A man drives from Louisville to Lexington, a distance of 68 miles over well-paved Kentucky roads, for the express purpose of gambling. This man is a short, chubby, old guy called ME who could have spent his meager funds on more worthwhile endeavors, say an evening at the Irish Rover Pub, rather than trying to pick the horse that might stick its neck in front of ten or twelve other horses crossing an invisible line after running around a circle of synthetic dirt called polytrack. On this particular day, though, an old friend of Mine (possessive of ME), was running a filly named Brilliant Autumn in the third race and she had a good shot at winning and paying a decent price.
This was exactly what happened. The weather was miserable, gray, misting rain, blustery, and twenty degrees below normal for mid-April in Kentucky. But Brilliant Autumn made the sun shine in my heart, more importantly my pocketbook, by romping to a four length win over a decent field and paying 12.40 for every 2.00 I bet. This experience felt much more rewarding than most of my experiences with human females over the years; however, the reason I brought it up has more to do with structure than content. The tale serves a simple purpose in the broader narrative. According to Wiki answers.com a trigger incident is what starts a story. I prefer Richard Hugo’s definition in that a trigger incident is what starts a poem, but that’s just my own idiosyncrasy. Sometimes you may retain the trigger and sometimes it may be eliminated upon revision. In this case, it gets me from my home to Lexington in the first place, without which no synthesis would have occurred and provided me with a theory for the recent demise of democracy in our country along with a possible solution to the abundance of idiotic, corrupt, sexually deviant, and narcissistic fools infiltrating the Congress of the United States of America.
Being flush as they say in gambling parlance, I rented a room for the night. Then, I ate a celebratory meal in my room consisting of various delicacies from the KFC next to the motel and retired for some reading rather than watching a rerun of the Bachelorette on the TV. That’s when it happened. During this period of attempted self-entertainment, the fusion of two small thoughts turned into a Jesus-level profundity of such consequence that, if adapted by our great unwashed masses, our 99%, America might once again become a free nation.
For you, dear reader, to understand the implications created by my brain, I need to quote a passage from Hunter Thompson’s Kingdom of Fear, the book I was reading in bed, and juxtapose it with a tourist brochure. It sounds trickier than it really is. This is what I read:
A Willingness to Argue, however violently, implies a faith of something basic in the antagonist, an assumption that he is still open to argument and reason and, if all else fails, then finely orchestrated persuasion in the form of political embarrassment. The 1960’s were full of examples of good, powerful men changing their minds on heavy issues: John Kennedy on Cuba and the Bay of Pigs, Martin Luther King Jr. on Vietnam, Gene McCarthy on “working behind the scenes and within the Senate Club,” Robert F. Kennedy and long hair and what eventually came to be Freak Power, Ted Kennedy on Francis X. Morrissey, and Senator Sam Ervin on wiretaps and preventative detention. Anyway, the general political drift of the 1960’s was one of the Good Guys winning, slowly but surely (and even clumsily sometimes) over the Bad Guys.
As I read this, I realized that Thompson had been correct. In America, we have always believed that good eventually triumphs over evil and we have always had men who acted in accordance with that principal, statesmen unafraid of rethinking their attitudes if the result of the adjustment produced a better result for society as a WHOLE. After all, representing the majority interests is what they were elected to do. Unfortunately something has changed in the 21st century and unless you believe in oligarchy, a caste system in which most of humanity forced by penury into the public school system would go undereducated and unable to achieve any vertical mobility, a dissolution of privacy and free speech, constant wars on third world countries for corporate protection and profit, and theocracy as arbitrator of your morality, then that change may not be in your best interest. The good guys are no longer winning. The bills, statutes, laws, and taxes passed through Congress and the decisions adjudicated by the Supreme Court no longer have anything to do with PUBLIC good, only the greed of a few individuals and the hatred of a few others. Hunter Thompson’s reminder of how things were reminded me of how they are not currently.
What is planted and cultivated in a society, like a garden, grows there. I’ve mentioned this analogy before, and I didn’t make that up. It’s a fact. If you plant corn, roses will not grow from the seeds. If you hoe away the corn, weeds will thrive in the fertile soil. Do you ever think about the Italian Renaissance? I do, especially if I forget my medication. Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Donatello, Bellini, Titian, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Ghiberti, Giotto, and Raphael are only a few of the artists who have influenced the world of art for the last six hundred years and they all came from a tiny nation that boasted a population of less than ten million people. Why? Because what is planted and cultivated in a society grows there. During this era in Italian history, art was planted in every child’s mind. When that child was old enough, he was propped in front of a canvas, paintbrush in hand. Art was cultivated.
Here’s what we’ve done as a nation for the last century, or so – planted idiots in Congress and then not weeded them out in new elections. In the days of old when true public servants actually existed they happened to be men who considered holding elective office a responsibility that went along with the rewards of living here, not an entry level job to gain experience for corporate lobbying. They had their own professions or were retired with wealth already and while corruption certainly existed, there were always those men in Congress who had enough integrity and backbone to work for the public trust. That kept democracy fluid and functioning. Serving as congressmen was a way to give back to society that, in turn, produced an environment conducive to their past successes in the private sector. Think about the beginning of the 19th century. The population of this country was around two million. History offers us the biographies of men such as Washington, Adams, Franklin, Burr, Madison, Hancock, and Jefferson, among others. These were not perfect men. They had flaws, but the contract they lived by was a social contract with Jean-Jacques Rousseauinstead of a business arrangement with corporate enterprise. Today in a country with three hundred and thirty million people, it is no longer possible to name even one statesman with their integrity and self-sacrificing spirit. Those days, and for the most part that caliber of politician, have long since departed.
The shift in direction began to occur when men came to see national politics as a career instead of a privileged duty and when statesmanship was no longer planted in our little democratic garden. Politicians needed re-election at all costs in order to making a living both during their political years and after. I’m making a guess here without substantiation that this change of attitude and direction began to grow during the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century at a time when men such as Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and J.P Morgan threw around boxcars full of money in Washington, D.C. to influence public policy. In order for senators and congressmen to be re-elected, these self-centered assholes had to forge relationships with private entities – banks, corporations, military contractors, local companies – that seek power and influence over everything from interest rates to interstate commerce to international wars.
Whenever it started, it’s impossible to deny the current existence of widespread corruption in our capital now, especially since the Supreme Court decided that corporations are people for the purpose of buying elections. If elected officials owe their livelihood to special interests, then they choose frequently to vote in a manner consistent with those short term and local interests to protect that livelihood.
The shift in priorities I’m talking about marked the beginning of the end of a young democracy. Some governing still got done through the process Thompson describes as Argument as late in our history as a two decades ago. From each end of the left/right ideological spectrum politicians quarreled, squabbled, and bickered until a few decent humans on both sides realized the opposition held some notions that were mutually beneficial and would elevate the quality of life for the majority of people in the country. Since representation was the essence of their job description and since their egos struggled to avoid embarrassment at all costs, they often reached solid ground somewhere around the middle of an issue. But, as Hunter discerns, arguments of principal can only evolve into arguments of practicality when the people doing the screaming are capable of reason, of enough humility and common sense and compassion to accept the possibility that our entire collective society should not be relegated to their individual selfish whims. The Rogerian method of argument based on the belief that winner take all doesn’t have to be the end result of every disagreement allowed this country to operate relatively well, or at least manage, until roughly the last decade.
After the time in 2000 when the conservative Supreme Court appointed an unelected president to pursue a traditional corporate agenda and disavowed the elected president, the era of representative government in America, in jeopardy and dissipating for decades, disappeared entirely albeit without much fanfare.
All of what you have now read would have remained an internal rant spurred into my thought processes by reflecting on Hunter Thompson’s words had I not gotten out of bed to pour another shot of good Kentucky bourbon. Did you know you can buy a bottle of ten-year-old Ancient Age for eighteen dollars and it tastes better than most forty dollar bottles?
The bourbon rested on a cheap wooden desk in the motel room next to the tiny Mr. Coffee – what other company specializes in appliances for dwarfs – two free tea bags, Styrofoam cups stacked neatly next to the enveloped sugar and cream, a red swizzle stick, a broken lamp – it was an economy room – and a tourist brochure – “Visit Henry Clay’s Home in Lexington, Tours Daily.”
A vague flame of memory began to burn. Henry Clay had never come up in a single conversation with anyone in my life other than comments forced from me by Arowana Huey who was my sixth grade social studies teacher. Arowana had been blessed with a stern Pentecostal upbringing. Moreover, she truly believed that the discipline required to chant information multiple times as she had done in Sunday School regarding the ten-horned, seven-headed beast due to rise from the book of Revelation during the Apocalypse, would help us all retain the trivia applied to a study of Mr. Clay and other political figures from the ancient world of America that existed before baseball.
In those days, I felt that Mrs. Huey simply pulled her hair into a bun so tightly each morning that she cut off circulation in her brain. Yet here in 2013 at the age of sixty-five sitting at a scarred desk in a cheap motel half-drunk from whiskey and contemplating the depraved mess that we laughingly call politics, I see method in her madness. Henry’s info came roaring back in all its glory. Mrs. Huey was an underappreciated pedagogical genius and Clay was an oxymoron, an almost honest lawyer. He developed great speaking ability in the courtrooms of Lexington, Kentucky. After becoming a wealthy landowner because of the clients he fleeced, Clay went on to serve his country in both the House of Representatives and the Senate before being elevated to Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams. His fight for increased tariffs created the foundation for American supremacy in the industrial world. He maintained the idea that federal tax money collected from ALL citizens should be used to support society’s infrastructure (i.e. roads, schools, hospitals), and Clay opposed the annexation of Texas. With the rise of Texas politicians such as George W. Bush and Rick Perry in the 21st century, it’s easy to see the farsighted wisdom of that latter notion. Henry Clay is now recognized as one of the five greatest senators in American history and best of all, Abraham Lincoln liked him. That’s a pretty good recommendation for anybody.
Most importantly for me, on this evening of whiskey swilling, Hunter Thompson, race track success, and the constant barrage of bad news about our broken system of government that dominates every type of news disseminating media 24/7, was Clay’s famous nickname, The Great Compromiser. Based on his wisdom and a belief that everyone, including and especially Congress, was responsible for the public welfare, he brokered famous agreements across party lines such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850, The Nullification Crisis, and several others on the issue of slavery that not only kept the Union together but made life better for the vast majority of our people. His work moved us closer to the eventual elimination of white people owning black people. His primary quality as a statesman of great virtue is the very same quality many politicians, wealthy conservatives, and war mongering Jesus-freak evangelicals view as anathema to their ideal of democracy today, which is in reality a frightening form of theological and economical fascism.
And that’s when it hit me, this great idea formed from a synthesis of trivial information churning around in my alcohol-addled brain. Why don’t our representatives in Washington, D.C. sit down together and do the job they were elected to do instead of fucking each other and the rest of us to make a crooked buck? Maybe, it’s the thrill of being above the law because you create the law. Many years ago when I was training race horses myself here in Kentucky, I knew a veterinarian who was a world-class equine surgeon. He traveled first class everywhere to operate on some of the best racehorses ever bred. A genius, he formulated his own brand of leg medicines and had a medical practice worth millions of dollars. If you believe in clichés, the world was his oyster. But Doc owned a few racehorses and he loved to gamble. He had no problem risking his license to practice and possibly even jail to drug said horses illegally in hopes of winning a big bet. I asked him once why he did that considering he already had all the money anybody could ever need. His simple and yet complicated reply – “Because every dollar I can make dishonestly is more exciting and fun than every hundred dollars I can make legally.”
While that may be the logic some congressmen apply to their elected office, it doesn’t work for me. Life isn’t a horse race, even metaphorically. Everything is not about winning. Congress exists primarily to levy taxes and institute laws that allow the vast majority of people in our society to benefit on a nationwide level. Politicians are not elected to line their own pockets, force people to adhere to one religious code, and surrender the responsibility of governing to multi-national corporations that exist in an amoral vacuum sustained by one rule, make more money even if you don’t need it.
I know it’s unheard of these days to argue passionately for a problem solving solution to a situation that concerns the entire population and at the same time be reasonable enough to surrender elements of that solution when someone on the opposite side shows you a more beneficial way. I realize that facts no longer matter in debate if your own interests suffer from their inclusion in the conversation. On the other hand, stupidity only goes so far before the natural world is forced to correct itself and I believe we are approaching the outer limits of nature’s patience regarding collective living, environmental concerns, technological advancements with no ethical restraints, human greed, and religious arrogance. Soon, the planet will need to start over, maybe without humans.
Is this outcome inevitable? I don’t know. Synthesis thinking and critical thinking are not the same as prophetic insight. They’re more like common sense. Here’s what I do know. Compromise is not a novel concept. As a matter of fact, it is a proven means of solving a lot of the issues we currently claim are irresolvable. Our problem stems from an unwillingness to synthesize ideas from the extreme right and left edges of our ideological differences into answers that rise from the middle and become greater than the sum of their fanatical parts. How we go about cultivating an attitude of compromise for the greater good in our 21st century politicians is a difficult question. But, if I’m right that what grows in a garden relates directly to what is planted and cultivated there, maybe we need teachers like Arowana Huey to conduct social studies classes in Washington, D. C.
Jim McGarrah, Author 