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Thursday, December 19, 2019

The Screaming Lie

When I was six years old, my best neighborhood buddy was a five-year-old boy named Jimmy. We climbed the apple tree in my backyard together, and we watched television together at his house. (Our family had no TV.) One day Jimmy and I wandered up to little Maureen’s house to play in her sandbox while she and her family were away from home. 

There had been rain the night before, and the sandbox was uncovered, so the sand was soupy and wouldn’t hold shapes well in the rain-filled box. We enjoyed dribbling wet sand through our fingers for a while. Then we discovered — and oh, the joy of childhood discovery, independent of adult guidance! — that if we threw dripping globs of it onto the nearby asphalt siding shingles of Maureen's house, they would stick, like molehills on the vertical surface! Defying gravity! It seemed like magic! Intoxicated with our powers, we soon had a whole section of the lower back wall of the house pock-marked with lumps of sand. It was quite wonderful fun, and when the excitement wore off, we found our way back down the hill (all of eighty feet) to our own homes and thought nothing more of it. 

That was the prelude.

Later in the day — it must have been evening, because my father was home — Maureen’s father appeared at our back door, livid with rage, quivering with rage, and demanding to know the identity of the “delinquents” who had thrown sand on his house. In his rage, he was threatening to call the police and have the miscreants thrown in jail! Terrified, I screamed and sobbed repeated denials! Jail! Locked up away from my family! I knew that lying was wrong but  could not face the punishment threatened and the shame of being branded a criminal

All these decades later (and thinking of Mr. Rogers, too), I look back on that incident and am astonished by the lack of proportion and reason Maureen’s father exhibited. We were such tiny children, Jimmy and I, and we had not thrown paint, only sand. Water from a garden hose would wash it away! Police? Jail? Were these appropriate threats for a grownup to shout at a frightened little girl, his daughter’s playmate?

If anything, Jimmy and I had been guilty of poor judgment. Well, again, we were five and six years old! I don’t recall if “trespassing” was an issue. That would have been strange in our modest, lower-middle-class neighborhood of forty-foot lots, where we kids were always running from one yard to another and “cutting through” from one street to the next. The whole neighborhood was a "commons" for us then, as well as for unleashed dogs and outdoor cats.

What we had done was neither malicious nor irrevocable. We had had fun and made a mess, a mess that could be hosed away in minutes. Maureen’s father could have asked us to clean it up, but apparently he didn’t think of that. Only police and jail. 

So I lied. Now that was very wrong, and I knew it. I lied to my parents and I lied to this other suddenly threatening adult, and because I knew lying was wrong, I screamed and cried while persisting in my lie, both out of fear of discovery, for what had now been labeled a “crime” (the sand), and out of guilt for the lie.

After a while, after Maureen’s father finally left, my parents calmed me down and assured me that I would not go to jail, even if I had thrown the sand, but that I needed to tell them the truth. And so, tearfully, I did. 


That incident came back to me yesterday as, one by one, so many members of the House of Representatives lost control of their emotions and yelled and screamed in rage. At first I thought, they have to know [the truth], so why this  lack of self-control and dignity? That's when I remembered my six-year-old self, caught between lying and fear of punishment, screaming and sobbing uncontrollably. Oh, yes, I thought then. They know, all right. 

Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Je l'accuse!

If there is one single individual I hold primarily responsible for Congressional gridlock and the awful, yawning chasm of partisanship that divides our country today, for the deterioration of political civility and the abandonment of Constitutional duty by elected officials, that person is Mitch McConnell. I know many of my friends would give the current president shame (not honor) of first place in such a contest, but I see things differently. The current president would never have been a candidate had the divide not been already so deep. And even elected to the highest office, he could never single-handedly have achieved the levels of destruction we have seen without a Republican party united behind him, united for the sake of their party rather than the country, led in the U.S. Senate by Mitch McConnell. 

McConnell’s reprehensible and indefensible machinations began long before the current administration was in place. Never in my life (there may have been instances in history but never as long as I have been alive) has there been such disrespect for a sitting president as McConnell showed President Obama. Others in his party and in the Senate fell in line, but McConnell was the ringleader. Anything President Obama proposed, McConnell was against, not because any particular proposal was against his “principles” but simply because Obama proposed it. He made it plain from the very beginning of the Obama administration that he did not intend to let the president have a single “win” on anything, and the shameful culmination of this campaign of partisan Congressional dereliction of duty came when the Senate refused to hold hearings for Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, a moderate admired by Republicans as well as Democrats. Blocking those hearings was an egregious slap in the face to the president, and I call it a dereliction of the Senator’s duty under the Constitution, as well as a mark of disrespect I have yet to manage to forgive.

Now that there is a putative Republican in the Oval Office, McConnell has generally continued his lockstep partisan strategy, putting party ideology over ideals, principle, and even Constitutional duty. To bring civility back into our national discourse, we need to get rid of uncivil, power-hungry partisan ideologues in government and replace them with men and women of decency and dignity who will fulfill the duties of the offices to which they are elected.

Robert Reich has written a piece asking who is worse, Trump or McConnell, something I read it this morning while searching online for other opinions on the Senate Majority Leader. As I see it, the president is the Great Oz, a little man behind the curtain. McConnell is the curtain.