A TIME FOR REFLECTION

By H. N. Burdett

With apologies to Woodrow Wilson's Vice President Thomas Riley Marshall, what this country needs is a hell of a lot more than a good five-cent cigar.

The emergence of a seriously progressive political party that would at least do for the Democrats what the much-maligned Tea Party is doing for the Republican party - that is to say, shake them up - would be a positive start toward getting where the country needs to be.

If there is one thing on which overwhelming consensus might be reached in this bitterly divisive political era, it is the proposition that the lawmaking apparatus of this still great nation is broken. Furthermore, Americans cling to the understandable conceit that their legendary know-how can fix damn near anything and everything that requires repair.

So why in the name of Jupiter can't we put together that great Humpty Dumpty that had a great fall: the United States Congress? It won't take all the king's horses and all the king's men to put old Humpty back together again; an army of squirrel shooters provided that service way back in 1776. Fourscore and seven years later, rivers of native blood drenched great battlefields to preserve the union.

In 1789 in Philadelphia, the Founding Fathers, spearheaded by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton with the infinitely wise Ben Franklin offering his singularly sage advice leavened with wit and humor, wrote and the 13 original colonies subsequently ratified a masterpiece blueprint for democratic governance conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal.

Don't look now but the country stands at the brink of a crisis unparalleled in its more than two centuries of existence.

Confidence in government has plunged to a level unrivaled since the Civil War. Back then an unlikely self-educated rail-splitter named Abe Lincoln was steering the ship of state. Some say it was an act of divine providence

That Lincoln was in the right place at the right time in American history, is indisputable. It is one case that might give pause to the most avowed atheist who ever walked the earth. There would be monumental difficulty in refuting the intervention of a Higher Authority to anoint a Lincoln when he was most needed. Consider that Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan, was among the more inept souls ever to reside in the White House - one who would certainly be included among the five to 10 worst disasters ever to serve in the office of the presidency. And the Great Emancipator's successor, Andrew Johnson, also qualifies for that less than distinguished roll call.

At this current juncture in United States annals, the so-called two-party system has become such a rigidly partisan mess that a resolution praising motherhood and apple pie might trigger a party call and generate a maelstrom of uncivility. A mere 12.3 percent of the populus attest to having faith in their own national lawmakers. Easily remedied, one might wrongly opine. At the next election, just toss the rascals out and bring in fresh faces to set things right.

The glaring fallacy of this premise stems from the fact that it is unlikely to happen. Obviously the majority of some 87 percent of the electorate convinced that Congress has lost its way believe their own representatives are just fine; it's all those other nut-jobs, dunderheads and incompetents who are fouling up the works. And there's nothing to be done about correcting the inferior judgment of voters in other states and other congressional districts. To say nothing of there being no guarantee that fresh faces will be anything other than just that and that alone.

Evidence of competence can only be measured after it is too late to undo the damage done behind voting booth curtains. Only after the office has been won, the new member of Congress settles in and begins to legislate do we know what we have. The crystal ball and astrological charts have yet to be designed that can accurately predict whether those we elect will be an improvement upon what we have turned out.

This calls to mind the response of former Maryland Governor Theodore R. McKeldin when he was once asked the eternal question of whether judges should be appointed or elected. McKeldin unhesitatingly posited that there is but one way to ensure the ascendance of the very best judges: immaculate conception.

For all the hooting and hollering about how the Tea Party is muddying political waters, which were rather thoroughly polluted before the teabaggers rode into town, the contribution of these brash interlopers has been to force Republicans to become more introspective about their own values.

Tea Party supporters may have various stands on any number of issues, but they are united in their insistence upon whittling down government to its bare bones, as well as either vastly reducing or, preferably, eliminating federal taxes. And, incidentally, this is a departure from the credo of the Boston Tea Party with whom the contemporary incarnation proudly identifies. The original Tea Party, those who donned native American garb to dump tea imported from Mother England into beantown's harbor, did not rail against taxation per se, but rather taxation without representation - a condition most worthy of taking up ball and musket to challenge.

So just as the Tea Party has provoked the Republican party into examining what it stands for - presumably, small government and drastic reduction if not complete elimination of taxes, and the like - is it not time for a progressive counterpart to stand up and test the frigid feet of the timid Democratic party against the flames of self-revelation?

It is high time for Democrats to determine whether they remain committed to their traditional roots: a fair shake for working people; allegiance to concepts like social justice and equal protection under the law that they are more likely than their more conservative brethren to regard as sacrosanct rather than flowery euphemisms for pie-in-the-sky claptrap; a dogged belief in the revolutionary notion that health, education and assistance to those struggling to put roofs over the heads of their families, food on the table and clothes on their backs and playing by the rules are at least as much a slice of the same American Dream as the lust for ever greater profits and making a few killings on the market.

Holier-than-thou investors and venture capitalists succeed in pawning themselves off as courageous saviors of the American way, the risk-takers, whose kissing cousins at blackjack, craps and roulette tables from Vegas to Atlantic City engage in the same basic activity only under somewhat less respectable guises. In the end, both are are doing what they do: gambling, a pastime to which all too many are addicted and for which psychologists and psychiatrists have licenses to treat. The difference is that at least in the casinos there are rules and if you don't abide by them you get thrown out with an invitation not to return.

On Wall Street and in corporate board rooms, the consensus preference is for no rules, keep government off our backs, the market can only seek its own level unimpeded by nuisance regulations and the sky's the limit because, as any fool can plainly see, they are above and beyond the law. After all, they are the 'job creators,' the crowd whose high-stake wagers fuel the entire economy.

The truth is that there are decent folks at both ends of the economic spectrum, but there will always be another element: those ever seeking ways to tilt the playing field in their own favor, to game the system for their own advantage and at the expense of others.

The bad apples in the three-piece suits at one end will always try to dream up new variations on the Ponzi scheme, as will, operating from the lower end, welfare queens, grifters, three-card monty dealers and other street-smart sharpies out to pocket the fast buck from those of whom it is said are born every minute.

If and when they are caught, the difference is that the suits always seem to have sufficient emergency funds and a valid passport stashed away for a quick flight to the tropics or to hire the services of clever mouthpieces who make their living assisting and advising clients in the fine art of avoiding and evading taxes and which often enough allow them to swagger off into the sunset with, at most, out-of-court settlements. At the other end of the scale, the penalty is more likely to be stiff fines or jail time.

With all the nonsense spoken and suggested by the fear-mongers who wring their hands and express concern about the United States going the way of dreaded "European socialism," the simple truth is that the last best hope of capitalism does indeed rest with its ability to swallow hard and accept sensible regulations.

The challenge of government is to seriously enforce these regulations, to revisit the Glass-Steagall Act, which worked well from the Great Depression to prevent banks from engaging in multiple mischiefs that are morally untenable and unacceptable.

When Glass-Steagall was overturned in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley cabal, the drawbridge was lowered, the gates of economic peril opened wide; it was the game-changer that led inevitably to the malaise that the experts now tell us we'll be digging out for another five to 10 years at minimum. The Dodd-Frank bill, at very best Glass-Steagall lite, is tantamount to tending to a hangnail when open-heart surgery is required to save the patient.

For the Democrats another kind of surgery is required. They urgently need a spine transplant. If they could only find a way to acquire the DNA of arguably the two toughest presidents this nation or any nation has ever known, and they were both Democrats: Andrew Jackson and Harry Truman. Old Hickory and the Man from Missouri must be pinwheeling in their graves at the shocking transformations that have evolved in the party they revered. The backbones of these men would be just the ticket to resuscitate this flailing and floundering shipwreck of a political party.

As for that fellow Lincoln, does anyone honestly believe that were he alive today he would even consider registering as a Republican? The party that fights any real effort at health care reform tooth and nail? The party that would eliminate the Department of Health, Education and Welfare as the exemplar of government profligacy? The party that covets and fawns over those at the upper 2 percent of the economic scale with the ferocity of a lioness protecting her cubs?

From the vantage point of his memorial at one end of the National Mall, Lincoln peers toward the Capitol to the east. His heart is heavy. Were his hands not sculpted from marble, were they flesh, blood and bone, he would raise them to hide his eyes, his long, thin frame trembling with grief. The words carved into the stone on the wall to his right begin: "With malice toward none, with charity for all. . ."

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