I just watched the film Bobby this weekend. I am definitely getting old and crusty when I even resent the presence of Harry Belafonte in a movie. Forgetting the liberty one must take to dramatize the zeitgeist of the 60s, I recall one particularly un-prophetic phrase made by one of the characters in the film.
The character was a black campaign worker whose hopes were tightly bound to the success of RFK's campaign. By this time, John and Martin had been assassinated. He recalled a crowd of blacks and Mexicans rushing at RFK just to touch him. He was, in the words of the black campaigner, America's last hope for domestic tranquility across the races. Without him, we have no one else, he said.
I know it won't spoil anyone's enjoyment of the film to know that RFK too was shot and killed. If he had lived, would America be closer across the races and cultures? I rather doubt it. We did it ourselves. We always do it ourselves. The very idea of endowing RFK with the magical juju to make Americans do the right thing is a fantasy we maintain in our democratic process. But it's not the balloons or the vote that makes us work together. It is us working together.
As I have been saying, the fate of all of us, African Americans and others emergent depends upon our establishing once and for all that ours lies with the fate of the nation. This continues to be reinforced by what I read and what I see. Because of this, I am paying particular attention to those things which activists use to suggest otherwise, including especially deferences to The One. Our national unity does not depend on personalities. Isn't this desire for national unity oddly found in politics rather than in culture? It may be ironic, but is not surprising that so many are drawn to the civil religion and find strength in nominating and electing such articulate individuals into office. However this is something I don't look to from government. I am discomforted by the desire in the American people to satisfy their differences and distances one to the other through electoral politics.
If I may. I found one particularly salient point in Howard Zinn's 'Peoples History' which was the zeal of the 'Goo Goos'. And I found in their example a compelling argument that our best minds have not been drawn to government. And yet even his prime example of the Goo Goo victory over Tammany Hall, found in the modernization of New York and Chicago politics, it was based on models of efficiency found in private enterprise. So I do agree that good government is an efficiently managed government and that much reform is possible. Government should be utilitarian and politicians and bureaucrats engineer-like. The election of unifying visionaries is another ball game. Our ability to get along as Americans is not a state into which we should vote ourselves (if such a thing is possible). And yet there arise times in a nation's course when we become so divided that such a goal becomes the primary desire of the electorate.
I think that now is such a time, now that we see ourselves in Red and Blue. And I do believe that Fred Thompson is the best man for that job. But I am wary of that being the primary reason he or anyone should be elected President. We, the citizenry, should hold ourselves accountable to that task and not let the promise of rhetorical patronage satisfy a desire we shouldn't be outsourcing to campaigners. If Thompson or any other candidate cannot admonish us to work together ourselves, then they are not truly worthy of our support. We can only then hope to be unified by the merit of policy, not by the audacity of hope or any other such squishy sentiment.
Likewise, I think it is foolish that we would divide ourselves over the symbols of political difference. I am against identity politics in any form but the deepest - that being those alignments of deep political philosophy. I don't see that as what we are fighting over in today's contemporary political squabbles. We are almost universal in our acknowledgment that American bipartisanship is all too often a trumped up synergy and that both sides of the aisle rarely differ in principle as often as they do as a matter of priority or expediency. The parties are not true engines of thought so much as they are vessels of power.
I expect that we will keep voting on hopes and prayers and heroes embodied in candidates. And because we are in fact divided as a people on a variety of important issues, both parties will accentuate their differences and even occasionally make reasonable cases other than mere partisanship. Given what we've experienced over AG Gonzales, and now the Hsu and Craig scandals however, such matters are not likely to get the emphasis they deserve. Nevertheless as partisans we can help in necessary reform by sticking to the bigger picture over policy and asserting a kind of patriotic loyalty to the process. Anything effort that keeps our national politics from becoming the cult of personality it has a tendency to become is work well done. Let's keep that hope alive.
It's on us alone.
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