All of us are broken.
Some of us in ways that are immediately visible, more of us in secret. For some of us our brokenness is the salient fact of our existence, all our dreams and dreads coalesce around our suffering. Every action we take is influenced by the gravity of our wounds. That's why some people think that life is pain.
But if all of us are broken, a lot of us have nothing to complain about. We live in a good place, we get all we need to eat, we can read. We get to argue about things that don't really matter all that much, like whether the FBI director was just doing his duty and covering his butt or trying to influence a national election or whether a college football coach might really be worth the $9 million a year he's being paid.
We can even pretend that these things are important to us, that vague brave-sounding themes of social justice and peace resonate in our hearts, calling us to make the world better. Maybe we can pretend that we do what we do not because we're looking to resolve some old inner quarrel but because we've moved beyond the need to care strictly for ourselves and can afford to serve some larger constituency.
I don't know much about that. I don't know what the world needs. Maybe not another broken man confronting his own emptiness on the world stage, with bombs and soldiers under his command. Maybe not another bully incapable of recognizing his own ordinariness.
Other people say, sometimes in harsh words, that we don't need another politician either. We don't need someone who knows how things work, because the way things work isn't the way things ought to work. And I don't disagree with that. But politics isn't metaphysics, it's arm wrestling. It's squeezing another half-mill out of a reluctant tax base to pay to keep up the library. It's like those Argentine generals say, "the art of the possible."
Or to drag out old Matthew Arnold, "there is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice," and there are no more proudly practical people than our politicians. The first thing is always to get elected, to position one's self at the delta of power. Only after securing the job is it possible to bring ideas to bear on policy.
And one of the central problems of democracy is that the skill set that makes an electoral champion is very different from what's required of an effective administrator or legislator. Governance is largely detail work, a series of fine adjustments, each one occasioning friction and pushback. Compromise is necessary; deals must be cut.
But to appeal to a sufficient number of voters, one has to appear fierce and holy, a crusader intent on changing what will certainly not be changed. While some people are dismayed by Donald Trump's apparent lack of understanding about how government works, his supporters understand that it's precisely the point. Just put the right man in the job and let him brook no nonsense and let's see how that works. After all, we've tried the other Sisyphean way for so long now, and what has it brought us to?
(Only the greatest country the world has ever known, some might counter. Or at least a pretty good--some say great--nation of laws. Hardly perfect, but workable for most of us who only have our tax bills and insurance premiums to complain about. Things could be worse.)
Still, we are not completely rational animals. We crave drama and project our inner vacancies on the world at large. We are needy and selfish, and these terrors find expression in our public lives as well as our private moments. When you see the videos at the rallies, when you hear the shouting and the taunting and the unhinged rhetoric, remember that when we are hurting it sometimes does us good to howl. And understand that these people are hurting.
Because they've been disappointed. Because they've been over-promised. Or because they have done what they were told they should do and still find themselves struggling to hold onto what they perceive as--and what may very well be--a genuinely tenuous place in our society. The shame belongs to those who would exploit their anxieties, those who would present the world not as the often random, rarely organized thicket of contradictions and best guesses it is but as the carefully plotted conspiracy of others.
People get it wrong, though, when they talk about America being inevitably great, as though we possess some divine charter. It could go sideways on us, and those who pay attention to history might even believe that America's decline is inevitable. In the long run, the Lincoln Memorial's like the statue of Ozymandias.
And the guy immortalized inside that temple knew it. Though the Founding Fathers resolved that this Republic "should not perish from the Earth," Lincoln remembered the story of the great--and forgotten--Eastern potentate who asked his wise men to formulate a sentence that would always "be true and appropriate in all times and situations."
They came back to him with the words, "And this, too, shall pass away."
Yet gloomy as he was, as demon-bit and broken a president as we've ever had, Lincoln hoped that mightn't be quite true, and that we might endure through the "best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us."
Our salvation is never in politics. It's personal. But politics might be one of the ways we blow it.
Yes, things are rigged. But not in the ways that Trump--who knows better--suggests. He is part of the class that gets over, that wins not because they possess more talent or even luck but because they enjoy certain privileges. Hillary Clinton is part of that club as well, as am I and as you likely are too unless you found this newspaper blowing through the camp or shelter or street in which you find yourself.
Most of us enjoy entitlements we haven't--and that we needn't--earn. Those are our rights. That's where we start, that's what's inviolable. The rest is negotiable. We get to try to figure out how to best live together.
That's hard work. It's not a job for a preening narcissist trying to service his own brokenness by notching another win.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 11/01/2016