Lombardi's Question, and An Apology

The film clip is simple and direct, the way he was. He strides the sidelines while his team flounders. His exasperated comment comes as a leading question: "What the hell is going on out there?"

That was Vince Lombardi, who coached the Green Bay Packers to an era unequalled in the team's history. It probably wasn't the first, or only, time he said such a thing. I coached for a while. I know.

That's the question I pose to the United States of America. It's time we examined it.

I taught history and government at a high school in Wisconsin for 30 years. I wish to extend an apology to the students who were assigned to me.

I did not prepare you for what you are experiencing right now. I taught the system of our government and how it developed by making some underlying assumptions, or perhaps not examining those assumptions because I couldn't imagine being without them, about what could not possibly happen.

Those assumptions have been shattered. People entrusted with the republic's destiny are not acting the way they have previously acted.

Or, perhaps, they are. History blurs distinctions as well as enlightens them.

Has there been someone as unhinged as 45 in the Oval Office? Well, yes. Andrew Jackson had the same explosive temper, though he could also play politics. He made racist decisions that reverberate today. He made economic decisions that became disastrous.

Have there been disagreements as ferocious as those simmering in Congress right now? Well, yes. The decades of run-ups to the Civil War provided plenty of them (and there's a new book out about that). U.S. Senators, the paragons of decorum, viciously and physically attacked each other on the floor. Fistfights broke out. Canes were wielded. People were genuinely injured. Insults were flung wildly, irrationally, stupidly. We haven't descended to that level. Yet. (But Lindsay Graham's angry lashings may be a forerunner.)

The issue back then, of course, was slavery, the well-established, unanswerable issue, in which famous people (think Washington for one, Jefferson for another) knew it was wrong but couldn't let go of it, and their slaves, until they were gone from the earth. Jefferson knew trouble was coming, and couldn't do anything about it unless he would have denied his entire culture and freed his slaves.

The issue now, of course, is abortion, perhaps another unanswerable issue. The Republican Party has managed to win the long game by maneuvering the appointment of enough Supreme Court justices (assuming the next appointment, regardless of who it is, belongs to them) to provide a bulwark of rejection of a right that most women depend upon--if not to utilize it, then to list it as a guarantee that other rights will not go wanting. Without the right to choose to control their own bodies, other rights seem, well, inconsequential--and can and probably will be reduced if not eliminated. Once stairs are descended, too often doors close behind them.

But it's no longer enough for millions of women to harbor the resentment that stems from such an attitude. They now express it. They line the streets in protest. They run for office in unprecedented numbers.

This ferociousness was, perhaps, inevitable. The clash is building to levels that may become simply intolerable, accelerated by a minority-elected president who doesn't care about anything except himself--raw, naked power, the power of insult, the power of innuendo and half-truths for effect, the enjoyment of watching someone else feel bad. Politics get as damaged when there are poor winners as with poor losers.

We've never had anything remotely like this in my life and the lives of just about everybody else presently in existence in the U.S. I'm sorry I didn't prepare you for that, my students. I just couldn't foresee it.

But we need to promote and extend the study of history all the more. To this amended question: How did we get here? How long did it take, really? Were there any noticeable turning points? Or is this just human nature, confronted with staggering possibilities that even the best possible governmental concepts can't overcome? Will democracy fail, and in a nation this large, has that been our fate all along?

Or, are we doing the same thing so many have done--noted by the late historian Daniel Boorstin back in 1970 (when it also seemed like things were completely becoming undone)--in moaning about things in hypocondrial angst, attached to the repeated thought that we've never been through anything else like this before, except that we have?

We've missed something in our educational system, though, something very crucial. I'm going to examine it. If you want to as well, watch this space and let's talk.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark