Most of us will always be able to preserve our self-delusions. Most of us will always entertain a least a vague and nagging doubt about our virtuelessness.
There is a part of me that feels sorry for Justin Harris, the Republican member of the Arkansas House of Representatives who represents West Fork in Washington County. I cannot imagine how difficult these couple of weeks have been for him and his family, how hard it must be for him to venture out in public after the investigative vivisection he was subjected to by the Arkansas Times' Benjamin Hardy. (Good job.) What people say he has done seems horrific, and I'm sure he's gone over and over it in his head. I'm sure he's rationalized what he did, and that he genuinely feels picked on and sorry for himself. People have said many unkind things about him, not all of them particularly germane to what we're all euphemistically calling "re-homing."
He is low-hanging fruit. He may have to resign. He should. He might be called to account legally. I hope he is, I hope the wheels of justice grind over this case for awhile, that we consider all the circumstances that led to what everyone--including Justin Harris--would agree was a tragedy.
I don't think he's a victim, even if we accept his versions of events. But I would argue that he's a human being. And while I'm not urging that anyone forgive him whatever needs to be forgiven, I don't think it hurts anyone to ease up a bit on the cruelty. No matter how well he regards himself, he's not so big a boy he cannot be bullied.
Beside, it's obvious that he's not the issue. He's just one of those folks who exploited the free-floating loathing of Barack Obama and broke himself off a very small piece of power. Sure, when you match up his rhetoric against his actions there's reason to suspect him of hypocrisy, but he's hardly alone in that regard. I suspect that at least some people who profess to be concerned about the children involved in the case are secretly happy that one of these self-righteous tea bag types has been embarrassed.
Not to say shamed, because there's little evidence that Harris is ashamed of anything he's done. (Wait, an "exorcism?" This is becoming a Flannery O' Connor story. Maybe this guy should be liable for those little girls' therapy down the line.) Though I guess it'd be poor politics if he'd admit it.
Another Arkansan (perhaps using the term loosely) who ought to be ashamed (but defiantly isn't) is Sen. Tom Cotton, who somehow convinced 46 other Republican senators to join him in a publicity stunt that violated the spirit of Americanism even if it didn't technically violate the letter of the law itself. And I trust that Cotton, a Harvard-educated lawyer, knew exactly what he was doing when he saw fit to lecture the Iranian leadership on the way the U.S. government works.
Because while Sen. Cotton may be a lot of things, many of them admirable, he's not stupid. I'm sure that if I was vaguely aware of the provisions of the Logan Act before last week, he not only knew it existed but understood there was no practical way he'd face any sort of sanction for exercising his First Amendment rights. (I'm not sure I think the Logan Act is a great idea. Let me think on it.)
He probably also knew that his actions wouldn't exactly be unprecedented--he probably knew that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger may have prolonged the Vietnam War by seven years by undermining Lyndon Johnson before the 1968 election. He probably knew that Ronald Reagan and his then-campaign manager William J. Casey met with the Iranians to broker a secret deal to deny incumbent President Jimmy Carter the political advantage of having American hostages released on his watch.
Maybe he admired those political gambits. Maybe he thought they were pretty cool.
Or maybe he just got the idea while watching House of Cards.
Anyway, the truth is a lot of the rhetoric that people are throwing around about treason and the Logan Act is silly hyperbole. Cotton is protected by something called the Speech or Debate clause which protects members from Congress from being charged with a crime for their "official speech"--stuff they say in the course of doing their job.
Now the clause does hold up short of protecting "Treason, Felony and Breach of Peace," and I know some people are insisting that what Cotton did was treasonous, but let's get real here. I don't doubt the man loves his country. I don't doubt he thinks he was doing, in some sense, "the right thing." I wouldn't have him up on charges or even suggest he be censured. Politics is, after all, the art of the possible, and nearly half the Senate signed the letter, so maybe we ought to let that go.
Besides, Tom Cotton is still popular here. And there's a insipid but virulent strain of know-nothingness that contends that's all that really matters. (We've certainly seen that demonstrated in this last legislative session.)
Let's not pretend the letter wasn't legal. But let's also recognize it wasn't statecraft, that it was closer to fraternity prank than The Federalist Papers. It didn't help anything other than maybe Cotton's standing with the Obama deniers back home. It wasn't even disappointing business as usual; it was a dismaying escalation in political partisanism. It wasn't brave.
And it betrays a lack of respect in the people who sent him to Congress. Cotton assumes that the people who are disappointed in this president would just naturally approve of any cheap trick to embarass him and sabotage his efforts. After all, Barack Obama is not like us, he ain't from here. (Let's make up stories about where he is from.)
It's not all on him. The beating Arkansas has recently taken from the national press has frankly been well deserved. But the thing is, guys, we elected him. (And Justin Harris, and all those frustratingly narrow folks in the Arkansas legislature too.)
We decided they were worthy of a certain level of trust, we've endowed them with a certain level of responsibility. As much as we might make fun of them on Facebook, they have probably become used to ordinary folks deferring to them in public, silently reading their tables and refilling their water glasses while they decide what to do to us.
It doesn't really matter why people vote for the people they vote for, or why our best and brightest tend to get away from the rest of us as efficiently as they can manage; it only matters that they do. And sure, there are a few here who will fight what they see as the good fight. We need to take into account the ways that even unlikely people will sometimes do unselfish and brave things. We can't just cede the game to the cynical and opportunistic, but we do need to understand that we are all corruptible. Most of us are lucky that we will never face a genuine test of our courage. Most of us will never know whether we'd mislead the Nazis about the Jews we've hidden in our attic.
But you don't necessarily have to be courageous to be a good person. You just have to be honest with yourself.
It is ultimately our fault. They're pandering to us. And like the old football coaches say, you are what your record says you are.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 03/15/2015