I watched New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's State of the State message and found that, in keeping with the Orwellian nature of our time, almost unfathomable vacuity was greeted by uproarious applause. True, most of the applause came from his fellow Republicans, but the volume and duration of the hand-clapping and deep-throated roars of approval from his party cohorts easily lent the impression that he had the unanimous approval of his audience. Now, the man stands for basically nothing, but he puts his emptiness out there with such fire and conviction that, if you blinked, you might be deluded into thinking that he is driven by deep moral urges. His speech contained no surprises, just repetition of the Big Lie of our historical moment, namely, that the answer to all of or problems lies in frugal governance, a goal our nation has apparently been thwarted from attaining by school teachers, a lazy, incompetent and greedy lot collecting fat paychecks and even fatter pensions. I soon had the chilling realization that this guy is so good at this act that he will almost undoubtedly be his party's candidate for the presidency, and, barring some unforeseeable change in the political climate, there should be a Christie in the oval office in January of 2013.
The notion that the fat in teachers' wages and pensions, (and, yes, feel free to throw in the excesses of other such recalcitrant unionists as cops and fire fighters), constitutes enough cash to make a significant dent in the trillions of dollars of debt that thirty years of rule by the acolytes of Milton Friedman left this country with is a notion that anyone with a decent education should be able to see through in a New York minute. Oh, but wait a minute, the reason so few Americans are decently educated is all those guys and gals with the chalk on their fingers just going through the motions until their pension checks can be forwarded to the French Riviera. Any way you look at it, school teachers are to blame for all of our ills.
Well, what can you expect from a Republican, right? Umm... Then I realized that just a few days earlier, I had heard a remarkably similar argument made in the inauguration speech of none other than a man whose Democratic Party credentials are unimpeachable. Young Andrew Cuomo, fruit of the loins of Liberal Saint Mario, had also railed against teachers, decried the unions that represent them, made belt-tightening and austerity budgets sound as if they were mandates posted to the church doors by some divinely inspired reformer. A phallic finger punctuating his every point, an incantatory delivery the rhythm of which was only a little undercut by his resorting to a slide show, Cuomo, like Christie, did his magic and made something out of nothing. Addressing himself to the needs of a state legislature considered just a little less dysfunctional than that of Mississippi's and recently instructed in democracy by a woman abuser and an indicted felon, he let us know in no uncertain terms that he would bang heads together, lock the good lawmakers in a room if necessary, if that's what it took to have them get his program of union-busting and cuts to already grossly underfunded social programs in full gear.
And then, spinning ever deeper into the vortex as I listened to Governor Christie, echoes of President Obama's commission on budget reform assaulted me. Why, they were all reading from the same text! Too much the Harvard man to attack directly the very people who helped elect him in the first place, (those tenured, over-indulged teachers working three-hour days only ten months a year), his two-pronged cure for the national malaise added a call for charter schools to the cry for cuts, austerity, belt-tightening, etc.
A few days later, news came out of that Athens of the Southwest, the proud state of Arizona, home to the senator who gave us Sarah Palin, that yet another deranged mass murderer had crawled out of our deeply troubled ethos, this time instructed to count among his many victims a member of congress, a federal judge and a nine year-old girl. I steeled myself against the prospect of the "analysis" that inevitably accompanies these all too frequent tragic events. No amount of preparation, however, would prove adequate to keeping me from the despair brought on by the reality of the rhetoric that began to flow.
Oh, the cries for restraint, for civility, for a courtly spirit of compromise! Like a drowning man, all of the many events that should have prompted an impassioned response from the robot in the White House came in on me like a tsunami. When Tea Party thugs were shouting down revered political leaders, resorting to essentially brown-shirt methods, why was our most eloquent president not throwing a log on the fire and chatting with us via our HD-TV sets calmly explaining the dangers of such methods? Instead of fireside chats, we got silence or occasional platitudes. No passion. No attempt to educate, to lead. President Obama had compromised away the public option in health care. In that same spirit, he had allowed, during a period when many Americans were out of work or watching their standard of living deteriorate, a budget compromise that gave tax advantages to millionaires and billionaires in the full knowledge that there would be no "trickle down" to the commoners. He never lost his cool, always driving home his core belief that one had to work with the other side. He is too circumspect to often resort to the Christie/Cuomo finger jab.
Now, it appears, the savagery that took place in Tucson will be used to further calls for compromise, for courtliness, for conciliation. When, in the presidential election of 2012, Republican nominee Christie runs against Democratic nominee Cuomo, we will have achieved the ultimate in political politesse--complete agreement.
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