SAXTONS RIVER — There is a bookstore in Washington, D.C. called Politics and Prose. I'm not surprised it's doing so well in spite of Amazon.com and megastores like Borders or Barnes & Noble. For one thing, it understands the connection between the two words that comprise its name, two words I've been thinking about while reflecting on how polarized our political landscape has become.
Is it only in politics that we have grown to be so dramatically bifurcated? It seems to me that there was a time when bipartisanship was possible, practical, and applied when it really mattered. I actually remember Democrats and Republicans agreeing on how to solve critical social issues.
Friends a generation older than I also tell stories of good men helping women in the 1960s to press for Commissions for Women and to pass the Percy Amendment, which takes women into account in foreign policy. Now bipartisanship has become the 10-ton behemoth in the room.
Then I realized how much progress we've made in other respects.
Five states and the District of Columbia now sanction gay marriage. We have a black president, and it will no longer seem odd or unacceptable to have a woman head of state. Ghettos of all sorts, whether based on color, ethnicity, religion, or age, are no longer so prevalent.
This is not to say that there aren't binary thinkers out there whose political persuasions will never change, but it does seem to auger well for the future that we're on the road to breaking down so many barriers.
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So then I started thinking about language, and I had an “aha” moment: We are not always polarized; sometimes we are just penned in by our national character and the ways in which our language represents that character.
Americans see things in extremes. It is cold or hot, we are old or young, fat or thin, smart or stupid, rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, in or out. We like either the Three Stooges or the Three Tenors. We buy into the conflicting myths of Horatio Alger and Welfare Moms. We admire the Andrew Carnegies and dismiss Appalachian coal miners.
Most folks in between remain invisible. Always in a hurry, we want our words and our thoughts to be simple, uncomplicated, reductionist.
Ours is not a nation of nuance. Nor is it one of poetry or, for that matter, prose. That may be why some people are running out of patience with the president: We want action, not words! Words, like considered decisions, take time. They make us think. They ask that we ponder, posit, propose, refute, reach consensus.
Innuendo, like nuance, escapes us. Sometimes even suggestions go missing or misinterpreted. Ours is a limbo language. We are always waiting to go left or right, up or down, over or under. Robert Frost's risk-taking “road less traveled” has very little appeal to most of us. We much prefer to stay safely within the confines of our limited lexicon.
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With the exception of writer and past-president Václav Havel of the Czech Republic, who, we may ask, has inspired people in his country, or the world, in the same way Barack Obama did? What other wordsmith has ever run a country? What would have happened if Pablo Neruda or Rainer Maria Rilke had been head of state? Might our collective narrative have been different, more grippingly hopeful and less full of fear?
Politics are a complicated thing. So is crafting good prose. Both take skill, patience, talent and dedication.
Like the owners of the bookstore in Washington, I think they can complement each other – but only if we dare to look beyond that which binds us to preconceived notions, search out varied sources, and when necessary, seek translation.
That kind of effort can be time consuming, but consider the payoff: We could find ourselves moving from doomed political paralysis to a metaphorical library full of new possibilities. Wouldn't that make for one heckuva happy ending?