Politics: Where Up is Down and Good is Bad

Last week, David Brooks began a two-part series on eight books that have had a major influence in his own life (a summer reading list of sorts, should you want to learn about the inner-workings of Brooks’ soul).

One of the books on his list is the American political classic All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren. Brooks writes that King’s Men shows “the way good can come from bad, and bad can come from good,” and “asks if in politics you have to sell your soul in order to have the power to serve the poor.”

12 years ago, my senior year English teacher gave me King’s Men with an inscription that exclaimed, “Forewarned is Forearmed!” Reading the novel at the age of 18, I understood it from the perspective of an outsider to politics—someone who had been interested in the craft of governing from a young age, but whose experience with the daily give and take of compromise and contradiction was cabined to the four walls of our New England style town meetings, which to this day remain not particularly representative of how government works in big cities, state capitals, or the halls of Congress.

Senator Huey Long (D-LA) (aka "Willie Stark")

I picked up King’s Men again recently, now a self-styled “insider” of the political process, albeit one who is ever-wary of the obsession that comes with the incessant machinations people go through to inhabit the inner most circles of power (a means that all too often becomes the end—HT to Professor Roger Porter for this piece of wisdom).

The impetus to my second read was a discussion I overheard outside my office, but inside the NYC political world about the results of a report. The takeaway was that it was “good” that the data revealed gross inequities in city services because that narrative could generate press, which could, in turn, inure to the benefit of both the principal and the New Yorkers who were not being adequately served.

It immediately brought to find a passage from King’s Men in which Willie Stark is seeking to oust Dolph Pillsbury, the political boss of Mason County, Louisiana. Willie had little fortune upending Pillsbury’s regime until an accident on a fire escape at a local schoolhouse shoddily put together by a corrupt associate of Pillsbury’s changed the political environment forever.

[S]ome of the brickwork gave and the bolts and bars holding the contraption to the wall pulled loose and the whole thing fell away, spraying kids in all directions. Three kids were killed outright. They were the ones that hit the concrete walk. About a dozen were crippled up pretty seriously and several of those never were much good afterward.

It was a piece of luck for Willie.

Only in politics could an epic tragedy in which kids perish be accurately and coldly declared a “piece of luck” for a challenger. And yet, as Warren noted, such “luck” need not be actively exploited. “Willie didn’t try to cash in on the luck. He didn’t have to try. People got the point.”

Indeed, in politics, what challengers often need to win is to have misfortune befall a stronger candidate (frequently the incumbent)—misfortune that typically manifests in suffering for real people and their communities.

This is not a “problem” that requires solving, but is instead an intractable, if unnerving truth about democratic politics. There are only so many seats. What matters is not whether a challenger “takes advantage” of misfortune to rise to power, as Stark went on to do, but instead whether that challenger (a) understands the true nature of the tragedy and is not blind to the real suffering that enabled her rise; and (b) views the opportunity presented by fate as an opportunity to do good by the People, rather than by herself.

Politics takes thick skin—which is to say that you need to be able to take a punch, but also have the courage to throw one when the moment is right, sure in the belief that while aiming to win is anything but a selfless act, it is worth fighting for when motivated by the desire to serve and not be served.

The Fixed Point of our Spiritual Constellation: The Fault in Our Stars

“Identity is an assemblage of constellations.”

--Anna Deavere Smith, 2011

Last weekend, the Times published “New York City in Haiku”, a series of short poems from people of all ages that described certain aspects of living in America’s greatest metropolis. One submission from a 14-year-old Manhattanite reads:

Face seen across tracks,
We stare, and a train passes,
Face gone forever.

That feeling—of life lines converging for a fleeting moment only to separate once more, perhaps indefinitely—is common to all humanity, not only on the subway platforms of New York, but in towns big and small across the country and around the world.

Even these ephemeral connections are like manna to our souls. As recently detailed by behavioral scientists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder, these interactions with “strangers” (even mere eye contact!) generally produce a more positive experience than remaining in solitude. Social beings, we are.

But as beautiful as these short-lived convergences are, they cannot replace the sentiment felt when, against seemingly all odds, life lines not only converge, but dance in parallel motion, flirting, bumping up against one another, and eventually fusing together in a double helix bond.

The protagonists of John Green’s latest book, The Fault in Our Stars (2012) (a NYT bestseller that is sure to sell a few more copies when it is released as a major motion picture on June 6—see trailer below), are lucky enough to form such a bond—lucky being an odd word to use in reference to teenagers suffering from the scourge of cancer.

Lucky they are, though, in that their shared affliction—tragic as it is—led them to one another. “Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross…there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.”

Those “stars” or “constellations” in our lives take many forms—friends, siblings, parents, classmates, neighbors, competitors, strangers. Amidst the many uncertainties of life, the protagonists in Fault find that the “stars” inexorably orbit (and are pulled ever so slightly towards) humanity’s “black hole”, which is to say, closer to death and oblivion.

Nevertheless, one particular star seems fixed—to be trusted even when all the other measures of direction fail. As Augustus Waters says to Hazel Grace Lancaster:

I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.

One of the magical aspects of parallel lines is that even though we know that they go on forever, never to converge, perspective plays tricks with our minds, convincing us that far on the horizon, the lines, having ever so deliberately sidled up beside one another, touch.

And maybe that’s the greatest lesson of Stars—that for all those passing glances on the subway platform, life lines going far and wide, there is an Ultimate convergence that our shared mortality forces us to confront. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the infinity of love shines brightly, beckoning us home.

Enon: Dimensionality, Time, and the “Awful Miracle” of Life

“Even as our own universe settled down to a comfortable homey expansion, the rest of the cosmos will continue blowing up, spinning off other bubbles endlessly, a concept known as the multiverse.”

--“Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang’s Smoking Gun,” New York Times (17 Mar. 2014)

In 2010, Paul Harding—a native of Wenham, Mass.—won the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel, Tinkers. It was an unlikely victory, to say the least. After years of receiving rejection letters from publishing houses—many of whom, in Harding’s words, wondered if he understood “the pace of life today”—Tinkers was published by tiny outfit Bellevue Literary Press.

This week, I picked up Harding’s second novel, Enon, for no other reason other that the fact that the novel was set in Wenham, the sister town to my hometown of Hamilton, Mass (referred to, in the novel, as Hillham). It is a funny feeling to intimately know the seemingly fictional places Harding describes (the Tea House, William Fairfield Drive, Peter Hill, the golf courses, Enon Lake, the canal) and to have taken part in many of the traditions referenced in the book (the Memorial Day parade from the Civil War Monument to the cemetery and back evoking the most visceral memories).

 

Whether you feel those nostalgic sentiments or not, Enon challenges our vision of the world as being a unitary whole, and instead insists on the multidimensionality of time and space.

“Just beneath our feet, on the other side of the surface of the earth, there is another, subterranean Enon which conceals its secret business by conducting it too slowly for its purposes to be observed by the living.”

That “other” Enon is itself, multidimensional. “[T]hat old earth…the cross sections of years and centuries and generations, folded up into the curled layers of prehistoric winters and antique summers.”

It’s an image that comes naturally in small, New England towns, where the weight of history is acutely felt in a way that never can be in a metropolis that is constantly reinventing itself (like New York) or a young city at the edge of a continent that remains, to this day, on the frontier (like San Francisco).

In Massachusetts, town after town greets natives and travelers alike with the same signage, proudly announcing—in understated but no uncertain terms—the town’s date of incorporation (which is almost invariably before the founding of the American Republic). Indeed, if population is the hallmark of the town lines of the Plains and the Rockies, in New England, it is history and time.

My mother often said that the afterlife is another dimension and that her loved ones communicate with her through space time in the form of birds that come to frequent our backyard feeder (I’ve asked Mom—if indeed she has the choice—to return to me in the form of the black-capped chickadee, the official bird of the Commonwealth). It’s a comforting concept, albeit one that I’ve never had the spiritual stomach to truly believe. And yet, it seems eminently believable—scientific even—in the wake of both our continued discoveries regarding the origins of the Universe and the magnetic pull of history.

For some of us, that pull is so profound that the reality of existence in our given moment seems wrong. As the protagonist of Enon describes it, the fear of falling into the “old earth” described above was that the odds seemed so impossibly slim (“one in a million or even slighter”) that one would reemerge in the right place at the right time and not be “hoisted from the ground a dead Puritan or quadruped fossil.”

But if that is indeed true, then it would seemingly follow that those who do “fall” into tears in the space time continuum are, more often than not, spit out into a world far removed from their soul’s internal clock.

Despite this possibility, Enon challenges us to view the “curse,” “condemnation,” and “provocation,” of having been “conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth,” as a miraculous opportunity to be present in whatever moment you happen to find yourself, and to simply and unabashedly feel.