The humor in ancient wisdom and the folklore celebrated by hunters and gatherers who spent long-ago evenings and days together with family and friends found its source in paradox—that place in life and history where nothing works as it should. At least, as we think it should.
Lucille Ball was its comedic master, taking simple sketches and adding her timing, eye-rolls and physical twitches until she embodied the madness that engulfed her. It was no longer the situation that was ridiculously funny: it was her!
And nothing fixed it, either. Paradoxes, like stones in a river, can be traversed, but not solved. No engineering or spin, no rule or bill, no lie or fear will change their nature. That’s why the ancients often pointed to them as the center of not only village humor but as communal religious teaching. They require heroic courage and thinking, both inside and outside, to get past them and mark the passage.
But paradoxes have a dark side, on full exhibit in the conversations about sex and race.
Anthony Weiner offers a paradox—more pathetic than funny or religious—until you realize that his situation is not an “either/or” of guilt and penitence of personality and politics, of bad judgment and stubbornness, but is a sequel, with parts one and two. His two-step process jointly connects to the biggest voyeuristic thrill in the history of American politics. Therein is his paradox; he is using politics to further the thrill!
What’s bigger and more dangerous to personal standing and the sanctity of the inner self than sending high-definition pictures of personal sex organs to unmet strangers over the internet?
Doubling down and knowingly running for one of the nation’s highest municipal offices, the high-profile mayor of a city that is a global beacon, and announcing at the announcement that more scandal is to come, then reveling in it when it does, dragging his family along, and refusing to step down, in order to draw the maximum public attention possible to what began as a private, prurient act and turning it into a daily outing, seen in the eyes of the hundreds he encounters without shame of his being a bad boy.
So with Weiner, rethink the prevailing view: switch the roles of the election and the exposure and see them as connected, evolving stages. The campaign’s main purpose is for flaunting his flaunting. Remember the announcement of his candidacy also included the announcement of “more incidents” to come. Note there is no platform, team, volunteers.
Now focus on the campaign as the second stage as a two-part event; the first being the private, digital exposure; the second being the public, personal exposure—the largest of its kind in history, within a public crucible that heightens the exposure, contact and exuberant feeling—even as the polls drop.
His running for mayor is a part of the earlier event, a vehicle for widening the data and getting the feedback so craved; a continuum of the risk-taking exposure morphed and zoomed to the biggest possible public stage—the ultimate danger, the non-repeatable, once-in-a-lifetime thrill, driven not by plan but impulse that laid out the order for it to fall into place.
It’s not for politics that he will not let go. It’s for the same reason he sent the pictures; for him it’s the same thrill/danger/defiant compulsion, larger, grander, a public naughty.
Notice it doesn’t bother him in the least.
Built on denial and blame, the GOP relies by intention and instinct on paradox. Theirs is a cultural strategy that relies on built-in paradoxes leveraged by misdirection, framed around denial, resolved by cognitive dissonance and the plausibility of blame.
Slavery is among the biggest of America’s historic paradoxes and is used to leverage racism and disenfranchisement today.
I see a neat match between our current place and the landed gentry who decided selling human beings from auction blocks was a capital idea—after trading with corrupt leaders for their capture, and disposing of those who died en route by dumping the bodies into the sea as great whites tore the flesh off the falling bones. Nothing defined America’s political parties, inside and outside, the rich and poor, and the common collective consciousness, its “governance,” like weekly arriving barks and schooners of Africans. Law, will and make-believe turned them into a half-million enslaved.
I’m amazed that historic memory, the pundits’ search for the right match for the contemporary moment, never removes the dust from slavery’s massive footprints! American history doesn’t begin and end with Ronald Reagan. Then and now, slavery has much to say. Then and now, the cultural features of slavery’s paradox are used in political arguments. Then and now, cognitive dissonance suspended fact and belief successfully—on many of the same issues: women’s rights, voting, immigration, wealth, privilege, deregulation and cases of cause and effect and on human freedom itself.
The main difference of consensus, displayed in the last two elections, is race as a factor of a broad, tacit agreement about who holds privilege and power has been removed. For once, politics ran ahead of society!
But as Barack was pulled up, we encountered a paradox the ancients knew well. Progress is always associated with resistance. The movement and effort to elect Barack also pulled up dormant, embedded layers of attitudes and acts of racism. Disturb the status quo and new ugliness (resistance and resentments!) always emerges. It is a historic principle for all actions of change. (And gardening!) So what we see is the depths of a racism that was before Barack’s election lingering still and quiet—that some call “post-racial” to deny its existence and shift blame to Barack for it when it can’t be denied.
Barack’s victory has produced a brutal politics even as other racial elements remain.
The latest idea, rebranding black conservatives as Frederick Douglass Republicans, tries to reset history away from its substance (making visible the pandering contempt and disrespect conservatives have for truth, principles, and blacks!)—and ignores the lessons of George Wallace, D, and Strom Thurmond, R (both won black votes!): make a sincere mea culpa backed by action; bark loudly but never bite.
Thurmond, who loved college-aged women (he married two!), is a paradox along the lines of Lucy. His skills are missing among the Rubios, Pauls, and Cruzes, who don’t know the genius of their party. An avowed segregationist, Thurmond nevertheless rebuilt the physical plants of black schools; statewide, between 1952 and 1958, students walked into brand new buildings without a similar rebuilding of white schools. As senator (I know firsthand from the mayors) he delivered government grants to build infrastructure for all-black towns, including sewer, water, paved roads, and public safety. He was even-handed and efficient at constituent service, securing payments many families depended upon. Every civil rights bill he opposed passed.
In a paradox of history, Thurmond, with all his noise, will have done more for black citizens in South Carolina on jobs, infrastructure and education than the state’s first black senator, (and the South’s first since Reconstruction) Republican Tim Scott.
