Just this very day, I was musing upon the implications of a communiqué’ (e-mail!) I received from the Democratic National Committee (wanting a donation of course).  I recognize that while I style myself a Democrat and identify with that Party’s goals in broad and general terms, I am aware that, realistically, even my fellow party members (and certainly its leaders) often over-state its or their case–to raise money or to secure a few additional votes.   And it (the rumination) made me wonder if over-stating or exaggerating what the opponent says or advocates is “hypocrisy?”  I quickly decided it was. 

         This political tactic clearly involves pretending the “other side” is doing something worse or different than it is really doing–and a more clear case of pretending to be something (pure and truthful in all circumstances) while being another (an advocate for a cause preying upon or hoping for a reader’s or listener’s lack of acuity or discernment) could hardly be made.  Democrats do it, Republicans do it; and “Tea Partiers” do it.  But, as inescapable as such is in the realm of politics–a game not for the faint of heart–it is certainly easy for each of us to become sick of it.

          The relationship between politics as practiced in our beloved United States and the sulphorus stench of hypocrisy is really clear to me; as I know precisely from whence the clarity arose and how the concept became emblazoned in my heart and on my mind.  When I was “growing up” as a youngster in Arkansas from 1943 upon my birth until a few years before 1957 and the Little Rock Central crisis, I truly had no awareness of either “politics” or even the subjects with which politics dealt.  My first memory of one of those subjects with which politics dealt hit me (right ”between the eyes!”) when in my late grade school years, I went to the motion picture with my best friend Buddy Reynolds.  I walked or rode my bike from our house out in the County to his home on Tennessee Street, and we proceeded on to the theatre together. 

    As we approached the theatre, side by side and had arrived at a point no further than ten yards from the ticket booth, Buddy veered off to the left. I was surprised (nonplussed?) and asked him why he was changing directions.  He told me, “Donnie, I can’t sit downstairs with you; I have to sit in the balcony. All ‘colored folks’ have to go up there.  I’ll see you after the movie is over.”                   

I was still unaware of what was happening, so I quickly decided what I was going to do:  ” Wait a second, Buddy; I’ll sit up there with you.”  Buddy was in front of me and purchased his ticket at the window inside the side door of the theatre building.  When I stepped up to the window, the ticket lady told me, “You can’t go up there and sit with the ‘Niggers’.”  

    I replied, “I want to sit with Buddy.  Why can’t I buy a ticket?”  The lady replied, with an obvious consternation that I can still recall, “We do not let Niggers sit with us Whites. You can’t go up there!”

    Buddy quickly said, “Donnie, don’t worry about it, I’ll see you after the show’s over.”

    I was a slow learner.  I had just discovered something that was clearly despicable, but which, at the same time, explained so many other things about my home state–and much of our Country and much of Mankind as well.  I knew at that early age that what I had just experienced was horrible; and I also saw it as a sick explanation of why the public drinking fountains around our little town of Crossett were marked with signs saying either ”White” or “Colored.”  And I recognized why the kids with whom I played stick ball or basketball or with whom I went swimming at Lucas Pond near the pump station got on a different school bus than I did every day.  It also explained why I never saw any “colored folks” at Mr. Spikes’ soda fountain,  and, also, it explained why they always sat and ate their meals behind the kitchen over at Morgan’s Cafe, i.e., the old bus station.

    After a while it came into focus for me why my Dad (whose primary businesses–a bootlegger and a small loan broker dealing almost totally with Blacks) hated hypocrisy so much.  You see, only a couple of “White Folks” who were friends of my Dad would come out to our house in the country to buy liquor (cheap bourbon–Early Times as I recall); but many white folks would send their servants, their black maids or their yard men, out to pick up their bourbon for the week-end if they had forgotten to drive down to the State Line or over to the River to buy the “good stuff.”  As time has gone by I have figured out that most of them surely poured the Early Times into empty bottles of other, better brands to pass it off as the “good stuff” to certain of their less-discerning friends.

    When President Eisenhower sent the 101’st Airborne Division from Ft. Campbell, Ky. to quell the Faubus-incited violence at Little Rock Central and enforce the Order of the United States District Court, there arose in me a truly deep-seated shame of my own race and gave impetus to a life-long pursuit of the history of slavery and how men of various civilizations all throughout human history had taken advantage of their fellow human being for economic profit.  One of the more “pungent” reminders of this came just within the last couple of years when my friend Lane Vastine’s Mom (her husband was Arthur, a fine man and a career employee of The Crossett Company) loaned me copies of the Crossett Company’s monthly organ, Forest Echoes, from the 1950’s.  The strict, uncompromising segregation was evident in every photograph, i.e., separate facilities and times for banquets, award ceremonies and so on.  I am certain that it was at least rare for a single page of that publication to have both a black and a white face appearing in a photograph.         

    I don’t really think that Dad minded selling the liquor to the white community in that “two tiered” fashion; but it incensed him that all of the “white folks” who did that were pillars of the community of Crossett, members of the First Baptist Church or the Methodist Church and were executives of The Crossett Company–the local, family-owned and quite large and successful wood and paper products business.  You see, Dad could not stand people such as these who pretended to be one thing while they were another.   His ire was particularly aimed at those leaders of the Baptist Church, Deacons for example, who bought liquor from him!  But he would take their money.

    Dad had few limits on his hatred of hypocrisy.  Just as an extreme example, there was one funny episode when I believe I was off at Dartmouth and did not know of it until later when my friends Billy Joe and Marsha told me of it.  It seems Dad had read in a local paper, or one from Little Rock, that Johnny Carson used “cue cards” during his nightly monologue to help him remember the jokes he was to tell on the Tonight Show.  So, that evening, when Carson started his monologue, Dad looked up from the kitchen table where he and his good buddy Pete Mizell were “having a few,” picked up his .38 calibre Smith and Wesson revolver and shot out the television set.  Anyone who knew Dad also knows that he would have done the exact same thing had he been cold sober. 

    Later on in my maturation, a very, very slow one I will again add, I believe that I first really recognized that there were two political parties (there was only one in Arkansas at the time–no one ever heard the word “Republican” before the 1980’s) came while I was in college during the Presidential Campaign of 1964 when the Democrats had nominated Lyndon Johnson and the Republicans had nominated Barry Goldwater.  I remember thinking the Democrats were obviously the better party because there was a particular “nerd” on the campus in Hanover, NH who had attached a bumper sticker to his briefcase which simply read “AU H20.”  No way was I, in face of that nerdism, able to think for myself.

          But during Lyndon Johnson’s second term, I really began to understand politics in a meaningful fashion, for by then the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 (which Johnson had earlier pushed through) had taken effect, and it exacerbated the long-standing racial “warfare” within the United States.  I believe everyone realizes that while racism was clearly much worse in the South and there was more segregation and less opportunity for Blacks (and there were so many more Blacks and opportunity for discrimination), those of you from up North come from a line of Caucasians that were not exactly as “pure as the driven snow” on this front either.   (I have Northhampton, MA, in mind at the moment, for a good friend of mine was a student at Smith College at the time and quite aware of the problems of which we speak occurring with great frequency in the North as well as in the South.) There was a veritable racial war all over the Nation in the mid to late 1960’s…which, of course, extended way back into our history; but from the 1960’s we all have the words “Selma,” “Birmingham,” ”Watts”, “Martin Luther King,” “James Earl Ray,” Philadelphia, MS,” and “Sheriff ‘Bull’ Connor” seared into our minds.  It was not just Viet Nam in that era; it was this evil remnant of our past as well. 

    I began to believe at that point, near the end of my college years, that I was a Democrat–for I identified that party as the one that stood for the good in human nature, and I had by that time studied economics and enough history and business to know that the Republican Party stood for Hans Morgenthau and rapacity in general.  But I apparently had not learned the lesson well enough, for I became a Republican when I started voting anyway, for subliminally, I knew that in order to “succeed” (as in make more money!) I had to be a greedy “son of a gun” to take advantage of everyone not “smart enough” to be a Republican.

    And it was not until 1990 that I really became a Democrat, because, I believe, it finally “came home to roost” with me that treating one’s fellow man honestly and fairly, in race relations, in business dealings, in one’s seeking of health care, and really in every aspect of life, became so important in my life.  I believe more than anything else this came as a direct result of three things, i.e., my seeing the incredible, even vicious cruelty which one of my former law partners had inflicted upon another of his “junior” law partners; the remembrance of when I was V.P. and General Counsel of the American General Life Companies in Houston, and had risen high enough on the corporate ladder to see just how debased the corporate world was, or could be, even to its own employees;  and then later when I was an insurance regulator to see how in Arkansas and Texas essentially everything about politics was corrupt and still colored by racism. 

          But by this point politics had become a two party system in the South, and the Republican Party was the one which drew most of the racists and which stood for everything self-serving, inhumane, pro-business, anti-government, all decisions which would hurt the “man of the street” and for lying to the Public on every issue as a matter of course.  While the Democrats still stood, Nationally and mostly on a local basis, for the ideals in which I had by degrees come to believe: fairness to all, equal opportunity, and openness.  

       It has been a long and convoluted process, but I am now fixed in my ways and only ashamed that it took so long to get where I am.  

    All of this is prelude…and I apologize to you for the length of this “tirade?” It is prelude to the Democratic National Party piece I received today and which was purportedly written by James Carville (who I find offensive–mostly because of his personality!) but which is important because it points out the supposed positions of Rand Paul (Ron’s little boy) and Sharon Angles to repeal the Civil Rights Act to do away with Social Security, respectively.  I am both wizened enough and well enough informed to know that this DNC piece is over-stating the case as to their full positions (not by much!), but it is important to me in high-lighting the incredible extremes which persons to the far right and also those of the far left are taking these days–using the Internet, television and press to attract people to one of the major parties or to the so-called independent “Tea Party,” by use of the most vile lies and misrepresentations, as appeals–not even subtle–to some negative aspect of what could be called the battered American Psyche.

          And therein lies the hypocrisy!  Every time some party’s political ad or some political candidate directly accuses an opponent or the “other party” of doing or supporting some move or position they or it did not do or do not support–and the accuser know(s) it, they are all lying and pretending to be something they are not, i.e., honest, truthful and the best thing since “sliced bread.”  They are duplicitously pretending to be something they are not.  That makes them, all of them—in all parties when the “shoe fits”–hypocritical!!!!  The only way to censure them, in a land where “political speech” is absolutely protected, is to withhold your votes from  those who lie and misrepresent the most–and reward those who are more candid and truthful and who will obviously treat the People more fairly, honestly and competently if they are elected. 

         To cut through all of the lies, the posturing and the misrepresentation inherent in political  campaigning, I “long ago” (if twenty years is long enough) determined that individual candidates in most instances count for less than does the Party they are representing–with the Party’s principles, its heritage–what it stands for–usually prevailing over the whims or posturing of select individual candidates.  And this is something of which we should all be continually aware.

          Obviously politics, the outcome of races, ultimately, all comes down to what each of us does in the polling booth–when we are all alone with our consciences and the machine or the paper ballot.  It is in that context that I ask a simple favor:  Before each of you votes in this summer’s primaries and in the General Election this fall, just really peer into your respective hearts and ask yourself, “Which candidate (assuming competence of each)–or Party, by reason of his or her ABILITY AND CANDOR, truly stands for and portends the BEST possible outcome and is most consistent with the values inherent in the true America–not the positions sometimes represented by the “wing nuts” on each end of the political spectrum? 

        If you are truly honest with yourself, that is all I can ask.  But I would, nonetheless bet a lot that if most of you ask yourselves this question and truly placed your personal “good” AND the “good” of the Nation, all of it,  into the equation, each and every one of you will vote for the Democratic candidates for Congress (House and Senate) and in most of the gubernatorial elections.

       At the very least you will–in your hearts–have voted for the better choice of the candidates running.  And you will have freed yourself from the hypocrisy “go around.”                

          That’s where my Dad comes back into this long story.  

Donald K. Switzer

Rogers, Arkansas

(c) June 14, 2010