Writing at National Review, Jim Geraghty compares the impending demise of the 2020 major league baseball season and the response of elected officials to the several different crises we have seen come our way. He finds them well-matched in at least one area -- a complete failure of leadership needed to handle the problems involved.
Baseball's owners and players are fussing themselves out of a season over how they will split revenue that hasn't shown up and won't because they choose not to disinter their respective crania from their respective ania.
The less said about the majority of current elected officials at all levels of government the better, a course of action I heartily recommend to a bunch of the people I follow on Facebook. I recommend it no less heartily for those who suggest that the replacements they propose will improve on their record in any way shape or form.
I may agree that the current occupant of the White House, for example, is a lout unfit for decent company -- unless he's apologizing to them for his contribution to the coarsening of modern political discourse. But his most significant opponent is little better, a man who cribbed speeches from both sides of the Atlantic (and whose campaign still does), who spent several years claiming -- even after the man had passed away -- the other driver in the tragic accident that claimed his wife and daughter was intoxicated when he wasn't. And as for the coarsening of political discourse, the former senator and vice-president told African-Americans in the audience at a speech in 2012 the last GOP presidential candidate he faced who was absolutely the awfullest awful who ever awfulled wanted to "put y'all back in chains."
Crisis, character and leadership connect in an alchemy that always remains a little mysterious and dependent on the people involved. But the general idea is that crisis might produce or reveal character in one who previously seemed feckless. Something similar often holds for leadership.
Our news is full of folks who have the label "leader" in fields of government, commerce, sport and public life. But when faced with a crisis, they make plain their "leadership" resembles the sartorial splendor of their fabled fellow ruler, no matter where we look.
2 comments:
Given that we sort of choose elected leaders, I think the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves.
Completely so. The irony of the title of P.J. O'Rourke's "Parliament of Whores" is that it can apply to the elected officials who will sell themselves for votes as well as to the electorate who will sell their votes just as readily.
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