In the Department of No Surprise, we report this week on the excommunication from polite conversation of one Ron Paul, the odd-man-out candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Odd man, because Paul manages to remain his own, oddly-compounded self. No flip-flopping there; what you see with old Ron is pretty much what you get.
But there is some rising degree of alarm in the land because Paul’s record is composed of an admixture of good, bad, and ugly. The ugly being mainly his failure to disavow the support of blatant racists or to quickly and sufficiently distance himself from dreadful comments made about blacks, Jews, and gays in his old newsletters. All that Paul himself has said about the newsletters, uncovered several years ago by The New Republic, is that he personally didn’t write or read the vile stuff.*
Right now, with Paul still in the race, the editors at TNR simply urge us to shut our ears to everything he has to say. In their view he’s just a really, really bad actor, guilty of unspeakable bigotry and thus unworthy of any serious attention.
To their credit, TNR’s editors allow that, in addition to the old Ron Paul bigotry, it’s the current Ron Paul isolationism they really wish to anathematize. That’s good of them, I suppose. But what’s not so great is the “gotcha!” card they play with the old bigotry. They mean for it to function as a total dealbreaker. They mean for you and me not to give Paul’s admittedly off-center ideas about the cost and consequences of American Empire any hearing at all. Which means that they dismiss not just Paul himself but also all of the young enthusiasts he has been able to draw to his side, many of them so drawn on account of his plain talk about US military adventurism, and almost surely not on account of any Paul-ist association with anti-Semitism or homophobia or white racism.
Because this matter is so very highly charged I feel compelled to state that under no circumstances would I wish Ron Paul to become our next president. But I do worry these days about the capacity of even the chattering classes to manage complexity.
I believe that it was a second-rate intelligence—a mind belonging to one F. Scott Fitzgerald—that pleaded for the importance of the capacity of a first-rate intelligence to hold contradictory ideas in one’s head at the same time. I do, however, view it as lamentable that a lightweight like Fitzgerald gets the credit for what is essentially a theological insight with a long and quite distinguished pedigree.
What Theologically-Informed Poets and Novelists Wish Us to Know
Others may correct me if I stray here, but what I seem to recall from seminar rooms of bygone years is a significant difference between Hellenic and Hebraic modes of narrative. This was from the work of Erich Auerbach, among others. In the Hellenic epic mode, everything is out in the open. There is no nuance, no shadow. The characters are who they are, and everyone lives out his or her character without variation. The entire narrative (most plainly in The Iliad) simply plays it out. Within the world of the Hebrew Bible, on the other hand, the reverse is delightfully true. Particularly in the very big swatch of material known as the Davidic Court History, the narrative itself is very spare, but it is spare in a way that lets a great deal of characterological variation to come to the fore. To say, for example, that the character of Jacob/Israel is an ambiguous character becomes rather an understatement as layer upon layer unfolds. The same, of course, with the uber-ambiguous figure of David himself.
We are compounded, the Bible seems to say. We are all compounded of bits of good and bits of evil in a complicated amalgam. And so trickster Jacob is not ultimately damned on account of his trickery in displacing his older brother’s inheritance, nor is King David ultimately damned for arranging to murder the warrior husband of his desired inamorata.
The great European-American epic poets and novelists who inherit both the Hellenic and Hebraic traditions tend to favor the Hebraic mode of shadow and inference. They are not especially interested in presenting us with any “pure” types: in giving us unalterably evil or incorruptibly good characters who never vary, never change it up.
RD’s editors will go nuts if I adduce, at length, all of the many ambiguous characters from the literature we love best. So just choose your own examples of fictional characters from the writers you love, in any language. We love them partly because they are so messed up. We love them because they all have their “points” despite their dubiousness in other respects.
For a Politics Worthy of Our Messed-Up Selves
Here then is the burden of my argument: in a badly fractured world with its badly fractured politics, would it not be wiser to respect the fractures each of us presents rather than attempt to arrange the fractures into distinct columns labeled All Good or All Bad? And if we will be generous to ourselves in this respect, can we not be somewhat more generous toward our politicians?
In this particular instance, I am not asking anyone to forgive Ron Paul his various idiocies or his past or present bigotries; I hope people will continue to call him out and stay on him for whatever he carries around that’s loony or vile or both. That also means, of course, that we remain open to the possibility that applauding him for sane positions on some matters could prompt less discerning folks to buy into the whole package.
Nor am I asking us to imagine that because we all fall short of God’s glory we cannot make distinctions between the merely flawed (Anthony Weiner, say), the more deeply flawed (Paul), and the truly fallen (Hitler): those who actively pursue evil and who must accordingly be stopped cold.
But really, are we incapable of even hearing Paul on the sorrows of empire? After all, we’re just days past another MLK Day, when many of us were reminded yet again of Dr. King’s prophetic warning that we approach “spiritual death” when we as a nation spend so much more every year on the military than we spend on the support of our poorest and most vulnerable.
Ron Paul is far from the only figure in public life who gets subjected to Manichean All Good/All Bad judgments. To take just one other example, there was the Icarus-like fall from grace of the brilliant Green-for-All advocate Van Jones—a fall triggered by a single, unfortunate quote dredged up by Glenn Beck. The White House did not heap honor upon itself by immediately disappearing Jones.
At my rather advanced age and with my own rich history of dumb and ill-considered comments, I have no plans to enter public life. But again, I worry about people like me (minus thirty years or so) who still might wish to enter, and who really might have something significant to offer were they to do so.
Will these aspirants to public leadership be undone by a “gotcha!” zero-sum politics that can only reward ultra-safe, and thus ultra-boring, or ultra-secretive candidates? As of now, I’m afraid the answer is that they will be thus undone.
That’s so depressing to contemplate. What the bien pensant class is doing now to Ron Paul—latex gloves and all—augurs an increasingly flat political world; a world without subtlety that this correspondent would rather not inhabit.
*This passage has been altered to more accurately reflect Paul’s contortions over the years with respect to the comments in his newsletter and the support he continues to receive from extremist groups.
