Wayne Moses Burke

I have been familiar with this bizarre sight from having wandered by it previously, but yesterday it struck me as particularly bizarre. You see, I had just left the House Committee on Foreign Relations meeting and was pondering the reason for such meetings — the seemingly strange way that both Congresspeople and the viewers act, and why the entire field of politics is viewed as unseemly by so many.

For whatever reason, this seemed to sum it all up for me. As you can tell if you click through on the picture to enlarge it, this is the US Department of Education and on the front of the little “schoolhouses” it says, “No Child Left Behind” as if it were written by hand on a chalkboard. This is clearly the brain child of a committee. Cute? I suppose. But to me, I mostly see disturbing. The ludicrous nature of a caricatured schoolhouse with the blackboard on the outside attached to a monolithic federal building to help sell the current administration’s policy to…

Well now, that’s an interesting question. Who are they selling it to in the corner of the federal district that they reside in? The employees of the DoE? It’s very strange — I suppose I should allow for the possibility that the DOE houses conferences or something that bring together lots of school administrators, principals, and teachers that would appreciate the stunt, but I’m still cautious about the legitimacy of this as a marketing effort.

And that brings me to my point. I don’t actually think that it IS politics that is detestable. I think the difficulty comes from the fact that there is a very fine line between three closely related activities that policymakers have to engage in:

1. Representation. This includes representing diverse constituencies while compromising with other policymakers, and generally doing what is necessary to make the best agreement for all sides.
2. Leadership. There are times when policymakers know more about a situation than their constituents, and they need to have the strength of character and trust of the people sufficiently that they can educate and lead in the right direction.
3. Salesmanship. This is the slippery one that much politics ends up in. There are no well-defined lines to let policymakers OR constituents know when it is time for policymakers to represent and when it is time for them to lead. Salesmanship is required to sell the beliefs of the policymakers to each other and back to their own constituents.

Politics, I submit, is the intersection of these three activities in a murky atmosphere. The information is rarely perfect. The judgments are frequently made more on opinion or belief or scant information, and the final decisions affect thousands or millions of people’s lives. It has to suck. It has to be a media circus. It has to be a continuous sale of personal beliefs.

And to make it even better - the party never stops. Just because a bill is passed, the circle doesn’t close - it requires continuous attention and care and concern and involvement in the process. Unless I’m mistaken, I believe it was Thomas Jefferson who said, “Vigilance is the price of liberty.”

So, I’m arguing that while entertaining, Max Headroom’s axiom about how you can tell when a politician is lying - his lips move - is neither true nor false (now I’m starting to sound like a politician, right?), but rather an oversimplification of an incredibly complex process. By nature, I believe that humans like to classify. We want it to be black or white, but don’t confuse us with greys. Unfortunately, in the real world, there is only grey. And when all of those greys attempt to come together in an messy process like politics, it only makes sense that it won’t make sense — a lot of strange things will happen, and the ones that disagree with our sensibilities will be detestable.