A reader asked the other day if it was stressful for me to write about politics.
There are many ways to answer this question. I could have interpreted this as a criticism of my column on Ray Fosse and Pete Rose; a hint that I was writing about trivial things when I should have been dealing with the big issues of the day. (As if performative arrogance and bravado aren’t among the most real and urgent problems of our time.)
But I don’t think he meant it, so I answered as best I could.
To paraphrase myself: aside from the intense deadline pressure, nothing about this job is that stressful. I don’t worry about people disagreeing with me and saying bad things on Twitter. I often worry that what I have to say about politics isn’t very original or insightful. I’m not very interested in politics; I’m interested in writing compelling nonfiction.
If journalism is, as Carl Bernstein puts it, a search for “the best version of the truth you can get,” we can define politics in equally brilliant terms. What about the process by which we try to improve our (admittedly imperfect) society? We need politics and politicians, and they have their own ways of handling their business.
We may be disappointed in them, but for them to be effective they must play the game in a more or less conventional way. Which means they can’t tell us the truth. Because, as Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Nathan R. Jessup once remarked, we can’t handle it.
Hanna Arendt beat Jessup in that conclusion.
You’ll remember the Pentagon Papers, the Department of Defense’s 47-volume secret history of US political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, commissioned by Robert McNamara that while the consensus view was that the Vietnam War was an invincible madness, at least three American presidents have secretly expanded the scope of US actions in Vietnam. Both Congress and the American people were deceived in the name of political expediency.
A defense analyst specializing in nuclear weapons strategy and counterinsurgency theory named Daniel Ellsberg was among those with access to these documents and was shocked and horrified by their implications. So, in 1969, he began to photocopy the report; It took 18 months to secure a complete set.
He then offered the report to several members of Congress – including Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas – in hopes that they would enter the documents into the Congressional Registry. After everyone refused to do so, Ellsberg – likely at the suggestion of Senator George McGovern of South Dakota – provided them to The New York Times and the Washington Post.
The release of the Pentagon Papers could have been to Richard Nixon’s advantage, as the report focused on the mistakes and mistakes of his Democratic predecessors. But Nixon was a paranoid beast, more concerned with finding leaks and prosecuting leakers than actually stopping the publication of classified documents.
So his crazy plumbers ransacked Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to try to find something embarrassing about Ellsberg, a clumsy ploy that only succeeded in a judge dropping the government’s Espionage Act case against Ellsberg.
Thus, Americans learned “the truth” about Vietnam and the lengths our government was willing to go to instill a fanciful fantasy about American power. Arendt, a decade away from covering the trial of Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker, was prompted to write an essay, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” in which she notes that “sincerity never was counted among the political virtues, and lies were always considered justifiable tools in political relations”.
(Serendipity alert: The day after my friend asked about writing about politics, “On Lying and Politics,” a new Library of America publication that bundles Arendt’s New Yorker essay with her earlier essay “Truth in Politics,” arrived. by mail. be published in September.)
Politics, Arendt argues, is a creative pursuit, and a “characteristic of human action is that it always starts something new… as they were before are changed. Such a change would be impossible if we could not mentally move away from where we are physically located and to imagine that things could also be different from what they really are. In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth – the ability to lie – and the ability to change facts – the ability to act – are intertwined; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination…
“We are free to change the world and start something new in it. Without the mental freedom to deny or affirm existence, to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – not just to statements or propositions to express agreement or disagreement, but to things as they are given, beyond agreement or disagreement, to our organs of perception and cognition – no action would be possible; and action is, of course, the very stuff of which politics is made.
“Therefore, when we speak of lying… let us remember that lying did not infiltrate politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral indignation, for that reason alone, is not likely to make it go away.”
My point is not that politics is an ignoble activity – or that journalism is noble – just that human beings crave stories, and both politics and journalism fulfill that desire. What I don’t care about is convincing anyone to vote one way or another; I have a strong disbelief in the ability to make things much better for much longer. This is a fallen world that will eventually fail, as all living things must. What we can expect are incremental and temporary improvements. (So yes, you should vote, early and often if you can.)
The truth is, politics won’t save us, and journalists overemphasize its importance in part because it’s so easy to cover politics. Politicians want attention. Some of us develop symbiotic relationships with them; there is a semi-permeable membrane between politics through which some of us come and go quite easily.
I never got around to it. I bought Tucker Carlson lunch a few times, I had many friends who wrote speeches and drafted bills, but I was never too tempted. Or maybe no one has ever found my price.
But I’m not a Menckenite determined to despise all the drug dealers and the boys and girls damn happy to meet. They have their stories to tell, and I have mine.
I’m not interested in telling theirs.
