Reconciliation: 22

Ear-worm of the week: “He do the police in different voices.” This is, perhaps, my favorite line from T.S Eliot’s classic The Waste Land.” Why did national politics initiate it as germinating thought?

Wait one.

Eliot must have liked the quote as well, for he used it as working title for the poem. It is, actually, a quote borrowed from Our Mutual Friend by Charlese Dickens. A character named Betty is complimenting a savant orphan named Sloppy: “You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.”

As for Eliot, who can guess completely what he had in mind. A most difficult poem, I spent the first year of my life following discharge from United States Navy studying it. I came of the experience freed from religious mythology but otherwise clueless. Perhaps, in a moment of cosmic prescience, he intended the poem as a cacophany of voices of the type that would eventually determine our fate. 

Which brings us to politics. Seems a reporter had the temerity to ask a Montana candidate for the U.S House of Representative a question about a matter coming before House, on the night before the election. The candidate's answer was a physical attack. Then the “different voices” started.

The reporter: “He body-slammed me.”

The assaulter’s campaign manager: “It was the reporter, actually, who attacked our candidate.”

The Police Chief: “Too many witnesses for ignoring the event. The reporter was, without doubt, attacked for asking a question about national events. Let’s just say it was a misdemeanor and let it go at that.” (There is a persistent rumor that when someone started turning to the First Amendment to the United States Constitutes, the Chief, who had donated to the miscreant’s campaign, ordered him stop, adding there was nothing to see there).

The leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump: “A glorious [political] victory.”

The Democratic Party leaders: “This man must not be seated by the House.”

The voters of Montana: “He (the assaulter) is our man. Kudos.”

This blog’s right-wing correspondent: “Summbitch got what he deserved.”

This blog’s left-wing correspondent: “Impeachment.”

The rest of America: “Groan.”

The upshot of it all was a resounding victory for the misdemeanorant. (Is that a word? If not, let’s make it one. We may need it in the future). What are decent folks to think?

Some of us are in hopes that this sad moment in our nation’s history may be, figuratively, the “My Lai” or “Kent State” in what has been a long battle in our country against common decency and civility. Perhaps it might even lead to … to … shall I say it … reconciliation?

One can only hope.

James Thurber forseeing the current
state of political discourse in America.