The Blizzard of Twenty Six seems to
have reached a point of significant remission.
I am going to at least pretend that it has, even though I won’t really
know until daylight arrives. And so I am declaring a personal remission as
well. The last ten days have not been without
their difficulties on the health front, and my health aide Christie Kadelu
and I have been—in the absurd phrase reserved for such occasions—holding down
the fort in a kind of unsplendid isolation.
As you may be aware, there has been snow in these parts, quite a lot of
it, and no small amount of ice. Joan is
for a while tucked into a rehab facility a few miles up the road. Our telephonic communication, though
frequent, is inevitably a bit wistful. Not
quite Pyramis and Thisbe, but getting too close. My great buddy Frank is probably at this very
moment surveying the Great Pyramid and the Giza Necropolis in Egypt. He beat the blizzard by about twelve hours,
and I won’t be watching any movies with him for the next three weeks.
In many ways the big snow is a
pleasing distraction. The tone of our
national political life is rarely inspiring, but the current atmosphere seems
especially poisonous. I am loathe to
contribute to the near hysteria. I do
not believe that it is 1858, but I do increasingly fear that the spirit of
American democracy, if not its actual institutions, is being coarsened and
cheapened by fruitless and polemical self-indulgence and self-righteousness. The Question of America, it seems to me, has
always been this: can we possibly live up to our own hype? This is just my clumsy version of the question
famously raised by Abraham Lincoln in his address at Gettysburg. Can a nation founded on truly democratic
ideals actually endure?
The explosive atmosphere of mutual
distrust and political loathing in Minneapolis is the context in which two of
our fellow citizens lost their lives. Police
agents have difficult and dangerous jobs.
They also frequently have big
guns. The principal purpose of big guns
is to kill people, so that it is hardly surprising that they frequently do
so. But the pity of it all. The waste of it all. The madness of it all. The two deaths differ in particularity but not
in their shared moral insult. And perhaps
reflection over time will acknowledge the madness, and the nation will try to
step back from it in honest penitential reflection, though what I see so far is
mainly absurd tribal spin.
I am moved once again to invoke the
Goheen Principle, which I derive from the late and much admired Princeton
President Robert Goheen: never be sure that you are more than about eighty per
cent right. The number of hundred
percenters seems ever on the rise. Yet
we can, though not without humility, strive with Lincoln, to advance “with
firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”
I hope that this brief place-holding
post might at least serve as the expression of an intent to return to business
as usual next week, by which time I hope to be ambulatory and reasonably compos
mentis. Even have some hopes for the
corpus part.
