Earlier this week I got a fundraising email from my congresswoman. Here’s how it started:
Peter, I didn’t get into politics to play it safe.
I spoke out immediately on behalf of our federal workers when Trump needlessly caused a shutdown. I’ve taken on the NRA in my district to push for comprehensive, common sense gun safety legislation.
And recently, I’ve called on both Ben Carson and Kellyanne Conway to resign, because they’ve betrayed the public trust by lying and violating the law.
I don’t apologize for a single word or action. But when you take on Donald Trump’s closest allies, you make yourself a target.
Monday’s Post. I get the paper edition to support free press and to take in the essential irony afforded by each morning’s layout.
Here’s my response in lieu of cash:
Dear Rep. Wexton,
But you are playing it safe with respect to an impeachment inquiry. Playing it safe is what the Democrats did in 2016. The stakes are much higher now than then because this moment may be the last in which to investigate the president for his impeachable offenses. If you want to play it safe, look at the polls: before Congress opened the impeachment inquiry against President Nixon, only 19% of the public wanted him impeached. It took leadership for a Democratic House to impeach the president then, and will take leadership for this Democratic House to open a formal impeachment inquiry against our president.
I found patronizing Speaker Pelosi’s remark about wishing to see Mr. Trump in jail after the expiration of his term of office. As I hope you and the speaker know, there is far more at stake this year than the fate of Mr. Trump. We have the republic to consider.
In light of what’s at stake, your stands with respect to the HUD and press secretaries seem not bold but pusillanimous.
I am not a Democrat, but I voted for you in hope that you would stand up to this administration’s many-faceted attack on our Constitution before it is too late. The balance of power on which our Constitution rests, as well as the political freedom it was designed to protect, may rest on what the House does about Mr. Trump this year.
Victoria and I talked this morning about our fears of not being heard. For my part, I’ve been working on a book that I may or may not ever finish. I’ll let Victoria speak for herself.
Hannah Arendt’s vision of the political is essentially positive: the political is a realm where people are seen and heard. All creation, it seems, wants to be seen and heard, to express the god-ness that God has placed in each.
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Today’s Post.
When I teach, I teach too much. That is, I talk too much. This summer I’ve worked hard on a plan to talk a lot less this fall.
I talk so much I didn’t know that one of my students, forced like the rest into relative silence, was working hard this spring choreographing an award-winning musical that meant so much to me and many others. What kind of talk is that, that doesn’t care to know its listeners?
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The most important prayer is what’s prayed through us: “Lord, teach us to pray.” Or the most important prayer is whatever’s on your mind: “You have not because you ask not.” Are these concepts so different? Because prayer is fundamentally communion, its content — the petition side of the operation — won’t come together outside of communion. The petition side is about hearing and being heard, the real presence that always expresses itself in communion.
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We all know by now that, despite his almost 11,000 false or misleading claims since becoming president, the president can count on the unwavering support of a very large base. That’s because, for the first time in their lives, many people in that base feel heard by their government. (The “familiar themes” in today’s headline refer to themes the president made to his base in 2016.)
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Consider two verses in which three steps seem to do the job of two:
So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.. – Romans 10:17 (NASS)1
And this is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked from Him. – 1 John 5:14 – 15 (NASS)
Our dyadic Western minds want to truncate these verses into simple, two-figure propositions: “Faith comes by the word of Christ,” and “If we ask anything according to his will, our prayer will be granted.” It’s not so simple, or at least it’s not so mechanical. In the former proposition, we’ve left out our hearing God. In the latter, we’ve left out God hearing us.
Hearing and being heard are among the most triadic and capacious of actions and are close to the ultimate “mediators,” to employ Charles Pierce’s concept.2
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Walter Lippmann in his essay “The Indispensable Opposition” defends freedom of speech with a unique argument: we need what our opponents have to say:
Unless all the citizens of a state are forced by circumstances to compromise, unless they feel that they can affect policy but that no one can wholly dominate it, unless by habit and necessity they have to give and take, freedom cannot be maintained.
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Five things (among many) that steal voices:
Abortion. Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, whether you see abortion as murder or as the lesser of two evils, you are probably not pro-abortion. Abortion silences voices. The birth of a hero saga turns the births of Moses and Jesus into tales of survival; each hero in his birth survives an edict to kill babies. In a sense, considering the number of sperm that never fertilize eggs, we are all survivors. We are also all heroes. (I’ve listened enough to my students to finally understand this.)
Poverty and economic inequality. The French Revolution focused on the poor’s need for food, and it discovered that the poor speak this need with one voice, fulfilling Rousseau’s concept of the General Will. On the other hand, the American Revolution, when it addressed the poor at all, focused on the poor’s need to be heard. America’s poor wouldn’t disrupt society, John Adams believed, but would not have the leisure time for civic engagement and the public visibility it brings. Adams’s thinking about the poor was in this respect different from Robespierre’s: “The poor man’s conscience is clear; yet he is ashamed . . . He feels himself out of the sight of others, groping in the dark. Mankind takes no notice of him. He rambles and wanders unheeded. In the midst of a crowd, at church, in the market . . . he is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar. He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is only not seen . . . To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable.”3 The American Revolution focused not on discerning and addressing the General Will but on forms of government, including (imperfect and incomplete) forums for the expression of specific viewpoints. The effective price of admission to these forums keeps many people out.
The destruction of the local community and of Tocqueville’s mediating institutions.
Facebook. Ironically, I suppose.
That image I just saw for a split second: a rock star’s windmilling his last chord, raising his arms in triumph. The next split second: his adoring crowd.
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Arendt on the “too apathetic or too stupid”:
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 193017 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been “spoiled” by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the power of reason. This would have been a shortcoming only if they had sincerely entered into competition with other parties; it was not if they were sure of dealing with people who had reason to be equally hostile to all parties.4
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and this from U2 (moments before the Edge windmills the last chord):
I woke up at the moment when the miracle occurred
I get so many things I don’t deserve
All the stolen voices will someday be returned
The most beautiful sound I’d ever heard
[Outro:]
Your voices will be heard
Your voices will be heard
“When processes of comparison grow complicated, new ‘third terms’ or ‘mediators’ may be needed at each stage of one’s undertaking. . . . it is by means of the use of a ‘third’ that each act of comparison is made possible, — whether the case in question be simple or complex. And the mediator plays each time the part which Pierce first formally defined.” — Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity, at 301. ↩
Adams, John. Discourses on Davila, Works, Boston, 1851, vol. V1, p. 239-40, 267. 279. ↩
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism, pages 311-312. ↩
