Watching the Gohmerts and Nuneses seek to turn black into white and up into down, watching Robert Mueller stick fastidiously to his narrow and apparently legalistic conception of his duty when given the opportunity to speak plainly and directly about the mortal peril facing the United States, the words of the last stanza of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” kept swirling around in my mind:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
The United States is and always has been an imperfect thing, sometimes a brutally and violently imperfect thing. But the preamble to its Constitution —
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America”
— always held out the promise that its imperfections could be overcome.
It’s no secret that the language of the Constitution could be turned into a bludgeon against the weak and the powerless. But the beauty of its language lay in the hope that its powerful words could and would be weapons in the continual struggle for equality and justice.
Confronted by the relentless, grinding sociopathy of its Republican assailants, though, the Constitution needs powerful and tireless advocates, advocates capable of doing more than eliciting stuttering responses from the man tasked with investigating the president.
I admire Nancy Pelosi; I respect the leadership of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees; Adam Schiff did a wonderful job today. But the defense of the United States cannot be confined to the committees of the Congress — that defense must be made vigorously, relentlessly, courageously, on the floor of the House, in the Senate, on television, in town hall meetings, in presidential debates.
This is a time for giants: a time for the likes of William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Thurgood Marshall. We need a latter-day Margaret Chase Smith to rise to the occasion, to declare, as she did in 1950,
I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some soul-searching — for us to weigh our consciences — on the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America — on the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges.
Who will those giants be? Will there be one? Or will another poet, Yeats, have written the epitaph for the republic?
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
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