The last few weeks have
been a blur as my wife and I prepare to move to a retirement community. Downsizing has been every bit as difficult as
we were warned it would be. So, as the
American holiday Mothers Day arrived, complete with visits to and from children
and grandchildren, it was nice to pause and recall “Whistler’s Mother”, the
classic American painting of a seated elderly woman known more formally as “A Study
in Gray.” For it is both a loving
appreciation of the artist’s mother and a beautiful expression of all the
artistry found in combining mostly varieties of gray into one composition. Emotional art you could call it, that
refreshes at multiple levels.
The policy arena these
days looks like the palette for such a work.
In foreign policy, China is both our trading partner and our rival, the
Middle East includes allies who are bitter enemies of each other, and Putin and
Ukraine are a swirl of competing grays.
Putin is both a traditional Russian who would like to reclaim the
centuries when “The Ukraine” was as integral to Russia as our “the Midwest” is
to us – Time magazine depicts him as Czar this week- and a power monger who
uses tactics reminiscent of Hitler’s moves against Czechoslovakia. Ukraine
itself is torn apart by competing factions. And there is no agreement about how
to handle any of the issues. In the
domestic policy arena, people identify themselves not by what they are for so
much as by whom they are against. Anything
positive said by one side of any debate is immediately denounced and derided by
the other. Spin doctors rapidly distort
it into a mass of corrupt garbage. The
cynicism that used to be the province only of world-weary reporters infects
everyone. Unfortunately the result is that the emotion in the current policy palette
is mainly a virulently destructive anger.
As an old adage goes,
leadership is the ability to proceed boldly when you have no idea where you are
headed. FDR in the 1930s was the great
exemplar of that. He unabashedly
admitted not knowing the solutions to both foreign and domestic policy issues,
but proceeded openly by a policy of experimentation – and the people followed
him. He did so by speaking not to their
intellects but to their emotions. His
fireside chats, in an era before television, were accepted as his way of
entering your living room and speaking with you personally. His cheerful “the only thing we have to fear
is fear itself” heartened millions, including my mother. That a blue-blood aristocrat from upper New York
State could connect with a share cropper’s daughter from rural East Texas was
remarkable. She, among millions, was
willing to try anything he thought worth trying.
Fareed Zakaria wrote
the other day about the emotional vacuum in foreign policy. He blames much of the current confusion in
foreign policy on the lack of a passionately expressed American point of
view. I think he is on to
something. We are missing that “can do”
willingness to follow leadership that got us as a nation through equally
difficult times in the 1930s. And we are
missing the emotionally compelling leadership to follow. The closest we’ve had to that in several
presidencies now is the good-old-boy “I share your pain” of Bill Clinton. George Bush was a good old boy, but not
gifted at sharing your pain. The closest
we’ve had to the FDR comfortable familiarity is Joe Biden, and it’s not he who
leads. Barack Obama is a problem solver
with the right instincts and intellect to search out solutions to our issues,
but his TV persona is that of one haranguing crowds, not sitting in your living
room chatting with you one-on-one. That
TV is a much less “warm” medium than radio hurts. And the overly cynical press corps and spin
doctors don’t help.
But deep down, the
problem is one of legitimacy. That vacuum Zakaria writes about in foreign
policy comes about because there is no “American” point of view. We
lack the shared vision of America they had back in the 1930s that leads to a
legitimate American point of view in foreign policy. We each have our own vision of America as it
should be, and our visions each exclude a multitude. We are rapidly losing the “United” in
USA. We cannot all follow a leader
because there is no leader acceptable to all of us. The incumbent of the presidential office,
whether liked or disliked, of our political viewpoint or opposed, friendly or
distant, is no longer accepted as leader of the country by all.
That is often blamed on
a national cynicism following Viet Nam and Water Gate, but it’s more likely the
pace of change that is so different in parts of the country that it constantly widens
our individual differences. Swelling
demographics and rapid changes make even parts of the same city alien to each
other. Some of us inch slowly forward in
a rapidly changing world in a perpetual hysterical denial, while others have
become neighbors in a global village whose local ties grow vaguer every day. I can’t really go home again to my East Texas
home town; it has become too strange to me.
We need to find ways to take a deep breath, reclaim our heritage and
relearn how to pledge allegiance to the same things.
The next two holidays
are Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, perhaps a good place to start
remembering that we all share more than just a continental landmass. Find ways to reach out to those who oppose
you politically and whose policy views you detest, to remind them and yourself
that we have more in common than we have differences. We need a common passion for our country far more
than a common hatred of those who oppose our views. Constructive passion won’t reenter our
national policy agenda until we put it there.
Washington won’t lead us through current messes until we all can look to
it for leadership.
