Can't we play nice?

  Sunday night at the Tony Awards, Robert De Niro dropped an F-bomb on Donald John Trump. This produced a few mild cases of the vapours in the usual quarters, including The New York Times. The reaction was nothing like what, for example, George McGovern produced by calling a lady a “horse’s ass” on an airplane when she acted like one. We've come down in the world.

 De Niro provoked the Times to write a story about the coarsening of American politics, a process that has been going on forever but took a giant leap when the Republican candidate for president made vulgarity as legitimate a political tool as dirty money and gerrymandering.

 The Times thought we would heal better as a nation if we’d be nicer to each other. That reminded Charles P. Pierce of Esquire of why he disagrees.

 

 Pierce, who belongs to the same alumni association I do, is invariably entertaining, although recently he has been lazily violating the Second Commandment  in reaction to an administration that makes a point of violating all Ten. I wish they would stop. Nevertheless, he makes a point worth considering here.

 Pierce has a list of times when “healing” became an excuse not to call a spade a dirty shovel. One of them is the 2000 election in Florida, which the Supreme Court decided George W. Bush won. A consortium of media went back afterwards, looked at all the votes and assured us that if the under-votes were counted, as Al Gore wished, Bush won. Happy ending! In the fourth or fifth paragraph, the consortium noted that if the over-votes had also been counted properly—as the Florida constitution required -- Gore won.  As the story was written, Gore’s way was the best way because that was the happy ending the Supreme Court had already chosen. Let the healing begin!

 You may consider Pierce’s other examples for yourself. That one particularly galls me.

 Concluding his list, Pierce goes on:

All of these were undertaken on the theory, I believe, that The American People are made of fragile glass, and that they must not be encouraged to anger over the misuse of their right to self-government, lest it upset the salons of D.C. or the quiet anesthesia of our finer think-tanks. It must not frighten the horses, or David Brooks, who is only half of one.

Can anybody truly say that these exercises in civility and healing made our politics better? Is America a better place because we let the torturers go unpunished? Can’t it be argued that torture coarsened American culture worse than Robert DeNiro’s bad words at the damn Tony Awards? Is it that hard to trace a cultural line from the cells of Abu Ghraib to the cages of Brownsville, and to conclude that the implicit absolution of the former led to support of the latter?

 If you think about it, we have piled up a lot of conspiracy theories and a lot of resentment -- some of which erupted to decide the last presidential election -- through our nannyish urge to pretend "the system worked," slide the dirty linen under the bed, replace the doilies on the arms of the couches and go on as if nothing happened.

 I feel strongly in favor of Pierce's argument, especially after a week of ly... ah, misstating by the White House. Unfortunately, it has also been a week when St. Matthew's account of the Sermon on the Mount dominates the daily liturgy, so I have been treated to days of forgiving trespasses and overlooking faults. What seems best on a personal level seems downright dangerous in politics. In fact, we have brought a lot of misery upon ourselves by believing in Lincoln's "angels of our better nature." I don't know how to apply those angels to our festering resentments without being either a) a sucker or b) indelicate. Any ideas?