Dear Children:
Depending on how you count, there will be more than 100 new Members of the 112th Congress. That’s more new members than the First Congress had in total. Depending on how you count, there were 26 Senators and 65 Representatives that met in Philadelphia during that balmy April of 1789. They were a gaggle of petty, fractious, stiff-necked, upper middle class, thick skinned and hidebound individuals sent to straighten out what was wrong with government since the Revolutionary War (depending on how you count:1775-1783) was settled six years earlier.
And every two years thereafter a new congress was formed to do the people’s business, damn each other to perdition and expect fulsome praise for the effort.
What’s different? There are two schools of thought: The first is that, in those olden days when the earth was still cooling, public persons treated each other with a gentility and rigid attachment to etiquette that one does not see today. Boy Howdy! is that ever true. The other difference often stated is the homogeneity of that congress: all white, all male, mostly wealthy, all Christian and all former rebels. That also is true.
Digging deeper, however, you will find that while they resisted snark in public, they hired goons (we call them surrogates today) to tell the most vile tales on street corners and in the press. And, while they had no reason to look down their noses about physiognomy, purse or religion, they did find ways to snigger about professional and regional distinctions. Planters had little else in common with lawyers; merchants had little else in common with mariners; bankers had little else in common with the clergy while northerners despised southerners and southerners despised northerners with a purity only arms dealers could love. Since when did we need an excuse to identify a despicable if irrelevant dissimilarity in the quest to vilify a political rival?
This topic bears a nod to Jeffrey Lebowski, the slacker Everyman who speaks of himself in the third person and abhors change. He does not update us on his life so much he as validates it, “Yeah, well. The Dude abides”.
Anyway, I’m making the case that not much is different between the First Congress and the 112th Congress when it comes to the issues and the personalities. There may be a change in the look of members and most have thrown off their veneer of sophistication and decorum. All the venality and grasping and smugness remains. Remaining also is the idealism, fellow-feeling and desire for service that motivates a small but significant fraction of the political class. We have no right to expect human nature to change. It’s the constraints we agree to that change.
That’s right; it’s the institution that’s changed. Members have huge staffs. Committees have huge staffs. Leaders have huge staffs. Travel is free within its liberal constraints. This last election did not repeal incumbency which is common and stretches across decades. Campaign finance and its corrupting influence just reached the $4billion mark. The whole system is awash in money. Congressional work is exhausting. There is little time to think. The Congress has rule books. Those rule books are thick, densely written and respond only to furious ministrations of legalistic minds. Nearly everything is recorded and reported to feed a news beast that is, at once, all-seeing and never makes eye contact.
Life in Congress is, in short, life in a toxic fish bowl. Your guess is as good as mine why an otherwise smart and effective person would subject himself to the abuse. Okay, there is the public adulation and the cushy lobbying job afterwards but she pays an extraordinary price to get there.
Still, as we’ve seen, there is 222 year’s worth of people who got elected. Think of them as ordinary people with a prodigious appetite for pain. They deserve civility from us notwithstanding the loutish circumstances that surround them. Come to think of it, everyone deserves civility from us.
I’m just sayin’,
Poppy
www.poppylbs.blogspot.com
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