Dear America,
As I have done with the prior two, I set my mind to watching last night's debate and at 9:00, I turned it on...as if I had a choice, what with the ubiquity of the debates on the commercial and cable channels. As on the occasion of the first debate, I got through the first half-hour, cringing less than I expected to largely because of the moderator's initial control of the discourse, but then, "shab" overtook my interest again and I had to turn away...largely with embarrassment for our country. These two people are the best we could do. Out of over twenty options including the candidates from both major parties, our electorate...we...winnowed the field down to them. It astonishes me. Martin O'Malley, former governor of Maryland who hung in for a couple of weeks, would have been a better candidate than Clinton, but Bernie Sanders definitely was. He even polled far better than Clinton, who is winning the polls now, but just recently started doing so convincingly. We rejected Sanders' sincere effort to bring equity back into our dealings with one another in favor of Clinton's artifice. And as for the Republican Party, there was Jeb Bush. I remember my son calling me one day after Bush had been on some junket covered universally by the news media. He told me that he thought he might vote for Bush because he seemed reasonable, and I suppose, moderate as well. Even Christie, who still seemed to have some integrity at that point, was a possibility. But the Republican Party, like its Democratic counterpart, couldn't help itself and it sank to the lowest common denominator by nominating the most preposterous of the seventeen choices offered to it. Donald Trump would be a qualified candidate in some banana republic where the elections really are fixed, but here where we have real choice, his hegemony among the Republican candidates is, well as I said before, astonishing. Even Marco Rubio, who was almost life-like enough to make you forget that he is an automaton who just repeats the same lines every time you pull the string in the back of his head, seemed a more likely final choice than Trump, but here we are.
As to the debate last night, everything I have heard on the news today was something I heard during that half-hour I could stand. Just as in debate number one, there has been no mention...not even a word...about anything that happened thereafter, which tells me something; after the first half-hour, nothing worth noting really happened, except that Donald Trump declined to commit to accepting the election results, which brought even more shab to the enterprise than I had already observed last night. Not to put too fine a point on it, we could have dispensed with everything after the first 30 minutes and we would have suffered no loss of anything of merit. The consensus seems to be that the first thirty minutes was substantive enough to justify having the debate in the first place, though I didn't notice anything I hadn't heard before. However, everything after that, as in the case of each of the prior two debates as well, was superfluity. It was two people getting fatigued by a few minutes of being civil and rational, and thus lapsing into what they truly are: crass, self-seeking egomaniacs whose sole motivation for doing what they are doing is personal ambition. It's all shab, I tell you, but what is the alternative.
Well, we could resort to the ideal propounded by Socrates in Plato's Republic. He proposes an ideal city-state, Kallipolis, in which governance is executed by "philosopher kings" who live austere lives in one another's company, supported by a corps of soldiers similarly committed to service without personal gain. Of course, the issue of how we might select such philosopher kings would still arise, and in fact, modern critics of Plato and his idea suggest that pursuit of such pure idealism as philosopher kings would have to embody lead to abuse of humanity by people like Stalin and Hitler rather than being the panacea that Plato seems to have thought it would be. So maybe we are as close to the ideal Plato proposed as we can get as modern human beings. Perhaps elections like ours are the way to go, but what role should debates like those we have seen in this election cycle play...how do they facilitate selection of our American equivalent to a philosopher king.
Well, the answer is that as of 2016, they don't. These televised presidential debates started in 1960 with Kennedy and Nixon. I haven't watched it since it happened, and I was just an adolescent then, so it made little enough impression on me then, but my recollection is that it was far less personal, and in consequence, it was civil by comparison to almost anything we do in politics today. I think we could possibly return to that standard if the moderator could turn off the participants' microphones when they exceeded the time allowed them, but even then we would be dealing with the candidates that we seem prone to choosing these days. So I think that presidential debates have outlived their utility and now serve just to embarrass us as a nation. I think they should stop because they don't really inform us anymore whereas if candidates actually put their ideas on websites, at least there is no ad hominem component to them and we can possibly keep shab out of the equation. That's the way I say we should go: no more presidential debates. We just embarrass ourselves with them. When we start nominating philosopher kings, that's when we should reprise the presidential debate, and what are the odds of that happening.
Your friend,
Mike
Leave a comment