I read a hell of a lot of crap; and I don’t just mean that I read a large amount of material (though that is also true). A lot of what I read is crappy. Books of all different stripes, magazines, articles on the magic internets—even the occasional newspaper! But even given all the time that I spend reading, it’s pretty rare that I wind up reading anything that actually moves me. It’s even more surprising when what I read moves me to feel an emotion for a person I had always previously considered utterly repugnant. To borrow a phrase from the article I’m talking about, it was “utterly surreal” Wednesday afternoon when I read a Boston Review article by Bill Ayers and felt, at the end, a bizarre stab of pity for that most unlikely of souls—the late Andrew Breitbart.
At this point I am debating about whether to go into book report mode and summarize the article, in order to comply with my own loose interpretation of journalistic ethics; or whether I should just soldier on with how I responded to the article. (I do not know what it is about me that dictates whether or not I respond cynically to something. I only know that sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. A simple Google search for Andrew Breitbart, Bill Ayers, and dinner on Super Bowl Sunday, will turn up a Salon article, by Joan Walsh, that contains not a small amount of cnyicism at some of the things Mr. Ayers wrote in his article.)
I suppose I am less prone to respond cynically to the article by Mr. Ayers because I have read enough material in the Boston Review to know that they are not given to publishing writing that is sentimental just for the sake of being sentimental. The articles published in the magazine are thoughtful, challenging, dense, and often thought-provoking—though I think ultimately that they are aimed at very serious thinkers. I like to think of myself as a thoughtful and intelligent person, but I am not sure that I would call myself a very serious thinker. (If am a serious thinker, then I am certainly at least one or two notches below the kinds of thinkers at whom articles in the Boston Review are generally aimed.)
I also don’t think that Mr. Breitbart was the kind of person who would say or write something for public consumption if he was not sincere about it. I don’t think that I ever agreed with anything he said or any of the positions that he advocated, and I certainly did not care for his style of rabble rousing; but he revealed a human side in the comments he made during the radio interview after his dinner with Mr. Ayers. (It turns out that I am not going to go into book report mode, mostly because I hope that anyone who reads this will go ahead and click on the link to the Boston Review article and read what Mr. Ayers wrote and what Mr. Bretibart had to say about Mr. Ayers at the end.)
There is far too little constructive give and take in the arenas of politics and policy today. The men and women who hold elected office spend so much time trying to keep their jobs that they forget to do their jobs. (And if you think that sounds like something that Aaron Sorkin wrote, then you’re right.) Having a majority of seats in either house of Congress does not give either party the right to try to ram its agenda down the throat of the other party; and the other side of that coin is that the minority party doesn’t have the right to say no to everything, just because the other party says yes. Both sides have to stand up and demonstrate trust; both sides have to be willing to compromise; and both sides have to have the courage to go back to the people who elected them and convince them that what they are doing is the right thing to do.
If people like Bill Ayers and Andrew Breitbart can get together for dinner and come away from the evening thinking well of someone they might not have believed they could think well of, then surely other people who don’t necessarily agree with each other can do it, too. It sounds awfully idealistic, I know; and it’s almost certainly a pipe dream. (And, yes, maybe the whole thing was trumped up, too; but I don’t believe that.) But when so much of what we hear and read is full of dread and dour predictions, it makes the tiny signals of hope, that too many people miss because they’ve lost the will to look for them, shine the brighter.
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