Outgoing Sen. Alexander gets it wrong
Thoughts on how outgoing Republican Sen. Alexander’s plea for unity missteps on E Pluribus Unum
vol. 2 issue 57
E Pluribus Unum redux
Greetings,
Previously in docu-mental, when considering why Congress changed our national motto from E Pluribus Unum to In God We Trust as a fear-based political statement in the 1950s, I explored how this highjacked our national resolve to be the mature adults democracy requires us to be. I didn’t really understand the underlying profundity of that at a personal level, however, until earlier this week when I watched on C-SPAN, Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander (R.) give his farewell address in advance of his imminent retirement from a life of public service.
A constituent of the senator’s by proxy, since my parents live about 20 miles away from his hometown, I wish Sen. Alexander had voted to impeach the president, but I respected his reasoned decision not to. In general, the senator has been a rational bipartisan institutionalist whose collegial approach to being a public servant makes him stand out, which is sad, frankly.
As a reporter who covered the senator in his role as Senate health committee chairman, among his many bipartisan achievements (which you can read about in the text of his speech, naturally) are the 21st Century Cures Act, which I covered on Capitol Hill for what is now Medscape, and which I expect will be revisited as soon as President-elect Joe Biden takes office because the act includes his cancer “Moonshot” funding. The act also included much needed attention to mental health issues, including one billion dollars allocated to solving the opioid crisis.
But back to that sad thing. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., KY) introduced his friend, Sen. Alexander, breaking down in tears not once but three times, recounting his love of working with his retiring friend. So, let me say it was with respect that I subsequently watched as Sen. Alexander proceeded to essentially rebuke his buddy McConnell for running the Senate like a dictatorship, squashing disparate voices by having jiggered the parliamentary procedures of the body so that it no longer operates by committee, but more like whatever McConnell wants it to be like. Read the transcript, and tell me if you don’t agree.
So, that’s me finding the good, and praising it. Finding and praising the good was the first part of Sen. Alexander’s overall message. The second part, which he emphasized was what really mattered to him, was to preserve the filibuster to avoid the tyranny of the majority. Well, okay, I thought. The founding fathers spoke often about the danger of said tyranny, and built several stop gaps for this into our tri-partite system of governance. But one of the ways that they sought to reinforce how to rule according to the greater good of all, including the minority among us, was to choose a motto that emphasized unity, not the majority nor the minority. To not think any one part was more important than another.
For Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Adams, and all the rest, the motto was part of a public relations campaign to emphasize that out of all the original 13 colonies, we could come together as one nation. They needed this kind of unity for a lot of reasons, paying for the war against the Brits chief among them.
“More than ever, our country needs a United States Senate to turn “pluribus” into “unum,” to lead the American struggle to forge unity from diversity,” the senator exhorted his chums.
Argh! He got it backwards.
It’s the past 25 years of perpetually emphasizing the “unum” by way of taking a “my way or the highway” approach by whomever is in charge of the Senate, that has muted the plurality of our nation’s voices. The breakdown in bipartisanship began with Newt Gingrich in the House back in the 1990s, but was made a consummate art in this administration by McConnell, and I suspect Sen. Alexander knows that given the frankness of his comments.
McConnell’s focus on the sameness of his conservative view, and his clear disdain for those who do not agree with him cloaks him in some weird, undeserved entitlement to not cooperate, to speak derisively and condescendingly to those he evidently thinks are beneath him, is the kind of “unum” that has gotten us into this messy, extreme division. By being afraid of and repulsed by “the different”, we have run to the shelter of the one. If Sen. Alexander really wanted to draw attention to this during his tenure, he would have raised legislation calling for the return of our true national motto, not wag his finger at his relic Senator friends, including those seated in Democratic seats.
I’ve been thinking about this missed opportunity ever since I heard his speech, and it occurs to me that E Pluribus Unum is an intensely powerful and personal motto, as well as one for our nation.
First of all, it’s part of a larger Pythagorean philosophical code for how to forge family and society bonds that don’t break. That code, unus fiat ex pluribus, means that when a person loves others as much as said person loves him or herself, it makes one out of many.
But let’s move on up in time to circa the American Civil War when poet Walt Whitman wrote about loving his many, often contradictory, selves in order to better love all the people.
It’s freedom to spend time and reflect on all these selves within and the others without that give us the kind of wisdom we need to integrate into the meaningful “one” self, “one” nation.
As an american, my freedom equates with the right to pursue what makes me happy. As a mature adult, I like to think that the one pursuing happiness is the integrated me, the one who is at peace with her many selves. The one who understands that to pursue something, I have to know how to define it.
After years of introspection, and of observing other americans, and also of writing about mental and general well-being, I think I can boil freedom down to being a state of non-pain. We really don’t like pain in this country. If we could learn to make peace with pain, learn to live with at least a little bit of it, to stand still when things are uncomfortable, I think we’d have less pain overall.
Throughout my life, beginning with my traumatic and turbulent childhood and teenaged years, through my equally challenging early adulthood, through my first marriage, my second, through parenthood, sisterhood, and now my middle age and all the infirmities it brings with it, I have observed that among the possible range of sources of pain we might experience, not recognizing that what makes us free at one stage will eventually become our prison if we don’t let it breathe, grow, and evolve.
But if freedom is dynamic not static, how do we legislate in favor of one person’s happiness without, at best, limiting another person’s, or at worst, harming others?
So many of us think we know: The Constitution! That’s how!
And then we fight about what it actually says.
Here’s my two cents: The framers of this document, practically metaphysical in its bridge and scope of the divine and the mundane, reached into the future for a way to describe what we could become on this continent, and applied it as best they knew how, limited as they were by their cultural beliefs at the time.
But like a well-crafted poem, whatever its meaning to the poet, once released into the world, the finality and certitude of its interpretation is moot. It will mean what it means to whoever hears it, according to how those words fill the spaces of in that hearer’s heart and mind.
Fighting over whether the Constitution was intended to be applied strictly, as Originalists argue, or in its overall spirit, as some Progressives suggest, is pointless, as in there will never be a point, no there-there where one can say the argument is finished.
How brilliant! With there being no there-there, there will always be the freedom to apply it as necessary. And now, like then, what is necessary is for us to come to peace with the realities of our culture and our collective beliefs. Those rather young men who crafted our guiding document gave us the tool for that, too: E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one.
Out of our many parts, whoever and whatever they may be, at whatever stage in history, whatever our cultural mores, we must always seek to create one whole. That is the wisdom of ages reaching back and forth, connecting us with those young rebel men whose legacy is us all.
For my part, I am whole because I have sought the freedom to integrate all these disparate and often broken pieces into one beautiful, functioning whole. Can I not be a microcosm of my beloved country? It always has been my understanding that freedom is precious and, as an american, my explicitly stated right. This has urged me on to find meaning in my pain and my many dissolutions, and to make them into something worthwhile and whole, and me, a worthy american.
I have resisted the pressure by so many in my life who have sought – even demanded – to tell me what to think, who to be, how to view my experiences, what I should seek to achieve. This has included the mental health system which when, more than once, as I have written about here and here, I approached it in pain, proffered me pills and people who said it was silly to stay in pain when the drugs would deaden it. I wanted the pain to end, but I didn’t want the pain to be pointless. What was the meaning of it all? I knew I needed to feel my way through, and to assign it meaning if I were to use it for good.
The system was not designed to see me as one unique yet equal part in a greater whole, but as a standard part in a greater sameness.
Our system, now untethered from the idea of “out of one, many” failed me, as it has so many others, because it is now designed for profit, not for meaning and mattering. It requires that we are all the same, that we ignore any inklings of what it means to be who we are as individuals. It demands we forget that we are equal but we are not the same. It demands we not break out of our prisons of the past. It is a system at odds with our freedom.
To continue to perpetuate the system as it is ultimately has nothing to do with the Constitution, but with policymaking. The Constitution allows us to fit our resources around a nation that is composed of many parts making a whole. It is our legislators, and others who directly profit from a system of sameness, who perpetuate it. In so doing, they perpetuate our pain, and the lack of opportunity to assign it any meaning.
That is cruel.
Despite the odds, despite what many might have thought, I have succeeded in finding my freedom, and in breaking the bonds of the pain. The key to this was to see through the cognitive dissonance this system of sameness and profit at my mental expense, to reject being seen as a rung on a hierarchy, and to speak about it. It was to grow older, more reflective, and to accept my many selves, not try to force them into the prison of what I once was.
It’s liberating to be myself, made of the many selves I have had to be.
That’s what I wish the honorable senator would have emphasized. Not the stuck-up know-it-all-itis of many intractable selves, the ones who for years now have inflamed both sides of the political aisle with their versions of painful prisons of the “same”, but whole people. Whole individuals who serve as microcosms of our country, reaching across our inevitable divides to other whole individuals, creating whole communities, a whole nation. There is no “one” without the many.
And to that end, here are some past docu-mentals you might enjoy. Click on the black underlined text to be taken to the links.
In case you missed it…
Last week, Dr. James Griffith discussed how we heal our national divide by choosing one or the other of our two brains: the social or the primitive one. He cautioned that the fewer of us who do this, history has shown, the more likely it is that we will go to war with ourselves with others. He also said something matter-of-factly that is actually rather profound: politicians may not know what the actual science of fear mongering is, but they sure know how to use it to their advantage.
Thanks for reading, listening, and thinking.
Peace,
Whitney