Politics in America has become a blood sport worthy of the Coliseum. It’s degenerated to a point where a sizable portion of the mob (of which I am a part) really could care less which contestant wins as long as there’s plenty of blood spilled in the sand.
Even though the spectacle of Republicans being trounced would have been gratifying, the “shellacking” suffered by the Democrats on Tuesday was equally entertaining to see. Seeing Meg Whitman bleed $141.6 million of her personal fortune in a failed bid for the California governorship was just as much fun as seeing Minnesota’s longest-serving congressman in history, Jim Oberstar, choking back tears of disbelief at having been thrown out of office. There’s similar carnage everywhere. It is hard to care about any of the gladiators in this arena. Let them bleed and weep.
The “winners” will have their comeuppance, too. It is just a matter of time. They will sow the seeds of their own destruction and will bring themselves down someday—and maybe bring down the whole system with them.
Yet public service does not need to be as base and dirty and disreputable as it now is. Politics has always been a nasty business, but there seems to have been more civility in the old days.
There’s a story told about John Kennedy and Barry Goldwater that still brings tears of nostalgia to my eyes.
Even though they were at opposite poles of the ideological spectrum, Kennedy and Goldwater were close personal friends. They knew they would be opponents in the 1964 election, and had planned to fly from place to place on the same campaign aircraft, debating each other in a display of gentlemanly civility that would have been historic in its inspiring example.
When John Kennedy was assassinated, an historic moment of creative possibility died along with him. This moment was very real and existed not only at a national level, but in many local places as well. I observed its reality in my own community and family.
My grandfather Louis was a local businessman with a strong sense of civic duty. He was a member of our city’s school board when he died. The newspaper stories about his death got it wrong when they identified Grandpa as a Democrat. He wasn’t. He was a Democratic appointee to the school board, but he voted Republican his whole life.
I caught hell from Grandpa one time during the 1964 presidential election for sticking a Goldwater bumper sticker on his car. He made it clear to me that as a member of the school board who was appointed by his friend, a Democratic circuit court judge we called “Uncle Joe,” it would invite trouble for both him and Uncle Joe if Grandpa were to be publicly identified as a Republican. Partisan politics was a fact of life then as now.
In having encouraged public misapprehension about his true political affiliation, Grandpa and Uncle Joe were not engaged in a shady deception. The two of them just had a different take on the idea of competition.
Grandpa was the right man for the job (which paid nothing, by the way). He was serving his second term on the school board at the time of his death and had ably served as its president through a particularly contentious period of unionization. He was a respected and unselfish man who had a special talent for getting along with others regardless of their politics. He did so by sublimating his ego and focusing on the requirements of situations and the needs of others.
To give you an idea of how he worked, I‘ll share a business example. My grandfather owned a bookstore. It was a block and a half away from a competing bookstore owned by a good friend of his. Neither bookstore could afford to stock every book a customer might ask for, and few customers wanted to wait the time it took for special orders.
So this is what the two friends worked out: before a special order was placed by either store, the clerks would first place a call to the other store to see if a particular book was in stock. “I’ll have it here for you in fifteen minutes,” the customer would be told, and a stock boy (usually me) was dispatched to fetch the book. (As often as not, I would also be dispatched to deliver books to the other store for their customers.) In this way each of the competitors helped the other to serve their customers who, when they browsed the shelves while waiting for the stock boy to bring them their book, usually found one or two additional titles to buy.
My grandfather was a smart, creative, and agile thinker, and a thoroughly decent man. By today’s standards of business and political competition, my grandfather’s methods may seem quaint or even unrealistic. Yet they worked because the main thing for him was getting the job done in a way that made everyone a winner. He was not motivated by seeing others lose.
My grandfather would not have been at home in today’s gladiatorial arena. By the same token, I’d guess that few of today’s gladiators could have made it in my grandfather’s milieu, either. Today public service has become so overtly greedy and mean and dysfunctional, I doubt my grandfather would recognize it—and I know he wouldn’t approve.
In his time and place, public service was not spelled “serve-us” as it is today. For him, it was all about giving, not getting.
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