Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, who has taught English and history for 30 years, writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
We read “Death of a Salesman” when we were juniors in high school. We took to reciting lines at each other, partly because we were juniors in high school prone to smirking at almost everything, but also because as callow as we were at 16, the play struck us somewhere in our souls. It captured the frailty, folly, mortality, and stalking human tragedy we were just beginning to see in lives around us.
Salesman Willy Loman’s mind and life unravel in the play. Lost in his memories, haunted by ghosts, guilt, disappointment, and failure, he careens between bravado and despair until he takes his own life. Along the way he voices his desperation and the imminence of the catastrophe with the alarm, “The woods are burning.”
I’m hardly the only American whose concern for our republic extends as far as alarm. I don’t pretend to be neutral about the present occupant of the Oval Office. If my other choice is Donald Trump, I’d vote for any of the 20-odd aspirants currently vying for the nomination, even though I can’t believe most of them really think they’re qualified, let alone that they’re among the top five most qualified.
Neither, however, am I enthralled with much of what I see and hear from the Democratic side of the aisle. Apparently you don’t have to be Donald Trump to think more highly of your talents and experience than you should. I don’t know how many more times I can handle candidates pointing and wagging their fingers to punctuate a platitude or impossible promise. I’m tired of the incessant railing against the top 1%, especially from members of the top 1%. I’m waiting for someone to tally how many competing promises they’re planning to fund with the same additional tax dollars.
I’m especially sick of hearing candidates declare how what we need is “big change” and “a revolution,” and how the time for moderation has passed, by which they mean they intend to ignore the preferences and will of the vast majority of Americans who aren’t progressives – and somehow still win the election to boot.
The headline particulars reshuffle on a weekly, sometimes daily basis, but Democrats display a penchant for internecine pettiness and disproportionate outrage. Joe Biden needs to be more judicious when he speaks, but it’s hard to miss the valid point he was trying to make about Sens. James Eastland and Herman Talmadge. The signal parallel is that many of Biden’s fellow candidates are just as unwilling to work with today’s Republicans and even moderates as they would have been to work with yesterday’s segregationists.
Across the aisle some Republican officeholders are doubtless tormented in their souls as they bend their knee to President Trump. Others mistake the real cost of what they count as pragmatism. But a congressman’s oath of office doesn’t include a promise to seek and win reelection. A senator shouldn’t win praise when he plays the grim reaper to bipartisanship. Vaulting ambition, cowardice, a readiness to see no evil where there is evil, a willingness to fold your arms as villainy has its way with the national virtue – these are all shameful and accursed.
As for the president, he has proven himself manifestly corrupt and incompetent, a chronic liar whose only defense is his perjurious insistence that the patent lies he tells are the truth. He answers charges of assault with the vulgar assurance that “she’s not my type.” He stirs up strife for advantage and sport. He’s a sucker for flattery.
He invites what George Washington denounced as “the insidious wiles of foreign influence.”
He asserts his personal sovereignty and undermines the foundations of our constitutional government.
He toys with unleashing the dogs of war, but all he brings to the battle is swagger and his ignorance of history.
President Trump claims this nation under him is newly respected by friends and foes around the world, but we’re not respected. We’re feared the way unstable men and unscrupulous men are feared. We’re scorned and mocked behind our backs the way foolish men are scorned and mocked.
Sometimes what people want to hear about isn’t the most important thing they need to hear about. Many Democratic leaders warn that Democrats will lose if they “talk about Trump,” that candidates should focus on voters’ kitchen table concerns. In response to that conventional wisdom, I offer Mr. Lincoln’s prediction that “at some time” a demagogue would “spring up among us,” and that “when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”
This is that time.
We need to talk about it.
Of course, we need to do more than talk. The president’s Wharton diploma bears the Latin motto “Leges sine moribus vanae” – laws without morals are empty. The Constitution without our faithful defense is only words.
In his farewell address eight years after our founding, our first president declared his confidence that we one day would be a “great nation.” He expressed his hope that as a great nation, we would “give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence,” even when acting justly works to our temporary disadvantage.
The kitchen table campaign question is always, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
We face larger questions. Have we lost the world’s esteem as a just and benevolent nation? Is the United States as trusted and admired as we were four years ago? Here at home do we honor and uphold justice, or do we permit President Trump to disdain and obstruct it? Are we a nation of laws, or does the president rule by whim and decree?
Will our government by the people perish from the earth?
What must we do?
These questions aren’t academic. They’re at the heart of who we are as a people.
Our peril is imminent.
The woods are burning.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Peter Berger: The woods are burning.