After a long hiatus in grandchild production, a blessed
industry in which our daughter held a family monopoly for nearly two decades,
her two brothers began in the second half of the last calendar year to redeem
the time. For the roughly five
months since jolly John Henry arrived in lower Manhattan followed roughly six
weeks later by radiant Ruby in Red Hook, Brooklyn, their pixilated paternal
grandparents have been spending as much time as possible adoring them, an
activity that has had a particular appropriateness as the season of Epiphany
ran its course. Should any
friendly pagan need an explanation of my allusion, it refers to the liturgical
memory of the legendary visitation of the three magi kings (Caspar, Balthasar,
and Melchior) to the newly born infant Jesus.
Unlike
the magi our mode of travel is not stellar. We travel at the sufferance of the New Jersey Transit
Corporation, and we must open our
coffers to their hungry ticket machines.
For your bloguiste there is one other slight inconvenience. Should visiting day fall on Tuesday, that
is to say yesterday, with a New York overnight, he is unlikely to start
thinking about his Wednesday post, let alone writing it, until he’s well south
of the tunnel on the return trip.
Such
is the present circumstance, though “current events” practically dictate the
subject. For what we have just
witnessed as the New Year began—the orgy of fecklessness, incompetence, and
poltroonery summarized under the general rubric of “the fiscal cliff”—relates
to my newest grandchildren in a very poignant way. It means that little John Henry and even littler Ruby will
spend the first years of their American citizenship in a land where the rising
public debt is already greater than the annual gross domestic product. Along with their birth certificates
each one picked up a congressional Visa bill of about sixty grand. Head start? No child left behind?
The
disgrace of our federally elected officials is fairly ecumenical, but I have to
say that the spineless Republicans take the cake. Can a political party that preaches fiscal responsibility
and then proposes Mitt Romney for the presidency and actually re-elects John Boehner as Speaker of the
House of Representatives have any claim on serious men and women?
Some
of you will be old enough to remember Spiro Agnew, one of our most disgraceful
and disgraced of Veeps. Long
before he was exposed as a crook he had been widely recognized as a dolt. But when publicly taxed for his
“mediocrity,” he in no wise contested the charge. On the contrary, his view was that the large numbers of
mediocre people in the country deserved to have their representative too. He must have alluded to that large
majority of our fellow citizens who have come to the consensus that every
American has a natural right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—and, oh
yeah, a free lunch. Lest I seem to
speak obscurely, I mean an unfunded welfare state. Perhaps Agnew had a point. Such people do need representation. But do we need four hundred of them in the House alone?
Sadly,
we probably have the Congress we deserve.
We have an electoral system that does an excellent job of pre-screening
out intelligence, moderation, imagination, and any traditional sense of public
service. Once elected, most
Congressmen soon reveal by their actions their one unfailingly constant motive:
getting elected again. As we
voters seem happy enough to collude with this system, we perhaps have merited
our loathsome reward. But surely the
children of our nation deserve something better.
My
own grandchildren will, I devoutly hope, survive the malfeasance of their
government, for they enjoy some powerful advantages. They all live in stable homes with two loving parents who
are committed in marriage to their well being, their education, and their moral
training. They will do some family
travelling. They will have books
in the house. At the family table
where they will regularly take their evening meal, they will join in intelligent
conversation sometimes characterized by complete sentences and disyllabic
words. They thus will find
themselves endowed with a certain amount of what is called “social
capital”. That fact alone may make
them members of a generational minority, but it should help them to seize such
opportunities as appear on the constricting horizons of our national life, as
in happier and more generous times their meritocratic forebears of earlier
generations once did.
It
is the fantasy of a large swath of one of our political parties that
“government programs” can do nothing to replenish the sadly depleted social
capital of millions of our children, and the fantasy of a large swath of the
other that they can do everything.
Perhaps one early locus of the compromise which will be imperative for
any real progress might be an agreement that at the very least we will not bury
the newborn under a mountain of prenatal debt.
