Politics As Unusual

Some of the big news in the past week has been about W Administration and CIA-backed torture of terror suspects.  This in itself is old news, in that nothing revealed now is new, but what's new is the detailed revelation.  I saw one criticism of the revelation that said it was recently ousted Dems who were unloading all of this, since they're leaving office and have nothing to lose by embarrassing the W administration and even the rest of the country.  The reciprocal concept is that if they still thought they had discretion and reputations to protect, they would not have blown the whistle on W.  That's really a shame.  They would have kept dirty secrets, because it would have been to their personal disadvantages to spill them?

I'm reminded of Noah Jacobs' comment about governments' being "reactive," and I think in many respects, Noah was right.  At some level, governors are afraid of the governed, and of incurring their displeasure.  Governors are afraid to act, because they know that no matter what they do, someone will complain.  And either for the sake of future votes, or for the sake of their narcissism, governors shrink from voters' complaints.  The result is that they often won't act until a matter becomes so desperate that no one, or very few people, can accuse them of anything, since at that point, there is only one thing to do.  It is only then that governors have anything remotely like "courage."

I recently read JFK's Profiles in Courage.  This book was about a series of US Senators, from the early days of the new nation until about the 1940s.  Each of these Senators took bold and unpopular positions, ending the Senator's career in most cases, but positions taken because the Senator thought the position was right and in the best interest of the greater good.

I'm very proud to be a member of a Commission that has on more than one occasion pursued aims and initiatives that although not necessarily popular, were considered necessary and prudent in the greater interest of the future of the Village.  That's the big picture.  The fleeting preferences of individual Village residents are not in center focus.  That approach is essentially pandering, and it is politics as usual.  This Commission has opted to take the broader view, and adopt deeper and more sustaining meanings.

My commonest complaint about the last Commission was that a majority of its members didn't want anything.  Presumably, they wanted their stipends, but they didn't seem to want anything else.  They had no articulated ambitions about their neighbors or about the neighborhood.  The one seeming and partial exception was that they wanted lower taxes, but in that the Village is failing fiscally, this ambition is not considered wanting something.  Unless what they really wanted was for the Village to die.  They never admitted that (except that Bryan Cooper sort of admitted it), so I won't assert it as their overarching goal.

The present Commission does want something.  It wants a Village that is capable of surviving and thriving, and it wants a Village that is better than it was, and will be better than it is.  Because that requires change, and because some people don't like change, some of us appear to be at odds with others of us, or with some residents at large.  It is very possible that this discrepancy will cost some of us our Village jobs, if we want to keep them.  So be it.  If I "leave the Village better than I found it," I will be more than satisfied.  And I'll be more proud than I am already.


"For The Best We Can Be"