OPINION
The Ties That Bind
Hanging on to the past—grasping for a future
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Newly acquitted of impeachment charges, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is back on the job and getting back to the usual.
I never remember my grandfather without him wearing a tie. At times, it was under a vest and a jacket. At times not, revealing his suspenders. He wore a tie pitching softball to his grandsons. On the croquet field, he often wore that full three-piece suit. He was an ace at croquet.
That was his generation. My time in it felt kinder and gentler. My earliest memories of him were when he was about 70. I’m approaching that marker faster than I want to. I no longer wear ties. If he were to pop back in for a visit these days, he’d probably pull out what few strands of hair he had on his head, given how fashions, culture, and just about everything else has changed.
Except politics. In that realm, the more things change, the more they remain the same.
He’d still wear a tie.
Paw Paw Moon, as we called him, had a healthy distaste for politics and politicians. But he was a practical businessman. One of his neighbors and business associates was a local party chairman. They owned the two primary businesses at the train stop town where they lived. The neighbor was typically invited to our large family gatherings. His entrances were always formal. His exits were always welcome.
Paw Paw Moon had two things to say about politics and politicians. He said the first one often:
“Why do you want to elect a person to write laws if they aren’t smart enough to break them without getting caught?”
And he was increasingly pissed off that he had to say the second one with growing frequency:
“Why would you want to elect somebody to office if he doesn’t have enough moxie to make off with another man’s wife now and then?”
We should never be surprised by what happens in politics. Outraged? Not that, either. Politics are a very human endeavor. Human in the sense that humans engage in ways that often expose just how human we are. There’s never been a purity about politics. There have always been practiced efforts to pretend there is. Practice never made perfect.
Here in America, the Republican Party has largely abandoned the pretense. The Democrats still insist that this is a battleground worth defending. To an increasingly larger degree, that’s become wasted effort and energy.
Yes, there are some who enter politics for noble reasons and feel a call to public service. Regardless of affiliation, they always are and always have been in the minority. Times have changed. People haven’t. Far too many have just tossed out the rule book that everyone used to follow. And those expecting corrective remedies for what was once thought of as disqualifying behavior, gasp and choke repeatedly when consequences don’t appear out of the increasingly thinner air of shame.
“The art of politics is to separate actions from consequences.”
-Alexander Cockburn
Politics is a nasty business. Politics ain’t beanball. Politics is war. Politics is… pick your cliché. German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck is largely credited with coining the phrase “politics is the art of the possible.” Hinting at our reticence to face reality, those who quote Bismarck often end his statement there. The full quote is, “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.”
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith couldn’t quite stomach Bismarck’s idea and spit out a counter: “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
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Bitter pills.
Two Different Worlds
If there’s an art to politics, pretending that there aren’t two different real-world realities is artifice and as artificial as the necktie worn by my grandfather on a softball diamond or croquet field. The false sense of decorum that begs for respect is illusory at best in the face of those who’ve bared their necks and say come at me.
Texas politicians and wanna-be Trump-ets have revealed, and now revel in, the sham that it has always been. They are doing so with urgency now that Trump has lifted the curtain in his attempts to keep himself out of jail. There’s no explanation for those ties, though.
There are two different worlds. There’s a world that’s run by those who understand and play by the rules of the jungle. And there is the world where the rest think things should be fair, and that politics can be governed as such.
Through the ages, we’ve tried to reform, fix, and futz with it to make it more fair. Largely, that’s failed. You can’t ask water to be less wet. Or as the legendary Chicago ward boss Paddy Bauler once said after a particularly tough election night victory in the trenches, “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.”
And here’s a small hint to preserving your sanity. Chicago, and everywhere else, will never be ready. If you thought that there was a chance that Ken Paxton was going to be convicted for his obvious wrongdoings, then your wish casting is as much a part of the problem as Mitt Romney’s longing for a return to sanity and some constitutional sanctity on his way off the stage.
Moving north from Texas to Colorado, the latest political brouhaha over Lauren Boebert’s piggish behavior in a theatre more than proves the well-intentioned are drowning while others continue across the Rubicon. Sure, her behavior was inappropriate (vaping in a public auditorium, fondling her date, etc.), and sure, she lied about it afterward. Got caught with video proving her lies. But it’s not going to matter. Her wanton slutishness paired with her ignorant hypocrisy, is her brand. She no longer has to care about brandishing it.
Her opponents are trying to show a little political leg by trotting out a line suggesting she might have been vaping something other than nicotine, thus perhaps at one time lying on a gun registration form about drug use. Essentially the same crime the President’s son was just indicted for. Tit-for-tat? Perhaps. But it’s dry humping.
As expected, the Democrats, playing the “we’re better than those guys” card, keep saying if Hunter Biden is guilty, he should be convicted. Sure. But they would have been far better served to seize on his indictment for lying on a gun registration form and immediately crafted a piece of legislation called Hunter’s Law to toughen gun registration laws and provisions, tossing that back in their opponents' faces.
Sausage Making
The other well-worn political cliché is that no one wants to know how the sausage gets made. It’s as true in politics as it is in a beer garden. For much of the history of the United States, most have been content to remain ignorant. Or at least pretend so. There have certainly been moments when we’ve seen more than we want to safely acknowledge. A few come to mind: John Boehner handing out envelopes of cash on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. The ABSCAM scandals. Rob Blagojevich begging for bribes to fill a Senate seat. And pick just about any moment during the reign of Trump.
Outrage ensues. Opprobrium is demanded. Occasionally, comeuppance is delivered. Those days are probably gone, if they ever really existed. The outrage and opprobrium, loud though they may be, have always been less about the acts and bad actors and more about anger when political shenanigans momentarily remove the blinders from our eyes, forcing us to look at what we’ve always looked away from.
Jane Byrne was the first woman elected Mayor of Chicago. She came from the Daley Machine. She put sand in the gears. The Machine turned against her, and her administration was filled with all sorts of rough and tumble-political strife.
In the midst of one such battle, her husband, former journalist and then her press spokesman, Jay McMullen, appeared as a guest on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight. Talking about the contretemps of the moment, he tossed up his hands in exasperation and said to legendary and always affable host John Callaway, “I don’t understand people. What do they think? This is all on the legit?
It’s never been all on the legit.
Most of us have never wanted to own or admit that because it exposes a baser side of human nature we wish we could overcome. We’re raised to believe in honesty, look for it in others, and admire those who demonstrate it. These are the ties we want to bind us. But they can be blinding as well as binding. My Paw Paw’s ties locked away all that was behind that pretense and created a sense of continuity and protection.
Locks only serve to keep honest people out. We’ve locked ourselves behind a curtain that’s become flimsier and less opaque to the point where there’s no longer a way to hide from what’s behind it.
Perhaps removing our ability to be so willfully blind is the greatest legacy Donald Trump will leave us.
It may suck. But in its own way, it’s more honest.
