I remember a political cartoon early during the Reagan administration that poked fun at his fondness for quick vacations, which became a running meme in the media decades before that word was invented.
It went something like: Mr. President—inflation is high, unemployment is bad, your signature legislation hasn’t passed yet, and your Interior secretary is a walking disaster. What are you going to do? To which Reagan answers, go to Aruba and Barbados for five days.
That was a mostly harmless little jape, as Reagan’s taste for a little R & R did the republic no real harm. Plus, the Republican Party had not yet metastasized into the sinkhole of amorality and un-conscience that it is today. And given that tragic decline, it’s only natural that today’s version of the Reagan story involves Ted Cruz, probably (against stiff competition) the most unprincipled and oleaginous Republican holding high office today, whose now-confirmed excursion to Cancun while his constituents are suffering and dying is the most shocking thing I can ever—yes, ever—recall seeing a politician do.
This is beyond comprehension. Texas, more or less the entire state, is in the midst of its biggest crisis in memory. How can a man who was elected by the people of that state, who is a servant of that state and those people, decide that this is the right time to go to a world-famous beach resort?
It’s 82 and sunny there today, by the way.
I mean, this is staggering, even for Cruz. Everyone knows he’s an asshole. Nearly every senator hates him. He seems like a completely awful person. But for God’s sakes. Constituents are dying.
I worked for a congressman once. The year after I left, there was a flood in the district. I checked in with all my friends in the office. They were all in shock at how awful things were back home, some in tears; the congressman was back in the district traveling to every corner of it he could. That’s what you do.
How Cruz could fly off to Cancun while literally millions of people are suffering is just beyond comprehension.
Or maybe it isn’t.
Here’s a theory for you. This is about shame. More precisely, the lack of it. And not just normal everyday shame, as in, oops, I did something unintentionally mean to my friend, and I feel shame.
No, this is a particular kind of shame. Civic shame. Public shame. This I would define as a sense on the part of a public person and elected official that he is a servant of the public and there are certain things that a servant of the public just doesn’t do.
These might include, for example: you don’t drive around in a fancy foreign car, particularly if you’re from Michigan or Ohio, but really, if you’re from anywhere. I used to have long chats with aides to New York politicians about the semiotics of the cars they chose to ride around in. Winner here, I must say: Chuck Schumer. Chose a Ford Taurus, at least when I was tracking such things.
That’s a minor example, but it makes my point. A public official must imbibe and maintain enough civic shame to remember that he or she is, at the end of the day, a servant of the people.
Civic shame is vital to democracy. Without it, the democracy degrades, corrodes, becomes something else; an oligarchy, in which the office holders are no longer servants but masters, lords, suzerains.
Right-wingers, of course, love to seize whatever opportunity they can to remind liberals of this when, say, Gavin Newsom goes for dinner at the French Laundry, or Nancy Pelosi shows off her fancy refrigerators and expensive ice cream. I agree, by the way, that both deserved to be dinged for that. It was nuts of Newsom to go to one of America’s most crazy-elite restaurants while asking Californians to stay home, and while Pelosi is entitled to own the refrigerator and eat the ice cream of her choice, she should not have chosen to show them off at that trying time in America.
Those were, even so, relatively minor transgressions. But this? Flip the tables, sticking with Pelosi, while we’re discussing her. Imagine that California had been nailed by a gigantic earthquake, and millions of Californians, including thousands in her own district, had no heat, power, water, and so on. And she flew down to Cabo for a few days.
A, she wouldn’t do it, I feel pretty certain. And B, if somehow she did, she’d be mercilessly attacked. By Democrats as well as Republicans. And she’d deserve it.
Cruz deserves nothing less than immediate calls for his resignation, from Democrats and his fellow Republicans alike. This is not anywhere near okay or forgivable.
Will Republicans make such calls? They may surprise me, but generally speaking, it’s hard to imagine. Republicans have canceled civic shame (maybe the real cancel culture!). They use it as a weapon against liberals whenever handy, but shame never applies to them.
It started with Newt Gingrich, remonstrating about Bill Clinton’s morals while he himself was cheating on his second wife with the woman who lately represented our great nation before of all institutions the Holy See. The unlamented Rush Limbaugh enforced it, with his relentless lying attacks on liberals. Donald Trump perfected it. Which leaves us now at a point where Republican voters don’t even expect or want it. Civic shame is being disappeared from our democratic life by Republicans, which is yet another of the ways in which they’re wrecking democracy.
Cruz should resign. He won’t. But he can never, ever be allowed to live this down. In the meantime, I hope it at least rains every day while he’s down there.
