INTEGRITY? SYDNEY WILLIAMS
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This essay was prompted by former deputy director of the CIA (2010-2013) Michael Morrell’s interview with House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH). In that interview Morell said he had phoned Antony Blinken in October 2020 about the Hunter Biden laptop story, which had appeared in the New York Post on October 14, 2020. A consequence of that call was that a few days before the 2020 election fifty-one former intelligence officers signed a public letter (a letter prepared by Morrell), which claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop story had all the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation. As those officials have since acknowledged, the letter was written without any evidence of Russian involvement; yet those intelligence officers chose to propagate a false story to help Presidential candidate Joe Biden. Reporters from mainstream media were provided an out from having to follow up on the Hunter Biden laptop story. Integrity, where art thou?
Why, I wondered, would someone with Antony Blinken’s pedigree stoop to such a dirty trick? At the time he was a senior advisor to the Biden campaign, with hopes of a position in a Biden administration. And why would fifty-one former intelligence officers do something that may have affected the outcome of a Presidential election? Is integrity as rare among Washington’s bureaucracy as it is among elected officials?
When I first thought of Mr. Blinken, a man raised in privilege – educated at the Dalton School, École Jeannine Manuel, Harvard, and Columbia – abetting the manipulation of an election, my mind went to Eugene Field’s nursery rhyme, “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” only with names and words changed:
Biden, Blinken, and Harris
Sailed off in the Ship of State;
Sailed onward toward Utopia,
On a sea of deceit.
And what is your goal, voters did ask?
We have come for the power and glory,
And the gold that will follow,
Said Biden, Blinken, and Harris.
Politics and honesty have never mixed. One is reminded of Diogenes searching for an honest man. In his 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad (based on a trip to Southern Europe) Mark Twain wrote: “An honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere.” Twenty-six years later, Ambrose Bierce published The Devil’s Dictionary. In it he defined politics: “n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” Written in humor but highlighting a truism.
Most politicians, I fear, will never meet Webster’s definition of integrity: “The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.” This is not to say that there are no honest politicians, but, as a species, they are endangered. You are more likely to see an ivory-billed woodpecker out your window than an honest politician on Pennsylvania Avenue. They fabricate, dissemble, and tell half-truths. Elected politicians are accountable to voters, but they evade responsibility for bad decisions. They are masters of illusion and obfuscation. In his taped message announcing his re-election plans, President Biden said he wanted to “finish the job,” a frightening thought. Consider the examples these people set for our children – they lie, blame the other guy, procrastinate, and never take responsibility for bad outcomes.
How will we disengage from this dank and dismal place? Finding honest politicians or government bureaucrats is a dream unlikely to be realized. Extrication may never be possible but if it is, it must lie with the media and education. The former could report facts and leave opinions to editorial pages. The latter could teach students to think independently. A reporter should be interested in uncovering the truth, regardless of where it leads. Will that happen? In today’s polarized environment, doubtful. The better solution – though also a stretch – lies with schools, colleges, and universities where students should be taught to think independently, to study facts, appreciate nuances, and then form and defend their own opinions. Sy Syms used to say, when hawking off-price clothes, “an educated consumer is our best customer.” Similarly, an educated citizen is the best way to keep democracy from collapsing. The most effective response to social media, biased reporting, and hypocritical politicians, is the ability to think for oneself, to read, listen, and to question. That may be wishful thinking, but it is our only hope.
Integrity is a personal trait, difficult to practice when society’s emphasis is on conformity; for example, being asked to put one’s signature on a letter that includes a false statement. Employees are warned about using correct pronouns; conservatives are banned from speaking at universities; universities have substituted social justice for merit. Individuals are subjugated to the state, as mandates are issued regarding gasoline-powered cars and as we are told how much electricity must come from renewable sources. Thrift is penalized; under Fannie Mae’s and Freddy Mac’s new rules, those with higher credit scores will be charged higher interest rates, so that people with lower scores can secure mortgages at lower rates – the socialization of credit risk, as The Wall Street Journal put it. Unnecessary government interferences impede free markets; regulations imposed by the Biden administration have had an estimated cost to the economy of over $200 billion, according to the Washington Examiner. Sensitivity readers are employed by publishers to ensure harmful words are eradicated. But perhaps there is hope? At the Time 100 summit last week in New York, Steven Spielberg spoke out against political correctness in the film industry: “No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are either voluntarily or being forced to peer through.”
Technology is changing our lives, with so many “cultural and political earthquakes testing the cohesion of our society,” as Walter Russell Mead recently wrote in Tablet Magazine, that we need the guidance which fundamental principles provide. Integrity is one of those virtues, along with tolerance, fortitude, diligence, charity, humility, and others. In Emerson’s essay, from which the rubric above was taken, he wrote of the “need for each individual to avoid uniformity and false consistency and follow his own instincts and ideas.” In Hamlet, Polonius offered similar advice to his son Laertes: “To thine own self be true.”
Eisenhower is alleged to have once said: “The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity.” It is a characteristic missing in almost all public figures, in the media, large corporations, banks and, perhaps most damaging, in schools, colleges and universities. Without principles to guide us, darkness prevails.
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