PARTING SHOT LIKE IT OR NOT, WE LIVE IN A POLITICAL WORLD

Jim Morrison, thou shouldst be living still. Strange days have found us, for sure.

A few flags burn, and a lot of demagogues make hay from it. Rap groups pump mindless, woman-hating drivel into the airwaves. . weird doctors push suicide machines on “Donahue”. . .another oil spill is waiting to happen, as the foxes guard the environmental henhouse.. .Air Jordans soar past 100 bucks, and ghetto kids rob to have them.. . senators praise law and order, then vote to fill the streets with military assault weapons. . .citizens crouch behind burglar bars, praying that the angels of crack will pass over their homes.. .

And in the midst of this crazy summer, how lovely are the crape myrtles, building to their glory in the afternoon heat.

Should that last thought be illegal? Or at least unpopular, socially embarrassing? There is a certain type of modern mind that would say yes. The world is a hellhole of crises stacked on crises, they say, and we have no right to tend our gardens until the struggle has ended. Here you are, Mr. Bourgeois Homeowner, clucking over your wounded St. Augustine. Meanwhile, the looming menace of global warming/higher taxes/AIDS/violence on the West Bank/il-literacy/strip mining/apartheid/child abuse/ pornography/inadequate housing for the poor grows unabated, and what have you done about any of it?

My hero George Orwell, to whose eminently sane writings I retreat in times of contusion, addressed this subject of private life vs. public responsibility fifty years ago in a little essay called “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad ” One day, while the headlines were full of Hitler and Mussolini, the Luftwaffe and me nightly blitz that left London in flames, he found himself in a garden, watching two toads mating in the shrubbery.

At least for a little while, Orwell was more interested in the frogs’ small affirmation of life and the natural order than in the plans of dictators or democrats. Almost guiltily, he wondered: what right had he to enjoy the simple pleasures of nature, when maimed and terrified children were lying in the rubble? Shouldn’t every moment be dedicated to the struggle against fascism?

It would be hard to call Orwell an apathetic, inverted slacker. Leaving aside his own service on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, novels like Animal Farm and 1984 have done more to advance freedom than a thousand filibustering senators. But his answer in the case of the toads was right, I think. None of our worthy causes-political or military or ecological or humanitarian-is an end in itself. Causes are a means of getting somewhere else, to a place where the fight is behind us, a world (forgive the irreverence) that is safe for toads and crape myrtles and those who’d rather watch them than sign a petition. And since that’s the world we’re aiming at, there’s no sin in practicing a little along the way. Between struggles, of course.



AND THE STRUGGLES DO GO ON. FORCING us to admit that we live in a political world and must play by its rules. Take gun control, for instance. We can never lose faith in dialogue and rational persuasion, but anyone who’s followed this “debate” for a few years knows that at bottom, this is a matter not of right ideas but of naked political power. The National Rifle Association has a tight enough grip on the manhood of enough legislators to block sensible gun control measures. Those who favor gun control can and should continue to speak sweet reason to their gun-worshiping friends. While we talk, however, the bodies stack up in schoolyards and in barrooms. And if you want to do something about the growing number of guns showing up in school lunchrooms, there’s just one way: politics.

Yes, the old we-got-fifty-one, you-got-forty-nine method. Get the votes. Make sure that lawmakers know you don’t buy the NRA’s propaganda. Let them know you believe in a middle ground-a gun control policy that would not interfere with people’s rights to protect their homes, but would draw the line at some of the cheap pocket rockets and the drug lord’s automatic bullet sprayers. Show up at meetings and let your representatives know you’re serious, and that you’ll remember how they voted on Election Day, just as the NRA remembers.

I’ve been watching this “debate” for almost a decade now. and I can tell you that we shouldn’t wait for universal harmony to break out on this one. As C.S. Lewis once noted, you cannot reason someone out of a belief they were never reasoned into. If an idea didn’t get into your head via logic, it’s not likely to come out via logic. Spend five minutes listening to gun nuts howl on a radio call-in show, and you’ll quickly discern that many members of the species are beyond the pull of argument. A deep, morbid streak of paranoia runs through them. And the paranoid are not easily moved by statistics and testimonials and promises of good will.

This is not intended as an insult, but a description. What is it but paranoid to believe, as NRA fanatics do, that any gun control measure inevitably will lead to a police state in which all guns are confiscated and the disarmed citizens herded into concentration camps? These superpatriots talk about how much they love our country and our flag, but they see our government as a giant ogre just drooling to stamp out their freedoms. They believe that if we register one gun. or institute one seven-day waiting period, it will be Nazi Germany all over again. Amazing.

Our current policies about guns in America were shaped by people of this mindset. They’ve got a lock on the levers of power, and things aren’t going to change until someone has enough votes to pry their hands off those levers. So we have to get involved in the political process, though Orwell was right again when he described politics as “a mass of lies and deceptions.” It’s that, and probably always will be. But it’s the same playing field, the same srnoke-filled or smoke-free room, for everyone, whether the issue is gun control, capital gains taxes, abortion, whatever. Politics is the road you travel to change the system, to get the fight behind you so that you can get back to the toads, or the crape myrtles, the things that really matter.