Category: ethics

Outrage and Longing

Courage

“The desire to surpass our limits is as essential to the structure of the human as the recognition that we cannot.” — Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought

To live with integrity these days is to live inside the conflict between outrage and longing. But, if we become practiced in the art of paradoxical living we will see that dancing on the high wire between these two towers may be our best chance for grace-filled living.

“If we were God,” says philosopher Susan Neiman, “we could change moral principles into sovereign law. Were God Himself to enact such a law, moral principles would lose all connection with freedom.”

And there’s the rub. Being made ‘a little lower than the angels,’ in
the quaint phrasing of the King James Bible, means we are beings who desire wholeness; the state of ‘being made’ means that we will never experience that. We live within the limitations—and the grandeur—of moral freedom in which the desire for the reign of goodness sometimes overrides the understanding that goodness flourishes only where it is wanted, gifted, and received. As Neiman points out, magically changing moral principles into law, even if done by God, would jinx the whole thing because freedom means there is a genuine choice to be made. Making those choices every day is the burden of freedom and the brightness of being human in the image of God. Moral freedom is a form of creativity, available to all of us.

Rollo May, one of the pioneers of existential psychotherapy, quotes Rainier Rilke on withdrawing from psychotherapy: “If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.”

Rilke knew that creativity for the artist surges up from the depths, a necessary fire in the mind and heart. Rollo May put creativity and evil in the same room. Creativity, he mused, comes from the rage within us against death and destruction.

If we are made in the image of God and that image in us is the power to create, then how could evil threaten creativity? God, as creator, never creates for destruction because all God’s work is created for life. When we create—and we do—our sense of direction is not inerrant. We create in all directions, some of them winding off to evil and all of them subject to losing their way.

But creative power, moral or artistic, is no guarantee against a certain perversity. Put up a sign for “Wet Paint” and see how long it takes for fingerprints to appear. What would happen, we think, if we did this, this thing we’ve been warned never to do? Let’s try it—just to see what would happen. If it’s awful we’ll know and we’ll never do it again. And off we go. And we find that this evil, now loosed in the world, arrives without a warning label, with no expiration date, and without operating instructions. The terrible truth about creative work is that it can be turned to destruction and that there are always some who will do that just for the hell of it.

One of the ways our outrage can lead our moral creativity astray is to imagine that God resents our natural powers and is suspicious of our freedom. Thomas Merton calls this Promethean theology and comments in The New Man that “This means that man must either save his soul by a Promethean tour de force, without God’s help, or else that man must turn his freedom inside out, stew up all his natural gifts into a beautiful guilt-complex, and crawl towards God on his stomach to offer Him the results in propitiation.” But this is to deeply misjudge God’s love and the grace that is ours.

We are not worms. Our moral and spiritual freedom before God raises us to our feet, lifts our sights, and erases the false image of God we conjure up. “Grace,” says Merton, “is given us for the precise purpose of enabling us to discover and actualize our deepest and truest self.”

“The fantasy of replacing God is the test by which morality itself is decided,” says Neiman. To imagine, with longing, a better world is the flip side of outrage at the present one. It’s the outrage that compels us to imagine a newer world; it’s the longing that endures when we admit that our best efforts will probably not outlast us. But the visioning of such a world, even with all our limitations out at the edges of our sightlines, gives us the energy of hope.

Neiman opens the windows and runs up the shades: “Integrity requires affirming the dissonance and conflict at the heart of experience,” she writes. “It means recognizing that we are never, metaphysically, at home in the world. This affirmation requires us to live with the mixture of longing and outrage that few will want to bear.”

Reaching beyond our expectations is part of our human destiny; falling short is our fate. We are threading our way between hubris and humiliation. There is another way, but it’s much more difficult. This is where faith rides the rails to keep us safe. We need the reach to go beyond, but patience, humility, and good humor helps in knowing that we can do so without trying to usurp God or having to crawl before Him.

Another take on this is from Reinhold Niebuhr’s Beyond Tragedy when he writes, “The church is that place in human society where men are disturbed by the word of the eternal God, which stands as a judgment upon human aspirations. But it is also the place where the word of mercy, reconciliation and consolation is heard: ‘Thou dost well that it was in thine heart.’ Here human incompleteness is transcended though not abolished. Here human sin is overcome by the divine mercy, though man remains a sinner.”

Outrage and longing is not about winners and losers, it’s about “Those who endure to the end . . .” We’re not required to win; we’re invited to travel with “that great cloud” of large-souled ones who have borne their witness before us in all times and all places. If hope means anything and if love lives up to its reputation a time will come when justice and mercy will be the way in the great day of the Lord.

It makes no sense to set a date and expect the arc of justice to touch down in that precise moment. We don’t set the clocks or even wind them up. They were running before we got here and will continue after we’re dead. But it does matter to regard our time and how we spend the little of it that we have.

Our outrage alone will not save this sorry, stubborn, strange, and beautiful world; according to our primal myth that has been done in hope already. So there’s no need for us to presume that we are the hinge of history the universe didn’t know it was looking for. Nor will longing alone be enough. We need them both: the push of outrage to change our world, the pull of longing to heal our restless souls.

Yet, we each have a part to play—perhaps several parts. That much is clear. How we play it is the question, and for that we need patience for ourselves and each other.

If we have a conscience and compassion our outrage can propel us beyond our reticence. If we also live with longing our limits will be no barrier to God’s healing and sustaining grace.

Photo: Unsplash.com

Suffer the Children

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In these years of our discontent there is no shortage of outrage. If you are a Trump supporter, these are your salad days in which the outrages of the Obama administration are finally receiving their comeuppance. If you are not a Trump supporter, but now find your moral sensibilities being dragged behind a pickup with three rifle racks across a landscape of cacti, rocks, and boiling sand, then there is a certain relief in shouting out loud. It is cathartic. I am in the latter group. You are free to leave at this point; no hard feelings.

I mention that it is catharsis only because so much has already been written and said and analyzed and disseminated about the Trump administration’s policy of tearing children away from their parents at the border. I am writing because thinking out loud helps me understand what is important to me, and more to the point, how I can express a spiritual faith in times like these.

There are a few moral precepts that one should be able to affirm without agonizing over. Slavery, the rape and abuse of women, and the abuse of children are among them. Stating them thus does not exclude other precepts nor should it be considered a knee-jerk reaction without thought and reflection. Rather, these are simply part of one’s moral landscape, familiar markers that commemorate a covenant between God, oneself, and others, markers that remind us of the (now) obvious conditions of being faithful to God, responsible to one’s society, and true to oneself. These are also three reasons for moral action, as I understand it.

The first one is that God asks us to refrain from certain actions and to do other actions. For people of faith, whatever form their god may take, this is often enough reason to act. It is a powerful reason, and for some does not require any further reflection.

Even some who are moved by it still find themselves intrigued by Plato’s question: are actions right because the gods approve of them or do the gods approve of them because they are right? According to some lines of the historical discussion, if we do them because the gods approve of them we may run the risk of blindly following some arbitrary divine commands. What if your gods are tricksters, irresponsible, forgetful, or otherwise not to be trusted? On the other hand, if the gods do them because they are right then while that is a powerful vote of confidence in the moral justification of the actions, it makes the gods look weak. In the first case, the gods have arbitrary and perhaps capricious power; in the second case, not enough power to make them worthy of worship.

Most historical religions have a moral structure and some even have commands for meeting moral and religious expectations. We could chose to think of these commands as arbitrary, but then we would have given up any semblance of trust or even of thoughtful reflection on our relationship with our god. Again, it’s a matter of trust: we do these things not only because our gods ask us to, but also because doing them is an exercise of our moral freedom.

The second reason is to be responsible to one’s community—and again, we may choose to act for a number of reasons. We may wish to avoid jail time if we break the rules; we may desire to be in favor with our neighbors, our friends, and our families (Adam Smith called it the ‘approbation of society’ in his Theory of Moral Sentiments); we may want the rewards that come with good behavior or we may genuinely want to contribute to the well-being of our society. These are all good reasons for doing the right thing, and as many have pointed out, one does not have to be religious to accomplish them. For many people today, ethics is the new religion.

The third reason is to be true to oneself, a piece of advice that can be traced back at least to Aristotle. It’s not hard to see that either or both of the previous reasons could give us a sense of ‘self,’ but some people will immediately get diverted into questions of whether we have a self or not, and if we do, how much of it is the result of genetics plus environment. Since most of us act as if we are selves and treat others as if they are selves too, we can leave the questions to others and try to think about whywe ought to be true to ourselves.

Classical ethical theory invokes Aristotle here (practicing virtue aligns us with our true end or telos , which is to flourish) and Kant (do the right thing because you respect yourself and others and you’d want the same respect for everyone else).

Being true to oneself not only involves respect for oneself and others, but going deeper in and farther back to find the highest regard we can have for the human being.

In an essay on goodness, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) examines the relation between habit and nature. “Goodness I call the habit,” he says, “and goodness of nature the inclination. This, of all virtues and dignities of the mind, is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing, no better than a kind of vermin.” Bacon believes that we achieve a “habit of goodness” through “right reason,” but that just as there is in some people a natural inclination toward goodness and a willingness to help others, there is in others a “natural malignity” that drives them beyond mere irritation with others to envy, anger, and selfishness.

Such people revel in the calamities of others. They are like flies buzzing around a raw wound, says Bacon, and rather than bind up the wounds of those who are suffering these misanthropi enjoy the misfortunes of others. “Such dispositions are the very errors of human nature; and yet they are the fittest timbers to make great politics of.”

Having been the victim of some palace intrigues in the courts of Elizabeth I and King James I, Bacon knew from first-hand experience how crooked the timbers of politics could be.

The policy of the immigration hardliners in the Trump administration to separate children from their parents has been roundly condemned by congressional Democrats and some Republicans. Immigration-advocacy groups, lawyers, children’s rights organizations, psychologists, educators, and doctors, all have been scathing in their criticisms. The Catholic Church has flatly called out the practice as immoral. Melania Trump has expressed her horror at it and former First Lady Laura Bush, diffident to a fault, has written an op ed in which she called the policy “heartbreaking.” Even Franklin Graham, who refuses to call out Trump on anything, has characterized the practice as “disgraceful.”

And yet here is Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General of the United States, whose shrill pronouncements increasingly sound like the cries of a desperate man, fiercely clinging to his “zero-toleration” position. When Christian authoritarians run out of options for justifying their immoral policies and laws they reach for the fire extinguisher they think will put out the blaze—Romans 13—in which the Apostle Paul advises his readers to obey the laws because the authorities have been put in place by God. Read out of context these verses (Romans 13: 1-7) have been used to justify slavery, war, apartheid, and systemic evils of all kinds. Marilynne Robinson drily comments in her recent collection of essays, What Are We Doing Here?, that “Indeed, unread books may govern the world, not well, since they so often are taken to justify our worst impulses and prejudices. The Holy Bible is a case in point.”

Read in context, these verses are sandwiched between the marks of a true Christian—extending hospitality to strangers, living in harmony with others, and overcoming evil with good—and showing love for one another by loving our neighbors as ourselves. Paul is pretty clear earlier in his letter to the Romans that every person, Christian or not, knows in his or her heart the basics of what is right. The implication is that Christians try to do what is right in every situation out of love for the neighbor and respect for that which God has created. The assumption is that good rulers and good laws have the blessing of God; the knowledge that there are bad rulers and worse laws is so obvious that it does not need mentioning. God’s people are expected to know the difference and to live by their consciences accordingly.

People of faith who look to the Bible to understand the function of principles in shaping our ethics and actions see that caring for children is pretty high up on the hierarchy of values for Jesus. In the gospels of Matthew and Luke Jesus makes the point that people make mistakes in caring for children, but woe to the person who deliberately hurts a child. “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea (Matt, 18: 6).

With his characteristic irony and pointed hyperbole Jesus lays it down that crushing a child’s faith and hope is a deadly sin. These are things that everybody is expected to know and abide by. As Bono says, “Jesus said ‘Suffer the children to come unto me,’ not make the children suffer!” But the fact that Jesus speaks so urgently means that this fundamental precept of human existence, caring for the children, was alarmingly ignored in his time. So it has ever been. And now we’re doing it again with howling cynicism and hypocrisy by appealing to the sanctity of the rule of law and the authority of God and scripture. Except that it’s literally not a law but a prejudice, and Jesus condemns such actions in the strongest possible terms.

In the increasingly fractious and twisted arguments over immigration one thing should be clear: these children have the most to lose right now and in the years to come. And as for us adults, it’s time to throw off our millstones.

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

Oprah Maybe, Arpaio No

One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes. . . And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and powerful. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, #129

Sometimes, the conjunction of two very different people or events or ideas can provoke a perception that would not have been possible otherwise. The ascendancy of Oprah in the wake of her Golden Globes speech, and the announcement in The New York Times that Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff, is running for the senate, provides such a moment.

One of the foundational myths of American culture is that anyone can become president. It is a story, usually bolstered by reference to Lincoln, that is meant to widen our horizons and reassure us that opportunities seized can result in the fulfillment of private ambition rendered for the public good. No matter how humble one’s origin, the story goes, America’s egalitarianism theoretically makes it possible for the guy down at the 7-Eleven, or your neighbor—hell, even for you!—to strive and to rise to presidential heights.

Never mind that the 2016 presidential campaigns alone racked up a price tag of $2.4 billion out of a total of $6.5 billion after the congressional elections were tallied. That means that our last presidential election cost just under the United Kingdom’s gross domestic product (GDP) for 2017 ($2.5 billion), as estimated by the IMF.

Never mind that our last political contest, by contrast to other democracies, ran to 596 days, while Britain’s 2015 election was 139 days, Canada’s longest election cycle was just 78 days, and Japan’s elections, which are limited by law, are never more than 12 days.

Somehow we live with the cognitive dissonance that the office is open to anyone over 35, while still knowing that a presidential candidate must be prepared to raise and spend about a billion dollars for the privilege.

But in a curious and vulgar way, Donald Trump proved that the myth is true: anyone—no matter how unqualified, incompetent, and dangerous—really can become president, provided the money is there.

We have now entered the era of the celebrity president, one who has no discernible ability to lead and negotiate among the factions of American society nor any desire to support allies across the world. The confounding spectacle of a billionaire whose racist sympathies and misogynistic attitudes were enough to win him the White House but not the popular vote seems to have set the stage for other improbable candidates. If success is name recognition, vast wealth, and the unlimited ability to indulge oneself, then we can expect other celebrities to be courted for a presidential run.

And that brings us to Oprah, whose Golden Globes speech won her the applause of the audience, and the fervent endorsement of Meryl Streep and other Democrats desperate for charisma in 2020. She’s a self-made billionaire, a philanthropist, a uniter instead of a divider, and beloved by millions. What’s not to like? But the fact that people are seriously considering Oprah as a candidate shows how low the bar has dropped for American democracy.

Her achievements are extraordinary, made all the more so by what she has personally overcome through life. But none of that has prepared her for the decisions that must be made when there are no good outcomes and the lives of millions are at risk. If she is serious about public service then she should run for mayor of Chicago. If she could do that job with grit and grace then perhaps she could try for a governorship or a Senate seat. From there, with experience and testing, she could become a powerful candidate for the presidency, taking into account her character, her charm, and her many other likable qualities.

On the other hand, there is Joe Arpaio, the controversial Arizona sheriff who was facing jail time for abusing his power and defying a court order until Trump pardoned him, and who has announced he is running for the Republican senate seat soon to be vacated by Jeffrey Flake.

Arpaio was entrusted with the protection of his citizens and with upholding justice under the law. In his tenure as sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona he styled himself as “America’s Toughest Sheriff.” He consistently mistreated prisoners, discounted and ignored crimes against women, misused public funds, defiantly bucked a court order to stop illegal immigration roundups, and relished the power he wielded to terrify people of color. If he wins the seat for Arizona Trump will find a senator who is devoted to him, who is willing to flout the law, and whose stance on immigration and civil rights is illegal under current laws.

For elected office a candidate must possess character, vision, and prudence. Character would include, at the very least, courage, integrity, honesty, and compassion. Vision would be a capacity to imagine and to articulate plans for the future that understood historical patterns and present problems. Prudence would be the ability to exercise good judgement about the use of one’s power.

With time and experience it’s possible that Oprah could be that person.

As for Arpaio, his record should stand as disqualifying him for public office of any sort. He represents the worst of what people fear in a politician: blinding ambition, cruelty honed to a knife-edge, a willingness to bend the law until it breaks, and a profound contempt for those he considers his inferiors.

In a country of 343 million people, surely we can do better.

A Case Study in Lying

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When Donald Trump tweets millions of people pay attention. And when Donald Trump lies it affects millions of people. If he stays true to his penchant for lying we will have a four-year dynamic case study in deception and lying from the President of the United States.

We need to pay attention to his lying for it can teach us a great deal about his methods of leadership and his views on democracy. We need to be alert to the various kinds of lies he and his administration will use, and the effect they will have on us as members of an experimental democracy. Most of all, we need to examine ourselves and our own tendencies to lie.

Recently, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker, in an appearance on “Meet the Press,” demurred when asked by Chuck Todd if the Journal would call out Trump when he lies. “I think if you start ascribing a moral intent, as it were, to someone by saying that they’ve lied, I think you run the risk that you look like you are, like you’re not being objective,” he said. Baker believes the Journal should report what Trump said and let the readers decide if it was a lie or not.

But this betrays the historic role of the news media in ferreting out the truth no matter what. Few of us have the time or the means to drill down through the layers of propaganda, news releases from public relations firms, and “image refurbishing” that goes on daily. To a great extent, we rely on real journalism to do that for us, the kind of investigative journalism that doesn’t just find two opinions on the same topic and hit “publish.”

Journalists need to call out the lies when Trump doubles down on a statement that has been proven false, such as his claim that he saw thousands of Muslims celebrating when the towers fell on 9/11 or that he was against the Iraq War. It is crucial to our moral vision that we distinguish, regularly and clearly, between truth and falsehood. And it’s even more important, in an age that is skeptical that truth even exists, to persevere in searching for the truths that can be established.

As someone who teaches philosophy and ethics, I have a professional as well as a personal interest in understanding lying and deception. This semester, at Trinity Washington University, I will be teaching a course in Social and Political Philosophy. We will study historical sources on how societies are formed, maintained, survive and are destroyed as a result of their ideas and practices. In addition to selections from the usual suspects such as Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Marx, and Gandhi, we’ll be reading and commenting on current views on our political process and ethics. One of the readings for the semester will be Sissela Bok’s 1978 book entitled Lying, as relevant now as it was in the wake of the war in Vietnam, the bombing of Cambodia, and Watergate.

Every administration lies, even if it’s using Plato’s “noble lie,” to hide from the people what they supposedly could not understand or to advance the public good. This is not a partisan issue. But I believe that with the Trump administration we will see lying on a scale we’ve never seen before. I think we should understand what lying is, what the many forms of lying and deception are, and ultimately, how we can be more honest with each other. I’ll be writing occasionally about these topics as a way to personally sort out what I’m thinking and learning about lying. I invite you to join me.

I’ll close with a quote from Sissela Bok that reads, “Trust is a social good to be protected just as much as the air we breathe or the water we drink. When it is damaged, the community as a whole suffers; and when it is destroyed, societies falter and collapse.”

Help, Help, I’m Being Depressed

Those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness. — Alcuin, c. 804

On an otherwise lovely day in the tentative transition zone between a Maryland winter and spring I fell into a melancholia that lasted into the night. Some might say this was a perfectly natural reaction to an American Zeitgeist that had inexorably, over the months, twisted its grip like the coils of a python around the necks of the innocents. Others, less given to reflection on civilization and its discontents, were insistent that America would be great again, and proved it by punching out reporters and protesters who dared object to the emperor, who not only had no clothes but was gleefully parading, butt naked, across the arena stages of these Untied States of America.

As the Republican party trudged along on its trail of tears, the E pluribus unum (out of the many, one) of elimination trials powered along at a burn rate of millions per day, each approved Superpac message arcing through its trajectory like incendiary flares. In that white-hot glare every pore, every bead of sweat, every curl of the lip and glint of the eye transfixed the doubtful and transported the faithful.

Whatever is new is news — history need not apply  — and the news, like an unholy simulacrum of God’s creation, was brought forth every evening and morning in the fullness of time. The chairman of CBS chortled that whatever else was clear in the wake of yet another episode of the reality show called the Republican debates, the news for the stockholders was very, very good as 14.5 million viewers tuned in on February 13 for the Saturday night fights.

Throughout it all the doctor from Detroit, Ben Carson, ambled through his campaign with a benign smile as he pronounced the president a psychopath, Obamacare worse than slavery, and the pyramids — who knew? — to be ancient granaries. In the debates he was both literally and figuratively sidelined, giving way to the bombast of his opponents, while occasionally bleating that he got no air time.

Carson’s campaign was fueled from the beginning by his inspirational story of rising from poverty to become one of the world’s leading neurosurgeons. He was the recipient of countless awards, honorary doctorates, and royalties stemming from his autobiographical books. A movie starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. was made of his life. It was a good life.

Friends of mine who knew him from the Spencerville SDA Church spoke of him with respect for his accomplishments while quietly sidestepping a commitment to his campaign. But many Adventists believed he was sent “for such a time as this,” and enthusiastically followed his every pronouncement on the campaign trail.

When Adventists hit the news it’s rarely a good thing. Despite our relevance as an indigenous American product of the Second Great Awakening, our global hospital and educational systems, and our healthy lifestyles, we usually get pegged in the media as vegetarian blood brothers of David Koresh. Add to that the full coverage of our refusal to ordain women during last summer’s world-wide gathering of delegates at San Antonio, and we can be forgiven for wanting a different profile.

Thus, when Ben Carson, Seventh-day Adventist physician and inspirational speaker, dissed the President at a National Prayer Breakfast, it seemed like once again we’d be known for all the wrong reasons. And then he announced his candidacy. Compelled, he said, by thousands who implored him to run, and given the green light by a revelation from God, Carson jumped into a crowded and boisterous Republican field.

Well, we thought, okay, maybe his personal integrity would make up for his lack of experience. Maybe all that street cred he’d built up all those years, and his notable charisma, would carry the day. He might bring some civility and professionalism to a fractious national arena. His political positions didn’t seem all that different, in many ways, from those of Cruz and Trump, but at least he didn’t raise his voice when he insulted  immigrants, his Democratic opponents, and the president.

We want to believe that political candidates don’t toy with our trust. We hope that we’re seeing the real person  when he speaks and that he believes what he says. We hope that these candidates are not just pandering to their audiences to get the vote. Most of all, we hope that their personal integrity runs like a silver thread from past to present, that whatever their positions on issues they respect themselves enough not to bow the knee to whatever Mammon looms up demanding their worship.

But no. Carson took himself out of the race in the same oblique fashion that he entered it. He did not join in his last debate, but it was unclear if that meant he’d be heading home to Florida to chill. Finally, he made the decision, picked up his bags and headed for the exit. At that point one could suppose that he’d retire gracefully, beaten but not bowed, his dignity intact to fight for his causes another day, another way.

Thus, when he endorsed Donald Trump, the very antithesis of his own campaign style and of his personal Christian values, it was a stunner. He was consistent, though, in that his flair for the bizarre came through when he declared Trump to be “cerebral” and that they’d buried the hatchet. There may be depths to Trump that only Ben Carson and Trump’s wife have seen. Humans are complex, act for a variety of reasons, and do things surprising even to themselves.

But the notion that a kinder, gentler Trump might appear on January 20, 2017 is about as plausible as Ben Carson signing on with all his heart and soul to the whole Trumpian package. Because that’s what he did when he endorsed Donald Trump on March 11, 2016. Carson said yes to The Wall, to reducing freedom of speech and of the press, to violently throwing peaceful demonstrators out of public spaces, to labeling an entire country as rapists and murderers, and to regarding waterboarding as but the beginning of horrors for captured enemies.

So that is why I fell into a melancholy. While I would never have voted for Carson for president I respected his self-discipline, his abilities, and his faith. Chris Christie endorsing Trump seemed sheer opportunism for two combatants who certainly gave the impression that their blows were intended. But Carson?

Has all this rancor, this bile, this winter of our discontent, just been a show? Off the stage, behind the scenes, out of range of a hot mike, are these candidates really just good buds who have figured out who the alpha dog is and where each of them might line up in the pack? Were Carson’s good manners, apparent Christian faith, and personal integrity just chips he was willing to trade for a bigger score?

I had hoped he was better than that.