A friend is
reading Robert Caro’s latest, Working:
Researching, Interviewing, Writing, and has ordered the first volume of his
five-volume Lyndon Johnson biography. He’s a heartier man than I. Years ago,
while working on a story about the Taconic State Parkway, I read the Robert
Moses biography and my back still hurts. Moses was indisputably an influential
figure but that doesn’t make him interesting, and the same goes for LBJ. My
friend writes: “Both men [Johnson and Moses] were utterly corrupt. I have begun
to think that anyone who enters politics is ipso
facto corrupt.” Who can argue with that?
Especially
amusing are candidates who tout their sanctity over that of the incumbents. Each
new crop of voters falls for the same old promises. Politics is the place where
soft-headed naïveté meets stone-cold cynicism, and the latter always wins. Max
Beerbohm articulates my political philosophy in the essay “General Elections” (Yet Again, 1909):
“Of politics
I know nothing. My mind is quite open on the subject of fiscal reform, and
quite empty; and the void is not an aching one: I have no desire to fill it.”
2 comments:
On the other hand....
"To let politics become a cesspool, and then avoid it because it is a cesspool, is a double crime."
-- Howard Crosby
I, on the other hand, found both books unputdownable, and not just because I listened to them as audiobooks though it's true that helped.
I found them both to be fascinating studies of how dreadful men can nevertheless accomplish impressive things that better men seemed unable to do.
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