I’ve been singing the same song for a long time. Just can’t get the lyrics out of my head. The lyrics go like this: “If this nation goes down, it won’t be the fault of the Democrats or the Republicans; the conservatives or liberals; the communists, socialists or capitalists. It will be the result of a belligerent partisanism that manifests itself from both sides of the aisle.”
The bitterness and hostility that characterizes the divisive partisanism in our nation isn’t new, as I’ve been discovering. My brother-in-law gave me a copy of David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Truman. Once I started reading it, I was captured by the deep integrity and courage of the late president. He overcame a lack of education through a love of reading—especially of reading history. He overcame early associations with the Pendergast political machine in Kansas City and his integrity prevailed, even when he went against “Boss Pendergast.”
He faced some of the most difficult decisions any president ever faced, and never backed down. His decisions, over all, were on target for his own goal of doing what was best for the country. His administration accomplished more than most administrations do, and primarily because of Truman’s courage of his convictions. He studied an issue in depth, got the counsel of his trusted advisors, and then made up his own mind and acted.
Sometimes he was wrong. Sometimes his quick temper got the best of him, and sometimes he just plain blundered. And each time, he was berated by the press, attacked by the opposition party and his popularity ratings declined. With each single blunder, a dozen or more accomplishments would be forgotten in the rage that befell him. But on balance, his was one of the most productive, effective administrations in American history.
But even as early as 1934, when he first ran for Senate, the bitter, belligerent partisanism was present. Apparently it has been with us for many generations. Maybe it always has been so. American history is not without its political duels to the death. The duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr is romanticized in American folklore. Andrew Jackson vs. Charles Dickinson, Henry Clay vs. John Randolph and even Abraham Lincoln, whose duel with James Shields was averted at the last minute, are just three in a list of no less than sixteen early American duels listed in an online Wikipedia article.
Today, virtually no subject and no environment is free of adversarial, confrontational language. From virtually any political issue to the relative value of the Confederate Battle Flag to the musical interpretation of a classical guitarist’s rendering of a well-known piece on UTube, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that if you don’t agree with me completely you have lost our mind (or worse). Compromise is seen as weakness. Only total agreement with my perspective is acceptable.
Not even on Facebook.com can one escape the adversarial name-calling.
In Harry Truman I found a kindred spirit in his sadness over our inability to be civil with one another. After his retirement from office, Oxford University awarded Truman an honorary Doctorate of Civil Laws degree. Following the ceremony, at a white-tie dinner in his honor, he addressed the crowd and offered words which, while he intended them in regard to the relationship between The United States and Great Britain, I find applicable to interpersonal relationships in general, and especially in regard to the belligerence that typifies our partisanism:
“A good many of the difficulties between our two countries spring not from our differences but from the fact that we are so much alike. … Another problem we have … is that in election years we behave somewhat as primitive peoples do at the time of the full moon.” (emphasis mine)
But the essence of his warning was that “a great, serene and peaceful future can slip from us quite as irrevocably by neglect, division and inaction, as by spectacular disaster.” He said he hoped that both nations would never become careless about “our strength and our unity.”[1]
His words were prophetic. Sadly in America, we have become careless about “our strength and our unity.” And as a result we are letting “a great, serene and peaceful future slip from us quite as irrevocably by neglect, division and inaction, as by spectacular disaster.”
In the words of that great Okefenokee prophet, Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”[2]
[1] David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1992) p. 957.
[2] This quote appears several times in the writings of Walt Kelly, creator of the comic strip, “Pogo”. The quote is a parody of an 1813 military dispatch, viz., “We have met the enemy and he is ours”, and first appeared among Kelly’s writings in a book entitled The Pogo Papers, published in 1953. Its final appearance was on a poster for the first Earth Day in 1970.
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