Andrew Young & the Ethics of Ambition

I've always been fond of Andrew Young--not the assistant and accessory after the fact to former presidential candidate John Edwards (not the eighteenth century pastor-theologian), but Andrew Young the former mayor of Atlanta, ambassador to the United Nations and key player in the Civil Rights Movement. I feel bad for this Andrew Young--and for Jonathan Edwards the theologian, for that matter--that events of the past two years have overshadowed their significant historic accomplishments.

Yet I must confess, I feel a little bad for the new Andrew Young as well. I heard him interviewed on the radio this week, discussing his role in attempting to cover up the new John Edwards's affair. The radio host called him "probably the sleaziest person I've ever interviewed." I don't suppose they were face to face during this interchange, but they were likely as close as radio interviews get. Maybe it's because I know how much pressure authors feel from publishers to sell their own books, but this exercise in indignity made me feel bad for the guy.

It also reminded me of something I recently read (or re-read, as I am wont to do in the case of this book). In Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose, nature's most nearly perfect book (which I rely on a great deal in Deliver Us from Me-Ville), author Brian Mahan talks about the various "bells" that ring throughout our pursuit of vocation. Some, he says, are like "the inkin, a bell used in Zen practice to announce the start of a period of silent attentiveness." Others are less reflective and more urgent, such as "the tocsin, or alarm bell, that warns of imminent danger" (p. 74).

Mahan goes on to review the curious case of John Dean (not Jimmy Dean, the sausage guy, nor John Deere, the tractor guy), former legal counsel to President Nixon. Dean was a young, up and coming attorney when he was invited to join the president's staff. He was living the high life during the events that led to Nixon's eventual downfall. At the same time, for example, that he was enjoying direct access to the leader of the free world, he was being given permission by one of the architects of the Watergate break-in, G. Gordon Liddy, to "have him shot if this would help with the cover-up." Dean was enjoying first-class flights and accommodations wherever he went at the same time he and his assistant, Fred Fielding, were deciding to put on surgical gloves "to avoid leaving fingerprints" while they "rifled through Howard Hunt's safe" (p. 75). They don't teach you that stuff in law school, so far as I know.

Mahan's intent in rehearsing Dean's story is to show how easy it is to deceive ourselves when we're caught up in something big. He doesn't excuse himself from this scrutiny; he goes on to tell the story of what great lengths he was willing to go to win a round of "hide the eraser" in grade school. Trust me, it's gross. But it's an important observation nonetheless.

Andrew Young indicated during his animus-dripping radio interview that his judgment was clouded by the thought that "what we were doing would literally change the world." He had long before decided that John Edwards was presidential material, qualified to lead the free world and for his time the best person for the job. Little indiscretions like a dalliance were scandalous enough to derail the train of history but little enough that they shouldn't be allowed to.

So in the thin air of a presidential campaign, Young became convinced that pretending to be the father of a child born to a woman his boss was having an affair with was politically expedient, if not patriotic. Life was moving too fast, with too much drama as a constant companion. Young couldn't hear the bells, Mahan might say. Only time could clear the air enough to see how absurd his patriotic impulse was, how closely his idealism resembled hubris, arrogance.

The trouble with living history is that it doesn't become history till you're dead. Till then, it's simply wading through wave after wave of urgent decision-making and murky ethical optioneering. "If you are to be armed for success in the real world," Mahan observes, "the capacity to rationalize on your feet, extemporaneously and with conviction is not optional; it is required" (p. 84). So I feel bad for Andrew Young, though my opinion of his behavior has not changed from shock and revulsion. There but for the grace of God, I suspect, go I. Till then, may we all listen for the bells as they ring their messages to each of us, and may we do as they suggest, because when it comes to the ethics of ambition, the bells are a blessing.

I’m the Governor! I’m Important, Yo!

Pardon my long post, but I'm feeling a bit heady. Illinois is a heady place these days, after all: the Bears may make the playoffs, the junior U.S. senator is about to become president, and the governor is about to be impeached and imprisoned. The 2016 Olympics are a possibility here that is strengthened by our favorite son ascending to the presidency but weakened by our chief executive allegedly conducting a political crime spree.

I’m fascinated by the governor’s story. He’s been in view here far longer than President-Elect Obama, to be honest, and his own presidential aspirations have never been far below the surface. Senator John McCain, the “maverick” reformer cum failed presidential candidate, told David Letterman that Governor Blagojevich once told him that he considered himself a reformer like McCain, thanking him for being a political role model. McCain and Letterman shared a laugh over those comments, absurd as they sound alongside transcripts of foul-mouthed shakedowns from the governor’s office.

The conversation about Governor Blagojevich has shifted, at least temporarily, to the question of his mental health. People think he must have been crazy to conduct so brazen a campaign as the one to sell a senate seat and force the firing of critical journalists. The mental health community, however, is stopping short of calling the governor psychotic; instead, they’re calling him a narcissist.

Dr. Daniela Schreirer is a forensic psychologist at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and she does not see any sign of mental illness in the public Blagojevich, but believes he does have sociopathic traits.
"We're just talking about traits. We're not talking about full-blown diagnosis. But certainly, there's the same sense of entitlement, the same sense of thinking I am superior. I can do whatever I want. I am not going to be caught," Schreirer said.

Blagojevich was, at one time, a rising star. He achieved office initially by being charming and self-deprecating; an advertising campaign consisted of everyday Illinoisans struggling to pronounce his last name but admiring his qualifications and energy. He eventually became a U.S. Representative and made a name for himself by helping to negotiate the release of three American soldiers, who were being detained in Yugoslavia under dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

Three years later he was running for governor, but the presidency was on his mind. In an ad that cemented his reputation in my mind as a twerp, he had grade-school students quiz him about American presidents: “Sixteenth president?” “Abraham Lincoln! . . .” Ostensibly about his commitment to education, the ad told me that he viewed the governorship as a stepping stone to his true destiny as president of the United States. And yet he spoke clearly, candidly and winsomely with interviewers, among other things stating with enthusiasm that he and his family “love Jesus.” This at the time was one of the most plainspoken, unambiguous comments on personal faith I'd heard from a candidate who wasn't in the pocket of the religious right. So while I didn’t vote for him (remember, I thought he was a twerp), I had hopes that his tenure as governor would be marked by policies that reflected his love for Jesus—just and compassionate programs, ethical policies and practices.

Blagojevich became governor in what might be considered the easiest campaign ever: the current Republican governor, George Ryan, was on notice that he’d be facing trial after his term ended, and the Republican candidate to replace him shared the same last name: Jim Ryan, no relation. For the second time in his career, Blagojevich’s last name carried him into office. Four years later the Illinois Republican party still couldn’t get its act together; State Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka was the only Republican holding statewide office, and when she ran against the governor on the argument that he had failed both to manage the state’s economy and to fight corruption, one video of her dancing with former Governor Ryan put an end to her chances to unseat Blagojevich. He made Elvis jokes about being “All Shook Up” over his victory and settled into his second term.

The governor’s second term has been characterized mainly by gridlock. It seems that he’s systematically alienated everyone in state government, such that the legislature and the Chicago Transit Authority, among other institutions, faced near-implosion while he sat in the bleachers enjoying hockey games. Some tried to call a constitutional convention for the express purpose of making it legal to recall his position; others spoke explicitly and frequently about his grandstanding and bullheadedness.

Barack Obama, it’s presumed, frustrated Blagojevich’s career plans by taking the national spotlight in 2004's Democratic National Convention and launching an ultimately successful presidential campaign in 2007. This was to be Blagojevich’s year, if you believe the scuttlebutt, but public and peer opinion had turned against him, so that by election day 2008 he had, among his liabilities, a federal investigation into his office and a devastatingly negative reputation among his constituents, and as almost his only asset, a recently vacated senate seat.

I feel bad for Rod Blagojevich. That’s a relatively new feeling for me; I’ve typically dismissed him as a mere worshiper of “the characteristically American bitch goddess of Success,” as Mark Stritcherz put it in America magazine. But Blagojevich is merely the most recent and most pronounced example of the pervasive streak of narcissism, with its attendant sense of entitlement and invulnerability, that runs through our culture and, I think, every human heart.

Blagojevich is, in that respect, this year’s Gary Hart, who dared reporters to follow him in their suspicions of his infidelity, and who resigned his own presidential campaign when they did exactly that and caught him in an affair. Blagojevich is this year’s Richard Nixon, who publicly told onlookers “I am not a crook” but who privately and obscenely violated the law on tape. He’s this year’s Ananias, who made a grand public gesture in donating his wealth to the early church but who was revealed to be just another poser with a wicked heart. He's this year’s Cain, who killed his brother and then stared down God with a brazen dismissal of the accusation: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He's this year's me, and all the mes here in Me-Ville.

Stritcherz goes on to lament the Me-Ville we find ourselves in, a world effectively incapable of policing itself or aspiring to self-sacrifice toward the greater good, by describing the world we've fallen short of:

In a morally and spiritually robust society, institutions identify such characters as rascals and discipline them accordingly; they can separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

I paraphrase the apostle Paul: Who will rescue us from this city of death? Thanks be to God who, if we dare follow, will deliver us from Me-Ville, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen. Come Lord Jesus.