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On the used rack at a local bookstore last week, I found
a copy of Why Americans Hate Politics,
by E.J.
Dionne, Jr., whose words sometimes grace these pages.
It was good reading, but it missed the point. Americans hate politics because our system never grapples with real questions. There's always a sham issue which provokes posturing and simulated battles.
Consider the latest scandal from Washington. In 1993, some confidential FBI files were examined by a White House aide, who got to the letter G before they figured out he wasn't supposed to be looking at the files.
There was speculation that the information in the files
could have been used for political purposes
if it
leaked out, and now there will doubtless be hearings,
accusations, responses, charges, counter-charges, and
whatever else passes for statesmanship in Washington.
All the storm and fury will revolve around whether the aide passed on the information and whether it was used.
Along the way, the important question will get lost, since nobody has asked it: Why is the FBI compiling dossiers at all? Dossiers with derogatory information which, if leaked, could damage reputations and political careers? Is this what we want done with our money and in our name?
These collections can't be related to any legitimate law-enforcement need. If there were real crimes in the files, the FBI should have turned the evidence over to a U.S. attorney for prosecution.
That wasn't the case. So what is in these dossiers?
Apparently, the potentially embarrassing stuff (what else
could be used for political purposes
?) that comes up
in background investigations of people who might get
federal appointments.
In theory, background investigations are supposed to insure that we don't have foreign spies in high places, and that presidential appointees do not embarrass the president.
In practice, background investigations haven't worked. Spies still operate, and appointments can still backfire -- potential attorney generals violating tax laws, a potential defense secretary who's a real party animal, a Supreme Court nominee smoking pot while teaching law school, etc.
So these FBI files really serve no legitimate purpose. They don't help prosecute lawbreakers, they don't keep any president from getting hurt on an appointment, and they don't preserve national security.
However, the files must contain titillating information -- why else would there be such concern about unauthorized people reading the files? If the files were merely resume material, who'd care who read them?
This brings up another question. Whose fault is it that the titillating information in the files could destroy reputations and careers? Just how is that information even relevant to whether a given potential appointee is able to perform a given job?
Suppose there was damaging
information in a file
-- say, that a potential appointee, while out of town, had
dinner with a man not her husband and they then retired to
a hotel room.
Does this tell us whether she'll come to work on time? Or how well she handles a budget? Or whether she can get talented people to work for her?
It tells us nothing of the sort. Yet modern society
keeps acting as though this matters. Is this a result of
the yuppie ambition ethic of the 80s, when it was assumed
that people were always on the job? Or various movements of
the 70s, when the personal is the political
was the
phrase of the hour?
It really doesn't matter what caused this lurid
fascination with what used to be known as a person's
private life.
The results are pernicious in any
case.
By modern standards, Oliver Wendell Holmes and William O. Douglas, both notorious flirts, could not sit on a federal bench.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, with his Camels and martinis and mistresses, would be unfit for the White House. Nor would Roosevelt dare be seen in public with Winston Churchill, a man of brandy and cigars and a youthful taste for opium.
And so, we act like every election concerns the Vatican College of Cardinals, rather than a mere act of engaging a certain person to do a certain job. And every appointment thus means that the appointee needs to qualify for sainthood, rather than competence for a given task.
This extends even to the lowest reaches of government. At a local school board meeting once, they were discussing a proposal to test the blood and urine of all district employees.
I mentioned that I would rather have my children taught by smart junkies than by morons whose only credential was the purity of their urine, and of course I was ignored.
All this might explain why Americans really hate modern politics: the art of making mountains out of molehills while ignoring things that really matter.
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