’s crowd of lawyers may be. Proceeding on the assumption that Biden will
be the next president, would you care to say something about Biden’s personae?
There are more than one, no?
I wrote back to her:
To the city mouse,
Biden wears more than one mask, and this is the case with most politicians. Fielding a question from
an audience in Danbury – I was present on
the occasion – Bill Buckley was asked, following his comments on President Richard
Nixon’s trip to China, all of them bitterly negative, what Nixon was really like.
Buckley: “Which one?
There are at least three.”
Biden, I do believe,
will have a persona problem. He campaigned as the person who wasn’t there, and
indeed, for much of his campaign against Trump, he was unavailable. In his
absence, Biden supporters, many of them journalists, began to craft a persona
of Biden as a political pragmatist, someone willing to adjust his messaging to favorable
winds.
We forget what the
Thomas More of Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons, says about Thomas
Cromwell: “Pooh – he’s a pragmatist – and that’s the only resemblance he has to
the Devil, son Roper; a pragmatist, the merest plumber.”
In his absence, journalists pumped personality, persona,
into Biden. Who is he, really? Had he matured enough to wean himself from
Obama? Will his foreign policy replicate Obama’s midnight deal of cash and gold
to Iran’s mullahs? Importing the socialist tinged fundamentals of the Democrat Party’s
platform into Biden, may we assume he will waste some vital months of his
presidency attempting to breathe life into a moribund Affordable Care Act that
was neither affordable or careful concerning the damage universal health care
will have on the insurance industry and its clients in Connecticut.
And, about that industry,
Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal favored, on the campaign stump, a universal
health care system proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont socialist
Senator Bernie Sanders, quite forgetting he was a representative of what used
to be called “the insurance capital of the world.” Blumenthal has appeared,
smiling like a cardboard cutout, on the campaign stump with both Sanders and
Ocasio-Cortez. Was he simply flourishing a persona before an appreciative
progressive crowd, or can that be his real face? Trump, whatever his faults, at least brought his own pail to the well, and there is about him an authenticity -- grating to 99 percent of journalists -- that one does not find in politicians such as Blumenthal, whose character has been painted on by journalistic cosmeticians.
I think you can
understand why I am concerned with political personae. Narcissus fell into
his persona – and drowned. Just as Hollywood stars lacking fundamental ballast
sometimes lose themselves, tragically, in their personae, so do pragmatic politicians.
The city mouse did understand, having once upon a time in
the long ago been an actress, her personality relatively undamaged by the
ordeal. Pragmatism, because it is so amorphous, really is a narcissian pool. And
in politics, the ever shifting surface of the pool is the media.
We are simpatico, the city mouse and I, in our dislikes, if
not our likes. I like coffee, the bitterer the better; she likes tea, but –
praise God – not green tea. She’s partial to Tennessee Williams. I am partial to
anyone who is not Tennessee Williams, but favor playwrights born before the
advent of the realist theatre. We both think the politics and morals of the
Marquis de Sade are, as he intended, disreputable, even though Albert Camus was
willing to give de Sade too large a portion of the benefit of his doubt. We
like Camus. Both of us dislike Sartre and his quasi-Marxist philosophical
children -- yea’ even to the tenth generation. We both like organized religion
and dislike its opposite, disorganized religion. We think the 21st
century may be a portal to a new Dark Age, and we dislike darkness because
we like light.
Most atheists I know, the city mouse once told me, are
unbelievers because belief requires courage, fortitude and an absorbent and creative
imagination. The post-moderns are atheists, many of them, not because they
disbelieve in God but because intellectually they are slovenly, full of half
thoughts and startlingly improbable surmises. This posture, this blank
indifference to the scorching lessons of history and common sense, this vast
well of loneliness in the center of being, represents a new paganism, more
robust perhaps than the old paganism savaged by Lucian.
She likes Lucian. She scowled when I reminded her that Karl Marx
liked Lucian too.
“Yes, but would Lucian have liked Marx?” she asked.
Probably not. A modern Lucian would feature Marx prominently
in his updated “Philosophies for Sale.”
Has Biden, I asked her, matured enough to wean himself from
the Obama presidency? This, it seems to me, is the most important question.
Marx said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second
time as farce. Are we at the doorstep of a farcical presidency? And if we are,
who will notice the farce?
She writes back:
To the Country Mouse,
Old fruit doesn't mature; it rots.
The second part of
your question is the more important: If there is a farce, who will notice it?
Largely because of its hearty distaste for Trump, the national media has
committed itself to a certain course of thought and action. It has, in other
words, made commitments. And commitments are fly paper; once you attach
yourself to it, flight becomes impossible. You end up, ultimately defending
the absurd.
We find much mention
in the media of “polarization,” for instance, most of it attributed to Trump’s
bad manners. That he is bad mannered few will doubt. In disputation, Trump
prefers the club rather than the rapier, and with that club he has repeatedly
bashed the heads of media adepts and political challengers. Left leaning media heads
are soreheads, of course, and have returned the bashing tenfold. It is
impossible in Connecticut commentary to find even a handful of pleasant or
neutral references to Trump. And not a few commentators and reporters have made
it a point, on the eve of the 2020 elections, to encourage Connecticut
Republicans to denounce the nominal head of the national Republican Party. In
the absence of a robust denunciation, it has been suggested, the political
futures of such Republicans will be very much in doubt. One imagines the more
virulent of anti-Trumsters in Connecticut’s media keeping a list of errant
Republicans and checking it twice. Nor have there been many ardent defenses of
Trump among moderate – i.e. fiscally conservative and socially liberal -- Connecticut
Republicans. We know that silence in politics and law signifies assent.
Consider the
accusation in the abstract: Trump has
polarized politics. Has he now?
We know that it takes
two poles to polarize. An impeachment polarization by Democrats began even before Trump had been sworn into office. And that polarization continued
unabated for the entire length of Trump’s first term. So, who began the
polarization of national politics, the chicken or the egg?
The left leaning media
in Connecticut has been the seedbed of progressive politics in the state. Who
will convincingly doubt it? We are what we are because politics in the state
has been what it has been for the last 30 years. And politics in the state
during the last 30 years has been what it has been because the state’s media
has been what it has been for the last 30 years – humorlessly and reflexively
progressive.
You are right: A real
Lucian would blow the whole thing to bits.
We had all better get ready for a progressive Coronavirus
winter.
How do we identify the modern progressive? He or she is the
person who offers a solution to a problem and is unwilling to accept the notion
that the solution will lead to what has been called “unintended consequences.” This
absurd idea – that for every problem there is only one acceptable solution and
that the solution progressives favor will bring in its train no adverse consequences
– is the mark of a true modern progressive.
Going masked and sequestration are the “solutions” to the Coronavirus
“pandemic.” Sequestration carries in its train no adverse consequences. Masks
and sequestration are curative rather than, as some “scientists” suspect, prophylactics.
Flattening the Coronavirus curve is the same as eliminating Coronavirus. You
can close or partly close businesses in Connecticut for a half year and these
closures will not be attended by disastrous economic consequences. We need not
consider these unimportant secondary consequences because there can be no
causal connection between politically induced economic shutdowns and mental or physical
health. You can shut down the General Assembly for a half year and the political
business of the state will continue ploddingly along as it always has.
But it won’t.
Coronavirus rather than politicians have closed businesses
in Connecticut.
Really?
If you prevent the General Assembly from assembling in one
spot to do the public’s political business, as it is constitutionally obligated
to do, government in Connecticut, if it is to continue, must be done by permanent agencies, and the governor, armed with plenary power, then becomes a legislative
and executive body. When this happens, has anything changed – anything at all?
You close the courts. Is the closure attended by other consequences? You eliminate
insurance as we know it by instituting a universal health care system. Will the
replacement system be less or more costly? Will the product produced by a
government run insurance system be more or less desirable to people forced to
buy or pay for the product? Will the people who consume the product be the same
people who buy the product? Will the enforced disassociation between purchasing
and consumption be attended by any adverse unintended consequences? You close a bar. Other than driving the bar
out of business, what else is lost?
People can buy liquor at a package store. They can drink at home alone.
Do people go to bars for liquor alone? Of course not. They go to bars and
restaurants and theatre productions to mingle with other people – because sociability
lies at the very root of the human project. It is what makes us human. Sociability
is the efficient cause, linguists will tell you, of language.
We are sociable, therefore we are human.
This is exactly what history teaches us. Agriculture, the
search for grain products – hops was one of them – led humankind out of the
cave into small agricultural based communities. Language itself is a product of
social interaction. Communication made communities possible. Agricultural man produced language at the same
time he was producing beer. The connection between language and beer is more
intimate, more causal, than the connection between progressivism and social
progress. The shutting down of businesses, the sequestration of humanity into
modern caves, anti-social monasteries overseen by severe, joy killing, saintly politicians
is the very definition of regression, and regression, however much it may
benefit politicians, is the opposite of progress. In a practical atheist state, politicians
have become a new priestly caste; this too is not a sign of progress.
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