I have not read a comparison of the last three Democratic presidential candidates, not even in the narrow subject of their proposed policies. Perhaps that's because Senator Kerry has few specific proposals, but I am not interested in that right now. What strikes me is that Clinton, Gore, and Kerry are all Hollow Men.
I use that term not to express my contempt for their politics, but as a description of their souls, at least the aspects of their souls we can see without knowing them personally. "The Hollow Men" was one of the most famous poems of the 20th century, composed by T.S. Eliot in 1925 and still frighteningly relevant today. He sings of men who are dessicated to the roots of their being, mere shadows of men.
On the surface, the three men seem very different. The Arkansas kid from a broken home, the son whose senator-father programmed him to succeed in politics, and the Swiss-boarding-school product have few superficial similarities. Yet consider these things: all of them knew at a very young age that they would run for president, and calibrated their actions accordingly. They spent nearly their entire adult lives in politics, and virtually no time in the private sector.
None of them have any discernable principles for which they have worked during their political lives, and they have introduced no significant ideas into politics. Their primary concern is promoting themselves, not for the sake of a cause, but solely for personal advancement. The three men reject traditional understandings of morality in favor of a fuzzy relativism.
Because they do not seek to destroy and murder their opponents like a Middle Eastern despot, their danger to the body politic is not immediately apparent. Whatever one might think of Jimmy Carter, for example, he was not a Hollow Man in that he truly attempted to serve others when he was in office, and though ambitious (what high officeholder isn't?), he did not allow his ambition to enslave him.
By contrast, the Hollow Men will subordinate everything and anything to their ambitions. They fought in the Vietnam War, they protested against it; they spoke out against abortion, they promise to nominate only doctrinaire pro-abortion judges; they say they will propose a tax cut, they raise your taxes; etc.
Sane men change their opinions in the light of new facts or upon deeper reflection. The Hollow Men change their opinions based on their perception of the world's trajectory. Every action has raw calculation behind it: will this gain me votes or will it lose me votes?
What frightens me is not simply that the Hollow Men are self-serving and venal, devoid of higher purpose. We will always have such men until Jesus comes again. What frightens me is that so many ordinary people vote for them. What frightens me more is that millions of ordinary people are exactly like them.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
[Read the whole poem]
Jesus loves hollow men.
Catholic Light loves trolls.
Michael Dukakis was in the 1988 campaign somewhat hollow, but not as completely as Clinton, Gore, or Kerry. Dukakis the candidate was hollow in the sense of being a classic cultural-elite sophisticate: play up the colorful aspects of your ethnicity (in this case his Greek and Orthodox roots) when useful, but utterly abandon traditional moral and social elements connected to that background, and hope the rubes don't notice.
But Dukakis was genuine in a couple of ways. He was genuinely boring and did not have the slickness of Bill Clinton to dress it up. He ran for president as a genuine liberal, and lacked Clinton's ability to lie and cover that up when it became a liability. Unlike Clinton, Dukakis had never really had to deal with a world outside of the elite Harvard-Cambridge crowd and was unprepared, I think, when he took the plunge into politics outside of Massachussetts.
do you guys even know what a hollow man is? The whole Catholic faith comprises of hollow men of varying degrees...
Kerry wanted public office yes. It's not a shameful thing to want to serve your country.
He served his country by going to Vietnam, and did the bidding of his superiors. When you are in the military, you're supposed to obey orders, and he did so with valor, as his fitness reports attest.
But just because one is ordered to kill doesn't mean one agrees with it. When he saw the carnage, he decided he didn't want to have anything to do with the killing going on there anymore. He couldn't deal with it. He got out as quickly as he could according to regulation. He had answered the call to help our servicemen. He also answered the moral call to challenge the leadership to cease the unjust war, and bring those servicemen home.
Ambition, yes. His ambition led him to dedication, obedience, and courage to speak up for the end of bloodshed - despite persecution from the people in power.
You can't use Kerry's Vietnam experience to paint him as a hollow man.
Want a hollow man? I propose President Bush. There are too many promises broken to talk about here. Here is something else that everyone needs to know:
www.ceip.org/files/Publications/2004-03-25-jtm-nie.asp?from=pubdate
And then, verify the truth with the original documents:
Exerpts of declassified NIE - this is what the White House received from the CIA:
www.odci.gov/nic/special_keyjudgements.html
White Paper - Congress voted for war based on this given by the White House:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd/Iraq_Oct_2002.htm