Debates, Kings, and Sweet Empty Moments
A reflection on our leaders
Over a year ago, just about, I went on to friends about how the two leading possibilities for the major political parties should step down from their posts as potential presidential candidates for 2024. One was too polarizing, too divisive and trigger happy. The other too old and compromised.
You know, the old song and dance.
And they didn’t step down, because why would they? One is the great symbol of frustration at the system, of a people left behind by the elites and intellectuals. The other is the guy who beat him.
So they stayed in. The one guy outlasted sensible replacements refusing to even engage in their grovelling for second place. He sat in front of judges and prosecutors, seeming to wink at the camera, a nod to the reality tv we used to love to watch him on.
And those same judges adjudicated him guilty and he winked and nodded and some of us thought, well, surely now. Then from behind us, people clapped and cheered, and the prosecutors and judges and juries all kind of had this wide-eyed look on their face like “this was not the plan.” Which makes sense because when they make plans, those plans almost never work. We throw something at him, and it just bounces back at us. Teflon Don, the man you trained in media, business, and New York tough politicking. You can’t lay a glove on him.
And then the other guy, he’s going nowhere. I mean it literally.
When I lived in Denver, one of my favorite things to do was ride the train to and from the airport for a travel weekend. It is easy and convenient, and it gave me a sense of starting and finishing. I remember a tough weekend of travel with several planes and bad quick meals, and getting on that train at the end of my trip, close to midnight, which would take me to my car and then the short trip home. It felt like finishing.
It took me about 30 minutes, half a podcast, to realize there was no one else on the train. At first I thought it was eerie. Where was everyone? Even that late, there were usually others in the same boat. I stepped out of the car without my bag, not unlike a Stephen King novel, to a completely vacant airport train station. I went back into the car to retrieve my bag, and saw the little flashing sign that usually reads a destination, a next stop.
“OUT OF ORDER”
I was on a train to nowhere.
This is what it must be like to be Joe Biden. You are on a train, and you don’t know where you’re going and by the time you realize you aren’t going anywhere, it’s later than you hoped for, and the baggage is heavier than you wanted.
So then it comes time for us to put the two candidates who did not withdraw on a stage to talk about the issues. America needs to know: is it really as bad as we think it is?
The answer, in short, is “yeah, pretty much.”
Biden did not look totally functional, especially when one considers the fact that his core function is as leader of the free world. When you include the lesser functions of walking and talking, no, functional is just not quite right.
I joke, but it was sad. Sad for our country, for a man who many admire, a family that should protect him. I’ve seen folks with dementia, and the way a family argues over whether the afflicted should have car keys, never mind nuclear codes.
But what about the other guy. I would love to say, along with some conservative pundits, that he was a big winner. He was reserved, more so than usual, which is a bright spot. Trump understands what most of his counterparts in politics don’t. Namely, that Americans have short memories. This has a double meaning. We don’t remember things for long (who can remember a certain scandalous video tape that nearly derailed 2016 Donald), and we don’t remember long things. Things like arguments about immigration or opioids or the economy.
To prove it, the things I remember verbatim from the debate are easy to recall, and none are substantive.
After a particularly garbled response from Biden, Trump quipped. “I don’t know what he said at the end there. I don’t think he even knows what he said.”
The golf conversation. Wow. Two old men arguing about their golf game. And for all the fodder about Trump’s lies, do we believe that Biden has a six or eight, handicap? Trump ends with the money line. “Let’s not act like children, Joe.”
“I did not have sex with a porn star.” A beautiful moment for America really.
Joe Biden beginning every attempt at a retort with “The idea…” seriously, go back and watch.
“I wish he were a good president. If he were a good president, I wouldn’t be here.” Money quote, only to followed by a real doozy. “I’d be at one of my many properties.”
Moments. We remember what is short, at least in our time. And Trump said a lot of short things. Things to be remembered, but not things to build a country or a path forward on.
The only upside of the debate, to me, was the fact that two members of the media, and the left-wing media at that, conducted themselves with baseline moderating skill. Ask the question, repeat the question, mute mics, etc.
But the two men I wanted to not be the two men a long time ago were themselves, and to a shocking extent.
If moments are what we hold in our collective memory as a society, then legacies are something else. Legacies are not moments, but lives, generations, to be used as a foundation for what is actionable.
“Because you’d be in jail,” is a moment. One I enjoyed, but I also like YouTube rap battles. The war time heroism of Winston Churchill, FDR, Truman, are legacies.
The funny quips and lines from our tv dads like Bundy and Tanner and Uncle Phil are moments. We literally cal them “episodes”. But the love, respect, honesty, we learn from our fathers, or lack thereof, are a legacy.
The difference between what makes a moment and a legacy, then, is the way the camera is facing. The tv dad says look at me, see how funny I am. The real dad says, look at you, look at who you can become with my help.
The politician who lives in moments demands a closeup when they deliver the line. The one who builds a legacy has us zoom out to look at the deeper questions of life. Good and evil, slave and free.
Sometimes the one who builds a legacy loses his way, turns the camera back around to get a good angle. Sometimes one who is always taking selfies is forced to build something greater, to turn it around and look elsewhere.
There is a poem I love by Percy Shelley about an old and glorious statue somewhere in a desert land. Except that the statue is not so glorious. Its legs are separated, and the head of the statue is on its own. Whatever glory it once had is completely gone. Shelley gives us the inscription that accompanies the ruined work, and fair comment:
“And on the pedestal, these words appear;
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains, Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
We discover from the inscription that Ozymandias has at the very least, had this sculpture made of himself, to sing the praises of his work. That the statue of himself would be evidence enough to strike fear in the heart of other rulers, and adoration in his people.
But the problem is, his people are gone. His works have passed away. And all that is left of Ozymandias’s idol to himself is the legs which can no longer take him anywhere, the face that is no longer the beautiful countenance of a young king, and his own words, which happen to be about himself.
“Nothing beside remains.” There are no works to “look on.”
When we build monuments to ourselves, when we turn the camera inward, we reveal the state of our own hearts, and thus, our empires. The colossal Wreck that is the state of American politics is filled with the wannabe Ozymandias types. Those that will build monuments to their moments, but not legacies for us to build on.
Legacy requires a positive vision. It does not look back at past works, but looks forward, using those works as a foundation. Legacy does not require despair, but hope.
Where there is no vision, the people perish.
As I observe American politics, I do not see legacy builders. There is no vision, no hopeful pointing toward where we will go. There could be, but there is not now.
The pedestals are there, the empty words and the decay of it all. But still, what I see is a fleeting memory of what was, now desolate.
“The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
*photo from USA Today
This is quite exquisite. Way to cook