Pots and Pandering
Another deadly school shooting, a new variant called Omicron with 50 mutations at least, stock market sinking and inflation rising…. and yet among a certain wing of people who call themselves journalists, the only story worth ranting about seems to concern a pot. More correctly, a pot that cost some hard-earned personal dough of the vice president of the United States.
Now, before anyone accuses me of being some kind of lecreuset elitist, rest assured that in my entire adult life of now many decades, I have probably not spent $300 in total on pots, pans, dishware, kitchen appliances and such. I prefer to enjoy the results of other people’s cooking! And I do quite well in that department, apparently…. but this contretemps is not really about food or cooking utensils, not is it about the spending habits of high-ranking politicians tho the self-righteous want us to believe it’s so.
No, the real issue is the utter crassness, silliness, lack of seriousness, willful cluelessness of a political commentariat that seems to be going for cheap applause lines all the time. Nothing is too low for those who pander to the mob, staging bread-and-circus shows daily to drive up ratings, gain notoriety, perhaps snag an invitation to Mar-a-lago. Do they ever consider the damage to our country?
Sure, yellow journalism is as old as Ben Franklin’s glasses; every president since George Washington wound up raging against press critics. But I want to consider the faux outrage over Vice President Harris’s precious pot from a different perspective: what lessons do rising generations of future citizen leaders take away from the incessant and highly personal attacks, invasions of privacy, demonization and even threats that political leaders endure each day?
And how do young women interpret the particularly vicious personal attacks on women leaders?
We need to be inspiring rising generations to have ambitions for public leadership, to have truly noble aspirations to seek public office, to work for the common good of the community. We need more young women, more young Black and Latino and Asian women and men to want to step up into elected and appointed positions.
Who will want to embrace a career in public life when the daily discourse is full of cheap personal attacks and utterly inconsequential patter about non-issues.
And then, of course, there are the more serious personal attacks, and not just by extremist pundits. Just in the last few days, Colorado Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert made remarks equating Minnesota Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Muslim, with terrorism. Such remarks should have prompted immediate and unequivocal condemnation from all leaders. But instead, the Republican leadership is silent, and media seem to think it’s some kind of hair-pulling contest, not a deeply offensive act by Boebert. Consider this headline in the New York Times:
No condemnation of contemptible behavior, but instead, a “both-sides” kind of tepid recounting of a “feud” that gives equal weight to Boebert’s utterly appalling comments and Omar’s reaction to Boebert’s refusal to apologize publicly.
A similar problem arose last month when Congressman Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, tweeted a doctored video that showed him killing an avatar resembling Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. The House of Representatives voted to censure him, but only 2 of 209 Republicans voted for the censure, and the Republican leadership did nothing to denounce his puerile but outrageous action.
An expensive pot is a small thing, a death threat is an atrocious thing, but all of these things point to the degradation of American political discourse and the failure of responsibility on the part of leaders — party leaders, editors and journalistic leaders, community leaders of all beliefs and party preferences — we need to start calling out the rancid and ugly personal attacks, the wasting of time on cheap shots, the ribald theater that has replaced serious discussion and real debate on important issues.
We educators, in particular, need to be louder in demanding better, stronger, models of public leadership to inspire the next generation. We need to be teaching our students how to have earnest and well-reasoned debates on issues where serious people can have wildly different ideas; we need to show them how to disagree without personal attacks; we need to develop models of respect and honor for the diversity that already exists, and that will increase dramatically in the years to come.
If we don’t attend to the most fundamental idea of public leadership — that it is worthy, noble, and necessary — then who will lead our communities and nation in the decades ahead?
Let’s stop talking about pots, and let’s stop pandering to the mob that only wants entertainment. Let’s talk about real issues and insist that the American people have a longer attention span and a larger capacity for intellectual engagement in political issues than the current headlines and laugh lines suggest.