Just so everyone knows, I have several Personal people in my life, not including those in my immediate family, which includes my Personal Wife and all three of my Personal Children. Elsewhere, I have a Personal Agent, a Personal Mechanic, a Personal Yard Guy (twice a year), several Personal Editors, and my Personal Fencing Coach, a jovial Egyptian who weekly tries in vain to teach me a beat-Four attack with an epee and then retires outside to smoke a cigarette and wonder why the Pharaohs blew town and left him with the likes of me.
I do not have a Personal Lord and Savior. Despite the attempts of television preachers, think-tank apostles, and several professional athletes to convince me otherwise, I do not want a Personal Lord and Savior, not even the most popular one ever to come out of the Nazarene artisans' community. While I have no problem with Whoever's eye is on every sparrow, and while I have indeed considered the lilies of the field -- and so has my Personal Yard Man, who believes them to be flowering weeds -- I'd just as soon not have a Lord and Savior who has my cell-phone number. I don't want one I can call by His first name, as though he were making me some bookcases. “Mr. ben-Yosef” is fine by me, thanks, and he should worry about Africa, and not about my beat-Four problem. When it comes to Lords-and-Saviors, I'm perfectly willing to be part of a large and impersonal client base.
I have no problem with all those people who disagree. Most of them I simply ignore, which is something that my fellow liberals seem to have lost the ability to do. We aren't any good at ignoring people any more. We've lost the essential ability to Not Pay Attention. Wiser pundits than I have argued that this is a problem of insecurity: that liberals -- and their Democratic meat-puppets -- are so unsure of that for which they stand that they're afraid to ignore anybody, even the theocratic carny-barkers who draw their public rituals from the Book Of Common Buncombe. I am not sure about that. I think the problem is one of timing.
The most important thing is not knowing who to ignore, but of knowing when to ignore them. Consider two cases now prominent in the news of the day -- those of Jack Abramoff and of Russell Feingold. Now, let us never forget that, in the annals of American corruption, the former is the capo di tutti bagmen. Compared to Jackie The Hat, the Daley mob were Campfire Girls and Boss Tweed was Jane Addams. For centuries, American politicians sought in vain for the Unifying Theory Of Political Sleaze. Brilliant men failed in the attempt. Abramoff managed to succeed in less than a decade.
Of course, he had help. Everywhere he looked, there was a Republican politician to sublet. There were GOP superstars appearing at his door with both hands out, each of which held a bushel basket. As near as we can tell by the available evidence, over the course of the past decade, the Old Course at St. Andrews hosted more Republican hacks than Bob Jones University ever did. Of course, the whiskey's better there. He helped fund think tanks. He helped find people jobs. He helped run phony moralist crusades. He became the most famous white person to swindle Indians since Peter Minuit. The only question regarding his oeuvre seemed to be whether scoring tickets to watch the Washington Wizards in any real sense constituted a bribe.
And now?
Nobody knows the guy.
Tom DeLay may have heard his name on an airplane. The president may have bumped into him while clearing brush. Denny Hastert thinks he might have been a guy he wrestled against in high school. Bill Frist thinks he put a stent in him once 20 years ago, but maybe not. Could have been someone else. Grover Norquist apparently believes him to be a figment of someone's imagination. Every other (so far) unindicted Republican thinks he or she may have bought a newspaper from him one morning, and isn't he the guy in the scalley cap who runs the newsstand at Union Station?
See the point, though? The Republicans didn't start ignoring Jack Abramoff until they'd ALREADY GOT THE GOODIES! They'd financed their political machines, won their elections, played their 18 holes. They didn't start ignoring Jack Abramoff until he'd done them all the good he could do for them. That is how you ignore people. You don't start ignoring someone until a federal prosecutor makes it easy for you to do so.Compare that to how the Democratic party has chosen to ignore Russ Feingold. A couple of weeks back, Feingold got up in the Senate and proposed that the legislature inform the president in no uncertain terms that he sort of, maybe, ought to obey the law. This gave many influential Democrats the public vapors. (Note to Evan Bayh -- IKEA called. Your spine came in.) It was hard to figure out why.
The president's approval ratings are in the low thirties. The vice president's approval ratings are in a Level Four biohazard facility at the CDC. The administration's primary domestic policies are lying in the road waiting for the Department of Public Works to scrape them up with a shovel. Its primary foreign policy initiative is most popular these days in Teheran. The generic congressional polling numbers seem to favor the Democratic candidates. Now, I'm no Bob Shrum, certainly, but this seems to me a good time to roll up the Constitution and give these incumbent lads a good whack across the nose while they're down.
Instead, the most prominent Democratic politicians -- to wit, everyone in the party who looks in the mirror and hears “Hail To The Chief,” which is most of them, God knows – have embarked on a strategy of Ignoring Russ Feingold.
“Who? Where's he from? Wisconsin? Is that a state? Oh, where the Packers play? I know that place. Harumph. Ahem. When am I on with Imus again?”
Ladies and gents, what you do is sign on, milk it for all the advantages during the upcoming elections that the polls say you can, and THEN, afterwards, that's when you ignore Russ Feingold, probably when he decides to run for president. As a great man once said, if I can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, and then vote against them anyway, what's the point of being in politics? All principled politics are essentially exercises in ingratitude.
Charles P. Pierce is a staff writer at The Boston Globe Magazine and a contributing writer for Esquire. He also is heard regularly on National Public Radio.
