Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Mark Zuckerberg returned to Cambridge to address Harvard University’s grads, Oprah enlightened the diplomates at Smith College, and Poor Elijah is once again, for lack of any other invitations, delivering his commencement remarks on my porch. I tried to console him that the president of the U.S. was speaking at only two colleges, which was just two more than Poor Elijah had been invited to.
He was unconsoled.
If you’ve got a few minutes to spare, there’s iced coffee on the table and plenty of room on the porch.
* * *
There’s nothing like Latin to dress up ordinary ideas. In their quest for classical status, America’s relatively modern Ivy League adopted inspirational Latin mottos, from Harvard’s Veritas, meaning truth, to Yale University’s embellished Lux et Veritas, which adds light to Harvard’s truth. Dartmouth College’s Vox clamantis in deserto recalls its founder’s mission to bring the gospel to American natives as a voice crying in the wilderness.
Most pertinent, however, for us today is the maxim Ben Franklin borrowed from the Roman poet Horace for his University of Pennsylvania: Leges sine moribus vanae – Laws without morals are useless. By useless, old Ben meant vain and powerless.
President Donald Trump should be familiar with this axiom. It appears on his college diploma. He transferred to Penn’s Wharton School as a junior, and as long ago as 1973, he boasted to The New York Times that he’d graduated first in his Wharton class, which he indisputably did not. In fact, he graduated without honors of any kind.
This is the same President Trump who repeatedly questioned whether former President Barack Obama had even attended Columbia University and Harvard, let alone distinguished himself academically there, all of which he indisputably did. That was after Obama was born here in America, by the way, another indisputable bit of reality that President Trump saw fit to deny.
Many Americans are likewise in the reality denial business these days. Prior to the election, half the country’s Republicans believed, thanks in large measure to President Trump, that Obama was born in Kenya, despite his published birth certificate issued by the state of Hawaii, which has been a U.S. possession since 1898.
Roughly the same share of Americans believed former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in the pedophile business, a delusion for which the ground was prepared in part by President Trump’s repeated, full-throated assertion that she was “the devil.” In the same way, Obama was allegedly the literal “founder of ISIS.”
There’s no need to recount all the vain boasts and lies. The 45th president has documented them himself.
He’s not an articulate man. For example, he said the U.N. has “such tremendous potential,” but “it’s not living up to its potential,” a position he immediately supplemented by adding that “it has such tremendous potential, but it’s not living up.” Of health care, he said, “the end result is going to be wonderful.” Kim Jong Un and North Korea are “acting very, very badly” and “behaving very badly,” respectively. As for Germany, “we’re going to do fantastically well,” despite the fact that “the Germans are bad, very bad.”
Superlatives and mindless repetition are neither policy nor wisdom. But what President Trump’s statements lack in sense and depth, they make up for in volume.
I teach history and English, and I want to avoid oversimplifying the facts and rhetorical excess. But I confess I see troubling parallels between our current politics and specters from the past. I see Napoleon placing the crown on his own head. I see Mussolini’s adoring crowds, the way he stuck out his chin and lip and played to the mob. And yes, I see the Third Reich, not the anti-semitism, though it’s there in darker corners. I see more of the cult personality. I see sycophants tripping over each other to praise the leader.
No law on paper has power if it doesn’t reside in human hearts.
I see a leader who doesn’t know, doesn’t know he doesn’t know, and doesn’t care he doesn’t know. I see a megalomaniac, addicted to lies, in thrall to paranoia and his own delusions of grandeur.
But this is not ultimately about President Trump. It’s about what I see in us.
I see otherwise responsible, decent politicians and business leaders stifling their consciences and gulling themselves like the pre-war plutocrats who thought they could manage Hitler. I see public officials, prompted at best by misguided principle and at worst by stubborn opportunism, who in their myopic arrogance equate their own advancement with the public good. I see the best among them excusing the current administration as merely an “unconventional presidency.”
I see voters like the German people who thought the Fuhrer had their best interests at heart, despite the lies and every indication that he didn’t. I see press secretaries morphing into propaganda ministers. I see facts and the truth deposed by deceit and innuendo.
Thomas Jefferson long ago observed that “if any nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” That warning extends to nations that allow themselves to despise facts and reason, and consequently descend voluntarily into ignorance.
I tell my students that our Constitution, while the creation of imperfect men, is nonetheless a work of genius. And since President Trump’s ascent, many in our government, in our public places, around our kitchen tables have asserted their confidence in the power of that founding document to safeguard our freedom in the face of enemies, foreign and domestic, and the havoc they wreak.
I’m not so sure. First, it seems the Constitution is often playing second fiddle to a bad reality script. But even more, no law on paper has power if it doesn’t reside in human hearts.
As long as we wink at President Trump’s transgressions, and as long as we accept conduct in the White House that I wouldn’t accept in my classroom, we will diminish ourselves. It isn’t that he’s loutish. The problem is too many of us glory in his loutishness. That’s a fault in us, not him. I fear President Trump is correct. He could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voters.
Leges sine moribus vanae. Laws without morals are powerless.
We each as citizens have a limited voice in making our nation’s laws.
But our sovereignty over our own moral character is limitless.
You are no longer children.
Your future turns on the righteous exercise of that moral sovereignty.
Seek right, and do right.
Godspeed.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Leges Sine Moribus Vanae.