DIAGNOSIS: HYPOCRISY
I have decided to blog here because a blog about hypocrisy will never run out of material. You might think otherwise. You might say, “Well, Snark, I manage to survive without saying one thing and doing the exact opposite, most days, why can’t the politicians?”
I hear you. We all lie a little. People cheat and do the things they have to do, even when they’re not proud of it. You do it and I do it. We have ever since the day we made goo goo eyes at momma and poured a little more affection into it than we strictly felt because we were five months old, we were real hungry, and it worked.
But, as a general rule, your regular Kate and Chris are straight shooters more often than not, and they say what they mean, when they can get away with it, because what they’re shooting for is regular, normal and healthy. They aren’t hypocrites because they don’t have “the disease.”
Here’s the thing you must never forget, kiddies. Remember this, if nothing else. Hypocrisy is not the disease. It’s the symptom.
Your politicians, celebrities, big-shot CEOs, the guys and gals who succeed on reality TV despite all the humiliation, superstar athletes, the great, grinning public intellectuals who make it so big they get to bloviate on “The News Hour” for a living—they all have it.
Outsize, sick ambition. A restless, relentless, soul-searing drive that has been with them since pre-school, that has never left them alone for a single minute of their driven, on-the-make lives. Ambition that is so hungry for “success” it’s never satisfied, it wants more more more. This is sick ambition. This is ambition as pathology.
What you have, what I have, is ambition to find a nice hot spouse, live in a nice big home, be thought of well in our work, and maybe make ten K more than our friends. That is normal ambition. That’s ambition you don’t have to lie, cheat and steal to achieve.
But that level of ambition won’t get you elected to the zoning board, much less president of the whole, fifty, goldarn United States. You need sick ambition for that. You need “watch your every word so you never make a misstep” ambition for that. That’s an ambition that cannot afford honesty. If you say what you really think, you’ll piss someone off and they might be the wrong someone and all your dreams and ambitions will come crashing down. So you do what you need to do and you say what the people need to hear.
That’s called hypocrisy. It is to be expected in politics.
But there are limits.
When the lies get too deep, when the hypocrisy gets so bad it starts to hurt people, when it reaches Larry Craig-in-the-stall proportions, someone needs to call them on it.
That’s where we come in. Our job is to keep them honest, to the best of our limited ability and moderate ambitions.
Because somebody has to do it, and the politicians sure as hell won’t.
That’s completes Hypocrisy 101, children. Take notes. There is more to come. Much more.
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