I have praised
and
lamented Esquire (a magazine I pay to receive,
and mostly quite like) for its political coverage in the past, but
the overriding spirit that makes its political journalism generally
its worst aspect is that it tends to treat politicians and politics
with a thoughtless
spirit of veneration, one expressed not only unquestioningly on
the part of the writer, but as if the writer can’t imagine that any
reader would question it.
A huge feature in its November issue (featuring Sexiest Woman
Alive, so-called, Penelope Cruz who stars in a
bizarrely misconceived story that mixes profiling her with some
superdated and unenlightening coverage of a bullfight, whose
symbolic power is somehow believed to still pulsate decades
post-Hemingway) by Mark Warren is called “Help,
We’re in a Living Hell and Don’t Know How to Get Out.”
The “we” are dozens of members of the House and Senate that they
interviewed; in a perfect Esquire touch, they reveal
that they actually started off trying to get tough with
politicians, who they generally can’t
help but love, and not even generally in a purely partisan way.
But:
I had initially planned to ask for no more than ten minutes of
their time, basically just to ask them why they were so bad at
their job, but fairly quickly it became obvious that these were
going to be richer and deeper conversations than I had bargained
for. And along the way, something unexpected happened: I became
less angry and more sympathetic to the thresher that all of these
people find themselves caught in. They are not whining. They are
crying for help. After only a few interviews, I stopped asking,
“Why are you so bad at your job?” because it occurred to me that it
was a cheap question, the kind of question that’s not interested in
an answer, which is just the sort of cultural deformity that got us
into this mess. It’s a terrible job, being in Congress in 2014.
And so the story became, for thousands of words, with lots of
different politicians’ voices across party lines, a lament about
how politicians can’t get things done. The story is
surprisingly lacking in any discussion of what must or should be
done; perhaps they think that all right-thinking, watch-wearing
Esquire readers all agree, but it’s a little disconcerting
to have a often thoughtful magazine write thousands of words about
our alleged political crisis with so little content. (Except they
seem to agree with politicians that it’s sad they have to raise
money all the time, and sad that other people are permitted to
raise money against them, apparently thinking it a given
that all incumbents should be re-elected all the time with no
effort, which would tend to be the result of a moneyless
politics.)
You learn a lot about some specific other congresspeople their
colleagues are willing to go on record slamming—Harry Reid and Ted
Cruz most prominent—and how the filibuster is obstructionist, and
how people holding up votes is bad, and how it’s bad that some
congressmen don’t move their families to D.C. because it cuts their
time to GOVERN!!!
But there’s no real hint of why any of it matters or why it’s an
unalloyed good that our legislators need to legislate more, or
longer, or more successfully (except that some executive or
judicial branch appointments aren’t being made efficiently
enough).
It’s an annoying but all too prevalent centrist view of
government: c’mon, let’s get over partisanship, ideology, what
people might want, what is just or efficient or affordable–we’ve
got this really big, enormous, cool, expensive government—it
needs to govern more!
And do so with what Warren calls “humility and civility” but
it’s clear he doesn’t mean humility about their power, but
merely humility in dealing with their colleagues, who, claims Sen.
Patrick Leahy with little credibility, in the old days would never
have “dreamed of giving your word and not keeping it” which
apparently certain villains now do, though he doesn’t say who or
about what.
And all reasonable people are supposed to nod,
and purse their lips, and say, dammit, they may be Republican, they
may be Democrat, they may be from the north or the south, but they
are legislators and it’s a damn shame they don’t
legislate more.
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