Colin Powell’s announcement on “Meet the Press” yesterday morning that he intends to vote for Barack Obama next month has been received quite appropriately as a matter of grave significance for the Republican establishment, and yet one more indication that the “base” is shifting and the McCain-Palin ticket is wobbling in the shockwaves of that seismic event.
What Powell said to Tom Brokaw was telling, most of all for his quiet composure and lack of animus. What was very clear, however, was that this career military man is completely dismayed by what the Republican establishment has permitted his party to become. Race-baiting and religion-baiting are of a piece in Powell’s moral universe, appropriately so, and he said very clearly and very candidly that Senator McCain has not done nearly enough to distance himself from the most noxious forms of rhetorical excess in which his campaign has engaged. Whispering campaigns about Senator Obama’s secretly being a Muslim are wrong on two separate counts, Powell warned.
First, they falsify a man’s personal profession of faith and are nothing more than lies made legitimate. Second, such statements seem to operate on the assumption that being a Muslim would somehow be problematic for a presidential candidate. That, Powell concluded, is not the America he loves and serves, and he went on to tell a moving story about Muslim-American, Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan from New Jersey, who was fourteen years old on 9/11, joined the armed forces as soon as he was old enough to do so, and was killed in Iraq at the age of twenty. He is now interred in the Arlington National Cemetery. This General has always known that he has Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists under his command; his conception of civic duty requires him to serve all of them equally.
Then came the inevitable question that you nonetheless get tired of hearing, when Tom Brokaw asked if this endorsement weren’t “really” about race. Was this not simply one prominent African-American gravitating toward the candidacy of another? Powell dissected the question with a surgeon’s precision. He said that if this were the case, then he would have done so eight months ago. He has been weighing this decision very carefully, mulling over what the two men say, examining the campaigns they have chosen to run, and though he did not say so explicitly, he also doubtless looked to their first decision of consequence: the selection of a Vice Presidential running mate. This was implicit in Powell’s repeated gesture to “the sorts of people with whom the president will likely surround himself,” the kind of advice he will solicit, and what he will be able to hear. These were the factors, not race, that inspired Powell’s choice.
I suspect that race is a factor in one subtle yet decisive way: these two men share the experience of growing up in diverse settings that gave them an unusual perspective on a country in the throes of its greatest social transition in the twentieth century: the push for civil rights and racial integration. What the two men share is an experience of and a perspective on racism, not a racial identity. They likely share the perspective on racism that Walker Percy described so well in 1965, in an anguished essay entitled “Mississippi: The Fallen Paradise”:
During the past ten years Mississippi as a society reached a condition which can only be described, in an analogous but exact sense of the word, as insane. Kind fathers and loving husbands, when they did not themselves commit crimes against the helpless, looked upon such crimes with indifference. Political campaigns, once the noblest public activity in the South, came to be conducted by incantation….
The language itself has been corrupted…. All statements become equally true and equally false, depending on one’s rhetorical posture. In the end, even the rhetoric fails to arouse. When Senator Eastland declares, “There is no discrimination in Mississippi,” and “All who are qualified to vote, black or white, exercise the right of suffrage,” these utterances are received by friend and foe alike with a certain torpor of spirit. It does not matter that there is very little connection between Senator Eastland’s utterances and the voting statistics of his home county: that of a population of 31,020 Negroes, 161 are registered to vote. Once the final break is made between language and reality, arguments generate their own force and lay out their own logical rules. The current syllogism goes something like this: 1. There is no ill-feeling in Mississippi between the races; the Negroes like things the way they are; if you don’t believe it, I’ll call my cook out of the kitchen and you can ask her. 2. The trouble is caused by outside agitators who are Communist-inspired. 3. Therefore, the real issue is between atheistic Communism and patriotic, God-fearing Mississippians.
Once such a system cuts the outside wires and begins to rely on its own feedback, anything becomes possible. The dimensions of the tragedy are hard to exaggerate.
The title of the essay is a deliberate recollection of a lost Eden and an original sin. Walker Percy was a Louisiana Catholic who was acutely sensitive to the unholy marriage of evangelical Christianity, race-baiting rhetoric and the political insanity to which it led. Colin Powell gave subtle voice to that precise worry yesterday.
Barack Obama and Colin Powell are men of whom this nation can and should be proud. They have, like the nation they wish to serve, come a very long way very quickly. But the men also share a perspective, born of an experience, that the rest of us should heed well: the deployment of religion in the cause of race- or other-baiting is an especially dangerous game. And once the cords have been cut to the outside world, all you hear is your own voice in the echo chamber. That is an apt description of the twilight years of the Bush presidency.
And that was the sub-text of the Powell endorsement. He is unsettled and unnerved by what his party has permitted, and the rhetorical excesses his friend Senator McCain has not spoken against loudly enough. By pandering to a certain kind of political insanity, we are all reduced. To behave as if the meaning of our words does not matter contributes to the insanity. And Powell’s quiet plea was for the restoration of reasonableness, sanity and civility to a political process tragically short on both.
