Constructive Passion

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.