OPINION

We have some questions

Stephen Miller's ominous-sounding imperative notwithstanding, I have some questions for this president.

Questions like:

What did you know and when did you know it?

Who died and made you the Queen of Sheba?

Why are your ties so long?

Have you no shame?

Lock who up?

I'll save them for now. Things are happening pretty quickly, and anything I write about so-called "current affairs" today is likely to be obsolete by the time this ink is dry. I can't begin to guess what might happen next--maybe POTUS will try to appoint Pepe the Frog as Michael Flynn's successor.

And it won't matter, because nobody changes anybody's mind about anything.

I wonder if it's true. I find myself re-evaluating things all the time. I started out kind of liking George W. Bush, then didn't like him, and now like him again. Bill Clinton was a serial disappointer who made Wall Street the Democratic Party's favored client, but I can't stay mad at him. I can usually find a way to forgive politicians for being politicians--by not expecting them to be especially brave or especially honest. I can even feel a little pang of empathy for a bewildered rich dude who didn't understand what he was getting into and now can't believe that not everyone is willing to respect his authority.

It's highly annoying that this administration won't simmer down and let the world ignore them for a while. It would be nice not to write about their ongoing battle with reality. But we can't keep waiting for grownups to show up and shut down this silliness because we are the grownups now. And that thought doesn't provide a whole lot of confidence.

I think a lot of us are just paying attention to this until Game of Thrones comes back.

And I get that. I'd rather write about baseball than this mess, or music, or dogs. A long time ago, when I was young and callow, I might have claimed to have been interested in politics, proud to be among the cynical and wised-up who understood how the game was played and how little of it had to do with the pretty lies thrown out for public consumption.

But that was a long time ago, before discovering how dull and meaningful it was, before understanding how people's lives are affected by the choices invariably ill-informed voters make in the booth. Before figuring out that it's no great trick to stir up a crowd if you're willing to flatter them. We are all susceptible to wishfulness. And we all get fooled sometimes.

These days, I don't pay attention to politicians because they're interesting. I pay attention because they're dangerous.

We'd all be better served if we talked more about what we're trying to achieve as a society and less about the processes of attaining and holding high office. We ought to be thinking about the moral implications of a late capitalist society operating in a relativistic universe. In a moral vacuum, everything that advances our interests is "right," and any advantage left unpressed is a dumb mistake.

Unchecked by any sense of sin--by conscience--we are freed to deal brutally with each other. Some do this, and maybe it's remarkable that most of us don't.

Or maybe it's because most of us don't want to live in that sort of Darwinian world.

We want to live in a country that behaves itself, that follows international law and holds itself out as a land of freedom and opportunity. Most of us crave meaning as much as we do comfort or wealth and so we're willing to make minor sacrifices so other might be elevevated. Right?

That's why most of us only grumble a little when it's time to pay our taxes--we don't resent the schools our kids don't personally attend or the roads upon which we rarely drive or the salary of the policeman we hope we never meet in the middle of the night. Most of us aren't genuninely avaricious, we just wonder if we're being played for suckers. We just wonder if it's fair that we should have to pay so much.

Those questions are as fair as they are difficult to answer; some people don't think anything that might be accomplished privately should be done with public funds. I think public schools are important and that there is a real need to fund public broadcasting. I think public art is a good idea and that cities benefit from planning. I don't mind if the government plants a few trees or maintains a few parks.

But government will never provide us with a morally coherent society--government will never provide us with solutions. If your kids cannot read, I don't think the brunt of the blame ought to fall on the schools. If you have a debilitating appetite, I don't think government ought necessarily offer you succor. I believe in self-sufficiency and compassion and the power of love and that politics has very little to do with the way most people--even the people with the bumper stickers and intellectual mascots--live their lives.

Politics today is mostly pastime, and some people follow it for the same reasons that their grandfathers might have followed baseball. Because there is always something to talk about, and because it's not hard to tell who is on what team. Newspapers overemphasize politics precisely because it is one thing on which it's possible to report constantly--because you will always find someone willing to say something about the exercise or abuse of power.

Like sports, it gives us winners and losers and the drama of competition.

And it matters. Maybe it matters more now than it has in a while--maybe it matters less. Whatever you think of him, this POTUS is not the first with outsize appetites. He's hardly the first who has polarized opinions. He's hardly the first who has been blindly defended by his loyalists.

In other ways, he is unprecedented. But maybe that's less on him than on us. For after all, he is trying to do some of the things he promised he do when he was campaigning. His position is that he's the same guy who got elected. He didn't change, and while some of us wish we would, he probably won't. Fair enough.

It's his job, until he loses it. It doesn't really matter what his qualifications are.

But he's not the Tsar, he's not even the boss. We're his boss. He answers to us.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Editorial on 02/19/2017

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