This morning the one voice (I couldn't be sure which) was asking, "Is Joe Manchin responsible for the end of the world?" The other was apparently uninterested in a debate. Instead, he responded, "No, he's not. But he is responsible for bringing it on a whole lot faster than necessary."
I'd have to classify that thought as unoriginal. I'm just reflecting all the cross talk on television and the internet regarding Joe Manchin, I know. He is being turned into a first-class monster, by some. And even those who defend him (a theoretical possibility more than a reality - I don't actually know anybody coming to his defense) have a hard time not thinking of him as a giant stone blocking the road ahead. Something that has to be removed before we can proceed.
One group of folk present his case like this: The world is burning up. Old people are roasting in their beds in Britain. Spain is on fire. There is no longer the slightest doubt that we are suffering from global warming. The only question is whether there is still time to stop the floods and fires, stop the rivers from drying up, the last of the glaciers from melting, cars and busses from sinking into melting asphalt.
Tune into the news and you read that the American president has proposed radical measures to slow the process down. Republicans, who have been in full obstructionist mode since Newt Gingrich came up with the brilliant idea that if he drove us all off a cliff, we'd all die, sure, but at least democrats wouldn't get reelected. And because of the way our political system errs on the side of protecting us against a possible tyranny of the majority, if even one democrat fails to keep us away from the cliff, that's all it takes to finish us off. While Democrats were coming to San Francisco with flowers in their hair, the Republicans were getting elected to school boards and building a solid and powerful infrastructure for keeping the country in their hands. Today we are seeing the result of that divergence of goals.
And Joe Manchin is the man of the hour. The Democratic Party's analogue to the RINO Republican. A man plucked out of near obscurity to assure that, just as Wyoming has as powerful a voice in Washington as California or New York, Appalachia need never bow down to either Hollywood or Wall Street.
There is a larger debate over whether we ought to concentrate, in our great democratic experiment, on persuading each other to inform ourselves and stay rational, or simply let each other vote our self-interests, damn the torpedoes. And yes, that's a real debate, and all sorts of really good thinkers have made the self-interest argument. Probably - I'm not sure of this - the same folk who argue that free speech should be total, and untruths will eventually be overrun by truths.
What we're up against is the weakness of democracy as a form of government. It may indeed be that it's the worst form of government except for all the rest, but that pearl of wisdom can't hide the fact that it can only work when there is high participation by informed members of society. And we haven't had that for some time. Until recently, in the U.S. (and many other places) that has not been a serious problem. There were enough good people doing the work of democracy to keep the ship afloat. What we didn't see coming was that information would no longer come from a garden hose but from a bursting Hoover Dam, and that, at present, we are powerless to filter the water from the dam. We lack the critical thinking skills, for starters, even if we could manage the volume.
I'm old, and I have a terminal disease. Not to worry. My doctor tells me death is not imminent. But the fact that I can see through to the end of the tunnel means I've had to rewire my head to include things like deciding how best to use my time. And sometimes in those wee morning hours I find myself wondering whether people will remember me when I'm gone. I know they will remember me for a time; the question is more how they will remember me. I have a family tree that goes back for six generations. When I get to the fourth generation I find myself in a forest of names of people I know absolutely nothing about, other than that they have a place on the tree. They are, for all intents and purposes, forgotten. In fact, I live with the melancholy reality that most of the members of my own biological family in the generation after mine, those who never knew my parents and grandparents, know next to nothing about them, and seem to be fine with that. When it does occur to them to ask, they stumble over names, don't know who was married to who, don't know the sounds of their voices, don't know what would make them smile.
My cousin Betty and I are the last human beings alive who remember my great-grandmother (her grandmother) Mary sitting in a rocking chair, and the fact that we had to keep matches out of her hands because she was always wanting to build a fire in the kitchen stove so she could bake bread. Which she would never have gotten around to because she would have burned the house down first. How often I've wondered how my grandmother remembered this woman from her childhood, her mother, when she was too busy raising nine children (well, the seven who lived past infancy) to burn a house down.
My mind goes to legacy, in other words. Something to which very few young people give even a passing thought. And I find myself thinking of Joe Manchin. Does he worry at all about the effect on his legacy of joining forces with the Republicans? Is preventing the U.S. from adopting better curbs to global warming in order to put more money in the pockets of the superrich the way he'd like to be remembered?
Maybe he's philosophical about it. Maybe he simply assumes that nobody will remember him, that he will not be even a footnote in history. After all, he's not an active purveyor of misery, not a Hitler or a Stalin or a Pol Pot. He's an enabler of misery of far lesser note. But he shares with the more active bastards of history the fact that he didn't listen to his mother when she told him to leave the world a better place than he found it.
Now I've got another thought I want to have on my mind as I fall asleep tonight, and let the two voices in my head work out. What did poor Joe Manchin do to become a plaything of the gods like this? He's not the worst guy in the world. I'm sure his loved ones have good reasons for sticking by him. But why does he appear to be some modern-day Job, whom God and the Devil treat like a rooster in a cockfight? Why was he chosen for this role of bad guy, of enabler of sleaze and political corruption? Was it simple greed? Simple weakness of character? The calculation that he could do more good as senator if he just stayed in office and sold out to big oil for the greater good?
Greater good than stopping climate change?
He's not special. Corrupt self-serving politicians who work for big corporations at the expense of the constituents they claim to represent are a dime a dozen. It's probably not his choice to have his moment in the sun showing him counting his coins like Scrooge McDuck. He'd probably rather be remembered as a great leader. Maybe have a congressional building named after him like Sam Rayburn or Tip O'Neill.
Instead, he will go down in history as somebody who found himself in the driver's seat of a bus filled with people working to slow climate change.
And put the pedal to the metal and aimed the bus for the cliff.
1 comment:
July 28 - BBC NEWS: Joe Manchin says he now backs a bill to raise corporate taxes, fight climate change and lower medicine costs.
Well, hot damn!!!!!
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