“Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of self-conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle.
There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blast on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.
Forward!”
Walt Kelly, Introduction to The Pogo Papers
A funny thing happened on my way to my Facebook page the other day: I found a message from a high school classmate to whom I haven’t spoken in over fifty years congratulating me on something I’d recently posted. We exchanged friendship invitations, and I quickly learned that he is currently running for public office as a Democrat in a very conservative western state. During our ensuing message exchanges, we briefly touched on the subject of partisan politics. In the course of that discussion, I told him that I used to split votes among candidates regardless of their party affiliation, based upon whichever candidate I believed was best suited for the post being sought given my estimation of their intelligence, their moral and work ethic, and their ability to generate common sense, workable ideas within the legislative context – things that I would broadly categorize as “character” for purposes of this piece.
I no longer split my vote. I vote the Democratic party line, instead. My reason for no longer splitting my vote is not because of all the grief that my stalwart Democratic friends once gave me. That sort of ardency has never appealed to me. No, I no longer do so because of the stridency and zealotry of those on the right who hold public office. A candidate’s character no longer matters to me when all elected officials toe the same line because they must, when every single one of them seeks to gain advantage by shouting their memorized, standardized rubric more loudly than the other guy shouting his, when no elected official is allowed the freedom and luxury of independent thought for fear they will be voted out of office by their own electoral base if they fail to religiously toe their party’s line down to the last comma and period.
Note that I said I no longer split my vote because of those on the right who hold public office. When I say this, I am talking about today’s version of the political right. Today’s political right is not the same thing as a thinking conservative. Thinking conservatives have no place in today’s politics. They are unelectable and nearly extinct. They’ve been shunted aside by bullies and bigots, and haven’t any competent political venue in which they can be heard. Their brand of conservatism is limited to being broadcast by a few journalistic opinion writers, obscure academic or quasi-academic publications, or in discussions among copacetic friends during and after a good home-cooked meal. Their brand of conservatism is no longer viable in a caustic climate because it entails a willingness to compromise with those to their left in order to find solutions that are palatable to each – or, more likely, mutually unpalatable.
While the left is trending in the same direction, I have greater hope that it won’t complete the journey. Perhaps I am blind to possibility.
The notion of the loyal opposition is, for now, dead on arrival in the these not-so-United States. The best evidence for this is the ever-pending appointment of Judge Merrick Garland to the United States Supreme Court which the Republican Senate will not deign to consider. Whatever the political spin doctors might have you believe, this refusal is unique to this time and place and is utterly contrary to historical constitutional practice. One can legitimately wonder, as many already have, whether the current Republican majority in the Senate has any respect for our Constitution. One should be very careful when first practicing to deceive for fear that his or her deception might prove to be a boomerang.
The source of this historic impasse is simple: it’s the lack of any demonstrable ability of the leaders of both parties to laugh at themselves or, more importantly, to laugh at the foibles of the opposition. Instant condemnation has replaced laughter as our political standard.
It is inarguably true that any political belief or theory has, if taken to extremes, laughable offshoots and consequences. This is true for the same reason that economics has been dubbed the dismal science: human behavior is not capable of being scientifically analyzed or readily categorized. Just when you believe you have absolute certainty what the next step taken by an acquaintance will be, he or he will dazzle you with hypocrisy and bendable ethics. Each of you reading this piece knows this to be true, because, like me, you’ve also zigged at times when logic told you to zag. Far too often, that’s what we do, and, when we do it, we take secret pride in having been unpredictable.
This sort of behavior in others ought to make us laugh, if only because we can imagine ourselves doing something similar and can easily understand the kind of forces that caused it to occur. When we lose the ability to laugh at others, we lose the ability to laugh at ourselves; and when we’ve lost the ability to laugh at ourselves, we lose our ability to laugh together with those of contrary belief in head-shaking amazement over the inherent inanity and common foibles of the human condition. And when we can no longer laugh together regardless of our respective political beliefs, we lose the ability to understand or employ the power of empathy.
Only when we are able to empathize can we compromise, and only when the body politic is able to compromise can it pass useful, momentarily meaningful legislation. When mirth disappears, so does respect; it is replaced by castigation, bullying, and the inability – no, the unwillingness – to carefully listen not only to what an opponent is saying but, more importantly, for the underlying reasons and concerns that are causing him or her to say it. For while an opponent’s actual words may possess little merit in a politician’s estimation, the reasons and concerns underlying those words have a great deal of merit for the simple reason that they enjoy an honored place on the spectrum that is the human condition.
In thinking about this, I found myself remembering The Jack Acid Society, Walt Kelly’s delightful spoof of all things on the far right fringe of his day. He meant his cartoons to be funny, but yesterday’s jokes, yesterday’s fringes, have become today’s truths for the simple reason that we’ve lost the ability to laugh out loud with him. There is a part of Walt’s personality that may have accepted this mess as inevitable. After all, he is also the author of that most famous of Pogo Possum’s utterances: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Jeez, Walt, lighten up. Learn to laugh, will ya?
