Yesterday, at a rally in advance of the upcoming Iowa caucuses, GOP Presidential candidate and frontrunner Donald Trump said (in his outside voice): “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters. It’s, like, incredible.” My first thought was: yes, that IS incredible, as in not credible. It’s almost as just plain unbelievable as it is unbelievable that Trump would think it or say it. My second thought? Yeah, he probably could.
I suspect that I’m not the only one who sometimes wonders what is the point in trying at all to maintain some sort of serious, active, and critically engaged civic posture anymore, much less try to cultivate the same in others? This Presidential election season is a bona fide circus. The Republicans have a leading candidate for President who basically believes, and says out loud, that he could shoot a man on 5th Avenue just to watch him die. Another thinks that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain. And, to be fair, it’s not that much better on the Democrats’ side, where the Official Party Line is that this whole dog-and-pony-show is nothing more than fait accompli. Madame Secretary has the pedigree, the bankers’ backing, and the entire technocratic, Machiavellian genius of the DNC election-machine behind her in what they all assume to be, in reality, a war of attrition. Oligarchs gonna oligarch.
In the meantime, outside the Beltway and beyond the Iowa echo-chamber, people are protesting in the streets. People are being poisoned. People are endlessly, secretly, and exploitatively surveilled. People are being screwed over by the criminal justice system every day or, if they haven’t yet been, they’re learning that they’re just a lucky break away from being so by binge-watching Netflix. It’s only January 24th and already 53 people have been killed by police this year. People are broke and in debt and seriously, legitimately, pissed off.
Let me say for the record that I fully understand the grim, race-based and asymmetrical economics of the criminal justice system, the healthcare system, the job market. I totally get the depressing mathematics of a single voter’s effectiveness in a representative democracy with an Electoral College. I am painfully attuned to the mutual back-door back-scratching of corporate and political lobbyists. I, too, mourn the substitution of infotainment for real investigative journalism in mainstream media. I know, I really know, the game is all but already fixed.
And, yet, still…. I believe in democracy and in my role as a citizen. I believe there are things worth doing. I believe it’s still worth doing something. If you’ve found yourself lured by call of Political Futility Sirens, read on.
I’d like to say that I found my salve in a philosopher– Fanon or Rawls or Fraser or Derrida, or even Obama— but the truth is that my relief came from a novelist. My sister (an excellent reader, whose literary judgment I trust without question) loaned me a novel recently, Defending Jacob by William Landay. I’m not very far into it, so I won’t even bother to proffer a spoiler alert. For present purposes, all you need to know is that the narrator (Andy Barber) is a district attorney. In the first chapter, Barber has been called before a grand jury and is asked whether or not he wants to exercise his Fifth Amendment right. Barber declines, saying that he has no desire to remain silent. His only interest, he says, is in seeing that the truth comes out.
“No matter what?” Barber is asked. “I believe in the system, same as you, same as everyone here,” Barber responds. It was the passage immediately following that exchange that really resonated with me. It reads:
Now, this was not exactly true. I do not believe in the court system, at least I do not think it is especially good at finding the truth. No lawyer does. We have all seen too many mistakes, too many bad results…. And yet, despite all that, I do believe in the power of the ritual. I believe in the religious symbolism, the black robes, the marble-columned courthouses, like Greek temples. When we hold a trial, we are saying a mass. We are praying together to do what is right and to be protected from danger, and that is worth doing whether or not our prayers are actually heard.
That “belief” in the system– and I intentionally put “belief” in scare-quotes– is what keeps me up at night, what aggravates and exasperates and annoys me, but it is also what keeps me from being drawn into the quicksand of despair. These days, when one is tempted to ask the inaugural philosophical question– why is there something rather than nothing?— with an especially plaintive kind of insistence, it’s worth remembering that all of these so-called social contracts we engage in with one another are but experiments, after all. They work only if we believe in them. They cease to work when we stop believing in them. As I wrote about prayer on this blog before, hoping-for or wishing-for or believing in things-not-yet-evidenced is as much doing the work of a social contract as it is constitutive of THE social contract.
So, too, is taking to the streets, the voting booths, the classroom, the town council, the city hall, the neighborhood association meeting, or the local caucus. There’s an age-old adage that goes: as long as there are tests in schools, there will be prayer in schools. One need not necessarily believe in some transcendent, omnipotent or interventionist Power to believe in the regular human power of hope and change. Hope and change is our work to do.
As Deray McKesson says on Twitter at the end of every night: Remember to dream. And that’s a man who understands that dreaming is only the beginning of all the work to be done.
That’s what Democrats believed in 2007. Yes, we had our hearts broken in a thousand inexcusable, insufferable ways. But we also saw some change, some small steps forward, enough for even the most defeatist among us to be forced to admit: yes, it matters what I do.
When a Presidential candidate stands in front of a microphone and assures you that he could shoot someone in the broad light of day with no consequence, it’s time to check your political engagement gauge. If you find that speaking up, acting up, f*cking things up is not worth your time in response to that… well, stand out of the way of the rest of us who believe there is still work to do..
We are praying together to do what is right and to be protected from danger, and that is worth doing whether or not our prayers are heard.