Can we agree that there is something very
poisonous and wrong with the state of the union
when our finest leaders chose not to seek
the highest office in our land, even at a time
of danger and crisis, while 70% of the nation
has lost all confidence in virtually everyone
in Washington?
I met Norman Mailer once. When I was a very
young man I was with a group of people he
knew when he strutted into the room and
invited his friends to join him for a beveridge.
I got swept with the crowd to the bar, too young
to legally drink, and too drunk to remember much of what was said.
I do remember one thing. I paraphrase for
lack of clarity due to intoxication, but this is
a fair representation of what he said:
The job of the novelist and the journalist is not
to kiss the ass of the establishment, or be a
simple partisan of the right or left, even though
he called himself at various times "a man of
the left" or a "left conservative". The job of
the novelist and journalist is to attack, provoke,
to get to the heart of the matter, to paint a
portrait of what is really happening in a way
that gives the reader whole new insights into
the complexities and truths of the matter.
One can sweep aside much of the pittypatter
of the cable news and insider blogs as the
clash of irrelevance and nonentity, the mere
regurgitation of dinner party talk, insider
lunches, courtier chatter and politician spin
debating in their common out-of-touchedness
with what is really happening in America.
The low point in our times was how falsehood
and lies about pre-war Iraq came to saturate
the front page of the New York Times, the editorial page of the
Washington Post, and the floor of the United States Congress. The high
point was when Stephen Colbert made himself
unwelcome at the White House correspondents
dinner, with the legacy that poor Rich Little was
invited the next year, to tell sad and inoffensive jokes about Richard
Milhous Nixon.
We now have presidential debates that are the
idiot's delight where some of the most qualified
candidates are barely invited to speak, where
candidates are given ninety seconds to discuss
World War III, where the candidates and voters
are insulted with idiot questions such as:
Will you guarantee that Iran will never have nuclear weapons (a
guarantee that can be enforced only by the willingness of the candidate
to hypothetically guarantee a thermonuclear attack against Iran, because
that is the only way to 100% guarantee the
undesirable result.)?
(But these debates are not about the true complexities of the world,
they are about ninety seconds of junk food, spoon fed by consultants,
offering bromides to create or alleviate fear, depending on the
candidates' motive, offered by "reporters" who view their job as to
illicit headlines, or score points with
the politicians who feed them questions, or
look clever, rather than educate or inform
the citizenry about who should lead the free
world at a time of crisis and danger.)
In last night's debate, a campaign that has had
virtually zero to say about Pakistan (which may
be our greatest security threat) (except for Joe Biden, who often does
not receive permission
to speak during the debates, and who appears
to be running for Secretary of State), the great
contribution of last night's debate was to elicit
from two candidates, including the Democratic
frontrunner, that sometimes our great nation
must sacrifice human rights to protect our
security (a view that is shameful and false
because it misses the heart of the soul of
the matter we should be debating), which
cannot be spoken in ninety seconds of bromides written by consultants
uttered in sound bites, which is this:
The heart of what has gone wrong is our
disrespect and devaluation of our democratic
values, procedures, discourses and debates
at home which have led to gravely unwise
disasters and our failure to remember our
highest values abroad, which has led to
policies such as torture, most recently
enabled by a Democratic Senate, that
create enemies and terrorists and lose
the battle of ideas which by far is the
most important battle we must win, and
are now losing.
Digression, memo to Joe Biden: if you really
want to run for President and not Secretary
of State, the next time you are not allowed to
speak in a presidential debate because the
powers do not believe you are an important
enough candidate, and the others are speaking
triteness in thirty seconds, walk off the stage in
protest and give a press conference outside
that speaks truth and substance and depth
about what really needs to be said, and is
not being said, in what passes for our national
debates.
Regarding Al Gore, having been an advocate,
supporter, friend, whatever, for a very long
time, I reserve the right to say this:
It is a damn shame that he feels he has more
important things to do, than be president of the
United States and leader of the free world with
our country engulfed in divisiveness and our
world threatened with a planetary emergency
that will not be solved by prizes, awards or
venture capital funds.
Those who believe in him the most are reduced
to being virtual beggers (a position I will not
take which is why I have simply written him
off for 2008 after my best efforts have come
to naught).
In my view, no candidate was even remotely
as right for the times as Gore in 2008, and
no result is more tragic for the times than
the fact that he concluded he was above
participating in American democracy
in the one way that matters the most.
Gore can win the Oscar, the Emmy, the Nobel,
and win every award except being named the
manager of the New York Yankess, and join
every venture capital fund and private equity
fund and make important documentary films,
but the planetary emergency, the crisis of $100
oil, the evils and dangers of this, are about
power and powerful forces that create these
dangers and corruptions. Those powerful
forces are now laughing and mocking and feeling great relief that one
more threat to their power structure, a President who understands the
danger and solution the most, has chosen to watch from outside the one
arena that truly matters.
How sad and symbolic: for us, for him, for our
democracy.
Senator Hagel is a more complicated story
because he is trapped in a political party that
he could have led to renewed greatness but
which treats him as a prophet without honor.
Like Al Gore for the Democrats, being right
does not reap the great rewards in our current
system, which has created the tragedies we
watch every night on the network news.
Chuck Hagel is one of the great Senators who
walks the floor of that chamber, which is no
long what the Founding Fathers intended,
which is not nearly what it used to be, a man
of enormous credibility, patriotism and respect
from both sides of the aisle, who has an
extraordinary reach of admiration from those
who opposed the Iraq war the strongest to
those who have served our country the most
bravely who view him, correctly, as a great
and true champion of active duty troops and
American veterans.
Gore and Hagel may well have greatness in
their futures, but what is sad for our democracy
is the role they play, and do not play, in our present. Something about
our democratic
system pushes our best people out of it,
depriving our citizens of the best men and
women who should lead our country, depriving
our world of the best leadership America can
provide, depriving our troops of the wisest and
most noble commanders in chief who choose
not to compete in the arena to be commander in chief.
We leave the arena to those who hunger
for power the most, who raise the most money,
who have the most consultants, who utter the
trite and insignificant platitudes and bromides
in debates that do not equal what our best
young men and women can say in their civics
classes in school.
Imagine what could have been, with an October
debate about the future of America with Al Gore
representing the Democrats and Chuck Hagel
representing the Repubicans (or independents,
a subject for another day).
In 1960 Norman Mailer wrote one of the great
political essays in the history of freedom, titled
"Superman Comes To The Supermarket" which was written about John
Fitzgerald Kennedy at the time of the 1960 Democratic Convention
in Los Angeles.
Mailer wrote about the limits of American
politics and the aspirations for greatness
that are the precondition for transcending
those limits and making America what it
can be, what it should be, what it has been
before, what it must be again.
Mailer was right about JFK, and right about
America, and right about the aspiration for
heroism in politics which is the height of
true Americanism and has led us to the
highest heights in our nation's history.
Perhaps one of our candidates will rise to
those heights, and then again, perhaps not.
We are leaving a lot to chance, and America
deserves far better than what our politics are
giving her, and if past is prologue, we are now
sailing further into very dangerous waters.