Detail from Rembrandt, The Night Watch, 1642. Public Domain.
. . . Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. . . .
—Shakespeare, “The Seven Ages of Man” from As You Like It
Young men with beards think they can fix everything for us.
Not long ago, clean-shaven young men thought they could fix everything for us.
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Well, STOP THE PRESSES, Dear Reader, because I’ve got a news bulletin: Everything is not fixed.
They’ve worked at it and worked at it and fought fiercely for their constituents and—guess what?—the only part they left out was the fixing of everything.
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Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be endured.
As to those things that can be fixed, we’ve mostly got to do it ourselves.
To imagine that politicians will fix everything—or would, if not thwarted by opposing, evil, politicians—is arrestingly naïve.
If politicians solved more problems than they create, we’d run out of problems.
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Of course we must have politicians, to divide the spoils among us and administer our public institutions. But Politics holds no key to a New Jerusalem where streets are paved in gold and teardrops never fall.
Here’s the fact of it: We are all in this together, Dear Friend: All broken, jumbled, confused creatures muddling our way through swamps of untoward circumstance.
Swamps of untoward circumstance . . . Paul Klee, The Man of Confusion, 1939. Public Domain.
Each of us gets one life, and it’s altogether imperfect. We are mixed creatures. Our lives are spotted, blotted, their meanings and messages obscure.
Perhaps God could have made us perfect—but at what cost to our souls?
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Beware the temper that looks to some hero to come along and straighten it all out.
Making idols of the prominent, or of the adamant, leads us to loathe our neighbors. Hatred and suspicion of those we live with is the worst form of hell on earth.
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It might be better just to relax.
Resolve to enjoy what life throws at you, pain and pleasure together, weal and woe alike. Do what good you can, when you can. Forgive others. Forgive yourself.
This—right here, right now—is your chance to witness the grand spectacle of human existence from a front-row seat, and it will be over before you know it.
Dear Reader: My apologies for postponing “Way Out West, Part V” for the second week in a row. It’s just that something came up. Next week, back to what passes for normal around here.
Charlie Kirk and former President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. 15 July 2023. Photo by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.
I came home from an appointment Wednesday afternoon, and my wife asked from the kitchen if I’d heard somebody had been shot—I didn’t quite catch the name.
“Who?”
“Charlie Kirk,” she said. “It’s been on TV.”
“Oh. Charlie Kirk was shot. I’m very sorry to hear that. Who is Charlie Kirk?”
She pointed toward the livingroom, where the television spewed forth the stew of messy details and somber speculation that it always serves up at times like these. It announced in due course that Mr. Kirk had died from the single bullet he received in his throat.
It turns out Charlie Kirk was a conservative political activist, a debater in the political arena, a Trump acolyte, the organizer and head of a huge student movement called Turning Point USA—in all, a Very Big Deal.
I suppose that’s why people, adrift in the rip currents of our era, have been treating his death as a Very Big Deal. The airwaves abound with post-mortem speculations and virtue-freighted posturings. The social media, too.
Charlie Kirk’s fans certainly knew who he was. His critics likewise were very much aware of him. Perhaps I was the only person in America to whom he was not a household name, but then, I’m often accused of not paying attention. It’s really just that I pay attention to other things.
My wife pointed out to me that Kirk’s death cannot be dismissed as unremarkable, having played out amid a crowd of thousands. Kirk was killed at a political event while delivering a political message. The assassin meant the slaying as a political statement.
Before the echoes of the gunshot faded, all sorts of people, speaking or writing in public media, began testifying that the central meaning of this event is political.
Some say, “A man speaking his mind peacefully has been silenced. This is a threat to our First Amendment right of free speech.”
Some say, “His views were reprehensible. He deserved what he got.”
Some say, “When will we learn? We must re-establish civility in our public life.”
Some, like the governor of Utah, see this moment as a possible inflection point—an opportunity to change course as our nation struggles with divisive ideologies.
All these diverse voices place the problem and the solution in the realm of politics.
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I think it goes deeper.
A man took a high-velocity bullet in his throat. His lifeblood poured out and his life was ended. His wife was widowed, his children left fatherless. The act was done by a man in the grip of powerful emotions he could not, or did not, control. His rage was murderous; he took it out in violence.
The ancient human drama of killer and killed is the primary meaning of this event. The beliefs and polemical effectiveness of the victim, the beliefs and operational effectiveness of the assassin, are secondary.
Our dogged insistence that the main meaning is political keeps us from seeing the real problem.
It leads our spokespeople to say fatuous things time and again, things that we know are not true, are meant only to assuage our sense of hopelessness. “We’ve got to understand the killer’s motive, so we can make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”
Really? How has that been working out?
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We in our oh-so-enlightened society are loath to admit the flawed nature of human beings. It used to be called Original Sin, back when we believed in sin. But to believe in sin, you have to believe in God, for sin is a crime not only against one’s fellow man but against God. And we have no room for God.
Instead, we assume we are naturally good, or at least neutral, beings. We do evil only because we are influenced by a negative environment. If only We—that is, Society—learned how to take the right approach, We could eliminate crime and violence. We need to educate people better.
If only Charlie Kirk had embraced a more enlightened political viewpoint, he would not have invited his own destruction.
If only the shooter had understood the First Amendment, he would not have sought to win his argument through violence.
If only we all took lessons in tact and diplomacy, this kind of existential conflict would be avoided.
What a mighty opinion we have of our human powers!
If any of us are grown-ups, we should know by now that none of these things are true; that our powers and our understanding are limited; that even our internal will to do good is apt to falter in the face of felt needs and fears.
Think of all the people you know. Surely you know someone who embodies, in one person, both saint and sinner: the best kind of person and the worst kind of person, inseparable and unaware.
Not many of us are prepared to take the thought further and examine ourselves for signs of this saint/sinner dichotomy. Maybe we’re afraid of what we’d find.
My point is, we are mixed beings, both good and evil in one sweet package. Education will take us only so far. We need firm guidelines, if only to protect society. And because even those boundaries will never completely rein in our waywardness, we also need forgiveness.
There is a Stoic in me who says, “Do not expect much of people. We are weak reeds, unreliable stanchions. When people deliver goodness, be agreeably surprised. When they deliver badness, do not condemn but look to yourself and straighten out your own inner being.”
There is also a Christian in me who says, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. I am only human.”
What Society needs is not some miraculous, altogether unattainable, political accommodation. People have been wrangling over divergent interests since the dawn of history. We haven’t got it all worked out yet, and we never will.
What Society needs is humility. We need, for starters, the simple recognition that Man is not perfectible. We need some firm guidelines enforced socially, and we need a spiritual basis for hope.
For me, it’s enough to trust that God has the answers, which must remain to me mysterious. I can live with that, but then I’m old.
Really, he only called me a “Nazi sympathizer.” But at that level of calumny, how significant is the distinction?
I am neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathizer, and I’m not sure the person who called me one could tell a real Nazi from a Cumberland Presbyterian.
Cumberland Presbyterians, photo by Delmont Wilson for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, 1964. Fair use.
After half a century in which I have purposely abjured political discourse, I found myself squarely in the path of a carelessly tossed mudball. It happened when I challenged a Facebook friend’s casual labeling of certain local officials, by name, as Nazis. They were Nazis, it seemed, because they performed their official duties in a way my Facebook friend did not like.
It’s easy enough to imagine that people who regularly talk politics in public may be Nazified, vilified, and mudslung as a matter of course.
Perhaps they get used to all this besmirchery.
I, however, cannot.
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Karl Marx. Public domain.
Vitriol was routine in our community around 1970. A mob of self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionaries dominated the UW-Madison campus. On any street corner, you could hear fellow students and not-so-students praising Marx’s theory on alienation of the workers or critiquing the more recent writings of Herbert Marcuse.
They were intellectuals, you see. Nonetheless, they had stingers.
Clinging to ordinary, plain-vanilla political thoughts left over from the 1950s and early -60s, I was drummed out of revolutionary society. When I sought a clarification of intent in an impromptu soviet convened ostensibly to oppose a particular strategem of the Vietnam War, the organizers snickered at me and swiftly moved on to the next speaker.
A small cell of leftist students whom I knew, busy plotting to unionize the employer who had created their part-time jobs, lowered their voices theatrically, loudly noting that “Spy Sommers” was in the room. As if I gave a damn how they amused themselves.
You may not know this, Dear Reader, but Your New Favorite Writer is one of Those Timid People. There are quite a few of us. When attacked, we choose flight, not fight. Over the years, I’ve added layers of bluff and bravado for self-protection, as many of us do, but deep inside the 79-year-old author dwells a shy little boy.
That’s why I withdrew from politics. It frightened me. Besides the avoidance of bruising battles in boring polemical trenches where nothing I prized could be won . . . I have also kept from being wounded.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” Mom said. That sounds comforting, but it doesn’t happen to be true. Words hold power. Words can be wings, bearing you up to a soaring perspective. But words can be weapons. Words can hurt.
For that reason, our parents and teachers, besides giving worthless advice about sticks and stones, also taught kindness and forbearance. Take care, they said, with other people’s feelings. We did not always heed this advice, but we did accept its relevance. I, and possibly you as well, Gentle Reader, grew up in a world where tact and gentleness had a place.
But that world changed very swiftly about 1968.
I returned to college in 1969, after a few years in the uniform of the United States, to find the rules I knew had changed beyond recognition, or were simply dispensed with.
It was now okay to flay your opponents with hateful and slanderous words. This was really nothing more than bullying and intimidation. But as with all topics in those days, it received an intellectual gloss. It was called “the politics of confrontation.”
The politics of confrontation meant this: If someone disagrees with you, even by a trifle—in fact, especially if the disagreement is trivial—then go all scorched-earth on them. Never mind “Come, let us reason together.” Just flame them.
If they stand in your way, use anything up to and including nitrate explosives.
In 1970, after the Kent State massacre on May 4 and the Sterling Hall bombing on August 24, the prospect of bloodshed to overthrow the old order lost a bit of its allure. Our society slipped into a torpid malaise in which old leftists still rumbled and grumbled, but routine commerce and something resembling normality returned to American life.
Yet we never got truly “back to normal.” We never got over the habit of subsituting invective for political discourse. It remains with us to this day. That is one reason politics is so toxic.
This problem is widely acknowledged. Hardly a week goes by without someone’s launching a new, wearily-heralded effort to “restore civility” to our national conversation.
Such attempts are bound to fail, because civility is not the issue. Civility, in the political context, was a permanent victim of 1968.
The only thing that will save us now is human decency.
Many of our fellow-citizens cannot imagine a person-to-person connection being more important than a partisan platform. There are millions, maybe tens of millions, in whose minds politics is the only occupant.
The vacuity of these people’s social and intellectual lives gets filled with formless, reflexive anger, which spills over into vicious utterance. They can’t tell you why you are a Nazi. It’s enough to state that you are one. Or a racist, or whatever. Just offhand, by definition or decree.
It absolves them of any compunction, relieves them of any responsibility for the well-being of others. There is no need to treat anyone with what we used to call kindness or decency.
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Dear Reader, it is clear you are not one of those I am talking about.
Yet I hear a whisper from the back of the hall: “In the face of pure evil, niceties can become irrelevant.”
The thing is, I don’t think we often come in contact with pure evil.
I think, rather, we have grown willing to transgress all boundaries of decency in our outraged harassment of those we disagree with, whom we define as evil to salve our consciences.
That’s what I’m torqued about: The abandonment of those curbs and boundaries—that kindness and forbearance—that once kept our politics in a manageable state.
So sue me.
Oh, by the way, I re-checked my facts just five minutes before posting this and can definitely affirm: (1) I continue to think my ordinary, plain-vanilla political thoughts left over from the 1950s and early -60s—and (2) I’m still not a Nazi.
He made me angry, and it could be hard to resolve one’s anger at Joe Nelson.
He made everybody angry. He was an equal opportunity annoyer. You had to take a number.
And before your number came up, he had done something to make you love him.
It wasn’t fair.
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Fred Hampton. UIC Library Digital Collection, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .
In the late 1960s, when the Black Panthers were one of many radical groups trying to start The Revolution, Joe Nelson used to debate politics with Fred Hampton, national vice-chair of the Black Panther Party. Hampton would come into Joe’s print shop in Maywood, Illinois, just to argue.
Joe, once a socialist, was by the 1960s a rock-ribbed Barry Goldwater Republican. He and the bright, articulate young black radical saw most things through opposite ends of the telescope. Both enjoyed the stimulation of their running squabble.
When Hampton was gunned down by law officers in a pre-dawn raid at his Chicago apartment, Joe did not hesitate to call it a police-led assassination. He was a conservative, not a fool.
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Since he was my father-in-law, I spent a fair amount of time with Joe Nelson.
One day I saw him provoke a local store manager. The man was spitting mad. Within a minute, the two were good buddies. They parted with broad smiles. Joe did that kind of thing all the time. You could say it was his M.O.
His dad had been a printer and editor who worked for a newspaper chain, starting small-town weeklies in the Dakotas. Once the local clarion-ledger-press-herald was up and running, he turned it over to someone else and moved on to another little burg to repeat the process. It must have been a sketchy living. Six-year-old Joe and his older brother Maurice were farmed out to a Catholic orphanage for two years because their parents couldn’t feed all four boys. The Nelsons weren’t Catholic, but the good sisters would not turn anyone away.
Even when the family was together, they moved continually. Joe attended thirteen different public schools en route to his high school diploma.
Some kids would wilt and turn inward in such circumstances. Joe toughened up and turned outward. He figured if you wanted friends, you had better make them quickly. He honed that skill.
When I met him, he was in his sixties, a master at getting along with people. He got along with everybody, to whatever extent he chose. He was always in charge of the relationship.
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I met him because I was attracted to his daughter, Joelle, whom I met at Knox College. Fair, feminine, and flirty though she was, I have since come to realize that her sterling character was formed more by her flinty father than by her gracious mother.
Elsa was the soul of respectability and conventionality. Joe, not so much. His mind was keen and penetrating. He did things the way that made sense to him.
When Joelle was a teenager, she had no curfew. By the wisdom of the day, she should have become a wild, out-of-control teen—one of those “crazy, mixed-up kids” the adult world talked about. It never happened. Her father taught her that arbitrary rules were no substitute for good sense and human kindness.
He often called himself an anarchist, of the purest stripe. “If we actually followed Christ and lived the Golden Rule,” he said, “laws would be unnecessary.”
When Joelle went on a date, Joe insisted the young man come into the house and engage in a few minutes of conversation. He always checked the boy’s driver’s license—to make sure the boy had one. Joelle may have chafed at this indignity; but she suffered in silence, then stayed out as late as she pleased.
When she came home—whether at midnight or four a.m.—Joe would be awake in the living room, reading a paper by the light of a table lamp. “Did you have a good time?” he would ask. “Yes, Daddy,” she would say. As she flew up the stairs to her bedroom, he would fold his paper, lock the door, and turn out the lights.
She knew he would never complain about the lateness of her arrival. She also knew he would be at work by six the next morning.
“On a weekend?” I hear you ask. Let me explain, Dear Reader. He was the owner of his print shop. His employees had limited hours; Joe did not. He had to make it work.
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Joe had not always been a printer, though he had learned the trade at his father’s knee.
Sidelined from military service in the Second World War by a pair of disease-scarred eardrums, he had served as a civilian flight instructor at Purdue University, training the pilots of our South American allies.
After the war, having survived the macho antics of his Latin flying students, he got a job as a mechanic at Sky Harbor airport in the Chicago suburbs. He serviced private aircraft for Chicago’s high rollers. Entertainer/impresario Tommy Bartlett, soon to become a Wisconsin water-ski maven, was one of his clients.
When a wealthy customer crash-landed his plane in a field somewhere, Joe would pack up his tools, take a train to the site, patch up the plane enough to get it into the air, and fly it home.
It was a life he loved, but it was an all-hours occupation. It kept him away from home. When he did come home, he found his young tot, Joelle, terrified of her own father. He had become a stranger to her.
So he gave up flying and went into the printing business. That also was demanding, but he was home every night, and his daughter got acquainted with him.
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Joe, right, with his brothers Bob and Maurice. Family photo.
Did I mention that Joe was sociable? His early life gave him the skills not only to form firm friendships quickly but also to negotiate with anyone about anything, on a very practical basis. He had boundless energy, a deep well of patience, and an endless fascination with people.
So naturally, besides running a business, raising a daughter, and participating in church and social functions, he entered politics. He ran for school board and won a seat. The Proviso school district was split between the suburbs of Maywood and Melrose Park. Joe was from Maywood, a town that had been racially integrated since its founding after the Civil War. It was integrated in this sense: Black residents lived in South Maywood and white residents in North Maywood.
The school board, however, was dominated by members from Melrose Park, a heavily Italian city.
Things were done Chicago-style. Joe had run as a reformer, so he was taken for a tense ride in the back of a large automobile, where the facts of life were explained to him. Contracts to paint the district’s several schools were coming up. By long tradition, these contracts were not let by open bidding but were simply divvied up among school board members. Each member got to choose the contractor for one school. The message was loud and clear: Don’t rock the boat.
Joe accepted his status as contract czar for a single school. Competitive bidding on contracts was not a hill he wanted to die on. He found a Maywood neighbor who needed the work and could do the job. [In the original version of this post, I inaccurately asserted that he recruited a minority-owned business to do the job. My wife pointed out that this was not so. I’m afraid my heroic mental image of Joe overwhelmed my usually accurate memory cells.]
The next election cycle, Joe recruited a black candidate, Dr. John Vaughans, for the other Maywood-connected seat on the school board. They campaigned together in the next election and both won. Two mavericks on the seven-member board did not work a miraculous change. But it was a start.
Joe believed in the American ideal of equality, and he could see that African Americans consistently got the short end of the stick. That did not make him a liberal. When teachers went on strike, Joe took a hard line in defense of taxpayers.
He was a tough negotiator. He made sure there were pitchers of cold water at the negotiating table, but he abstained from drinking any. Bargaining sessions could hinge on the relative bladder strengths of the negotiators. Joe’s frequent line was, “Wait a minute. We can always take a recess later, but why don’t take a few extra minutes right now and hash this out? Nobody leaves the table till we settle this point.”
In later years, after retiring from the school board, he was appointed to Maywood’s human relations commission. The work often involved mediating conflicts of view between the city’s white and black residents. He poured all his patience, skill, and goodwill into it.
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We were driving around one day, and Joe stopped to point out a rather ordinary-looking playground on a patch of land in South Maywood. “That was a vacant lot,” he said. “The city owned it. It was just doing nothing, no good for anybody. I thought it would be good if were a playground. A lot of kids in this neighborhood could use it. I started mentioning it to people, but it still took twenty years before we got it.”
“Why so long?”
“Inertia.” Joe snorted derisively at the memory of inertia-bound bird-brains in city hall. “Nobody wanted to do something new, unless they themselves got something out of it. You know how we finally got it done? We suggested the playground be named after the guy that was the biggest obstacle standing in the way. So there it is, the Alderman Doakes Playground.”
I let out a sigh.
“It proves you can do something, if you don’t care who gets the credit.”
#
In his public persona, Joe Nelson was by turns cunning, stubborn, and ingratiating. His incredible versatility brought to the fore whatever strengths were needed at the moment.
But what bound me to him, what made me love and admire him, what it was about him that helped inform my own slowly maturing character, was most observable in private moments.
Joe had not an ungenerous bone in his body. He regarded opponents as unfortunate, misguided people whose perspective might yet be transformed if he kept on patiently presenting the truth, as he so clearly saw it, to them. He called this “planting seeds.” In all the times I saw him arguing political or other points with people, including myself, I never saw him give way to anger.
His opponents got angry. Furious, even. Joe would smile, wink, and repeat their own points back to them, stripped down to their absurd essentials. He never left an argument untended. If his opponent walked out on him, he considered the conversation unfinished—an investigation to be resumed at leisure.
His and Elsa’s only child, Joelle, was the apple of their eye. Anything that was theirs was hers, automatically, without question. When I became her husband, anything that was theirs was mine also, because I was part of her and part of them.
I did not understand this. How could people be that giving? In my own family, gifts were stintingly given. We tended to operate on a presumption of scarcity. Joe and Elsa worked on a principle of abundance. There would always be plenty when it was needed, even when there did not seem to be enough to go around.
I could not accept Joe and Elsa’s open-handed love in a gracious way because nothing had prepared me for it.
Callow though I was, once I joined the family, I was theirs and they were mine. The price of my inclusion was that I had to learn to relax and enjoy it.
It took me years.
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Joe and Elsa made a buy-sell agreement with their print shop foreman, and they retired to a house on a wooded hill near Dodgeville, Wisconsin.
Retirement was harder on him than on her. He poured his prodigious energies into building and improving the house and property. He took up skiing, eventually breaking his leg on a cross-country trail.
Joe in retirement, at the hill in Dodgeville.
Little ailments began to creep up on him. A couple of larger ills—a serious bout of diverticulitis and a small stroke—made him an invalid, much against his will. You might say they reduced him to an invalid. He became smaller, suddenly, involuntarily.
He had no gift for inactivity, much less for being dependent on others. He rallied, for a while, but the second stroke killed him.
He lay in a bed in the Dodgeville hospital looking up at us, unable to speak. He summoned all his powers to utter the single word, “Why?” We had no answer.
Most people uttering that monosyllable would have been saying, “Why me? Why did this have to happen?” Something of that sort.
But you had to know Joe. He was a realist. I am confident his final “Why?” meant, “Why not face the facts? It’s over. Why prolong it?”
He tried to pull the IV tubes out of his arm. Although he did not succeed, he died a day or two later anyway, sometime in the fall of 1987.
He had run a good race.
At 42, I was still a mixed-up youth. But I had learned a lot about life just by knowing Joe.
Pacesetting nation-state seeks Chief Executive Officer to guide it through the next four years.
Employer is on geostrategic Short List—you would definitely recognize its name. This global power has gone through turbulence in recent years and looks to recapture a previous golden era, the cause and timing of which is disputed by major parties, but everybody agrees it was pre-COVID. Unification of diverse perspectives is a much-lauded priority.
Applicant must meet all wishes of all residents of this multifarious democratic republic, everywhere, all the time. Deep skillset in partisan politics is considered essential. The successful applicant will show no mercy to the opposition, despite significant downside risk of premature termination. Core competencies include appropriate distribution of credit (Ours) and blame (Theirs).
Required duties also, from time to time, include leadership of the Free World.
No applicant will be considered for this position who cannot show strong evidence of personal instability, preferably to the point of derangement.
Although cash salary is inconsequential, non-monetary benefits include a nice house, convenient transport options, multiple opportunities for family enrichment, and a testimonial library located near applicant’s chosen retirement venue.
Apply by Tuesday, November 3, to the United States of America, ATTN: The Electorate.
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THIS IS DEFINITELY THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVER HELD!!!!
You know—the election to determine whether our nation’s immediate future will be an Elysian idyll of prosperity, fairness, and brotherhood; or whether the bad guys will win and plunge the whole cosmos into an irrecoverable tailspin of poverty and totalitarian despair.
So we are told.
Do you believe that?
Do you believe those who disagree with you are evildoers, not to be trusted with the reins of government for a four-year period? And, so Bondvillainously effective that they will achieve their terrifying aims with one-hundred-percent efficiency once sworn into office?
Really? You really believe that?
If so, you might want to get out a bit and meet a few folks you don’t already know.
So many friends and neighbors have already sunk so deep in dystopian devotion to their wing—be it left or right—that riots and mayhem are expected to break forth, no matter who wins the election.
You and I, Kind Reader, need not compound this insanity.
We are permitted to take a deep breath.
Let us think, speak, and act like adult American citizens.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
It means, “prevalent over a whole area, country, etc.; universal, general . . . .” It is usually applied to disease, thus giving rise to its use as a noun, “a pandemic,” meaning, “a disease which is pandemic.” But it could really be used for almost anything that is widely distributed over the world.
Politics is pandemic. As was oft remarked of Chickenman, “It’s everywhere! It’s everywhere!”
In the midst of our current angst over COVID-19, President Trump has been accused of downplaying the threat. Trump’s opponents have been accused of weaponizing the fear of a dread disease. Players on both sides of the line of scrimmage are ripping up the Astroturf, wailing, “Unfair! They are politicizing a national disaster!”
So, what else is new?
If you read this blog regularly—a Recommended Best Practice—you may wonder, “Whence comes this commentary on current events? Is not this blog supposed to be about ‘seeking fresh meanings in our common past’?”
Okay, Dear Reader. You asked for it:
It Was Ever Thus
Politicians have made political hay out of all things sacred since the moment after time started. Many earnest combatants believe that everything is political; that exploiting all events to advance one’s political agenda is the purest form of service. (“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”—Rahm Emanuel, 2008.)
Those who seek to serve society must understand the political context in which they operate. Military leaders, in particular, often feel that war should be exempt from politics. But they would be extremely foolish to suppose that it actually is.
General Promotions
Elihu B. Washburne U.S. Congressman, Secretary of State, Minister to France. Mathew Brady-Levi Corbin Handy photo. Public Domain.
During the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant showed a canny cognizance of the political winds which blew all around him. In that conflict, almost every general, North or South, was appointed and advanced politically. Even Grant, who demonstrated the highest ability, would never have received the opportunity to demonstrate that ability without the sponsorship of his local Congressman, Rep. Elihu Washburne. The Congressman put Grant in for a brigadier general’s star, immediately began thumping for his promotion to major general, and in every possible way championed Grant’s career.
In 1863, Grant was tasked with taking the city of Vicksburg, which President Abraham Lincoln saw as “the golden key” to unlock the Confederacy. Take Vicksburg from the rebels, and you re-open the Mississippi River to Union navigation. At the same time, you dreadfully complicate Confederate efforts to get men and materiel from the Trans-Mississippi West (Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas). Vicksburg in Union hands would be the beginning of the end of the rebellion.
Major General U.S. Grant. Public Domain.
Trouble was, Grant’s first try—aided by loyal subordinates Sherman and Macpherson and the ambitiously disloyal McClernand—had come to naught, for reasons beyond Grant’s control. “The strategical way according to the rule,” Grant wrote in his memoirs, “would have been to go back to Memphis; establish that as a base of supplies; fortify it so that the storehouses could be held by a small garrison, and move from there along the line of the railroad, repairing as we advanced, to the Yallabusha, or to Jackson, Mississippi.”
However, “At this time the North had become very much discouraged. . . . It was my judgment at the time that to make a backward movement as long as that from Vicksburg to Memphis, would be interpreted, by many of those yet full of hope for the preservation of the Union, as a defeat, and that the draft would be resisted, desertions ensue, and the power to capture and punish deserters lost. There was nothing left to be done but to go forward to a decisive victory.”
What Grant delicately omitted was that political powers in Washington wanted Grant removed and replaced with McClernand—an officer who, despite his loyalty to the Union, was unfit for high command. So long as Grant was actively campaigning against Vicksburg, it was not too hard for Lincoln to resist these demands for his scalp. But any movement that appeared to be a retreat—back to Memphis, for example—would most likely seal his fate. I am not the first to suggest that if Grant had done anything other than what he did—go forward through the Mississippi lowlands with no established supply line, feeding his army off the land—he would have lost his job. So that’s exactly what he did.
Grant could not afford to ignore politics.
In the end, he found a way to win without losing his job.
So What?
How does this history apply to the present day? Simply in this: Those who wish to serve the country need to be entirely apolitical; but they cannot afford to ignore the politics of the situation.
There are a lot of players, political and otherwise. One is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, an interesting figure. He is on the opposite political team from the president—but neither of them can afford to make trouble with the other in facing the coronavirus challenge, both for political reasons, and for the sake of people’s health.
Cuomo, like any experienced governor, knows quite a bit about handling emergencies. I saw him on TV the other day, revealing one of the key things about emergencies—a lesson I learned years ago as a worker in Wisconsin’s state emergency operations. There are two things, Cuomo said—I’m loosely paraphrasing—two things: One is the objective state of things: the resources, the damage, the things that need to be repaired; or in the case of a pandemic disease, the infection rates, testing kits, all that operational stuff. The other thing is the public perception of the situation. The latter is what drives rumors, panics, compliance with relief plans or the lack of compliance, etc. Often, Cuomo said, that second factor, the public perception, gets to be a greater problem than the disaster scenario itself.
Cuomo is dead accurate on that. (Your New Favorite Writer’s note to self: Write a blog post sometime about the 1996 Weyauwega, Wisconsin, train derailment.)
The only thing leaders can do about the second factor, the public perception, is to provide a steady flow of factual information from official sources. Credibility is key. People know when they’re being lied to, and it’s the kiss of death in handling an emergency.
Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. NIAID photo, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Enter Dr. Anthony Fauci, and his sidekicks Dr. Deborah Brix, Admiral Brett Giroir, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams. These people are the key medical players on the President’s Coronavirus Task Force. They are physicians with impeccable credentials and experienced public health leaders. Their usefulness on the task force is based on their ability to help move key decisions. But just as important is the straightness of their dialog with the American public as principal briefers of this ongoing emergency.
What makes them useful is that they never say anything that is not factual. Their credibility is gilt-edged. It is a remarkable feat, day in and day out, to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, from the epicenter of a hurricane of fear, anxiety, and political games.
As Executive Branch employees, they work under the authority of President Donald J. Trump—a gargantuan figure and one who speaks in momentarily expedient approximations. Fauci ranks as a genius, saying what is true and correcting what is false, while affirming truths uttered by the president and never crossing swords with him over statements that may be less reliable.
Without being himself a politician, Anthony Fauci knows how to survive in a tough political environment, giving good service and straight advice with an easy grace.
He reminds me of Ulysses S. Grant, who made virtues of necessities and got the military job done without having to bother Abe Lincoln overmuch with messy details.
Funny how often parts of the present resemble parts of the past.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
