In George Orwell's essay "Such, Such Were The Joys...," he talks about having "suck" with the headmaster and his wife. "Suck" was pull, influence, an insider's hand that got the sucker sweets, attention, status. It was a smarmy business, reducing self-dignity to calculation. Orwell, through the lens of his gawky adolescence, focuses for us the dry rot of tyranny, the ossifying of the spirit that the pursuit of favor incurs.
But there are other kinds of suck as well, related more to hubris, or excessive pride, than the kow-towing Orwell talked about. I call one species "Ahab-ism": the chasing of the white whales of power. It's perfectly demonstrated by the Keystone comedy in Washington over Iran and the contras. Men with preten sions to having grand paragraphs written about themselves in future history books decided to circumvent the democracy they work for. "Rambo" Oliver North (in charge of the mining of the Nicaraguan harbors), "Bud" McFarlane, who hoped to be Kissinger #2; "Diamond Don" Regan, whose credential for foreign policy is a former job at the Treasury: these are men who believe that their own grand delu sions and Swiss bank accounts will preserve freedom far better than the sloppy democratic process they are pledged to uphold.
There's also another kind of "suck" at work in this fiasco. It's interesting to watch how people are scurrying to "protect the President." Why? He's hardly a man worth protecting. He's silly, unthinking, uncaring, uncomprehending, a dolt with a nuclear cannon. Yet there are those so enamored of the trappings and posturings of power that they would readily give up their common sense to ignore reality and keep intact the facade of potence. These monarchists will never mention the Emperor's nakedness, and will berate anyone who fails to see lace where there's just skin.
Toadying, arrogance, sycophancy: this is the spectacle we now see before us. Yet these devilish actions are as much failures of imagination as they are moral failures. They show that those people endowed with power have no vision of what the pur poses of power are in a democracy. They show the poverty of Gold water's statement that any vice in the pursuit of protecting freedom is a virtue. Freedom is not protected when laws are abridged or flouted, because it's not difficult to turn one's attention from getting those people over there at any cost to getting you at any cost. The liberty of none of us is safe while the wolves in wolves' clothing prowl the democratic pastures. Let's start the impeachment proceedings now.
In Praise Of Weirdness
My Nephew Christopher