Tuesday was election day, an off-year election. I didn’t vote this year, not as a protest, but only as an expression of my rootless circumstance. In lieu of voting, I’d like to take a few moments to meditate on the state of American politics in 1997.
The phrase that keeps rolling through my mind is, “Gosh darn it all to heck.” The keys words in that phrase – “gosh,” “darn” and “heck” – are all mitigated oaths. They are safer, nicer alternatives to words once found offensive in polite company. While some aspects of American life are plagued by litigation, the current urge for mitigation is no less strong. We are mitigating many of our vices – decaffeinated coffee, non-alcoholic beer, turkey bologna, fat-free ice cream. I know any number of people who pass their days in the constant presence of light cigarettes and diet soda. You take away the caffeine, the nicotine, the sugar – what’s the point? Why not just give it up altogether? I think it’s because we’re addicted not to the chemicals, but to the act of drinking any kind of soda, smoking any kind of cigarette. We’re hooked on the process rather than the substance, so we continually mitigate the substance to assuage our guilt about continuing the process.
But wasn’t I supposed to be talking about politics? In a way, I am. By looking at trends in the way we as individuals treat our physical bodies we gain insight into the way we as a nation treat the body politic. I don’t think you have to look much further than the current crop of national leaders, such as they are, for confirmation. Clinton and Gore, Gingrich and Lott are the national political equivalent of the light cigarettes and diet soda crowd, addicted to the electoral cycle and the powerbroking and dealmaking and the common welfare went out with the sugar and the caffeine, except when trotted out at speech time. Witness the debate on campaign finance. Both Republican and Democrats only find it useful as a cudgel with which to beat the other party, then rely on our old friend mitigation to make a few cosmetic changes in the law and keep on with the addiction.
Now, if these men were in on the monologue, I know what they’d say. They’d chuckle and bring out the old platitudes about “politics being the art of the possible” and “you’ve got to go along to get along.” I understand those concepts, but I’m not buying them. Our political system today is as corrupt as it has been at the worst periods in our history. This is no time to “go along.” My interpretation of the news out of Washington today is that our politics is not the art of the possible, but the art of the plausible. The real two-party system is composed of the Ins and the Outs. The Ins are beholden to the big money interests and they will feed the public the most outrageous confabulations to satisfy the needs of those moneyed interests.
These politics of plausibility have reached or exceeded the limits for many Americans, but because there has been no real progress on issues like campaign finance reform, many of us feel alienated from our own political system and it’s no surprise that I’m not the only one absent from the voting booth.
The Art of the Plausible
Tuesday was election day, an off-year election. I didn’t vote this year, not as a protest, but only as an expression of my rootless circumstance. In lieu of voting, I’d like to take a few moments to meditate on the state of American politics in 1997.
The phrase that keeps rolling through my mind is, “Gosh darn it all to heck.” The keys words in that phrase – “gosh,” “darn” and “heck” – are all mitigated oaths. They are safer, nicer alternatives to words once found offensive in polite company. While some aspects of American life are plagued by litigation, the current urge for mitigation is no less strong. We are mitigating many of our vices – decaffeinated coffee, non-alcoholic beer, turkey bologna, fat-free ice cream. I know any number of people who pass their days in the constant presence of light cigarettes and diet soda. You take away the caffeine, the nicotine, the sugar – what’s the point? Why not just give it up altogether? I think it’s because we’re addicted not to the chemicals, but to the act of drinking any kind of soda, smoking any kind of cigarette. We’re hooked on the process rather than the substance, so we continually mitigate the substance to assuage our guilt about continuing the process.
But wasn’t I supposed to be talking about politics? In a way, I am. By looking at trends in the way we as individuals treat our physical bodies we gain insight into the way we as a nation treat the body politic. I don’t think you have to look much further than the current crop of national leaders, such as they are, for confirmation. Clinton and Gore, Gingrich and Lott are the national political equivalent of the light cigarettes and diet soda crowd, addicted to the electoral cycle and the powerbroking and dealmaking and the common welfare went out with the sugar and the caffeine, except when trotted out at speech time. Witness the debate on campaign finance. Both Republican and Democrats only find it useful as a cudgel with which to beat the other party, then rely on our old friend mitigation to make a few cosmetic changes in the law and keep on with the addiction.
Now, if these men were in on the monologue, I know what they’d say. They’d chuckle and bring out the old platitudes about “politics being the art of the possible” and “you’ve got to go along to get along.” I understand those concepts, but I’m not buying them. Our political system today is as corrupt as it has been at the worst periods in our history. This is no time to “go along.” My interpretation of the news out of Washington today is that our politics is not the art of the possible, but the art of the plausible. The real two-party system is composed of the Ins and the Outs. The Ins are beholden to the big money interests and they will feed the public the most outrageous confabulations to satisfy the needs of those moneyed interests.
These politics of plausibility have reached or exceeded the limits for many Americans, but because there has been no real progress on issues like campaign finance reform, many of us feel alienated from our own political system and it’s no surprise that I’m not the only one absent from the voting booth.