Lessons of History?

The first two episodes of the HBO series about John Adams last night led me to ponder where we, as a country, started and where we have arrived.

As this show and a mountain of scholarship show, the men we call the "Founding Fathers" were a flawed lot: they were vain, petty, and contentious, and many of them saw nothing wrong with owning and exploiting other human beings as chattel slaves.

But they were also serious thinkers, who agonized over their decisions, thought deeply about such matters as liberty and justice, and were willing to risk everything they had, including their lives, for what they considered a noble cause. One feature of the drama of the Declaration of Independence that we often forget is that if the Revolution had failed--and it easily could have--every one of the signers would have been hanged for treason.

Compare them to the current president. Where they were serious, he is a fool, a capering clown who launched--exactly five years ago, with a rationale based equally on incompetence and deceit--an absurd and costly war at no risk to himself or his family. Our economy is in chaos, with the dollar and financial markets sinking, while the deficit swells like an over-inflated balloon. Yet the president indulges in sophomoric jokes, blandly assures us that all is well, and demands further tax cuts for the rich. He is a man who evinces no curiosity, cannot express himself coherently, shows little interest in science or the arts, and wouldn't recognize a complex idea if it bit him on the nose.

The explanations for how we accomplished this decline are legion: an irresponsible press, a relentlessly self-serving plutocracy, a political system based on lobbying and favors, and an electorate often more interested in celebrity sex than in our constitution or our military misadventures. However it happened, we've gone from George Washington, who could not tell a lie, to George Bush, who cannot tell--and doesn't even have a passing acquaintance with--the truth.