Body politic needs a good doctor

    Greetings from the Ridge.

    Used to be I went to the doctor when I got sick. Now that I’ve entered my golden years I get my innards checked more regularly than I change oil. “Preventive maintenance,” the doc calls it. I think he’s lonely and misses me.

    It seems like every four years our nation gets its own checkup. Oh, we gripe and growl between Presidential elections and our op -ed pages are just as filled with vitriol and venom when no one’s running for the White House, but there’s something about an election year that gives us a national CAT-scan and often draws a bit of blood in the process.

    I’ve never considered Americans to be a hostile group. I mean, the folks I run into during the course of the day’s activities tend to nod and smile and ask if I could use any more tomatoes. Fact is, I can run the entire length of a day without hearing one discouraging word. If a foreign tourist were to visit Coonridge or wherever you hang your hat tonight, he’d pretty much get the impression that we’re a live-and-let-live society with little more to complain about than the weather and the price of gasoline.

    Then comes the Presidential campaign and our vital signs start to sag.

    The nation’s most obvious ailment is our Hemorrhaging Humor Gland. You’d think that a patient who’d survived 222 years of wars, depressions, riots, and Jerry Springer would have developed a thicker skin, but once a man or woman declares the intention to run for President, the nerve-endings of every special interest group become exposed and the slightest sneeze will throw the poor patient into convulsions. Every campaign statement must be parsed, homogenized, and watered down into a milky plasma that eventually means nothing.

    Which naturally leads to the next disease, anorexia. In order to please the most voters the most often, the meat is simply removed. By the time a candidate for President puts his platform up upon the doc’s scales, there’s very little of substance. Whether it’s politics or physiology, air just doesn’t weigh much.

    Next, it seems as if our bile glands have begun to swell. In a time of crisis for both the financial and security concerns, our Presidential candidates avoid talk of real answers and instead empty their spleens at the opposing party. And of course this leads to further diseases of the national psyche as we become addicted to the negative campaigning.

    My doctor is always telling me, “If you don't use it, you’ll lose it.” I tell him that if that’s true, there’ll be no danger of my losing my billfold in the doctor’s office. But our national patient seems to be showing signs of atrophy in certain key organs. When we’re not asked to sacrifice we become selfish. When we’re not asked to dream big our concerns become self-serving. When we’re not asked to listen to good and noble ideas we turn our attention to the sensational, the sound bite, and the negative.

     So what is it about a Presidential campaign that makes us look so deeply under our own skin? I’ve a notion that the big guns running the political campaigns are experts at just one thing: they know what appeals to us. They know what makes our national heart tick, and they’re masters at knowing which nerves to tap with their campaign hammers to get the proper reflex. They may not be the most desirable sort of personality to have over for coffee, but, like a good doctor, they know their patient better than the patient knows himself.

    Frankly, I’ve never seen our national patient look so poorly at its four-year checkup. I’m no radiologist, but it seems to me that I see the signs of a few abnormal growths that if not treated quickly may become cancerous: racial prejudice, parochialism turned hateful, a large shadow of greed, and a gangrenous strain of selfishness. I suppose that I’ve been naïve not to notice that the patient has been suffering from some of this all along, and it’s only the necessity of a four-year exam to expose our innards.

    What makes me especially sad is that I’ve seen the good, the healthy, the giving side of this same patient. We’ve seen our national body sacrifice, we’ve seen it give until it hurt, and we’ve watched it strive to become the best that a nation can be. Maybe the check-up we call a Presidential campaign is a good thing. The first step toward a cure is the diagnosis.

    Long ago, before the days of CAT-scans and nuclear medicine, I knew an old doctor who’d ask his patients to stand naked in front of a mirror and stare. “There,” he’d say. “There you are. Now you tell me what you need.” I’ve heard that it was one of the most therapeutic physical exams the patients had ever experienced, and it came without the additional fees of x-rays or consulting physicians. When our country looks into the mirror every four years I hope we open our eyes.

    You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door, but you'll enjoy the trip.