This week's real column

Much Ado About Mudding

I found out this weekend that I wasn't born to be a cattle drover. Or a politician, but we knew that already.

It started in the middle of a peaceful Saturday afternoon, when someone happened to glance out the window. What we saw was our neighbor's cattle trailer, evidently bearing the calves of some distraught matres bovinae, who were circling the wagon (or the pickup, rather) and letting their displeasure be known. All might have been well, except that a few of the herd decided not to be concerned. We could see the evidence of this out of the other window, where our neighbor's wife was trying without much benefit to encourage a couple of stubborn cows and a stubborner bull out of our wheat and back to the road. Seeing our neighborly duty, we put on the coats and shoes and headed out to help.

I wondered, as I wandered out into mud staining my blue tennis shoes, what exactly I thought I was going to do to make those monstrous beasts move. I wouldn't have objected to whacking the cows, except that they were standing very close to a bull. I calculated my chances of outrunning an angry bull in thick mud. It didn't take much math to figure out they were a lot slimmer than he was. So I decided my best strategy was not to have to outrun a bull, by not making him mad. I moved around to the other side. "Ahem. I don't suppose you would like to walk back that direction?" I asked politely. He didn't like, and took another step away from the road. So I continued my fierce backwards march.

The cattle continued to munch until the trailer returned. Then they remembered that there was a reason they wanted to be with it and not with me. They trotted off mooing merrily, leaving me ankle deep in the mud.

George Washington, whose 275th birthday we celebrate today, knew some of the problems of corralling. He was, naturally, trying to corral people and not dumb beasts, but I think he may have experienced some of the same frustrations when he saw everyone wandering off in their own directions. Only he had it worse: he had to fear not only the disunity of everyone in the herd wandering off, but the far greater problem of the herd attacking and destroying itself, like a pack of cannibalistic wolves. He feared that the inward struggles would leave the infant nation vulnerable to outside attackers, too. And this is why, when he retired from the presidency in 1796 he stressed a warning: that the United States beware "the baneful effects of the spirit of party" (emphasis mine).

Washington was afraid that some men would, "according to the alternate triumph of different parties...make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests." Why? Because: "however combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer the popular ends, they are likely...to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reigns of government." Sound familiar?
Alexis de Tocqueville, studying American democracy in the 1830s, saw many of the same dangers facing it--the dangers of people being more concerned with their individual gain than with the good of their country. Tocqueville believed that the most important force combating selfish individualism was Americans' "self-interest well-understood"--the understanding that it is better for us as individuals to be a nation bound to each other so tightly by our commonalities that our differences don't make us fall apart.

Today it is easy to lose sight of our common ground. Americans no longer profess a shared belief in the beliefs on which our laws were based, or in morals at all. And we have seen our politicians spend their time and votes trying to curry favor with the masses rather than doing what they know is best for the country (incidentally, the founders were very wary of rule by the masses, which is why we don't have a pure democracy). We have seen them compromise, seen time and money spent on attacking each other; not from a desire to use power for the good of the people, but from the pure and selfish love of power itself. And we have seen a country mire itself in mud.
It's time for us to forget a few things about ourselves and remember a few things about our country. Happy Birthday, Mr. Washington.