Justice, Justice

This is primary season and the newspapers are filled with advice on what and how I should watch as the results are tabulated. Sometimes they even have recommendations for whom to vote. But regardless of who wins I know that the November vote will change nothing. We live in a time of political criminality. Politicians lie and cheat. Representative Liz Cheney, not a terribly nice person at all (ask her gay sister), has said of Kevin McCarthy, “He is embracing those in our party who are antisemitic. He is embracing those in our party who are white nationalists. He is lying about what happened on Jan. 6. And he’s turned his back on the Constitution.” Yet McCarthy will be elected by his Republican conspirators to be Speaker of the House should the tragedy of their ascension in the Fall occur. He is not alone in his hate, his lies, his animus: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Louis Gohmert, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Ted Cruz. And the rest of the horde who voted not to certify the election results even after the mob invaded the Capitol and threatened the lives of senators and representatives and who advocated hanging the Vice-President. All of this organized and directed by Donald Trump, the absolute worst and most dangerous President in United States history whose Big Lie that the election victory was stolen from him has continued to be broadcast and supported by the politicians. The pundits say that we live in a time organized by the cult of personality: that personality being that of Trump. Maureen Dowd writes in the New York Times, “It’s mind-boggling that so many people still embrace Trump when it’s so plain that he cares only about himself.” But perhaps, I think, it is not so mind-boggling that he is still supported by his crude base: I think we do not live amongst good people, least of all politicians. It is mind-boggling that so many people—millions—still adhere to Trump’s deceitful narrative and to his evil character and heinous intentions. 

In Iris Murdoch’s novel The Nice and the Good, Octavian Gray comments to John Ducane, his friend and colleague, “Politicians aren’t concerned with justice being done, they’re concerned with justice seeming to be done as a result of their keen-eyed vigilance.” For politicians (of either party finally) governing is all about appearance, but, in fact, the politician’s motivations are self-serving. They claim to pursue justice, but it is only the appearance of that pursuit that motivates them: what they pursue is privilege and re-election. Ducane suggests that whatever justice might be it is not what results from the speeches or acts of politicians who advertise their concern with justice. What occurs in our Congress is the enactment of self-serving acts of men and women. Politicians purport to act in the cause of justice but what they really do when they legislate is to display their egocentrism. What they are concerned with is not the good but what best serves their image and themselves—well, which perhaps is a redundancy! Politicians are their image.  

I am inclined to accept Gray’s comments in The Nice and the Good: politicians aren’t good, some of them are not even nice. Politicians are the damned. Octavian Gray again: “To be damned is for one’s ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting, agonizing preoccupation with self.” Others do not really exist for politicians though they espouse sympathies for their constituents. But look at the responses to the more recent mass killings in Buffalo and Uvalde. Lauren Boebert rants that they (the Democrats) want to eliminate the rights of the second amendment (already an inaccurate remark about an already contentiously disputed meaning of the amendment). But it wasn’t her child who was murdered. 

But then what is “good?” Willy Kost, a character in The Nice and the Good and a survivor of a concentration camp who lives now on the Gray property on a pension from the German government suggests that the good might be simply “a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.” The good is not selfless—I think that would be form of martyrdom—but perhaps the good might be thought of as a state of consciousness in which one could be open to hear others. Not to claim to understand them because that would be to essentialize, but to to listen with a concern for what is spoken. To forgo self-interest. To abjure lies and deception. To care not for party but for country. 

We live in a very dangerous time.