Lives of Our Leaders: Vice is Nice, But Sex is Best

Biden is from Scranton. Ryan is from Janesville, Wisconsin. They are both Irish Catholics and supposed defenders of middle class values. Ryan regards it as an infringement on religious liberty to force Catholic hospitals to perform procedures that go against church doctrine. Biden finds it’s an infringement on religious liberty to force other religions, to wit Protestants, Muslims and Jews, to honor the doctrine of his church. Biden feels that the Romney team’s proposed tax cuts will benefit 120,000 high income earners to the tune of 500 billion dollars. Ryan argues that Obama’s recovery has resulted in 15 million people living at poverty level. Plainly there's disagreement, but the second debate was a stalemate. Curiously the two vice presidential candidates have more in common with each other than with their running mates. In their tirades, one can hear the faint echoes of “a chicken in every pot.”  Ryan was cute when he translated a piece of Biden argot for the straight-laced Martha Raddatz. You kept thinking about a political correlate of swapping and open marriage. Romney was born into the elite and went to Stamford. Obama is a product of the meritocracy, but ended up at Columbia. Both are products of Harvard. Imagine Obama going to bed with Romney and Biden with Ryan—with all these free spirits flipping a coin to see who’s top. If there’s a class divide in the current election, it’s not between the two parties.

Quisling

Vidkun Quisling

Mitt Romney may not really laugh but Gary Wills is really brilliant. Why has Wills never been nominated for elective office? And is he the potential number #2 man, the dark horse that Romney has been looking for? Perhaps you are smiling in the confused nervous way that people do when they are being confronted with nonsense. In his short piece in the June 21^st New York Review of Books, “Why Is This Man Laughing?” Wills attempts to analyze Romney’s “non-laugh laugh,” as either a defense, an attempt to fit in, an offense, “comic rictus as a non-sequitur,” or as subterfuge. In his attempt to understand the laughter Wills invokes the author of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a seemingly logical step, that is probably sui generis in the annals of Romney scholarship. Even followers of string theory which gives eleven possible dimensions in which one could exist will find it hard to locate Kundera and Romney in the same universe. Wills’ reference point is actually not the novel itself but an essay entitled “The Comical Absence of the Comical (Dostoevsky, The Idiot).” Wills then attempts to account for Romney’s symptoms with the “etiology and taxonomy of senseless laughter…in examples of humorless humor in the defensive-aggressive response of Prince Mishkin to other people’s senseless laughter.” But it’s not Kundera’s analysis of Mishkin that provides the most stirring insight in Wills’ search for gold. It’s from an aside of Kundera’s about “a man standing uncomfortably in a crowd.” “I was seeing a person laugh who had no sense of the comical and was laughing only to keep from standing out from the crowd, like a spy who puts on the uniform of a foreign army to avoid recognition,” Wills quotes Kundera as saying. Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian politico who seemed to be defending his own country, but was really a Nazi collaborator.  The London Times made a noun out of his behavior. Wills description of Romney’s uneasy laughter is that of the quisling who is trying to appear like one of his people, but whose allegiances lie elsewhere. The question is where?