By now, most of you know that I have moved to Washington, DC to work as the office manager on Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign. Now that we’ve gotten that mouthful of bureaucratery out of the way, I can use it as an excuse for not writing for so long. It is a hardship: I have never had more thoughts but also never less time. But today the thoughts are screaming and they must fly out.

I am tempted to explain everything I have felt since I moved out here, and then I am tempted to go into great detail about my job and what I do there and exactly what I think of those things I do. I am forcing myself not to do that, however. I will say, merely, that since I have been out here I have been thinking hourly about the poverty of politics—what it can but mostly what it cannot do. I have been thinking about religion as the real and poetry as restoration. I hope I can explain.

Three things:

1.      I ride the bus to work. I bring books to read. One is Mills’ On Liberty, which we can talk about tomorrow. The second is Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, which we’ll need to talk about right now. Maybe you haven’t read Klein. And maybe—if you are prone to despairing on buses—you shouldn’t. It is a complicated book, but it spends most of its pages chronicling the tandem relationship between free market fundamentalism and torture—between economic and physical trauma. That’s the thesis, but not my point. My point is the artist the Argentine junta locked in a coffin for so long that he forgot about color. My point is the man dropped from a government plane with his belly cut: desaparecido. My point is the writing on the walls of a torture chamber discovered in the corner of a glitzy mall in Buenos Aires: words like ‘help,’ or perhaps a name, compelled to scrawl itself to no one.  My point is that I have spent the last fourteen mornings reading about people being brutalized in the name of a certain political and economic ideology. I have, in other words, spent my mornings learning how real human beings suffer in the name of something imagined, how humans—somewhere-somethings—suffer in the name of ideas—nowhere-somethings.

2.      When I get off the bus, I am at work. This is where I answer phones all day, from people who find the campaign number and call. They call to tell me they are poor and don’t know when they’ll eat again. They call to tell me they are losing a mountain or a stream that no one can bring back, yes-ma’am-amen-Jesus. They call to say ‘Iran’ out loud, to send me Rumi quotes. They call because they are voiceless. They call to say words like ‘help,’ compelled to scrawl their names to someone.

3.      But some people do not call for this reason. About thirty-five people call about immigration. They start out nice enough: “What is your policy?” I talk about NAFTA and corporate welfare; I repeat the phrase ‘root of the problem’ until it is ash in my mouth. But they are not satisfied. They are labor leftists who see the world through the backward telescope of wages. They are for solidarity bound on all sides by the idea of a nation. Immigrants aren’t from that nation, and so it follows that no solidarity is left for them. They tell me: “Tell your man to send them all back. Tell them to send those job-robbers packing.” I sit in my chair, nearly crying. I want to stand up, un-chaired, and say all the words I have, to break through the language of wages in a fury of sprinting. To be a human. But as surely as I sit in my chair, the protocol demon sits on my shoulder, telling me I work for someone else, telling me I am not free to use words, telling me to say ‘NAFTA’ and ‘root of the problem’ until there is no blood left in the room. And then no one is satisfied: the leftist hangs up and I sit, rebuking myself in my chair. But last Tuesday? I couldn’t please the demon. Somewhere after the third NAFTA, I lost it. “Because they are human beings.” I said, this time beginning to sprint. “Because your nation is fake and your wages are even faker and your proposed wall is the realest consequence of believing in all that fake!” All that fake, I should have said, over real flesh. But I didn’t, and it was just as well, because the man had some words for me—words about insolence and never voting for Nader again.

I have learned that a nation, simply defined, is a collection of tragedies that cannot be told in the language they happened in—in a language that is above and beyond the nation itself. A nation is the cork in the narrowing neck of language, a backward telescope with the lens stopped up. I have learned that true politics cannot speak in the language of government without silencing tragedy and joy. I have learned that true politics must speak a language both smaller and bigger than the nation to keep the nation from being bigger than its people. And since the only thing that is truly bigger than the nation is the human, I have learned that true politics must be radically humane. This is because humans, unlike nations, can speak in the voice that things happen in. Unlike politicians (and even less like people who answer phones for politicians), humans are radically free to set the limits of the language, and this language, if spoken fervently, can reframe the acceptable territory of institutional politics. The ongoing confrontation between humans and the limits of politics is radical in the truest sense: it forever acknowledges and challenges the limits of the political language, and it does so full-throated, in the language of a sacred happening.

Soon, I will take a two-month leave from my political job to do two months of intensive writing in the bluffs of Utah and Santa Fe. The bosses know this, and they have to let me go because I told them about it from the beginning. But they are confused: “Why do creative writing when the action is here?” Because for them, the action is here and words are just words, dull things for convincing people. I tell them I have to go because I promised, but that isn’t the truth. The truth is that I must go. The truth, at least my portion of it, is that words are the strongest things in the world. No, stronger than that: The truth is that words create worlds, that they are great fictions that become realer than the fictitious systems that threaten them.  Words are covenants that humans make with the real; politics is a contract that governments make with ideas.  Politics cannot speak; politics can only repeat. It is a fundamentally constricted language. Quite literally economic, it is as small as its public can afford and as systematic as a formula. Even if it would rather not, it speaks in the accent of money.

The truth is that politics desperately needs our best speaking so that it can do its best doing. Some people will deride the speaking, wanting to skip straight to what they call the action. Anything that is not practical is, for them, a superfluous hobby. But no one knows better than the pragmatist the prison-house of wordless doing—the house that is as small as the doing and can go no further. The practical politician must sit in chairs and listen while someone reduces immigration to economics, and the most he can do is talk about NAFTA. He will be forced to speak about the problem at whatever level the real-throated have demanded; he is a slave to their ceiling and the boundary of their words. He will be forced, even against his will, to talk about the problems in terms of systems rather than individual humans—in terms of logic rather than in terms of sacred worth. Ironically, he will become as bounded by his boundaries (national, ideological, rhetorical) as the immigrant; he will suffer the boundaries that bind him to bind people who are bound for something better; in so doing, he too will be bound.

It is not that the politician is bad. It is precisely that he is only as good as his people. These people, speaking freely, can give each new topic the subtlety, carefulness, and sacredness it deserves. The politician, as part of a system, is free only to practice politics as usual—the politics of formulas, common denominators, averages. It isn’t evil that gives rise to politics as usual. Politics, as a system, can only speak of the usual—what can be mapped, charted, ensured. Radical politics—the politics of individuals speaking bravely—is precisely the opposite. In its very nature it is politics as unusual, not just because it questions Politics but because it can see human beings as sacred individuals who are themselves unusual. This is powerful, since the unusual is the language of both tragedy and joy, and ethics is the language of unusual response. To Greek it up a little: Big P Politics is classically limited so that little p politics can be romantically unlimited—so that little p politicians can use the noble fiction of words as a faith against the fictions that threaten the natural hope of words. 

Clearly I am not finished yet. I said I wanted to talk about religion and poetry as political saviors (quite literally, forces that save us not in but from our politics). I have not done that, nor have I really connected the last part of this essay with the parts about torture at the beginning. That will happen in part two, which is a more direct collection of ideas on the shortcoming s of politics.