Our Very Best Wishes For A Directionless New Year & A Morally Stultifying Decade

Face it, folks, you're born with a penis or a vagina but not a compass. This goes a long way toward explaining why so many people are so clueless in an age when there never have been so many ways to learn, get around and communicate.

I could be talking about someone who drives up the backside of an 18-wheeler while putting on makeup with one hand and text messaging with the other. Dog knows that there are a slew of people like that these days. We'll get around to that type in a while, but the subject of the first part of this essay is The Greatest Deliberative Body in the World.

The lazy explanation for why the U.S. Congress is so out of synch with Main Street is that virtually every member has been bought by Wall Street. Indeed, it is hard to find an exception to the rule that what the high and mighty want they get, even when they bellyache to the contrary. There is no more pungent example of that on the cusp of the first and second decades of the new millennium than insurance companies screaming blue-blooded murder over health-care reform while knowing full well that they are getting 30 million or so new sheep to shear while sacrificing little of their independence and none of their profits.

But the fact that senators and congresspersons seldom have their hands in their own pockets and reliably in others' pockets goes only so far.

To get the rest of the way please note that while it is highly probable that Tom Coburn has a penis and Michele Bachmann a vagina, like insurance company bigs they are lacking in the compass department. We're talking both kinds of compasses -- directional and moral. This is not to say that Democrats are not similarly handicapped. But the Republicans from Oklahoma and Minnesota respectively are currently the compass-free gold standard: Coburn ended the sorry-assed year with a bang by beseeching people to pray that Senator Robert Byrd drop dead before a health-care showdown, denying his fellow Democrats a key vote, and Bachmann ended it with a whimper by flogging the government death panels lie first propounded by Sarah Palin, who by default has become leader of the compass-free Grand Old Party.

* * * * *

Serendipitously if accidentally, directional and moral compasses were a running subtext of the last two books that I read in 2009.

One book was The Education of Henry Adams by . . . well, Henry Adams, the Boston-bred, Harvard-educated grandson and great-grandson of American presidents. His autobiography chronicles a lifelong and ultimately unsuccessful struggle to come to terms with "progress" and then the dawning of the 20th century. The other book was Up in the Big Hotel by Joseph Mitchell, a Southern-bred and street-educated New Yorker magazine writer who drew rich prose portraits of greasy spoon cooks, oystermen, gofers, bag ladies, Gypsies and others in and around New York city who struggled to survive during another time of tremendous change -- the middle decades of the 20th century.

Despite their very different backgrounds, Adams and Mitchell were equally keen observers of the vacuity of the chattering classes and that compass thing.

Adams concluded that his traditional education and education in general had failed to give he and his elitist peers the tools to build the moral foundations necessary to confront the social, technological and political upheavals that emerged after the Civil War, propelling the U.S. at breakneck speed into the 20th century, and he was especially concerned about the debasement of politics. (Did you really think that this was a recent development?)

Mitchell's subjects -- all on the fringes of society who encountered the elite only when they shined their shoes or were run over by their limousines -- had little time for traditional education. Many of them sensed that radio, the emerging medium of television and other breathlessly embraced technological "improvements" were debasing the human condition. Mostly importantly to this essay, because of their own finely calibrated compasses they understood better than the sharpest social and political scientists the directional and moral emptiness of the people who ran the show from boardrooms and capital cities.

* * * * *

The big difference today compared to the eras of Adams and Mitchell is that while there certainly were Coburns and Bachmanns back then, they didn't have such outsized megaphones.

There also weren't nearly as many people to lap up their morality-free crap, let alone directionally impaired folks like that mascara applying, text messaging bimbo who wouldn't know Coburn from Coltrane and other contemporary manifestations of cluelessness. Some of the more pungent examples include the father who called 9-1-1 because his son wouldn't clean up his room, the aspiring rapper who held up a convenience store to get some street cred, the wrecking crew that keeps knocking down the wrong houses, people suing a cereal maker because the "crunchberries" in Capt'n Crunch aren't real fruit, brawls at Chuck E. Cheese parties that are so common that they're hardly newsworthy, the woman hit by a train after lying on the tracks "to clear her mind" . . . aw heck, you get the idea.

Perhaps it is our fate to become more clueless the further we get from the tree we swung down from not in spite of but because of all the material improvements in our lives. Thinkers far more facile and knowledgeable than me -- Adams and Mitchell to name but two -- have gone way deep on this and I am only stating the obvious.

In any event, our very best wishes for a directionless New Year and a morally stultifying decade.