The vain search for an earthly savior

Superman must be out of the country or something

As it is written, there is no one righteous, not even one . . .”

- Romans 3:10

Human nature has us looking for an unmitigatedly white-hat side to take in the most pressing issues currently before us. Our particular confirmation biases tend to prevent us from seeing any shortcomings in the positions or lightning-rod figures that strike us as the most sensible or virtuous.

You see it on both sides of the question of how, and how fast, to reopen society even as the pandemic rages on. If one employs a spectrum model for the range of positions, those informed by voices of reason and expertise hover close to the center line on either side. It doesn’t take a great deal of venturing further out to begin to see passion overriding reason, and a bit further in either direction one finds blind stridency.

Those most proximate to the center line on the open-the-entire-nation-at-the-first-possible-moment side of the dichotomy make a compelling case indeed. The economic fallout from the shutdown grows more dire by the day. The airline industry may take years to attain anything like recognizably normal levels of activity. The way sports and entertainment are configured may be permanently altered. Revenue for retailing and restaurants declined 16.4 percent in April from March, which was already a grim record-setter. 15 of 18 manufacturing-sector industries are looking at revenues going south for 2020. The plummet in factory output breaks a record dating back 101 years.

And the psychological toll is considerable. 56 percent of Americans say that changes to some aspect of their mental health, such as increased alcohol intake, trouble sleeping, and bursts of anger, has been affected by pandemic-related stress.

Humans are wired to connect, to break bread together, to touch each other, and to engage in work that brings them into the close proximity of teams. Americans are starved for that.

But there’s an undeniable point on the spectrum just beyond the earnest argument made from an appeal to compassion at which cynicism is a driver. The argument from there posits that a blue state-red state dichotomy has developed, with blue-state governors willing to put their citizens through months more of economic hell just to defeat Trump in November. In that same general zone on the spectrum one finds the militant anti-mask types, some of whom have expressed their defiance by resorting to gunfire.

At the outer edge of that side of the spectrum one finds conspiracy theories about Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates. Before it was debunked, Plandemic made a big splash on the Internet.

The other side of the spectrum has its own gradations. Closest to the center line is the position that recognizes that Doctors Fauci, Birx, Redfield, Bright et al are genuinely and deeply concerned about what happens if the reopening proceeds with anything less than the utmost caution, and that their concern is based on the most extensive understanding of the threat the virus poses to be found.

Beyond that, however is a camp that indulges in virtue-signaling and accusations of their counterparts on the other side of the divide of prioritizing “profit” and “Wall Street” over human lives. There’s not much progress toward a workable way forward that can come from such a starting point.

The plain truth is that such a way forward is going to be clumsy and all the various sectors of society are going to fumble. That’s what you get when imperfect people deal with an unprecedented threat fraught with mystery.

Neither Anthony Fauci nor Larry Kudlow represent a downside-free roadmap.

The other big matter presently on the nation’s plate, the tangle of issues and people such as Michael Flynn, the behavior of the Justice Department in this administration and the previous one, Russia, the FISA court, James Comey, Joe Biden and Barack Obama presents a similar bell-shaped curve of clustering around the spectrum’s center line.

Here’s how the latest episode in this sadly overblown hot mess of arcana got started. In a videoconference talk by Barack Obama to members of the Obama Alumni Association, he expressed a strong opinion - that the Justice Department dropping its case against Michael Flynn posed a risk to the basic rule of law - which is vulnerable to a compelling counterargument that the dismissal is an “ugly but necessary element of the cleanup of the Justice Department and the FBI.” It’s not surprising that Obama weighed in as he did. It was a political videoconference. He was dishing up red meat.

It didn’t take long for President Trump to weigh in, making #Obamagate a thing on Twitter, as well as tweeting that Obama had committed “the biggest political crime in American history by far.” He was asked to elaborate on that by Washington Post White House bureau chief Philip Rucker at Monday’s press conference. His response was that the “crime is very obvious to everybody.” That’s it.

Perhaps he was talking about the January 7, 2017 meeting at which Obama, Susan Rice, Joe Biden, Sally Yates and James Comey, in which Obama said that investigation of possible Russian electoral interference needed to proceed “by the book.” One would think, though, that if Trump had some hot scoop beyond that, he would have at least tossed a little chum into the water.

Again, there are no wearers of white hats here. While Obama is on the receiving end of vague intimations of nefarious doings, it’s not as if he was out of the loop regarding the actually nefarious doings of rogue elements within his own federal law-enforcement apparatus. Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Strzok and Page most definitely wanted to see if they could prevent the swearing-in of Donald Trump, or at least ensure that his presidency was damaged from day one.

But just because Flynn was entrapped by this crew doesn’t mean he qualifies as untarnished. Circa 2015, his Flynn Intel Group was a registered foreign agent working for Turkey, getting paid by a Dutch company with ties to the Turkish government to dig up dirt on Fethullah Gulen, the Turkish preacher and writer living in exile in Pennsylvania, whom the Erdogan regime has been hot to get its hands on for years. Rather a lot of baggage for an incoming national security advisor to be lugging around.

We live in a time when nerves are frayed and people race toward shiny objects that seem to hold salvific promise. It’s a fool’s errand. It assumes that this world operates in the same manner as the eternal kingdom.

We’re only going to get Superman’s voicemail when we ring him up.

Better we should determine our bedrock principles and let them guide us in determining preferable outcomes for the constant parade of travails that we encounter in this fallen realm. Absolute resolution to any of this is not in the cards.