Blizzard of '26

 

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 I 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.