[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 138 (Thursday, September 7, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1726-E1728]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                          MAKES ME WANNA WHINE

                                 ______


                         HON. MICHAEL G. OXLEY

                                of ohio

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, September 6, 1995
  Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I would like to bring a recent column by Paul 
Taylor of The Washington Post to the attention of my colleagues. As we 
in Congress continue about our task of reducing the power, reach and 
expense of the Federal Government, we might do well also to lower some 
unrealistic expectations.
  In a free society, there are limits to what government can do to 
guarantee financial success for its citizens, prepare for their 
retirement, or preserve their families. The U.S. Government can not 
compel people to make intelligent career choices, invest wisely, or 
take their kids to the ball game. The Government can not make you go to 
church--it is in the Constitution.
  Our first goal should be to see to it that government interference 
does not restrain citizens from realizing their dreams. Beyond that, we 
should limit ourselves to those relatively few activities which are 
performed best by a National Government. To that end, it would be 
helpful if politicians, pundits and the press would take a break from 
over-indulging the malcontents (and searching for scapegoats) and 
instead focus on efficiently executing the basic functions of 
government.
  The at once sad and glorious truth is that much of what ails the 
people of the United States today is beyond the domain of government. 
Americanism is about individual initiative personal responsibility, 
private acts of charity, and above all else, freedom. With the freedom 
to pursue your ambitions comes the risk of falling short. With that in 
mind, I commend the following column by Paul Taylor to the attention of 
all interested parties.
                          Makes Me Wanna Whine

                            (By Paul Taylor)

       ``Politics,'' says Bill Bradley, ``is broken.'' His fix is 
     to quit the Senate and ``focus on the lives of the people who 
     are disconnected from the political process.'' And just maybe 
     run for president.
       Three suggestions, senator. Start by telling all those 
     disconnected people to stop whining. Then tell the 
     politicians to stop pandering to the whining. Then tell the 
     media to stop exploiting the whining.
       Can anyone really believe the problem with American 
     politics is that the folks who claim to be alienated from 
     it--most inclusively defined, the nearly three-quarters of 

[[Page E 1727]]
     Americans who now routinely tell pollsters they don't trust their 
     government--aren't being hear?
       The problem is that they're running the show. They own the 
     radio talk circuit, the catch-a-scoundrel television 
     newsmagazines, the late-night comedy monologues, the prime-
     time sitcoms and the afternoon Oprah-and-Phil whine-alongs, 
     to say nothing of Madison Avenue and Hollywood.
       Their grievances have become our national entertainment--
     neatly packaged, voraciously consumed. Their everybody's-out-
     to-screw-me take on life is ground zero of the popular 
     culture.
       The political press lavishes attention on their rumblings 
     about the need for a third party or another independent 
     presidential run by the likes of Ross Perot or Colin Powell, 
     and never mind that the central truth about the ``radical 
     middle'' of our political spectrum is that its members have 
     no common ideology.
       Some are liberal, some conservative, some libertarian. What 
     grieves them doesn't start with politics and, in the main, 
     can't be fixed by politics. It is spiritual, social, moral 
     and economic. That's why, at Perot's whinerama in Dallas 
     earlier this month, the best audience responses went to 
     empathetic speakers from distant poles of the ideological 
     map--Jesse Jackson on the left and House
      Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich on the right.
       Here's a radical notion: When the whiners insist the 
     problem is rooted in politics, their delusions become self-
     fulfilling. Their media-stoked anger creates the 
     dysfunctional foundation upon which the nation's political 
     conversation is held, its candidates elected and its public 
     policy made. They do at least as much damage to politics as 
     politics does to them.
       In 1992, the whiners achieved the latest in a string of 
     dubious political victories by electing a president who is 
     forever reassuring them: ``I feel your pain.'' Naturally, 
     this makes then whine even louder.
       But their impact on politics didn't begin with President 
     Clinton. For a generation now, the angry middle class has 
     systematically put into office politicians of both parties 
     who over-indugle them, to everyone's eventual grief. What is 
     the hated national debt but the cumulative choice by one 
     cowed Congress and president after another to give the 
     American people all the goodies they demand, then flinch at 
     charging them at 100 cents on the dollar?
       When the angry populists get angrier still about the way 
     this shell game has mortgaged their children's future, they 
     scour the landscape for scapegoats. Is it the big money boys, 
     the corporate lobbyists, the PAC men, the NAFTA brigade? Or 
     is it the lily-livered politicians? Welfare cheats? Illegal 
     immigrants? Single mothers? Blacks? Whites? Japanese? 
     Mexicans? Detective Fuhrman? All the usual suspects get 
     trashed, except of course the perps themselves, who just get 
     more angry.
       Before I push this curmudgeonly screed any further, let me 
     put my own suspect credentials on the table: I write with 
     some complicity and, at least for another moment or two, some 
     distance.
       I'm recently back from a three-year stint as The Post's 
     correspondent in South Africa, where I covered the brave 
     transformation from apartheid to democracy. Before that, I 
     covered American politics for two decades.
       During the 1980s, I wrote my share of sympathetic articles 
     about the set-upon, anxiety-prone, economically stagnant 
     middle class. Perhaps I caught the virus. Eventually, like 
     the subjects of these pieces, I grew jaded with American 
     politics. I decided to cast my lot elsewhere.
       In South Africa, I had the chance to observe political 
     leadership at its most sublime. Had Nelson Mandela and 
     Frederik W. de Klerk been guided by the angry voices in their 
     respective constituencies, South Africa probably would have 
     been plunged into a race war. Instead, using moral suasion 
     and
      pragmatic statesmanship, they persuaded nervous supporters 
     to accept a scary racial compromise. Mandela and de Klerk 
     each succeeded precisely to the degree that an element of 
     their message to the people was: Stick you pain where the 
     moon don't shine; one day you'll thank me.
       During those three years abroad I also kept half an eye 
     trained homeward. From 8,000 miles away, American society 
     looked impossibly rich, breathtakingly dynamic and 
     pathologically whiny.
       Poor, bedraggled Africa probably isn't the clearest vantage 
     point from which to observe anything in the First World. 
     Nonetheless, here's what I saw from there: An America that 
     had colonized the planet with democracy, language, currency, 
     computers, movies, music, bluejeans and fast food. An America 
     whose inflation and unemployment was low, whose stock market 
     was booming. An America at peace. An America that had slain 
     communism in the second half of the century, just as it had 
     slain fascism in the first.
       Job well done! Let's party! Yet everyone in America I saw 
     on CNN seemed to want to shoot, shout or sue.
       Plainly, some of this dyspepsia is a morning-after 
     phenomenon. After wars, hot or cold, nations lose their sense 
     of mission. And some is the stress on everyday lives caused 
     by a shift in economic epochs, from the Industrial Age to the 
     Information Age. And some is a winner-takes-all dynamic that 
     keeps driving American income distribution toward more 
     distant poles of inequality. And some is the frustrating wage 
     stagnation of the middle class. And some is the confusing 
     change in gender roles and relationships. Together, all of 
     these forces have undermined the nuclear family, society's 
     most reliable incubator of values and morals.
       Let's stipulate that life is tough. It's tough to live in 
     the inner city; to lose a job to corporate ``downsizing''; to 
     graduate from college suspecting you'll never live as well as 
     your parents.
       But really! Can it be tougher to be a single mother working 
     at McDonald's in 1995 than it was to be a immigrant wife 
     working in a Chicago slaughterhouse in 1915? Tougher to be an 
     insecure factory worker now than an Oklahoma farmer during 
     the Dust Bowl years? A 22-year-old cab driver now than a 22-
     year old GI in 1917? Or 1943? Or 1952? Or 1969?
       Hey, we've got air conditioning, ESPN, Dove Bars and lots 
     of other good stuff. But Americans still seem to have 
     convinced themselves that life in the past few decades keeps 
     getting worse.
       Part of the delusion is sustained by my craft. In a complex 
     world, the culture of complaint makes journalism less 
     difficult. There's a grievance, there's a victim, there's a 
     bad guy. Whining (and O.J.) has become the touchstone that 
     connects us all. It bridges our diversity. It moves product.
       Sometimes journalism can take all this to silly extremes. 
     Last week's Time magazine cover story, ``20th Century 
     Blues,'' turns to psychobabble in seeking to establish a 
     ``mismatch between our genetic makeup and the modern world.'' 
     The piece begins: ``There's a little bit of the Unabomber in 
     most of us.'' Two weeks ago, a New Yorker essay started the 
     same way. Memo to colleagues: That guy's a crackpot. Most 
     Americans aren't.
       In fact, I've made an important discovery after
        returning from three years of worrying from afar about 
     America's angst. I'm amazed by . . . how normal everybody 
     is! In office elevators, at fast-food joints, in airport 
     lobbies, the folks I encounter are the same busy, 
     sensible, good-humored, can-do Americans I've always 
     known. They don't look crazed; they don't even look 
     stressed.
       At the hollow core of this culture of complaint, there's an 
     element of hype--a kind of tacit conspiracy between the media 
     and the whiners. The latter have grown savvy about which 
     sound-bites will get them into the national conversation. The 
     former, if they're so inclined, can extract a fuming quote 
     from just about anyone. I've found that if you talk to most 
     Americans long enough, they turn out to have nuanced, common-
     sense views (if not always quotable quotes) about almost 
     everything, including their government. They may not be 
     especially well-informed, but they're smart.
       They're certainly right that the political system isn't 
     responsive to their anxieties. But they're wrong that their 
     anxieties can be reduced to neat public policy solutions. Or 
     that the sky is somehow falling.
       When all these people loudly proclaim that politics is 
     broken, it reminds me of an observation sometimes made about 
     academic politics: the smaller the stakes, the nastier the 
     fights.
       Freed from cosmic worries, spared of wars or depressions, 
     bereaved of global enemies, Americans in the 1990s are gazing 
     at their navels and grousing about the lint. It's human 
     nature.
       Both the politicians and the media have a professional 
     interest in pretending the stakes are huge. So the 1994 
     Republican takeover of Congress gets blown up as a 
     ``historic'' realignment, and already the '96 presidential 
     contenders are talking about a ``once-in-a-lifetime'' chance 
     to reconfigure the size and scope of government.
       The voters are pretty wise to this poppycock, but it feeds 
     their frustration with politics. They keep hearing about all 
     the upheavals that are supposed to be coming out of 
     Washington; then they check their own lives and discover 
     nothing's changed. They feel jerked around. They switch 
     channels, or turn off the set altogether.
       The absence of big change from Washington can be seen 
     another way: as a testament to a stable, non-ideological, 
     centrist political system, where public policy is fought out 
     between the 45-yard lines. That's not a bad thing.
       The problem is that the real source of what ails America 
     lies beyond the reach of government. Nobody, for example, 
     wants to live in a society where a third of all children are 
     born out of wedlock and half grow up in homes without their 
     biological father. Everyone understands how that tears apart 
     the social fabric.
       Yet politicians indulge the conceit that they can change 
     these behaviors. Right now they're debating welfare policy, a 
     useful debate to have. But the personal behavior of the poor 
     (or anyone else) is substantially beyond the reach of policy; 
     always has been.
       New Jersey recently adopted a new welfare policy that cuts 
     off additional benefits to welfare mothers if they have more 
     kids. The preliminary findings? They keep right on having 
     more kids. In matters of the heart and matters of the loins, 
     government doesn't have enough carrots and it doesn't have 
     enough sticks.
       If there was a little more honesty from on high about what 
     government can do, maybe there'd be a little less anger from 
     below about what it cannot.
       But maybe not. I often wondered these past three years how 
     Mandela or de Klerk would have fared in the cynical pit of 
     American politics. They're both gifted politicians, but part 
     of their success was based on the respect that Africans have 
     for their leaders 

[[Page E 1728]]
     and institutions. It is a continent full of willing followers (often 
     too willing); in this instance they were served by 
     exceptional leaders.
       In America at the moment, that relationship has gone awry. 
     Our leaders won't lead and our followers won't follow.
       It's hard to imagine how the logjam gets broken from below. 
     The laws of human nature can't be repealed. Cynicism begets 
     cynicism.
       Still, each of us can make a start. I hereby vow as a 
     returning political journalist not to report at face value 
     all the whining I'm sure to hear between now and November 
     1996. But the real burden, I'm afraid, lies with politicians 
     like you, Sen. Bradley. By all means, go out and listen to 
     the voices of the disconnected. But not too long. What they 
     really need is a good talking to.
     

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