Sam Smith – It was just another day in my small Maine town. It had snowed and, as always, my driveway had been plowed along with the path to my front door. I hadn’t noticed initially because I was in my office on the other side of the house working on my blogs and, from time to time, looking out at farmland acres and the bay behind them.
The guy who had plowed my driveway had been doing it for me and many others for years. In nicer weather he worked at a nearby farm and had also run its hundreds of campsites and cabins. He was equally at home with ice, institutions, and individuals.
When I finished my work that day, I turned on our TV and watched someone explain how Elon Musk was attempting to buy some elections in Wisconsin and how Donald Trump thought he could run for president a third time.
I wasn’t shocked or surprised. After all I had covered Washington for more than four decades and had learned a long time ago there were two worlds there: the disjointed home of the powerful and the decent home of the weak. At one point 70% of the latter in DC were black.
As Dennis Farney of the Wall Street Journal wrote over 30 years ago:
“Arguably, national politics — once a device for achieving consensus — has become a device for driving people apart. The very terms used by political professionals are revealing. They talk of ‘wedge issues,’ highly emotional issues designed to split off pieces of rival political coalitions. And the wedge issue, in turn, has been mated to ever-more-sophisticated computer technology to "target" individual voters. Presidential campaigns now address not the electorate as a whole, but an increasingly atomized collection of individuals”.
Because I covered the national Washington while at the same time deeply involved in the city’s neighborhoods and communities, I learned to think of the powerful as a separate subculture that used the illusion of commonality to replace their true common ground, which excluded most of us.
These days when I try to find some justification for power what stops me is not just its disjointedness from community and real folk but also its failure to provide true value for those who crave it. Does being the richest man on earth or the most powerful politician improve your life or merely add to the questionable skills and behaviors you must develop to obscure the fact that tens of millions of fellow humans hate you.
The price of the success of Trump and Musk has been a rotten status among decent humans. I don’t have to keep calling my lawyer, pushing some untruth on a journalist, driving up car prices, or pretending I’m someone I’m not. And unlike Trump, I’ve only needed one wife over the past 58 years.
Why lie, manipulate, and intimidate others in order merely to have power? And still be stuck with tens of millions who hate you?
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