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Bipartisan Spirituality
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 I quit smoking (for the third
or fourth time) two months ago, and I still miss my cigars. At some point,
every day, I think how sweet a puff would be right now.
 I’m
sorry I ever started. I wonder how the habit caught on in
the first place, since starting is so unpleasant. The taste is loathsome and
the smoke chokes you. Why did the first man who ever smoked persist long
enough to learn to enjoy it, especially with no advertising?
Three of my four kids smoke. I wish they didn’t, I hope
they’ll quit, but they could do much worse. Booze, drugs, and other
thrills haven’t hooked them. But these are things we negotiate among
ourselves. All four of them are adults now, and they know what I’d
prefer, but I figure that if my affection doesn’t stop them, my
nagging won’t either.
Besides, we have more important things to talk about. And when we
do talk about smoking, we talk in gentle nudges. We don’t talk in that
booming Ted Baxter style that politicians adopt when the subject of tobacco
comes up. It’s wonderful the way guys who take bribes, cheat on their
wives, and promote late-term abortion preach the urgent necessity of
protecting “our children” from tobacco leaves, especially if they
can squeeze a few hundred billion out of the deal.
So I’m delighted that the big tobacco bill has flopped in the
Senate, leaving Washington’s latest hero, Senator John McCain, the
Arizona Republican, with egg on his handsome face. It finally sank in with the
brighter members of his party that this bill wasn’t about “our
children”; it was about power, money, lawyers, and a level of greed
that must have impressed even the tobacco companies.
When men like Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy express their concern for
the youth of America, it’s always a good idea to take a close look.
![[Breaker quote for
Bipartisan Spirituality: Realism, or at least humilty]](2007breakers/070605.gif) Is it possible that the
tobacco debacle will inspire a new birth of humility among our politicians? For
reasons that escape me, they always fancy themselves our moral and
spiritual leaders, as if they’d been plucked out of monasteries to
supervise the country.
The truth — which they ought to know better than anyone
— is that they are men with certain low skills, including the ability to
raise money and speak in bland cant. As Mae West once said, goodness has
nothing to do with it. They hope, after using all their wiles, to be chosen, by a
majority of those who bother voting in a two-party system, over a single
alternative.
You might think that winning office on such terms would breed
realism, the cousin of humility. But it doesn’t seem to. A man can
cheat his way up, betray his family and followers, misrepresent his
opponent’s views, arrange discreetly illegal campaign donations,
mouth platitudes he doesn’t believe in for a moment, and still, after
winning by a whisker, feel that his countrymen have selected him to
represent them on Mount Sinai. (Never doubting, of course, that his
countrymen have chosen wisely.)
Those who repeat Churchill’s dictum that democracy is the
worst form of government “except for all the others” seldom
look at the others. The confusion of power with moral elevation is worse
under democracy than under any other system.
The Soviet Politburo never seemed to have illusions about itself;
dictators like Saddam Hussein don’t seem to think spiritual leadership
is their special province; the old kings of Europe enjoyed their mistresses and
hired their mercenaries and left the moral stuff to the bishops. Such men
understood that they owed their power to fortune, not virtue. Even the most
arrogant of them seldom dreamed of correcting the personal habits of their
subjects.
It would be a healthy exercise for every politician to look in the
mirror every morning and remind himself that he holds office only because,
in a two-man race against another mediocrity, a modest majority of those
half-informed people who imagined that their votes mattered reckoned that
he was the lesser evil. And they weren’t too sure about that.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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