Medium Cool

In Medium Cool (1969), John Cassellis, a cameraman, maintains a medium-cool level of emotion even in the midst of the socio-political turmoil in Chicago during 1968 until he learns that his station manager had been allowing the FBI access to the news footage. The film can be interpreted as providing a justification for his lack of trust in American law enforcement even as the need for law and order is made clear from the ubiquity of the human instinctual urge of aggression. For the film shows not only the extent of violence, but also its engrained nature in our species. By implication, the viewer is left to conclude that that law enforcement is necessary in a civilized society.  Yet this can only be a necessary evil, for the last few scenes of the film show just how likely discretion is to be abused. The atrocious and one-sided police violence during the peaceful protests outside of the Democratic National Convention make it clear that if given the legal authority to use weapons, human beings may abuse such discretion if too weak to restrain their own personal passions and, albeit less common, even their psychological pathologies.

The film opens with a small protest in a rural area in Illinois. Of immediate concern is the involvement of Illinois’s military in a domestic matter. The disproportionate heavy machinery of official force seems out of place. That the soldiers’ knives at the end of the guns are so close to the necks of the peaceful protesters also points to bad judgment. A journalist recalls police roughing up cameramen so they won’t show untriggered police brutality. The implicit conclusion is that the excessive means of force together with an aggressive mentality among soldiers and police is a dangerous cocktail.

The film moves to a scene at a rollerball game in which individual players are beating each other up even off the track. The crowd enjoys it, just as the viewers of local news like watching violence. Later in the film, we see Cassellis practicing at boxing—again illustrating the human need or penchant for violence. He explains to his girlfriend’s son, “The object is to knock the other guy’s brains out.” At one point in the film, a manager of a media company says on the phone, “We do not manufacture violence.” This is true enough, for, given the human aggressive instinctual urge, violence can be expected to be around plenty enough to fill the time-slots on the local evening news.

The propensity for violence interpersonally is made very clear as Cassillis and his sound man, Peter Bonerz, contend with hostility from several black people in an apartment in spite of the fact that the two journalists had interviewed one of the people and thus provided a mouthpiece for the racial grievances. Even though the Black woman is being verbally hostile to one of the journalists, a Black man insult to injury by angrily demanding, “You got to respect our women!” The journalists were respecting her, and, ironically, she had not been respecting them. Conflating societal phenomena and the two journalists in the apartment, the Black man insults them by calling them arrogant and exploiters. That the journalists provided a societal mouthpiece for one of the men contradicts the accusation of exploitation. But reasoning is often wan up against anger: hence the need for law enforcement.

Violence is also on the societal stage. Watching a television program on John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, all of whom had been assassinated, the teacher whom John is dating remarks, “It seems like no one’s life is worth anything anymore.” We hear King’s “I have a Dream” speech, which we can juxtaposition against the propensity towards violence in the apartment of the Black man whom the journalists had (thanklessly) interviewed. The ideal is one thing; extant human nature on the ground is quite another.

The documentary-like scenes of the anti-Vietnam War protests of chants of “No more war” again demonstrate the ubiquity of untriggered violence even among people who are hired to prevent violence. Against the song, “Happy Days are Here Again,” we see Mayor Daly’s “police state terror” playing out in the streets of Chicago as police attack non-violent protestors. The excessive response of Illinois’ army being present just renders the danger all the more of hiring people with criminal mentalities to enforce the law. On the radio, we hear, “The policemen are beating everyone in sight.” Another reporter states that the police are targeting a specific political group—the anarchists. Appropriately, onlookers were chanting, Zeig Heil! As a reference back to the Nazi thugs in uniform. The overwhelming, excessive machinery of force, including that of a military, combined with the fact that the police mentality was criminal inflicting severe injury on innocent victims—and the fact that the criminals got away with it—is the emotional-image that the audience is left with. But there is neither remedy nor solution proffered.

The toxic American dynamic is just there, and as the Black Lives Matter movement would attest, Americans would be well justified in approaching police employees as dangerous even as they enforce the law. I contend that given the salience of the aggressive instinct in human nature, the power (discretion) enjoyed by police employees (and departments) is dangerous. Internal affairs offices within police departments suffer from an institutional conflict of interest (e.g., being part of the “brotherhood”) and thus should not be relied on, and the hands-off attitude of many city governments in favor of “citizen police commissions” is tantamount to aiding and abetting police brutality. Given this dangerous cocktail, the erroneous (and passive-aggressive) assumption/tactic that intimidation by an overwhelming, police-state, police presence should not be permitted. Simply put, there is simply too many police employees abusing their discretion for residents to have to be presented with a constant police-presence. The says that children should be seen but not heard is too charitable to police; they should not be seen or heard, but, due to the human inclination towards violence, present behind the scenes. This is the uncomfortable position that the film provides. Law enforcement is necessary, but, given the urge that some people feel to abuse power by instigating violence if given the chance, democratic, municipal accountability that does not rely at all on “internal checks” within police departments is vital.

The legitimacy of police to use force is limited to enforcing law. Hence, physically attacking people, such as in punching them with clenched fists and kicking them, which go beyond restraining people, are exogenous to the job function. Police with a penchant for attacking people may have a warped perspective justifying in their own minds, psychologically, beating someone up as a legitimate tactic. In 2023 in Ohio, for example, in an attempt to justify a police employee who kicked a man repeatedly in the ribs and hit him 30 times (and used a stun-gun), the deputy chief stated, “sometimes you do have to throw punches.” Even though his subordinates had use of a stun gun, he tried to justify their resort to street-fighting, saying “This wasn’t blows to the face or blows to the throat.”[1] This excuse fails, however, given that one police employee had straddled the victim’s legs and punched him “at least 30 times with both fists.”[2]

I contend that in going on the offence in violence rather than merely restraining and protecting oneself from violence, a police employee should be regarded as only another citizen. As Hobbes claims in Leviathan, self-preservation is a natural right that is not contingent on law. If anyone is kicking or punching a person, one has the natural right to defend oneself. Although this does not depend on law, city governments should encase this natural right because of the extent of discretion given to police employees by cities—an extent that is easily hyperextended. By no means should resisting getting kicked and hit be considered a criminal offence; rather, the “off duty” city employee should be charged criminally.

An obvious example of when a police employee should be considered a mere citizen concerns an employee who held a supervisory position in the New York City police department. Working as a private investigator for the government of China, he “threatened, harassed, surveilled and intimidated” a Chinese man “between 2016 and 2019.”[3] In 2023, he was convicted by a federal jury in New York of conspiracy and stalking charges. It made no difference that he was a police employee (and supervisor!) because his aggressive intimidation and harassment rendered him as a mere resident when he was engaged in that activity.

Even the language that a police employee uses along with unprovoked violence can indicate that the individual is no longer acting within the purview of one’s job in law enforcement. In Alabama in 2023, for instance, a state trooper felt justified in inflicting violence on a man who was not resisting arrest simply because he had joked “Oh, yeah” when she asked him if he felt tip of the stun-gun she had stuck into his back as he laid on the hood of a car. In saying, “Shut your bitch ass up,” and “Shut the fuck up. You was big and bad,” she was clearly not acting in a law-enforcement capacity. Her language is not professional, and thus it points to a state of mind that is outside of acting in her official capacity, which alone justifies the use of the stun-gun. That she ignored his pleas for her to stop using her stun-gun means that her desire to inflict pain was immune to any sense of compassion.

In his text, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith, who went on to write on competitive markets, claims that sympathy, aided by the imagination (in being in someone else’s place), is something that is normal to feel for others, especially if they are in pain. We don’t have to feel the pain in order to empathize. If someone who has been hired for a job in which deadly weapons can be used does not have compassion, then they are not the sort of psychology that should be hired for such a job. That such people have been hired suggests that the hiring processes of police departments are not yet advanced enough to be relied on, and so external accountability should receive more resources and attention.

Anger such that eviscerates natural sympathy can be immune even from the pleas of other police employees. Also in 2023, a Black man “was attacked by a police dog in Ohio after surrendering” to police employees “following a high-speed chase.”[4] That the truck driver had “refused to pull over, and was chased for about 25 minutes before spiked bars placed across the highway brought the rig to a stop” does not justify releasing an attack dog on the man when he was standing with his hands above his head, having clearly surrendered to the police.[5] Hence the police employee who released the dog was no longer acting in his capacity as an employee of the police department when he released the dog and could be charged criminally. 

The man's hands were up when the "SS (Nazi)" policeman released the attack dog. 

That the predator (i.e., the police employee) ignored his coworker’s demand, Do not “release the dog with [the black man’s] hands up. Do not release the dog with his hands up,” demonstrates just how flawed the hiring process of a police department can be, and thus how important external, municipality accountability is on police departments. The attacker shouted at the man, “Get your ass on the ground or you’re going to get bit!” which indicates not only extremely flawed judgment, which in turn likely points to underlying psychological problems, but that the guy was on a “power-trip” enabled by the discretion given to him as a police employee. That one of the police employees had aimed a machine gun on the truck driver can also be flagged in terms of flawed judgment. It is very significant that the employee had been hired for a position that includes use of a deadly weapon even though he had a penchant for violence.

The role of dysfunctional judgment is, I submit, a major problem in police departments. In 2023, two Los Angeles sheriff employees attacked an elderly Black couple in the parking lot of a grocery store because they had taken a cake (which could have been only a mistake). The employee attacking the man ignored the woman’s pleas that her husband was ill. Just for saying so, she was slammed to the ground by the other sheriff-department aggressor. Ignoring the woman’s pleas and shoving both people to the ground evinces utter disrespect, as if people deemed to be criminals by criminal police were not people. In actuality, such aggressors are not worthy of respect.

In yet another case, Los Angeles Sheriff deputies repeatedly punched a woman who was holding her 3-month-old baby simply because her maternal instinct would not allow her to release her baby to such aggressors. 

The aggressor's arm is circled as he repeatedly hits the mother as if in a street fight. There should be a special place in hell for men who slug women holding their infants. 

Interestingly, cities might consider enacting a “Good Samaritan” law protecting onlookers who stop attackers whether they happen to be city employees or not, for it is easy to tell if someone is resisting arrest or being pummeled with kicks and punches while passive. I contend that onlookers are ethically obligated to pull attackers off their passive victims, and, furthermore, that the criminal attackers should be criminally charged.

Because police hiring cannot be relied on, given the discretion with deadly force that police are given, the discretion should not include being able to turn off body-cams and cameras mounted on police cars. In 2023, internal documents showed that the police employee in Memphis, Tennessee who killed a man without cause didn’t turn on the body camera.[6] Just as Internal Affairs “internal accountability” within police departments should not be relied on, for police regard themselves in a brotherhood of sorts, so too is it a fatal flaw to presume that police employees can resist the temptation to turn off any cameras by which accountability could be aided.

We are all flawed, finite beings, human, all too human. Societies should thus be keen to check the power that is likely to be abused, and those with lawful physical power should be subject to psychological assessments that go beyond surveys and proforma interviews. Indications of “street” talk, bad (i.e., disproportional) judgment, and “street” fighting should be sufficient for terminations and criminal charges in cases involving violence, for the line between enforcing law and going on the attack is clear. Lastly, police employees should have more humility (i.e., a recognition of fallibility) in dealing with people assumed to be less, or lower, for every human being is worthy of respect as a human being. Being a city employee is conditional, rather than an entitlement. City governments should not only hold employees accountable, but also castigate police departments for policies allowing disproportionate force, such as aiming a machine gun at a truck simply because the trucker did not pull over. Retaliation is extrinsic to law enforcement. As the film demonstrates, accountability may be needed even on a mayor, such as Mayor Daly of Chicago, who astonishingly refused to stop the unprovoked violent attacks by his police even after his complicity was made public at the Democratic Convention. Even then, he evinced the Biblical pharaoh’s hardened heart. Similarly, the police predators discussed above demonstrated such stubbornness, in some cases even dismissing pleas for humanity from their fellow police employees.

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1. Dominique Mosbergen, “Police in Ohio Under Scrutiny after Video Shows Officers Punching Face-Down Man,” The Huffington Post, October 24, 2023.
2. Ibid.
3. Hannah Rabinowitz and Emma Tucker, “Former NYC Police Officer, 2 Others Convicted of Stalking New Jersey Family on Behalf of Chinese Government,” CNN.com, June 20, 2023 (accessed December 30, 2023).
4. Nick Visser, “Video Shows Police Allowing Dog to Attack Black Man Surrendering After Truck Chase” The Huffington Post, July 24, 2023 (accessed December 30, 2023).
5. Ibid.
6. Phillip Jackson, “Memphis Cop Who Fatally Shot Jaylin McKenzie Didn’t Turn On Body Camera, Internal Documents Show,” The Huffington Post, August 4, 2023.

Wall Street

Oliver Stone’s film, Wall Street (1987) was filmed in the midst of U.S. President Reagan’s push for financial deregulation. As a MBA student at the time, I volunteered to help a professor with his paper on financial deregulation. The theory behind why the NASD (the National Association of Securities Dealers) could self-regulate its members seemed solid enough to this idealistic youngster (i.e., me); I had yet to witness human nature in the field, and over decades. Similar to Marx overlooking the human need for economic compensation as an incentive to work on a daily basis (though I overlook it too in posting free essays online), I was blind to human nature in that I did not see that the NASD itself would protect even its most sordid members so to safeguard the reputation of the profession and, even more realistically, stick up for other “members” of the “club.” The Newtonian-like automatic mechanism whereby industry self-regulation would work was too beautiful to let human nature interfere. Similarly, when I worked in public accounting, I saw the “check mark” indicating that, “as per comptroller, discrepancy resolved,” was just one of several technical points in conducting an audit. The illusion of technique as somehow objective in the business world can shield practitioners from the ethical content. In case you’re wondering how this relates to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, the antagonist Gordon Gekko is the poster child for greed, and thus the reason why the public should not rely on industry self-regulation to police Wall Street. Bud Fox goes headlong into being Gekko’s insider-trading protégé, easily ignoring conscience personified by Lou Mannheim even though he and Bud work in the same brokerage office. In Freudian terms, the id easily defeats the superego. It’s not even a close fight.

This is precisely why externally-imposed (i.e., free of the influence of the political contributions made by Wall Street firms) government regulation is necessary in a Capitalist economic system. Even Adam Smith recognized such a need, and thus that his theory of moral sentiments would not be sufficient. Greed can destroy persons and even entire economies. Wall Street’s greed for the very profitable unregulated sub-prime mortgage-bonds (and the insurance policies on those financial derivative securities), for instance, led to the financial crisis of 2008. The Clinton administration had fought to keep those instruments unregulated. Even after the crisis, Wall Street refused to accept blame. Even after the fact, conscience was easily dismissable.

In the film, Bud Fox’s conscience, as represented by Lou, tells him that there are no short-cuts. Bud dismisses Lou’s wisdom culled from at least 20 years of experience. Bud’s position is that he can good later; got to get the wealth first though—as if doing good depends on being wealthy—but Lou is not referring to philanthropy after retirement from working on Wall Street. Later in the story, Lou senses that Bud has been cutting corners ethically and perhaps even legally and tells the young enterprising man that money makes a person “do things you don’t want to do.” Bud wants to profit off insider info about his dad’s company, however, in order to snag the big fish, Gordon Gekko.

Carl Fox, Bud’s working-class father, tells his son, “Stop going for the easy buck.” But Carl is going after Bud’s industry and thus misses an opportunity to counsel his son on his tactics. To Carl, financial brokerage itself is problematic in that it does not produce anything. He contrasts brokers with lawyers, but both mediate parties who make things. To Carl, GNP is constituted by goods—not services. This is interesting because as an airline mechanic, Carl must know that oil is important to keeping an engine going, and thus things to be produced.

In the 1980s in the U.S. at least, finance was king and business schools were booming. I must admit that I got sucked into that vortex, quite unaware of what was happening in higher education, for I did not even realize that I was reducing education to vocation in the process. In a MBA course, I read what Robert Reich wrote about the American economy increasingly comprised of paper entrepreneurism. Manufacturing had been a casualty in the recession of 1981. During that recession, my hometown lost practically all of its machine-tool industry to Europe and unemployment stood at 21 percent. Gekko’s view of wealth as a zero-sum game fit with the empirical reality of companies moving their factories abroad to capitalize on cheaper labor markets and less onerous regulations. Gekko could have written speeches for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. “America’s a second-rate power,” Gekko says at one point. The federal government is a “malfunctioning corporation” rather than a functioning democracy. The trade and budget deficits were just two indications that the government was in a pathetic way. Pro-business Reagan would hardly have agreed with Gekko’s negative view of corporate America, however.

In too many corporations, Gekko explains at a stockholder meeting, it’s a case of survival of the unfittest. Stockholders have ceded control to non-owner managers, who are after all really just bureaucrats. As a result, too many companies have become bloated. Referring to the company’s management sitting on the stage, Gekko complains that the company has 33 vice presidents. Gekko’s claim to be a liberator of companies has some merit. In breaking up badly run, overextended companies, hostile takeovers cut the fat and move the evolution of American Capitalism in the direction of greater efficiency and effectiveness. What about Bud’s father, Carl, who would lose his longstanding job were Gekko buy another company, Bluestar Airlines, and sell it for parts? Performing radical deconstructive surgery on the U.S. economy involves people’s livelihoods.

Carl has Gekko’s number. This is very clear. “He’s using you,” Carl says to his son. Carl knows that Gekko is lying about intending to keep the airline running. Bud dismisses his dad’s intuition. It does not help that Gekko has become a surrogate father and that Carl is at least in part jealous of Gekko, even apart from Gekko’s wealth. It is important to know that Bud has not gained a second father, for Gekko is not loyal to other people, and certainly not to a young salesman. Gekko lies to Bud about intending to keep the airline together and let Bud run it. That he actually thinks he could run a business merely because he has some experience executing trades shows just how delusional greed can be. Carl provides a reality-test here when he points out to his son that brokerage does not give a person experience tantamount to being able to manage a large business. Blinded by Gekko’s statement, “I’m going to make you rich,” Bud thinks he can do anything. Both Bud and Gekko are in fact greedy and consequently neither man pays any heed to insider-trading law or financial ethics. The S.E.C. is presumably on holiday.

Such is the delusion that can come from greed, the desire for more. This desire is treated as an end in itself. That is to say, that desire is assigned absolute value. God is knocked out of its perch, and relationships go by the wayside. The root is self-love, wherein the self is situated as the center and end of all; truth is a function of subjectivity.

“Greed is good,” Gekko states at the stockholder meeting. Greed works; it clarifies, which I assume means that it puts priorities in order. This goes for “love, life, and money.” Not surprisingly, Gekko admits to Bud’s fake girlfriend, Darien, with whom Gekko has been secretly sleeping with, that he has tried to avoid love. Presumably it gets in the way of his first priority, money. Lest it be concluded, however, that Gekko is the Devil incarnate, we get a glimpse of Gekko appreciating the beauty of the ocean while walking on the beach on Long Island. Even a greedy person is a human being. Even so,  greed eviscerates relationships, especially in a commercial context for there is no loyalty on which business relationships can be built, for the quick buck is all that matters.

Once when I was going to extend my hotel stay at a Merriott hotel, I asked that my rate be continued. The hotel manager refused, saying that hotels are like airlines so the rate is whatever is currently available online, given whatever supply and demand happen to be at the moment. This is in line with the hotel maximizing revenue on a nightly basis. The narrow fixation and the absolute priority on revenue cut off a business relationship from developing. Because hotels differ from airlines in that flights end whereas hotel stays can be extended, I knew that the company’s technocrats had adopted a flawed, ill-fitting model. I did not extend my stay at that hotel; rather, I went to another hotel, and, once checked-in there, I put the Merriott “loyalty" program card, which a front desk employee at the previous hotel had given me, in a trash can. One-sided loyalty is an oxymoron. To be sure, the Merriott company got some revenue from me, but the company stumbled over itself in that it lost much more (without knowing about the future lost business). Any marketing ploy that refers to hotel customers as “guests” is disingenuous because the “hospitality” industry, at least in the U.S., practices such radical conditionality in customer relations. From my observations and reactions to managers at that Merriott hotel, I could sense just how inimical greed is to human relationships in a commercial context.

In general, greed cannot tolerate the ongoing bonds that sustain human relationships, whether business or personal, if those bonds constrict a gain that could otherwise be snagged. Greed’s interests are immediate because the desire for more cannot refuse even a momentary gain even if it means diminishing or losing a long-term arrangement. Even a person’s or company’s reputation is no constraint if there is an easy gain to be had. This does not mean that greed eschews long-term investments and even business relationships that are advantageous (e.g., a discount for frequent business). It’s just that greed cannot be relied upon by counterparties to stay on course should conditions change. Like a cheating spouse, greed won’t let a vow get in the way of instant gratification.

In the film, it is not surprising that Gekko has been cheating on his wife by having sex with Darien. Even business relationships are difficult if greed is all that matters. Larry Wildman, who is trying to buy a steel manufacturer so to improve it rather than break it up (whereas Gekko would break it up), calls Gekko a “two-bit pirate and a blackmailer” who would sell out his own mother. Presumably no one on the street is going to go into a deal with Gekko because he can’t be trusted beyond what is in his immediate financial interest.

Therefore, greed is shortsighted not only in wrecking the finer things in life, such as love, but also in terms of business relationships and even in terms of maximizing wealth in a time horizon beyond immediacy.  Rarely does a person enthralled with greed look into the abyss and find his character. This, Lou tells Bud just before he is arrested at the brokerage office, is what keeps a person out of the abyss. A narrow, “pinhead” mentality is the natural funnel that forms when a person allows the desire for more (i.e., greed) to encompass one’s experience and even existence. Sartre claims that a person’s existence precedes one’s essence. The danger in subjectivity being the basis of one’s essence is that absolute truth is abdicated. Subjectivity itself can narrow without thereby recognizing this and thus being self-correctable. More than looking into an abyss is necessary to grasp a normative anchor. In the film, neither Gekko nor Bud even look into the abyss.

Little Women: Strong in Death and Love

Little Women (1994), based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott, can be thought of as a social history of civil-war-era New England—that is to say, the film captures what life must have been like on a daily basis. Yet the human predicament resonates and thus makes the film moving for viewers far removed from the world of the Marsh family in Concord, Massachusetts. In particular, the film confronts the viewer with the hard task of going on even with the emotionally heavy experience of loss.

The film presents the uneasy feeling of “ending” through two manifestations: death and love. Regarding the former, the Marsh family, and especially Jo, must come to terms with the loss of Beth. With a weakened heart from a fever and minutes from death, Beth tells her sister Jo, “I know I will be lonely for you, even in heaven.” Jo’s realization after the death that she will never see Beth is so hard that she writes a novel of her childhood as a means of vicariously holding on to Beth. It is difficult indeed to come to terms with never again seeing a person who has meant so much. This is true too in romantic love when it is as if fate has brought two people together, and yet one demurs and the other must accept the loss.

“You don’t need scores of suitors; you only need one, if he’s the right one,” young Amy Marsh advises her three older sisters.  When a beloved is felt to be “the one,” the forced return to life without that person can feel like a long prison sentence. Few people rise to such a rank; they can be few and far between—which is a testament to their tremendous value. So much distance, in other words, exists between “getting in” and “never to be seen again” that the heart struggles to make the journey.

In rejecting Laurie’s proposal of marriage, Jo feels that she will never find “the one” tailored to her, for she is rather unique as an independent writer in the nineteenth century. Faced with the unfathomable distance between loving Jo and never seeing her again, Laurie marries Jo’s younger sister Amy. At first, she resists, saying she will not date someone still in love with her sister.  Laurie denies it of course, telling Amy, “I have always known I should be part of the Marsh family.” Amy eventually agrees to marry him, and he need not face the prospect of never again seeing someone who has meant so much to him. Although he need not face such a hard sentence, his chosen path back to “just friends” with Jo is not easy.

The transition that Laurie undergoes in his relation to Jo is not one that many people in Laurie’s emotional place can make. Once you start falling in love with a person, it is nearly impossible to going back to just being roommates, for example. Once you discover that the person you are falling for is not falling for  you, continuing as "just friends" almost certainly goes with much pain, especially if the one you love starts dating someone else. 

Fortunately for Jo Marsh, she finds love in Friedrich, a poor academic tutor from Europe. That he is much older than her and comes with empty hands (i.e., not much wealth) are of no concern to Jo, as she really loves him. Putting her hands in his, she tells him that his empty hands are full now. That's love, which transcends, and thus relativizes, all those criteria that seem important in the absence of love but suddenly pale in comparison when a deep connection is felt. 

Life goes on even amid deaths and loves lost—and even love takes hold in spite of it all. This is the message conveyed by Little Women. Facing the prospect of their father’s possible death in battle and Beth’s weakened heart, the little women are hardly little; and years later, in going on after Beth has died, knowing they would never again see her, Meg, Jo, and Amy are hardly little women. Jo is hardly little when she wraps her heart around poor Friedrich. Life is indeed not only the struggle for existence as Darwin postulated; it is also the plight of the elusive yet very deep meaning felt as two people come together as if by instinct. 

Lincoln

In addition to providing an excellent glimpse of a man much studied yet nevertheless lost to history, Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg, affords us an opportunity to grasp a particular virtue that applies rather surprisingly to politics. Simply in there being such a virtue applicable to a profession much maligned and relegated to swamps, an insight into the value of politics is here for the taking.

On the negative side of the ledger, the art of politics suffers from the vice of self-aggrandizing compromise—selling out the voters, for example, for a private perk. Additionally, fabrication is often associated with politics. In the film, Thaddeus Stevens admits to a bevy of his colleagues that Lincoln is indeed not to be trusted. Noting the men’s flabbergasted expressions, Stevens remarks, “Gentlemen, you seem to have forgotten that our chosen career is politics.” The implication is that mendacity is interwoven into the very fabric of politics, and should therefore be expected rather than held as blameworthy.

Yet surely the purpose of the compromise or lie matters. In refusing to take the bait, Stevens tells his adversaries in the House that equality before the law, rather than in all things (such as in slaves being given the right to vote), is the sole purpose of the proposed 13^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In the gallery, Mary Lincoln says out loud, “Who would have guessed that man capable of such control; he might make a politician someday.” Off the House floor, Stevens explains to one of his allies, “I want the amendment to pass.” That is why he held back, in great self-control, from divulging his true North—freed Blacks able to vote and even getting some land from the government. Had he stated his version of radical reconstruction, the anti-slavery conservatives in the House would have bolted rather than support the Amendment.

Mary Lincoln’s observation is the hinge on which the insight for us pivots. To be sure, Stevens lied, and compromised, but—and this is crucial—he did so with great self-discipline. The exigency of self-restraint points to the priority of a public good over private gain, for who needs to draw on discipline to pursue the latter?  So here we have a virtue applicable to the profession of politics. By this reckoning, pushing through one’s own ideological true-North, whether by lying or expedient compromise, or by playing it straight, does not evoke the virtue. Rather, it is demonstrated by a politician holding back on the allure of an unabashed pursuit of one’s vision out of a mature recognition of being one mere mortal among others.

Even though similar virtues applicable to politics exist along the tether of self-discipline, such as having the political courage to act in the public good in the face of constituent discontent (even though the action is in their own best interest), Lincoln illustrates a particular virtue, or version of it, that I suspect is not well-known among the citizenry. In short, compromise and even lying in the service of politics are not necessarily indications of a sordid character. Rather,  a stubborn, or otherwise unrelenting pursuit of an ideology may point to an underlying vice.