Up - and Down

I skipped last Thursday’s Republican “debate”, instead watching a DVD of Up, my all-time favorite animated film. 

A quick plug:  If you haven’t seen Up, please do.  The first ten minutes tell, perhaps, the sweetest love story in all of film – animated, and almost without dialogue.

What follows is the story of a crusty, curmudgeonly widower (voiced by Ed Asner) who finds a way to reconnect with the love of his life by going on the adventure they had always promised each other.

There’s also a talking dog who is… well, you just have to meet “Dug”.

But back to the Republican “debate”.

I’ll probably watch if the networks ever figure out how to manage an actual debate.  Which they could, if they’d ask their sports divisions.

The truth is, a candidate can’t be measured in a ten-man joint press conference.  One-on-one debates would tell us a lot more. 

If I were in charge, I’d host a series of one-on-one debates, using a double-elimination bracket system like, say, the NCAA College World Series.

Seed the candidates, put them into brackets, and conduct a series of two-candidate debates – using viewer polls to pick the winners. 

After the first round, both would candidates go on – one to the “winner’s bracket”, the other to the “loser’s bracket”.  After the each subsequent round, two-time losers would drop out.

If they ran the tournament between now and the New Hampshire primary, it would give each candidate – even those not well-known at present – two chances to show his or her stuff against a single opponent.

And that would tell us something.

And if you think that’s a lot of debates, remember that there were twenty Republican debates in 2012, most using the present absurd format – and they produced *sigh* Mitt Romney.   

A double-elimination tournament would help voters choose – and once the actual primaries started, the networks could stage a second series of debates featuring still-viable candidates.

Thursday’s ten-candidate format would only have made sense if we lived in an age of greatness.

Imagine a debate in 1789, with George Washington appearing on-stage with nine other candidates.  The nine would probably have fallen silent to let the Great Man speak – or, if he preferred (as he probably would) say a few words and just stand there.

But then, Washington was a certifiably Great Man.  Foreign travelers familiar with the courts of Europe wrote privately that Washington was vastly more impressive than any ruling European monarch. 

Today, as we audition people for Washington’s job, we have nothing resembling a Great Man.  Most of the Republicans – and several of the Democrats – resemble nothing so much as a convention of funeral directors. 

Which might, indeed, be appropriate.

Because the present election – like most elections since I reached voting age – seems to represent another step towards the death of the Republic.

Apparently, our democratic process can no longer produce leaders able to do the hard work of governing in complex times.  Such men and women are probably out there, but we don’t vote for them.

As citizens and voters, we lack the conviction, intelligence, and – let’s face it – patriotism to vote for people with the wisdom to see what needs to be done; do it; and not care very much if we don’t agree. 

We prefer politicians who agree with us – which is curious, since most of us will freely admit that we don’t understand the complexities of today’s world.

Nonetheless, we prefer candidates who make us feel smart – which, of course, means they are lying to us.

In recent weeks, I’ve been reading a first-rate biography of Julius Caesar by Christian Meier, a German scholar of the post-War generation.  It’s not a book I’d recommend to everyone.  Like many German scholars, Meier takes a philosophical approach to history, seeking great patterns rather than simply telling a story.

Meier’s prose – at least in English translation – can be opaque.  Occasionally, I find myself wandering in the fog.  But the book’s overall impact is to confirm impressions I gained from earlier, more accessible, reading.

Some years ago, Colleen McCullough – the Australian novelist – wrote a fascinating, well-researched series of novels about the last hundred years of the Roman Republic.  The opening volume, The First Man in Rome, deals with Julius Caesar’s uncle, Gaius Marius, a military man who gained great power in the Republic.  Subsequent novels explore the careers of the dictator Sulla, Pompey the Great, and Julius Caesar. 

All in all, McCullough – like Meier – explores the factors which transformed Rome from a free, self-governing city-state to a vast, despotic empire. 

I’m increasingly fascinated by the history of the late Republic – not because I believe America will follow its exact path, but because there are sufficient parallels to set off alarm bells.

One of the consistent themes is the smallness of the men – mostly patrician Senators – who claimed the right to govern Rome.

And the silliness of the ordinary people who voted in Rome’s elections. 

Those parallels, at least, are much in evidence in 2015.