I suppose if I'm serious about this thing I oughta add to it now and again. It's been six weeks or so.
I am beginning to think that I can write better political articles than the stuff I've been reading lately. Much of it is so mean-spirited that it's more destructive to its readers and their spirits than anything, and it's unnecessary.
I suppose that I have a different perspective on politics from many people because I've had the opportunity to see politicians as human beings. My friend Marilyn, with whom I hung out with, co-habitated, saw, and generally stayed near for perhaps six years back in the 1970's was involved in local politics in Connecticut. I lived in New Haven, and it so happened that she had a good many young friends who were attending Yale Law School, and who were very involved in local and national politics. Marilyn worked in Joe Lieberman's campaign for state representative, which was chaired by his Yale Law classmate Bill Clinton. I believe that I would have met both him and Hillary before they were married at some point, but who'd have remembered either one in that context. Our friend Rosa diLauro (it's de or di, I forget which) was close to the New Haven mayoral campaign of one Frank Logue, who was interested in Rosa. But Rosa was more interested in Stan Greenberg, whom she later married; we were at a party at their house once. Stan was Bill Clinton's pollster, and Rosa has been a Congresswoman from that district for years now. I've met one mayor or city councilman or another, and talked with them, as well as many candidates for offices from justice of the peace to President of the US.
And thus I cannot abide politician jokes. They work hard--very hard--and they believe in their own ideals, and in the power of government to do good. Yes, there are crooks, but I haven't met any yet. The job of politicians is to get us to live together in peace and prosperity without killing each other, and this is a tall order in many contexts, and they really try their best to do it.
I can't even be discouraged about George W. Bush, perhaps the least-likely President we've ever had. I always recall his surprise at winning, almost without effort, the Republican primaries in 1999. "There's still plenty of time for me to screw this up," he said. Now, that's human.
George W. Bush would have been okay as a President had he not plumb run out of luck. It wasn't his fault that two of our greatest national disasters occurred on his watch. It was his fault that he took bad advice on both of them. After Sept 11, 2001, it was his job as President to make sure that nobody did anything rash, and that's precisely what we went ahead and did. The invasion of Afghanistan was ill-advised, and of course Iraq was even less so, for we were unprepared for either and too angry to think straight. What we should have done was precisely nothing for a couple of years--it would have been very, very tough, but in hindsight it wouldn't have mattered much--except to tighten up our intelligence-gathering apparatus to foil future attacks. None of the shoe-searching and harrassment of librarians has done us a bit of good; we'd have been far better off to rely on the good will of our people and our neighbors.
Hurricane Katrina was also nobody's fault, and as tempting as it was to think otherwise, I rather doubt that it was the philosophy of the Republican Party that caused the general bungling of the relief effort. Just as we had no experience in the collapse of hundred-story buildings in 2001, we had no experience in the destruction and total evacuation of cities. I do hope they do a good job of rebuilding the levies, but part of the tradition of the city of New Orleans--indeed, part of its charm--seems to somehow involve municipal corruption, and I believe that this was the main the poorly-constructed levies weren't properly shored up.
But none of this involves evil, or at least not much evil. Just what is wrong with evaluating a difficult situation and coming to the conclusion that it isn't the Devil at work, but simply jobs that are very large and misfortunes that happen to be overwhelming, and that everyone is actually trying to do his best? This isn't the case at all times--the current mess at the Justice Department shows a thorough lack of leadership on several levels--but I certainly believe that everyone is trying hard to solve problems of terror, immigration, health care, and most other challenges to the general health and safety of the populace.
I am a bit puzzled by the sudden attention to immigration. Insofar as I've been able to observe, nobody seems to be overrun by immigrants around these parts (I can't blame the immigrants; there aren't many jobs here in Lancaster) and I have heard of no diminution of the general welfare because of their presence. On the East Coast, we've had immigrants from everywhere for hundreds of years, and the fact that you have to know several languages to do business on every block hasn't stalled commerce to any great degree. Nor have I ever noticed any difference in behavior between legal and illegal immigrants.
