In that awful, wonderful Cecile B. DeMille movie The Ten Commandments, made in 1956 and starring Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, the final plague against Pharaoh -- the visitation of the Death Angel that took the lives of the first-born son of any whose house was not protected by the blood of the lamb -- was portrayed as a gray fog that crept into the streets and seeped through the cracks beneath doors and windows; a deadly vapor that gradually but relentlessly infiltrated the entire city, punctuated by the ever increasing cries and laments of the suddenly grieving.
Harry Potter devotes might think, instead, of the Dementors, those darkly shrouded, wraith-like, soul-sucking figures that mysteriously and silently swoop down out of the sky in hoards for a kiss that drains anything of significance and vitality from their victims.
Vaporous Death Angel wafting through the streets; Dementors descending from the night sky with their vacuous mouths open for a kiss. Both images came to mind this week during a conversation on faith in public life. We were asked by the leader to tell a story about some real, practical ways that the next President of the United States should affect our lives, and all I could think of was the soul-sucking, suffocating character of the political climate of our day. Permeated by fear and suspicion, judgmentalism and accusatory innuendo, political discourse has become the language of negativism rather than the vocabulary of hope, animated by the specter of terror rather than the spirit of possibility. Candidates over-talking each other; political parties savaging each other; special interest groups oversimplifying and insinuating slander. It has become the very air we breath -- or the very air that is suffocating us.
The real, practical way I wish that the next President would affect my life is by speaking a different kind of word. I know there are significant policy issues to address. Of course I want the next President to advocate on behalf of health care reform and protection of children and stronger support of education and more. I want the next President to work on rebuilding relational bridges between our country and the world. But all of those initiatives depend on the partnership of others -- Senators and Representatives, courts and states and more. Perhaps the only thing a President can do completely on his or her own is to use that significant pulpit to set a tone. And I am weary of the dark and life-destroying place into which the whole of public discourse, whether Republican or Democrat, has sunk.
Harry Potter would say that I am looking for a kind of political Patronus Charm to counter the Dementors. In biblical terms I suppose I am looking for some kind of blood to smear on the lintels of our common house that will hold this deadly discourse at bay.
I would like to think I am simply looking for a President who shines light rather than casts darkness; who inspires collective and hopeful participation rather than vague but paralyzing foreboding; who reminds us of and calls us toward the best that we can be; who is ready to launch among us a kind of "Marshall Plan" for our political character and culture instead of taking the easy way of finding one more "bogeyman" to fear or hate, demean or fight or legislate against.
I don't think that's asking too much.
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