A Taste of What Could Be

“This will give you an opportunity to testify… for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.”  St. Luke 21:13-14

The senior warden and I were having lunch a few weeks ago over at the Hunter’s Inn, and I asked the waiter if the reuben was any good.  I am, you see, a one sandwich man, and that sandwich is the reuben.  If it’s Friday, I’ll have the fish and, on occasion, the special.  But if I’m out for lunch, it’s usually a reuben.  If I’m to live here for many years to come, I need to figure out who serves the best reuben in Potomac. 

So, I asked the waiter the important question: “is the reuben any good?”  And he was that rare bird, the waiter of probity.  He answered me, “Well, people like it.  But I’m from New York, and they toast it here instead of grilling it.  It’s just not the same.” 

And I thought to myself, I know just what he means.  Because I, too, have been to New York, even unto Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side, where they make reubens of Biblical proportion. 

True Power and the Test of Ambition

“And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please.  If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.  St. Luke 4:6-7

 “If anything unites America in this fractious moment,” says the New York Times’ David Brooks in a recent column, it is a widespread sentiment that power is somewhere other than where you are.”[1]  “The Republican establishment thinks the grass roots have the power,” he continues, “but the grass roots think the reverse. The unions think the corporations have the power but the corporations think the start-ups do. Regulators think Wall Street has the power but Wall Street thinks the regulators do.”  He goes on to cite a recent Pew study which asked Americans, “Would you say your side has been winning or losing more?” Sixty-four percent of us, majorities of both parties, believe our side has been losing more.

People respond to this feeling of powerlessness, Brooks says, with “pointless acts of self-destruction.”  When we believe we have no power, compromise is suspicious.  If we believe we have no power, utopian dreams seem the only possible escape.  If we have no power, we must get behind the one who promises to “start winning again,” no matter what real abilities he might have to keep his promise.   This sense of powerlessness, Brooks says, is very dangerous in a political system like ours, which attempts to draw together a deeply diverse society through common citizenship and shared institutions.