Chicago, Athens, and Jerusalem

My favorite verse from “Mrs. Robinson” (1968), featured in the hit Mike Nichols movie The Graduate (1967), arrives near the end:

Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon

Going to the candidates’ debate

Laugh about it, shout about it

When you’ve got to choose

Every way you look at it you lose.

In the 50’s and 60’s, it was fashionable to refer to baseball as a metaphor for America, and DiMaggio represented the values of that America: excellence and fulfillment of duty (he often played in pain), combined with a grace that implied a purity of spirit, an off-the-field dignity and a jealously guarded private life. It was said that he still grieved for his former wife, Marilyn Monroe, and sent fresh flowers to her grave every week. Yet as a man who married one of America’s most famous and famously neurotic women, he never spoke of her in public or in print. He understood the power of silence.

…

In these days of Presidential transgressions and apologies and prime-time interviews about private sexual matters, we grieve for Joe DiMaggio and mourn the loss of his grace and dignity, his fierce sense of privacy, his fidelity to the memory of his wife and the power of his silence.

For all that has lamentably not been improved about our politics and our national discourse since Simon wrote those words about “Presidential transgressions and apologies and prime-time interviews about private sexual matters” in 1999, we should at least consider ourselves fortunate that we GET to choose, however poor quality the options.

And although we might be dissatisfied, and perhaps with good reason, we should not be so eager to declare our contempt for what is best about our nation. In the face of adequate warnings and the lessons of history, doing so would take us down a dark and dangerous path. The United States would re-create the experience of mid-20th Century Argentina, complete with open, organized violence between political left and political right and the nearly unprecedented self-inflicted destruction of substantial economic prosperity (Argentina was in the top 10 world economies by GDP per capita before the First World War, but lost this status and has experienced nearly a century of minimal net economic growth amid continuing post-dictatorship political turmoil and institutional decay).

Our nation, though flawed like all human endeavors, is already great. Angry extremists of the far-left and (particularly this year) the far-right show they either don’t understand, or actually disagree with, the sources and the nature of that greatness. There will always be those who profit from scaremongering and scapegoating, those who benefit from the creation of dysfunction and disorder, and those who just like to watch things burn. An especially pernicious form of this behavior consists of telling those who are hurting something like, we’ll solve your problems, it’s simple: we can tear everything down, and then everything will be rebuilt, but in the process we can make sure to exclude certain groups of evildoers living among us whose perfidy just so happens to be the cause of your social and economic pain. (Well, what do you know folks, that solution is terrific! It’s great, so simple that our previous leaders, whatever their party or ideology, must have been stupid or crooked for not figuring it out…)

To those who have been ignored and feel betrayed by the status-quo, this siren song can sound so persuasive that the would-be destroyers don’t even need to be subtle, proclaiming they really do want to “burn it all down”. The proposed remedies of the destructive charlatans are to our body politic, at best, alchemy–of the turn lead-into-gold variety–and at worst, medieval bloodletting. Such “cures” are far worse than the vastly exaggerated disease, and the process of enacting them would cause us to lose something essential and valuable about being the United States of America. For those who don’t like what we are, who promise to lead us back to a greatness they say we lost an undetermined number of decades ago, who relish the chaotic retribution they will get to unleash upon disfavored groups in order to supposedly bring us there, that’s probably the point. We must reject their narcissistic carnival of institutional pyromania, and mock the pretension that they speak for some greater good as boastful foolishness, because that’s what it is.

As Benjamin Franklin was said to have warned, the nation that declared its independence in 1776 and that created its Constitution in 1787 will be, “A Republic, If You Can Keep It”.

Let’s keep it, and work on ways to make it better.