The Abdication; or, Tolerating the Intolerable

I have had long-held a theory about collective emotions — you know those group feelings that ebb and flow based on shared events and shared experience.

Remember my emotional rhyme scheme? [It only works in English.] Four emotions, and if they don’t rhyme, they don’t count. Mad, Bad, Sad, Glad. The rest are intellectual variations.

Well, I think that each of us carries an aspect, and serves the rest of us, of the collective emotionality of humankind. Because of my own personal experience with death and grief, I default to Sad. I know people whose default reactivity — especially to collective experience — is Mad. I know others who default to Bad a.k.a. Fear. You take my point.

That’s why when Opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie writing in “Mitch McConnell Is Not as Clever as He Thinks He Is,” opined, “When banks, corporations and wealthy individuals need bailouts, the Republican Party is there, pen in hand. … But when ordinary Americans need help to pay their bills, and when states — which can’t run deficits — need help to avoid fiscal collapse, the Republican Party is much less interested,” I was utterly astonished that I defaulted to Mad.

Mr. Bouie continued, “Instead of assistance, McConnell wants states to declare bankruptcy. This isn’t a good idea — it would undermine bond markets, push up interest rates and raise the cost of investment — but it would serve a purpose. Bankruptcy would potentially eliminate any obligations to public employee unions as well as force deep cuts to state services. For a conservative Republican partisan like McConnell, it’s a two-for-one special: shrinking government while undermining a key Democratic constituency.”

I shook, sitting at my computer as I read, I was so Mad.

“It may be clever, but it is also a shocking abdication of responsibility in the service of extremist ideological goals. At the same time, it’s not a surprise, since McConnell and the Republican Party ran this exact play during the previous recession.”

“Or maybe we’re simply watching a politician who has no trick other than obstruction, no political mode other than ceaseless partisan operator. Keeping states afloat and rescuing the economy could keep Republicans in office, but it might help Democrats too, so McConnell won’t do it. For this so-called public servant, the only thing that matters is beating the Democratic Party. As for the people of the United States? They’re an afterthought.”

Here is where the Mad began to take discernible shape.

I want to shriek at the man. What? Only Republicans are human? Only Republicans are American? Only Republicans have faces?

Opinion columnist Paul Krugman is right there on the bandwagon with Mr. Bouie and me. “Unfortunately, it’s looking increasingly likely that tens of millions of Americans will in fact suffer extreme hardship and that there will be devastating cuts in services. Why? The answer mainly boils down to two words: Mitch McConnell.

“On Wednesday, McConnell, the Senate majority leader, declared that he is opposed to any further federal aid to beleaguered state and local governments, and suggested that states declare bankruptcy instead. Lest anyone accuse McConnell of being even slightly nonpartisan, his office distributed two memos referring to proposals for state aid as ‘blue state bailouts.’”

I’m a Libra, so of course, that means I carry the double-edged blessing/curse of being able to see the other side of just about everything. Okay, my Libran Fair Self posits, maybe he’s so used to working at a macro level that he’s not seeing that Democrats, just like Republicans, are all Americans? Maybe he can’t get to the granular, the personal, the individual because he’s accustomed to the broad stroke approach?

Maybe. But upon reflection, I don’t think so.

I’m relatively certain the Speaker is an elected official. From Kentucky, to be exact. Actual people live in Kentucky. Some of those people, who elected Mr. McConnell, are state workers: police, firefighters, teachers, for starters. I’m willing to bet that some of those police, firefighters, and teachers have children. “A number of governors have already denounced McConnell’s position as stupid, which it is. But it’s also vile and hypocritical.”

Mr. Krugman continues, “State and local governments, however, can’t [declare bankruptcy], because almost all of them are required by law to run balanced budgets. Yet these governments, which are on the front line of dealing with the pandemic, are facing a combination of collapsing revenue and soaring expenses.”

“At one level, it’s really something to see a man who helped ram through a giant tax cut for corporations — which they mainly used to buy back their own stock — now pretend to be deeply concerned about borrowing money to help states facing a fiscal crisis that isn’t their fault.”

Yesterday’s Times coronavirus news aggregator provided this: “Rather than looking for handouts, M[itch] McConnell said, the states should consider filing for bankruptcy. His aides threw fuel on the fire in a news release that said the Senate leader was opposed to “blue state bailouts,” suggesting it was Democratic-leaning states that were seeking the money to take care of problems caused by fiscal mismanagement.

“New York’s governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, seemed gobsmacked by the concept that his state should even consider declaring bankruptcy. ‘That’s how you’re going to bring this national economy back?’ asked an incredulous Mr. Cuomo, who called Mr. McConnell irresponsible and reckless. “You want to see that market fall through the cellar? Let New York State declare bankruptcy.”

BBC World News tapped in the final nail. “Republican Congressman Peter King — also of New York — referr[ed] to his own party’s Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, as a beheaded French monarch with a reputation for callousness toward the downtrodden.

“‘McConnell’s dismissive remark that states devastated by Coronavirus should go bankrupt rather than get the federal assistance they need and deserve is shameful and indefensible,’ said Congressman King, a moderate Republican who is retiring at the end of this year. ‘To say that it is ‘free money’ to provide funds for cops, firefighters and healthcare workers makes McConnell the Marie Antoinette of the Senate.’”

Ah, yes, Queen Marie of longstanding “Let them eat cake” notoriety. She probably never said it, but the sentiment remains alive and well hundreds of years later. Mitch McConnell, anyone? He was elected to the Senate in 1984 — how appropriate.

Now here we are 36 years later, and the Speaker of the House, partisan or not, who allegedly works for and represents a portion of the American People has taken a page out of Eddie Izzard’s book. “Cake or death?”

Says Mitch, “Are you a Republican or a Democrat?”

I’m an American. An adult, registered voter American who sees the faces in the news all over the world. Hell, in the news, in the parking lots of Lowe’s and Shoprite. Faces that are half covered with makeshift, home-made, and professional-grade masks. Faces whose eyes leak suspicion at the others in the same parking lots, fearful that you will take all the Hazelnut Cream before I can get mine.

Even more, faces of police officers, highway workers, electric grid linemen, security guards, pharmacy technicians, grocery store cashiers. They have to have them in Kentucky.

I don’t know where Mitch McConnell is currently self-quarantining — in the Capitol or in Kentucky — but I do know which way he’s facing. He’s facing and focused solely on the election in November.

Frank Bruni wrote a brilliant essay in this morning’s Times. “Tens of thousands of Americans die; what does the president do? Spreads bad information. Seeds false hope. Reinvents history, reimagines science, prattles on about his supposed heroism, bellyaches about his self-proclaimed martyrdom and savages anyone who questions his infallibility. In lieu of leadership, grandstanding. In place of empathy, a snit. …

“I know, I know: He’s Trump. He carries the secret weapon of his spectacular shamelessness, which means that he’ll resort to ploys and lies that even the most unscrupulous of his opponents wouldn’t attempt.

“He’s Houdini, he’s Scheherazade, he’s all the escape artists of history and fiction rolled into one and swirled with golden-orange topping. He’s lucky beyond all imagining. But here’s the thing about luck: It runs out.”

Marie Antoinette’s certainly did. After she lost her head verbally, she lost her head literally.

Mr. Bruni adds, “I predict that as November nears, more and more exiles will speak out, sharing alarming accounts of life inside the president’s hall of mirrors.”

The Hall of Mirrors is the central gallery of the Palace at Versailles in France. The principal feature of this hall is the seventeen mirror-clad arches that reflect the seventeen arcaded windows that overlook the gardens. Each arch contains twenty-one mirrors with a total complement of 357 used in the decoration of the galerie des glaces.

Mirrors serve a purpose. They reflect us to ourselves. But when the mirrors surrounding anyone morph into the fun house mirrors that have become the norm in the federal government these days, our images are distorted. Instead of a normal plane mirror that reflects a perfect mirror image, fun house mirrors or carnival mirrors are curved, often using convex and concave sections to achieve the distorted effect.

Amy Davidson Sorkin writing the opening piece in this week’s Talk of the Town in The New Yorker cites the expertise to be found in Africa over their handling of the Ebola epidemic. Alyssa Ayres, of the Council on Foreign Relations, put it well. “There is deep expertise in places that most Americans aren’t thinking about.”

Ms. Sorkin finishes, “That may be one of the most important messages from the wider world.”

Including Kentucky, Mr. McConnell.

“The struggle to control the pandemic has to be a joint project, as if the whole planet were seeking to reach the moon together. Every nation [I’d add state] can contribute, including those whose voices are less often heard. And no one can be left behind.”

Mitch McConnell, go home.

Go visit the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky. Or the Cumberland Plateau, or the Coal Region. Or, how about visiting the Pennyroyal Region, or the Jackson Purchase. Or, say, let’s go straight to Lexington and give those folks a good listenin’ to.

Because, Mr. Speaker, I’m pretty sure you’re going to find what the incomparable Meryl Streep wrote on Instagram yesterday.

merylstreep The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy. [Heart]

I don’t know where you lost yours but a good place to look is in your old Kentucky home.

Dr. Susan Corso is a metaphysician and medical intuitive with a private counseling practice for more than 35 years. She has written too many books to list here. Her website is www.susancorso.com

© Dr. Susan Corso 2020 All rights reserved.