Enable Beauty in the Voting Booth

.

Beauty is not a luxury.  At first glance the sentence appears to be an oxymoron. We need only take a quick stroll down memory lane to link the beautiful with the luxurious. Pick a century, pick an empire, pick a robber baron, and you will find a palace or mansion stuffed full of the artifacts deemed the most beautiful of the age. But interestingly we may have the chicken and the egg backwards. It is easy to assume that wealth and power were the dominant motivations of the top 1% of any particular era. And I would not suggest that Genghis Khan, Napoleon, the Medici, Hitler, Qin Shi Huang, and that crowd were shrinking violets; they were all megalomaniacs, whose glories were rooted in blood. But I am fascinated by what they acquired once they had amassed their wealth and power. Without exception they either plundered their known world for the finest art or commissioned new works by the world’s finest artists. A psychiatrist might wonder if all the brutality and mayhem had, at least in part, masked a frustrated obsession with “all things bright and beautiful.” 

But the love of beauty has by no means been restricted to the lifestyles of the rich and famous, or infamous, nor to recent history. Humans have been painting on the walls of caves and carving wooden and stone figures for some 60 thousand years! We seem to have an innate love of - even a visceral need for - the beautiful.  In the context of this specific post, we need to pay particular attention to the work of one iconic President, FDR. 

In 1934, with the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration realized that art and artists were vital to the fiscal and emotional recovery of the nation. And so the Public Works of Art Project was born, hiring some 4000 artists to create almost 16,000 works of art.  The scope and lasting legacy of the various works remains open to debate. What is not, is the legacy of an administration with the courage to assert that beauty was fundamental to the health of the nation. Interestingly, FDR’s distant cousin and fellow president, Teddy Roosevelt, had taken a similarly courageous stand earlier in the century, setting aside vast tracts of wilderness as national parks and forests, assuring us of a heritage of natural beauty to partner with FDR’s efforts in the arts. 

So what insight do these histories lend to our voting behavior in 2020?  A candidate’s position on environment is often fairly front and center.  Climate change, exploration by private companies into public lands, policies and leadership of the EPA, these are all fairly high profile issues that impact natural beauty, and separating the “pro-beauty” candidate from those who show little concern for, or outright animosity towards, these issues is not terribly difficult. Standard position papers posted on the candidate’s website usually make the candidate’s feelings on these issues clear.   

However, positions on the fine arts, like those championed by Roosevelt’s Public Arts Work Project are often less transparent. The National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities are flagship national “pro-beauty” endeavors, so we can be guided somewhat by candidates’ positions on those agencies and their budgets. However other issues, like a candidate’s position on national educational curricular initiatives the effect of which can trickle all the way down to providing art supplies in public elementary school classrooms are often harder to discern and may require contact with a candidate’s campaign that goes beyond their boilerplate social media blurbs. Take the time and effort to learn what these folks believe about beauty and the arts and why. 

Beauty and humanity have coexisted across the millennia.  It seems that every time the anthropologists and archeologists push our species’ history further back into the "mists before now" we find sculpture among the skeletons, paintings beside the ancient hearths. Enable Beauty is the second tenet of Distilled Harmony simply because it seems obvious that by enabling beauty we enable and ennoble humanity and the world in which we live.

.

Foster Harmony - The Most Harmonious Candidate

.

The “harmony” from which Distilled Harmony takes its name has its roots in science, physics, philosophy and theology. Searching this site for “harmony” will send you wandering down myriad paths through each of those heritages.  But for our current purpose - how can Distilled Harmony guide us in the voting booth - I will try to stay more focused.  The first, and preeminent, tenet of Distilled Harmony is Foster Harmony.  At the risk of sounding like a beauty pageant contestant, this tenet calls upon us to do whatever we can to ensure "world peace" - from the personal level of harmony in our own home, to harmony in the global community of which we are all a part.  But unlike the stereotypical pageant contestant, the tenet asks that we actually take steps to “foster harmony.” And holding any candidate for public office, certainly the highest in the land, to a commitment to foster universal harmony is certainly a good place to start.

I have been a member of the same academic department for almost 40 years. As such I have been part of dozens of faculty “search committees.”  These are fascinating exercises. The candidates craft letters of application, often wonderfully designed works of semi-fiction, to present themselves in what they hope is the very best light light given the often “big net” qualifications we often include in the announcement of the position. The selection committee then tiptoes around personal and professional preferences to come up with a short list of candidates to bring to campus for an interview.

It is only in the rearview mirror that I have come to see how important those interviews can be.  At 40 years, my professional affiliation with my colleagues far exceeds the length of many marriages. By hiring a colleague, we are inviting an individual who we often know only through their self-affirming narrative and letters of reference provided by - one assumes - supportive colleagues in the discipline, to share perhaps the rest of our professional, and often personal, life. It is a very, very important decision. And while our "marriage" to our President is limited to, at most, 8 years, it is - in the big picture - more important than hiring a colleague. Nonetheless, we might gain some insight by applying some “interview assessment issues” to the huge “interview” that is a political campaign.

Like a letter of application and supporting letters of reference, a political campaign is the candidate’s charm offensive, their attempt to appear wonderful in our eyes.  Attempting to separate fact from fiction in these beauty pageants is becoming more difficult in the digital age. There is no letterhead on the electronic "letters of reference" that flood the Internet. It is quite difficult to “source” support or detraction by individual, political party, or even nation. My suggestion is to watch how the candidate acts when they think nobody is looking.

We always take our invited interviewees out to a series of meals. Some rather casual lunches, other more formal dinners with the search committee that will make the final recommendation on hiring.  In these situations I made it a point to carefully observe how the candidate treated the wait staff. Most candidates are savvy enough to keep their game face on over meals with those who may hire them, but the way they treat the wait staff, who have no power in the hiring process, is sometimes revealing.  A candidate can affirm, and even research and publish works that advocate a compassionate and harmonious worldview. But that same candidate can be short and demeaning to those who bring the food, pour the wine and fill the water glasses.  These contradictions tend to be warning signs that there is a problematic disconnect between the public mask and the private person behind the mask. They also tend to reveal candidates with whom I would not risk spending decades. 

A political campaign is a closely related species. A political candidate will always say what they believe the voters want to hear, attempting to juggle messages to their “base” which tends to cling to the most extreme positions of the party, and the hyper-valuable “undecided voters” whose adherence to party orthodoxy is mercurial at best. The candidate's speeches and media campaigns will attempt to tout that strangely bifurcated worldview. It is our job to ascertain to what extent the candidate's actions - in current or previous political offices or the private sector - match their words, their commercials, their formal speeches, press conferences, informal comments, tweets, etc.  It is those specific actions, legislative history, executive actions, business practices and personal behavior, that are the political parallels to “how they treat the wait staff.”

Foster harmony asks us to look at each candidate in terms of how his or her “treatment of the wait staff” reflects or predicts an individual who sees the world through gentle, harmonious, and compassionate eyes; reveals a candidate who, when in office, will seek a genuinely harmonious relationship with their fellow office holders, our fellow citizens, and the community of nations with whom we share this fragile globe.  

.

Mind Like a Steel Trap, or a Large Plastic Garbage Bag

.

Both have their place.

When you are in the midst of your occupation, working for the Yankee dollar, you are expected to be in steel trap mode. But as you slide into your “golden years” the garbage bag tends to becomes the more germane metaphor. I call my mental garbage bag “the hopper,” not to be confused with Dish TV’s digital assistant of the same name. My hopper is my mind - or better perhaps, my memory. Just about everything and everyone I have ever known is in there somewhere. I’m just not exactly sure where. The point is that in most instances I really don’t need to know what I am looking for right then - my self-imposed expectation of immediate recall is a relic of the steel trap days. They went something like this:

Student: Dr. Schrag, what did you say was our first globally shared disaster?

Me: The sinking of the Titanic which was broadcast around the world almost immediately via the new medium of radio.

Student: And when was that?

Me: 1912, between the late hours of April 14th and into the early hours of the 15th.  The ship was captained by Captain Edward Smith who died in the disaster.

Student: Thank you.

Me: No problem.

The “hopper days” work somewhat differently: 

For example, there is a large black lab puppy in our neighborhood. And when I say large I mean REALLY big. His paws are the size of dinner plates and his tongue seems quite capable of slurping up a Smart Car. Labradors and Newfoundlands are both descendants of the St. John’s Water Dog, so share some DNA, but this guy definitely leans toward his Newfie cousins.

Anyhow, I like black labs, so I fuss over him and play “dodge the feet and tongue” when I encounter him out on his walk. I really like the pup, but I have trouble with his name. For some reason I first came to believe his name was Casper - sort of the opposite of the very white cartoon character, Casper the Friendly Ghost. In reality the dog’s name is Gaston. There is a Lake Gaston nearby and perhaps there is a relationship there, I dunno. So now when I encounter said canine I toss a "BOLO (Be On Lookout For) large lab puppy’s name" into the hopper. Fortunately both my daughters were addicted in their youth to the movie Gigi that featured a male protagonist named Gaston. (played by Louis Jourdan opposite Leslie Caron - “Ah, yes. I remember it well!” Actually, they didn't sing that song, Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold did. Anyhow.) So fairly quickly the hopper churns “big lab+not Casper+dude from Gigi+big lake nearby” together, and Gaston pops out. Sometimes in time for me to call the pup by name. Sometimes not. No big deal. I have learned not to stress over it. I don’t “need” the name right now, and it won’t be on the test.

I have been introduced to Gaston’s humans a couple of times. I have no idea what their names are. Hey, not everything makes it into the hopper. You still have to prioritize. 

.

Distilled Harmony in The Voting Booth

.

If you examine the course of great nations and empires over time there is an obvious pattern of rise and fall. The Romans, The Greeks, The Mayans, Dynastic Egypt and China, The British Empire, all rose to dominance and then, for a variety of fiercely debated reasons, fell. No doubt the reasons for decline were multifaceted, but one assertion seems to maintain credibility in most, if not all, the cases: the government was insufficiently flexible to deal with evolving social, geological, and political changes. A military leader - like an Alexander the Great, or Kublai Khan - dies and there is no political process in place to provide for a transition of power.  Or a ruling family is deposed through military or political means and what was once great is brought low. 

There are those who assert that America stands on the brink of such a fall and there are disconcerting signs that point in that direction. Primary among those indications are a political system that seems paralyzed. The billionaire-backed radical right rants about an immigrant invasion that threatens to well-being of “real Americans,” while the hard core left, still seeking to be all things to all people, bemoans the aberrant autocratic behavior of the Trump dominated Executive and Judicial branches of government. Neither extreme is the disease, both are symptoms. The disease is that as a nation we have lost our way, stagnated, fractured our political will. Such observations do seem to give weight to the assertion that the time of America’s ascendancy is past and we will follow those other great nations of the past into decline and irrelevancy.

There is a significant difference. Unlike every other dominant culture that preceded us, America is a democracy.  In previous dominant empires the power of the empire was seen as descending from God to the monarch, emperor, chief, whatever the title, of the supreme, often divine, ruler.  That changed with the American Revolution.  When exiting the Continental Congress of 1787 Benjamin Franklin was asked “What type of government have you given us?”  His response “A republic, if you can keep it.” And the truth is that after 250 years the republic is still ours to keep or lose. And if we continue to support the extremists on both sides of the aisle who paralyze the government we will lose it.

The Declaration of Independence asserts that in a democracy government “derives its power from the consent of the governed.” That is us. We are the governed. Every elected official from school board to the county commissioner, to the mayor, to the White House derives their power from us - the governed.  It is our most sacred duty to choose those upon whom we bestow power wisely. That wisdom has become increasingly questionable, for while we seek to blame the country’s ills on our political leaders the truth - to steal from the Bard - “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Somebody has to elect these people and - to steal again, this time from the comic strip Pogo - “we have met the enemy and he is us.” Or at least the enemy are the organizations that we often mistake for “us” - political parties.

It is interesting that about every political debate at every kitchen or dining room table often descends into accusations that “the democrats” want to do this or “the republicans” want to do that. It is true that one often finds greater comfort in one political party or the other, but it is foolish to assume that party membership in some way obligates us to support either an individual or a position advocated by a particular party.  Objectively, there are no doubt sincere, patriotic, compassionate, thoughtful people in both parties. The problem in recent years has become prying those individuals free from the ideological purity demanded of the parties - a cohesion enforced by access to the billions of campaign finance dollars controlled by the national party bosses and the financiers who exert such power within those parties.

The nation would be best served by the abolishment of political parties, political action committees, and the electoral college. Despite the attractiveness of that daydream, I realize that that is not going to happen - certainly not within my lifetime. Rather, something that could happen within my lifetime is that we actually begin to consider the extent to which each candidate - again from the school board and the county commissioner to the White House - espouses opinions and programs that are consistent with our own beliefs and values.

And yes, you caught me, this post is really only the introduction to the four posts that will follow, each in their own good time, that will explore how each of the four tenets of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm can be employed as a sort of political sieve to separate the gold from the dross as we consider the choices that will face us next year. 

.