If a burglar were to break into my home and steal the television, I might not notice its absence for several weeks. Perhaps twice a year I go on a binge and spend two or three evenings watching videotapes of old movies, but I never watch regular programming. The one exception is biennial election returns. Every other November, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday, I plop myself in front of the screen and stay glued until midnight. I know, I know: It is a failing, falling off the wagon like that, but I think the sin is only venial.
I have been watching election returns since my youth. It is the closest I get to gambling. At one time I was interested in seeing whether the good guys would win. As I got older, I became more interested in seeing whether the bad guys would lose. Later still, I became interested in seeing which of the bad guys would lose and which would win.
Although I am registered with a party, I feel no loyalty to it. I am registered so I can help eliminate a few of the worst candidates during primary elections, on the off chance that an acceptable candidate might rise to the top. This seldom happens, so the exercise usually becomes a chance to engage in the virtue of hope.
When I was young, I had political heroes. Their faces were on the news and their names were in the headlines. Much older now, I have no political heroes. There are political figures I admire, but I cannot think of a single one who was alive during my lifetime. There were a few in the earlier part of the last century, and there were even more in the century prior. The further back the calendar, the greater the proportion of admirable political figures—or so it seems.
Is politics subject to a law of devolution—at the beginning a high point, with things declining gradually from there? Maybe so. I look at the Founders, with all their failings, and see no analogue to them today. From imperfect to even less perfect—that may be how it goes. This is not to say that there have not been, and are not today, fine people in government service, but I do think there has been progressive decline in political intelligence and in political discourse. One barometer has been presidential inaugural addresses. Even with the help of ghostwriters, which president in my lifetime has given any that rivals Washington’s?
When I was young, there was a sense that having heroes was necessary. The heroes might be in politics or in some less exalted discipline, such as sports or music. For me and for many, secular heroes no longer seem a real possibility. In a way that is good, because it clears the field and lets us focus on the one place authentic heroes still may be found: the Church.