Gubernatorial Valedictory

 

 

            Andrew Cuomo’s resignation as the Governor of New York had a long news run these past two weeks, remaining competitive even in the face of Olympic autopsies, pending Afghan catastrophe, and Haitian earthquakes.  The achievement of catastrophe in Kabul finally got him off the front page.  The news concerning Mr. Cuomo varied from day to day.  First there was speculation concerning whether such a dramatic development as a gubernatorial resignation might, well, develop.  Then came the countervailing stories about how it couldn’t really happen and how it certainly would happen.  The governor’s chief of staff resigned, charges of unsisterly collaboration with the Man swirling about her head.  She had been “Cuomo’s Ghislaine Maxwell,” somebody said, referring to the intimate friend of the late Jeffery Epstein, alleged to have helped Epstein bed teenagers.  The governor’s firm denials that resignation ever could happen were followed within twenty-four hours by apparently definitive statements that it would indeed happen, that it had in a sense already happened, though it would not take effect for another two weeks.  But the stories continue: insider revelations of desperate last-minute pleas and ploys, postmortems before the issuance of the death certificate, and attempts to find out something about the highly obscure lieutenant governor, who will soon be elevated.                                                                                                                                                                                       This is not an essay about Andrew Cuomo, however, only a meditation on certain aspects of his situation.  I am not a resident of New York, nor a knowledgeable observer of its politics.  I have to admit that my generally unfavorable view of the departing governor, who always struck me as arrogant and self-regarding, is of long-standing.  Many people, including the dispensers of Emmies, seem to have admired his nearly daily coronavirus pep talks; but I thought they were long-winded and hectoring.  And that voice!  Furthermore, as a democrat I have an aversion to our family political dynasties that began when John Adams sired John Quincy Adams.  A country with a population of over three hundred million probably has more competence and talent spread widely around than that found in a few favored families. That said, I would choose to avoid joining in the pile-on and offer some general observations about the curious contours of political cancellation.

            I am hardly the first to note that there is a certain capriciousness that operates here. Grabbing at third rails does not always prove fatal to Democrats.  Consider the following two cases. You will remember that Senator Al Franken was photographed simulating lascivious intent toward a woman asleep in an airplane.  This was a theatrical, performative mime designed to represent to others, beginning with the photographer who was recording it, that Al Franken found a woman’s boobs desirable and arousing.  It was crude and it was sophomoric and to anybody even slightly distanced from the moment it certainly failed to amuse, but it was not an actual sexual aggression.  Harassment may be difficult to define, but at a minimum I should have thought it required actual and direct tactile and/or verbal contact, or at least concrete material signs (unwanted bouquets of roses, murdered pets, slashed tires, etc.) of which a victim is made consciously aware.  Nonetheless several other women had their say, and Franken was out.  The drop in the average IQ of the Senate was mere collateral damage, the price of purification.

            But then we have another photogenic politician, Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia.  In the hierarchy of political criminality race generally trumps gender.  So it certainly looked as though Northam’s goose was cooked when a photograph of him from his college days, in which he appeared pigmented as an artificial negro, turned up out of nowhere—nowhere meaning the research files of his political enemies.  I will not go into any of the actual ambiguities of “blackface” because nobody else did.  People simply called for his resignation.  Northam abased himself with apologies in a series of intermittent struggle sessions.  Right thinking people continued to demand that he go.  This was two and a half years ago.  A few are demanding it still in a ritualistic sort of way.  It is not going to happen, because there are big differences between Cuomo and Northam, quite apart from their offenses.  One minor difference is that there were some people who liked Northam.  But the real reason was that the election of a Democrat in Virginia was regarded as halfway between miracle and revolution, and the Democratic Party wanted in no way to jeopardize a hard-won foothold which it hopes to secure and expand.  There hasn’t been a Republican governor in New York since Pataki, and there may well never be another one.  Under these differing circumstances it is possible that similar loudly proclaimed high moral principles will lead to dissimilar concrete results. 

            Mr. Cuomo’s theory that he is a victim not of his own grotesque behavior but of changing social rules in the sexual arena is perhaps a small step toward righting the serious imbalance of trade in cognitive dissonance amassed by Republican leadership during the Trump presidency and its aftermath.  "In my mind, I've never crossed the line with anyone, but I didn't realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn. There are generational and cultural shifts that I just didn't fully appreciate."

            If there has been an evolution of mores in in these matters, surely it has been in the opposite direction to that posed by Mr. Cuomo.  That is to say, social relations between the sexes have become ever more relaxed and permissive, with a tone ever more “liberated”.  In our country and many others this trend has been noticeable, and well noted, since the end of World War I, which is to say for a full century.  Don’t take my word for it when you can consult the testimony of the genius sociologist Cole Porter.  He wrote “Anything Goes” in 1934, two years before I was born.  “In olden days a glimpse of stocking / was looked on as something shocking, but now, God knows--anything goes.”  And he added another verse of special interest to literature professors: “Good authors too who once knew better words,/ now only use four letter words/writing prose, anything goes.”  Too true.

 

Cole Porter

            The goalposts have been moved?  The line has been redrawn?  The rules have been rewritten?  Mr. Cuomo seems to suggest that according to some unstated rule of the good old days of his youth, any big shot man was entitled to feel up any female target of opportunity he might come upon.  But surely no normal, decent person of either sex or any party can have believed that then or thinks that today.  To the extent there has been a rule change, it has been among journalists rather than politicians.  In JFK’s day you simply didn’t write about off-topic stuff like that.  The media engines of excess mentioned by Cole Porter are “those little radios.”  He knew nothing of our social media which leave no stone unturned and no slug or elephant bug beneath the upturned stone unrevealed or without its thousand “likes”.  Let it all hang out, or in this instance, crawl out.  I don’t know that anything goes, but Cuomo is going.

Pro-Ambivalence

As I write this, the Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam,  is struggling to keep his job as his own top political party leaders, backed by a vast army of bien pensants with Twitter accounts, are demanding his resignation from office.  His alleged offense, no small one even when it was committed some decades ago, was to engage in some stupid high jinks now regarded as so hateful to God and man as to render their perpetrator unfit for elective public office, utterly and in perpetuity.  I am not a Virginian, and until recently I could not have recognized this man’s name if it were on a multiple-choice quiz.  Nor did I ever suppose that medical students assemble yearbooks, let alone ones that would embarrass your average Alabama high school.  Yet as it happens, by the time the story of the appalling photograph was surfacing, I had actually seen Gov. Northam in a television clip responding to questions about an abortion rights bill under consideration by the State Legislature.  He was saying that he approved of the measure, and that it would indeed allow, under certain circumstances, infanticide.  He didn’t use that word, and I don’t think he actually meant what he did say.  I doubt that he actually accepts the necessity of infanticide.  But that is what he said, and the only likely reason he said it was that he wanted to demonstrate his progressive bona fides to his party allies.   Not that I believe that infanticide is progressive or that people who call themselves progressives generally do either.  But the two episodes—abortion interview and the flap about the photograph—are not unrelated.  It now appears that Northam was “outed” with regard to the now infamous photograph by somebody outraged by his extraordinary remarks about the abortion bill.

Ordinarily I would avoid such a dispiriting subject as the abortion question.   It is a topic that invites passion and outrage and nearly guarantees the exacerbation of ill will with only the slimmest chance of advancing comity and ethical clarification.  It will continue to do so as long as we continue to act as though “Pro Life” and “Pro Choice” are not inadequate slogans but definitive adversarial categories like skins and shirts or Guelfs and Ghibellines, tribes or teams to one of which each of us gives our unqualified support.  There actually is an American consensus on the issue, but one unsatisfying to the righteous appetite for certainty.  Most Americans are “against” abortion.  Most Americans are “against” the criminalization of abortion.  This means that most Americans are ambivalent about an issue concerning which strident voices are demanding certainty.

What is progressive in the development of civilization is the abandonment of barbarity, not its continuity.  Some brutal practices of Antiquity are rarely remembered, but they do show up in myth, legend, and literary texts.  The motives for infanticide were many, but their common denominator was the social or economic inconvenience or potential long-term military or political threat posed by the child to living adults.  The “exposure” of unwanted infants—dumping them to die in some desolate place—was not uncommon in the Greco-Roman world.  You don’t come to be raised by wolves, even if you are Romulus and Remus, under ordinary circumstances.  The voice of the Hebrew exile in the beautiful psalm Super flumina anticipates with pleasure the prospect of dashing the skulls of Edomite children against the stone walls of the city.  C’est la guerre.  In medieval penitential texts there is frequent mention of something called “overlying”.  In peasant households several people might sleep in the same bed.  Babies were not infrequently stifled in the night, asphyxiated by the weight of heavy adult bodies, leaving moralists suspicious that many such mishaps were not in fact accidents at all, but acts of postnatal birth control.  Unless we wish to imagine widespread depravity, and deny any natural bond of love between parent and child, such episodes were evidences of a terrible desperation.           

In fact our literature, which is after all supposedly an “imitation of life,” has been on the whole perhaps more truly enlightening than street demonstrations and counter-demonstrations.  Among modern writers few are grimmer than Hardy, and Hardy’s grimmest moment is probably in Jude the Obscure, in which a child, believing that his father’s life chances have been blasted by his need to support a family, murders his two junior siblings and hangs himself, leaving the chilling note: “Done because we are too many”.  It is impossible to absorb the horror of the deed without considering the horror of its motivation.  Hardy was not the first to believe in a malign biological trap in which the sexual instinct was and forever would be a generator of tragedy for large swaths of the human race.  Dreiser actually put that word in the title of one of the great novels of the last century, An American Tragedy, closely based, of course, on a “real life” criminal case.  One of my recent posts concerned Farrell’s Studs Lonigan.  In it the “biological trap” is but one factor in a world that seems expressly designed for the destruction of its pathetic anti-hero.  But surely you don’t need to “shout your abortion” or acquiesce, as Governor Northam did, in the idea of “abortion” on the delivery table to avoid returning to that world.