Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit, part five. The Political Cynic.

I grew up hearing about the lofty ideals of democracy, as enshrined in the American Constitution. I grew up thinking that politicians were actually statesmen who really wanted to do the right thing for their fellow citizens, who entrusted them with leadership. As incredible as it may sound, I actually believed this when I was a kid. It was not hard to feel this way. I first became aware of the world during the administration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I remember where I was when the news of his assassination was broadcast. I was a first-grader, who heard it from the sixth-graders in my elementary school. I ran home for lunch and my mom confirmed the news. In upcoming years, I listened to recordings of Kennedy’s speeches, and they were very stirring. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” That’s the most famous line. But even better is this one: “Here on Earth, God’s work must truly be our own.” His assassination made me revere political leaders even more, since the official story (which nobody really believes anymore) was that the assassination was entirely conceived by a deranged man named Lee Harvey Oswald.

And I still revere Kennedy, even though revelations have come out since his death about some bad things he did, such as cheating on his wife. Even during the Vietnam War, I trusted our politicians to be telling the truth that North Vietnamese communism really was a threat to world peace and that we had to stop it, sort of, advance and retreat, advance and retreat, in which corporations that supplied the military got very rich over a war that seemed to never end and which was supported by an endless supply of federal dollars and conscripted lives.

Then came Watergate. I had been enthusiastic about Nixon, and I felt betrayed. I felt good about Gerald Ford, who took his place (the only president to not have been elected), because he projected an image of being clean. He said, “The national nightmare is over.” In Japan, which I visited about the time Ford took office, they referred to Gerald Ford as “Mr. Clean,” because Ford did resemble a little bit the white white white janitor on the cleaning supply boxes and bottles.

The presidency of Jimmy Carter was almost boring because of its lack of scandal. To this day, Carter remains about the only clean politician of which most of us can think. Then came Ronald Reagan, who inspired everyone with his words, but then did whatever the hell he wanted to, whether it was legal or not. He sold armaments to Iran, whom he had labeled an enemy of freedom, in order to get money to supply to “Contra” terrorists in Nicaragua so that they could kill civilians. Reagan once said, “I don’t like having to consult a committee of 545 every time I want to do something.” This committee, of course, was Congress, and he was required to obey them by this little tiny document that you may have heard of, the Constitution.

The rest of the story you probably know. I have filled in the 1960s through 1980s for my younger readers. Particularly noteworthy was the administration of George W. Bush, which was so filled with conservative corruption that John W. Dean (a Republican and Watergate whistleblower) wrote a book about it, Conservatives without Conscience. (Donald Trump recently called Dean a rat.)

It is even worse today. Not just the corruption, which we have always had, except for brief shining Camelot moments. But today the powerful conservatives are leading America in a direction of totalitarianism, and even a revival of respect for Nazis. Dean quotes Professor Bob Altemeyer: “If you think [the United States] could never elect an Adolf Hitler to power, note that [Nazi sympathizer] David Duke would have become governor of Louisiana if it had just been up to the white voters in that state.” White supremacist Richard Spencer was taken seriously by Steve Bannon, who was the national security advisor for Donald Trump. Trump said that the white supremacists in Charlottesville and the diverse people who protested against them both deserved equal respect and equal blame, even though the only person killed was a young woman, by a car driven very fast into a crowd by a white supremacist. Trump said that the Congressmen who had not clapped for him at his State of the Union address were committing“treason.”  The link is to the Telegraph, a U.K. newspaper, to show that Trump’s outrageous statement was taken seriously overseas.

In the political arena, then, it appears that the facts support a cynical point of view on the national level. On the state level (I live in Oklahoma), the legislature for a long time refused to allow public school teachers to receive a living wage, and instead of trying to solve the state’s fiscal crisis, they spend their time trying to enact creationist laws. The purpose of the state of Oklahoma, they think, is to make oil companies more profitable, even if it means the poverty and disease of the state residents. Is it any different in your state? Probably not.

I think I have made my point: cynicism is the only realistic summary of the political world. There is probably nothing you can reasonably imagine that can even come close to the reality of that world, only a little bit of whose corruption is visible to outsiders.

Clearly, the momentum of politics right now is toward Trump demanding, and getting, personal adoration. And slightly fewer than half of Americans are eager to give it to Him.

But we can’t stop on such a depressing note. Otherwise you will be exactly like the miserable man I described in an earlier essay. But knowledge is power. As a cynic, you know that politics is thoroughly corrupt. The practical result is that you know it is hopeless, utterly hopeless, to try to solve any of our major problems by working through existing political channels. At least, cynicism can keep you from wasting a lot of time and resources, only to get your heart stomped into a quivering mass of protoplasm on the Rotunda floor. Find something else to do to make the world better. But, as a good cynic, you should not expect any of your efforts to make a difference in the end.

This will leave you lots of time to do things that make the world better and that you enjoy. I mean, WWGCD? What would George Carlin do? Take, for example, the fact that Trump used a ceremony that supposedly honored the Navaho Code Talkers as a chance to insult both liberals and Native Americans by calling Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” and by holding the ceremony right underneath the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the president who broke the law in order to steal Native American land in the 1830s. What can you do in the face of such an insult from the highest office in the land? Humor, of course. A political cartoonist depicted a Native American saying to Trump, “You could learn a thing or two from us. We know how to run casinos that don’t go bankrupt.”