felixwas

In his Gettysburg Address in the fall of 1863, Abraham Lincoln called for his fellow Americans to resolve that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

Sorry to have disappointed you, Mr. Lincoln. That America may have existed at one point. It doesn’t anymore. Even if that America never existed, even if the notion was nothing but naiveté, our shame is no less, because that ideal clearly was within our reach during the century following Lincoln’s address. We failed to seize the promise. It has since slipped irretrievably away.

Government “by the people, for the people”? Perhaps that is still true in small towns across our nation, but those small-town governments find themselves increasingly hamstrung by state and national governments that constantly take, take, take and seldom give back. In state capitals like Albany, N.Y., and in Washington, D.C., the people who are doing the governing have forgotten the phrase “the common good.” Instead, they govern to protect their own interests: patronage, access to insider information that allows them to lead pampered lives of privilege, and accommodating the people who buy access to this system. Our vast national bounty does, indeed, trickle down to those who thirst the most. Trickle. In a just society, in the America we loved and thought we lived in as schoolchildren, that trickle would roar like a river, but those who control the floodgates control the flow, thanks to a system of governance that rests fatly and comfortably in the hip pocket of business, industry, and multinational corporations that serve nothing but themselves. All the rest of us will always thirst for more.

But those wearing the suits that contain those hip pockets that contain our political system would have us believe things are good all over. The economy is strong. I read that in the paper today. When I was a kid, I used to deliver newspapers. These days, your newspaper carrier is just as likely to be an adult — men on bicycles with newspaper bags slung over their shoulders, or women leaning out the driver’s side window on countryside tube delivery routes. Fewer people read the newspaper because they don’t have the time — they’re busy working two or three jobs to pay the bills. Tell them that things are good all over.

Write to your congressman or congresswoman in protest of something, anything, and the reply — if you get one — will be written by an intern or a junior staff member. The politician never will receive your message. Your complaint will be filed in a database, and during the next campaign, if enough people have voiced the same complaint, the incumbent — who is almost certain to be re-elected — will mouth platitudes and buzz phrases to convince you of his concern about your concern. And then the problem will linger unfixed. Do we hold our senators, congressmen and congresswomen responsible? No. Instead of voting the whole damned lot out of office, we keep re-electing them, deluding ourselves that this time, they’ll get it right. In the meantime, tens of millions of Americans lack medical insurance, yet this shameful story — one of many shameful stories — endures from administration to administration, from Congress to Congress, because the people who could do something about it have forgotten Lincoln’s words. They have forgotten about the concept of the common good. If the sick, the uninsured, were able to buy access to power, this situation would have long since vanished. Having no such access, though — lacking the only power that really matters in our society — they remain ill, tired and troubled.

And those of us with brains in our heads allow it to continue. We are unwilling to admit that we’ve been fooled again and again. The deceits of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon surely were aberrations, we think. Surely no one else would abuse power so greatly. The truth is that their successors, and the successors of scoundrels and predators in both houses of Congress, have been far more treacherous and vile, on both sides of the aisles. Smug in their incumbency, they grow more detached each year from the plight of the people.

Caught between the worries of trying to earn an honest living and the luxuries that even those strained lives afford us, we have stopped paying attention — or, worse, we have surrendered to the notion that this lack of concern for the common good was ever thus. President Clinton tells us he “did not have sexual relations with that woman,” and we shrug cynically. Of course you did, Mr. President, we think. Let’s get this charade over with. Just be more discreet with the next intern. In the meantime, Osama finishes dotting his I’s and crossing his T’s. Or President Bush leads us into a war based on intelligence (a word laced with irony if ever there was one) that he later admits was faulty but claims the best available at the time. But has anyone in the intelligence community been held publicly accountable for such gross incompetence? Has anyone overseeing the intelligence community been held accountable? Or was that person merely assured, too, that he was doing “a heck of a job”?

As a nation, we are more concerned with “American Idol” than with Supreme Court nominees. The dazzle of celebrities blinds our eyes to the puppeteers pulling the strings of our lives. When we lift our dulled gaze from the constant barrage of sports and entertainment, we glower at each other about who’s liberal, who’s conservative, and why the other side is always wrong. As we argue with each other, we become more susceptible to the wrongs being perpetrated on us all. Where is the middle ground? Where is the compromise? Where is the humility required to stand up and admit, “I was wrong”? There’s none of that in America. It’s all divide and conquer. Who’s being divided? Not the conquerors.

If we truly cared about government “of the people, by the people,” we would say to corporations, business interests, and the like, “Sure, you can continue to donate as much money as you wish to the candidate of your choice. You just have to do it anonymously.” But it’s more likely Congress will pass a law calling to reverse the direction of the orbit of the moon, and enforcing such a law would require a level of integrity and honor that our government is incapable of attaining. And where would be its incentive to do so? We are, after all, living in a society that last week actually listened politely instead of laughing out loud at the people trying to argue the merits of a memoir that was actually nearly pure fiction. The notion that readers had been lied to was subverted to a notion that the memoir still “resonated” with readers. It made them feel good. They wanted to believe it. If the message of feel-good fiction peddled as truth is actually more important than the truth itself, we may as well run Superman for president. When the truth becomes a commodity that is measured in degrees, then our nation’s moral foundation is slipping from granite to clay at a pace that would be frightening to behold — if we bothered to look and to think about it.

But we don’t. And as a result, the parade of our nation wanders more aimlessly each day. Cynicism permeates our very bones, and we are so cynical that we simply shrug, content to believe the myth that it’s all the liberals’ fault, the conservatives’ fault — when actually, it’s our collective fault that government of the people, by the people and for the people has indeed perished from the earth.

I’m sorry, Mr. Lincoln.