This Regina
Spektor song speaks rather bluntly to how I feel about the American
Presidential Campaign just now:
‘Tis the season.
The season of politicking, campaigning, debating and opinionating. Also of
satirizing, mocking, and tossing one’s hands up in frustration.
I find it all
very problematic because I am, by nature, a pessimist and a cynic. And I do not
approve of being a cold-eyed cynic, though I often like it and somehow continue
to be one in spite of my disapproval. I often find harbor in playing ‘devil’s
advocate’ and this can be of concern at times because it is so very easy to
mask real opinions and real concerns within the ready ability to speak with the
mouth of the opposition.
Here is the
trouble with creatures like me that are simultaneously so cynical and so
black-and-white; it is not that we can’t change or refine our opinions. It’s
that we cannot hover between them. Ambiguity is intolerable. Half-answers are
despicable. Vagueness is a harbinger of death. No, really.
The temptation becomes
to combine the pessimism with the ambiguity and create an uncompromising stance
out of that. (This, I think, is what Black-and-Whites are prone to do,
because uncompromising stances are the key). It looks something like this: put
confidence in no one, expect no improvement, cast a doubting eye on all reports
of progress, deem one option the evil and the other the lesser of two evils,
all is entrenched, all is rutted, it’s all the same. Trust no one. Hope for
nothing. Believe not a word.
Even though this
is how I often feel—and even though these sentiments are frequently valid—I
think it is evident that this is a bad road. Not that politicians are deserving
of the trust and belief they’re often accorded, but a wholesale reversal of
this doesn’t function either. Switching from rose-colored glasses to blackened
ones doesn’t make you see better: it makes you see hardly at all. Yes, you will
see the genuinely existing flaws, but you will also fail to see any viable
truths, however few and far between they may be (see…still a cynic).
We all have to
live with the fact that we are biased. We approach from given angles. We
possess pre-existing perspectives. No matter how are we try to edge out of
them, we just edge into a different angle. It’s still an angle.
So even though I
feel like Regina Spektor is on point, and boy do I love shouting those lyrics, I
don’t want to close my eyes and throw the whole game. You work for what you get…then
you work with what you get, provided you keep your moorings the whole way
through.
