July 27, 2017
Statesmanship has been scuttled. Forensics is dead. Once the realm of the erudite few, and the
aspiration of the many, these lie in ashes, vanquished by angry multitudes chafing
at the restraints of dignity and grace. There’s
a strategy behind this wreckage of intellect and reason – years of unrelenting
assault on comity – and there’s a tactic – the disparaging of one’s opponents, denigration
of their arguments and sources, and a tu
quoque assault, leaving adversaries bewildered, spinning, unbalanced and
unable to answer such specious spew for the dispiriting realization of futility
in engagement. We’ve been subjected to
this centerpiece of punditry and politics for so long now it’s woven into the
very fabric of our discourse, if we may even still ascribe the term to such
theatrical and artificial cloth.
Where
does this leave the foundations of our democracy? Stone is a particularly recalcitrant rival
and we have bred a Medusa of the masses, a rock-solid and willfully
self-destructive base, heels dug and blindly loyal. What of compromise? What of collaboration? What of circumspection? Of years of study and reflection? These are no longer for men, not for real
patriots, and as opposing forces (both human and natural) assiduously assemble for
their looming assault upon us, we stand defiant, beating our chests and
proclaiming the prowess of our forefathers long dead, their crumbling battlements
and rusting towers of achievement beneath our unworthy feet, our childishly hollow
boasts and chronic disparagement now the satire of distant shores.
Not unable, but
unwilling to see what is before us, our nation careens toward the cliff edge,
off-course and drunk with anger at imagined slights and chimeric internal foes;
nightly awaiting our familiar town criers to usher us in from the encroaching darkness
to the perceived safety of our tribal homes.
And if it is indeed all we have left, we must put our faith in its
inevitable destruction. In the destruction
of parties. Of institutions. Of the trust in fear and solace of emotion on
which our electorally enshrined tyrannical land mass has come to rely. Perhaps only in the rebuilding the
intellectual foundations of our republic (if we can keep it) can we find
deliverance – only in the dispassionate embrace of mastered art, of skilled science,
of lauded logic and common fact, of objective thought and shared reason – only
in these things can we recraft a society worthy of those who sacrificed so much
to grant us that which we have upbuilt, exercised, eschewed, and now jettisoned
to the gutter of our history.
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