[Newspoetry] Aftermath

[Donald L Emerick]

Dear William:

I liked your treatment of your AfterMath topic better than I liked my own,
of the paltry democratic leadership position after electoral non-successes.
These few shortcomings have been hyperbolically exaggerated, grandly
inflated, and otherwise elevated to the status of an enormous triumph by the
triumph seekers in the Bush camp.  These small undemocratic minds wish to
claim a mandate, to do anything and everything that their agenda has
promised us that they would do if they ever could do such things.

The two events may be connected, for Gephardt could have -- perhaps --
avoided some election non-successes (and maybe some fewer losses) by taking
a stand against the madness of the Bush camp.  But, the connection is,
nonetheless, quite remote.  It is your pre-dictive, pre-scriptive AfterMath
that Gephardt should have been contemplating rather than some AfterMath like
mine, which only prattles on after the event about how the event felt.

What aftermath logic did sway Gephardt, when he met with Bush?  Was it the
dazzle of threats that Bush highlighted: did Gephardt somehow, suddenly,
come to believe that imminent peril faced the nation if the Iraqi regime
were not confronted and changed?  In the setting, when many Congressional
and other persons were swirling around the White House that morning, I
refuse to believe that aftermath logic was suddenly convincing to Gephardt.
His actions, as Daschle briefly said, were inexplicable and unexpected:
because Gephardt had told Daschle that he was going up to the White House
only to discuss the situation with the Bush camp.  Daschle was stunned and
shocked by news of Gephardt's sudden apparent defection and seeming
enlistment in the Bush camp's cause.

I do not think that anything is rotten in Gephardt.  But, there is something
that is hiding there, something that was already within his contemplation,
which somehow suddenly became so prominent that, by his actions, he seemed
to betray his colleagues in the House and Senate, his party, and the nation
itself.

Unlike the way that I like to think that I am, I have always doubted whether
Bush really understood evil and manipulative people like those in the Bush
camp.  I have always thought that Gephardt was not skeptical enough about
people who seemed to be sincerely claiming to pursue some good objective and
earnestly so at that.  Appeals to his better nature, to his belief in common
decencies, to his belief that politics ultimately must try to make life
better for all of us often leads him to believe that someone else is
reasonable, when -- in fact -- they are as unreasonable as ever in their
evil intents.

And yet, as my AfterMath poem tries to say, as well, after the fact, it is
this very quality, of being capable of being deceived, that makes Gephardt a
better leader, overall, than (say) someone like Pelosi, who was chosen to
succeed him.  I would rather that every political leader were naive enough
to believe in the possible good of another human being, and be sometimes
wrong in such trust, than to have them be like the people in the Bush camp.
For, these latter people are cynical and jaded, believing only in themselves
as the ultimate repository of all values, solely responsible for winning and
losing, willing to calculate the deaths and other costs -- such as your
AfterMath logic portrays -- and to shrug their shoulders and say "Glory
always has a high price to pay."   And they say this especially because they
do not see the homes destroyed, the lives lost, the lives shattered and
crippled, and so on as you describe these things as being any losses of
their own property.  It is not going to happen, afterall, to people that
they know personally, or to places that they love to visit.  It's just the
impersonality of history, of doing what it takes to be remembered as the
greatest of the great, the greatest of kings, and the truest of all the
king's men.

The word truest here is not quite the term that I want -- for these people
in the Bush camp believe that historians will only measure them, most
critically, according to how they appear to have furthered what historians
may judge to be important goals that were achievable and achieved.  Hence,
some blurt out their inner most conviction about the issue of the
responsibility of power: "History will judge me!".  For, such statements
indicate no belief that the opinions of one's contemporaries matter.  And,
many rationalizations are available, mostly deriving from the egocentrism of
individualism, to believe that no one else knows one's own point of view,
that it is hidden from view, for the present, but, will be manifestly
obvious to historians who come after, who come to gather the clues and the
pieces, who put back together the world, as seen from the eyes of this
person who does things for historical reasons, alone.

It is that kind of vanity, I am convinced, that underlies many who
effectively occupy positions of power in any society such as our own.  And,
such persons, having amassed great power, have their successors -- for the
seemingly noble (even if wrong) purposes that animate them are not usually
shared by their inheritors.  Such followers in history, in history, are
often venial, given to despotism and corruptions.  Power itself does not, as
Acton thought, so often work its corruption immediately in the same person,
so as to corrupt the empowered, personally.  Rather, power corrupts the
role, for the successor never faces the same scenes in the same ways that
the entrusted person did -- and, if no "challenges" of the same kind
continue -- then power becomes suffused with a unique aphrodisia, the odor
of self-sanctity.

Well, you can see how I worry too much about proper relationships between
proper action and proper persons -- and do not attend, enough, or much, to
the truly horrific, truly significant consequences of some proposed courses
of action.  Thanks for reminding me that no apocalypse could be impersonal.

Thanks for letting me listen,
Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick