The late David Berman, known best for his poetry and his work as the face of the band Silver Jews, wrote one of my favorite song lyrics of all time in the song, “Random Rules”: “I know that a lot of what I say has been lifted off of men’s room walls.” Until last year, I thought it was a quip about being a profound bullsh*tter. I thought it was meant to be more absurd than it was serious; if anything, I thought Berman was giving us an exposition of his own blemishes — which sometimes are hard to spot behind the lens of his immense song-writing talent. But this is not an article about song-writing. This is about my first encounter with the hidden wisdom on men’s room walls.
I was in the bathroom on the first floor of the Arts & Drama building at University College Dublin when I came across the truth that Berman had been trying to show me all along. On a faint reddish-orange wall, some lad had asked, “will our generation be the one to save the world, or end it?” While it may seem like a youthful, unwearied question, it’s a question on the tip of our whole generation’s tongues, and you can bet good money that most of our parents find themselves asking the same thing too.
The answer? Neither. “By the time our generation takes power the choice will already have been made,” the sagacious men’s room wall told me. And now, after a whirlwind start to 2020, I find myself humming “Random Rules” and thinking of that golden sliver of Irish men’s room wisdom.
The implications of saving or ending the world can be as big or small as you want them to be. I imagine that many of us students would first think about climate catastrophe or another world war. But right now I’m thinking about something more immediate. I’m thinking about the impeachment proceedings of President Donald Trump.
“A trial without witnesses is no trial at all,” has become a famous remark from Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-CA). We all know it, and we can harp on that for as long as we want, so long as we are going to continue to accept a failing democratic process and live with a president who continues to betray the public’s trust. To actually diagnose the issue and talk about it constructively, we have to examine the purpose of our Senate and the duty that it failed to perform.
Republican representatives were reportedly warned that if they voted against the president, their heads would, “be on a pike.” Rather than showing any semblance of a spine, the Republican response was to side with our President, whom Kim Jong-Un once aptly called a dotard. Only two Republicans, Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah), voted to have witnesses at the trial.
Regardless of their party affiliation, the 51 Senators who voted against a fair trial are meant to be working for the people of the United States, and have effectively abdicated their responsibility to fulfill their obligations to our country’s democratic process based on fear of a man who is in fact a buffoon. Their failure to allow for witnesses at the impeachment proceedings effectively removed any chance of proving a direct link between the President himself and the hold on a congressionally mandated $400 million military aid package to Ukraine. The constant acquiescence of members of the Republican party in both chambers of Congress has become the party’s new norm.
During the second day of President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, Chief Justice Roberts sought to admonish House impeachment manager Representative Jerry Nadler and the President’s lawyers for trading barbs, and accidentally told a joke when he told them, “to remember that they are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body.” This is, of course, the same deliberative body that allowed a whopping 569 of 758 bills sent by the House of Representatives to collect dust in 2018. The same deliberative body that allowed Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), then-chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, to appear with a snowball on the Senate floor to “prove” that climate change wasn’t real. This is the deliberative body whose current majority leader, Mitch McConnel, just announced on Valentine’s Day that 395 House bills are sitting in the Senate and he does not plan to pass them. This is the deliberative body whose most recent claim to fame is exposing how fragile our democratic process is, as they’ve let a moron like President Trump command the kind of power that he does; he’s like a king making his subjects pledge fealty, except he doesn’t have the divine right of kings to justify his geriatric outbursts.
So as I return to the question and answer presented to me in Dublin last year, I find myself only able to offer the most underwhelming of observations, much like Adam Schiff: There’s a problem when there’s a more compelling argument to be found in men’s room logic than there is in the logic of the US Senate.
Climate change denial, partisan nonsense, endless adventures in the Middle East, toppling popularly-elected world leaders and replacing them with more agreeable ones, an unrelenting habit of austerity policy, and the constant satisfaction of the financial interests of America’s wealthiest who don’t want their stocks to lose value. These are traits that constituted the US Senate long before our most recent national high comedy of impeachment.
We won’t be the generation to save the American democracy we grew up with, nor will we be the ones to end it. Before our eyes, Democracy will be mangled into a violent death by partisan stupidity and moneyed interests, no matter how many dollars Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post pay to convince you that “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” We can’t save the world we are going to inherit. And the only thing our generation will truly have the unique power to do is to reimagine a better one.
The irony of my encounter with men’s room wisdom taking place on a faint reddish-orange wall wouldn’t be lost on someone like Berman, and I think he would also agree that we have to do more than just be complacent with mediocrity on both sides of the aisle. •
