His Dad was a textile mill floor worker in North Carolina; but he went on to become a highly successful trial lawyer, a U.S. Senator and a candidate for President; but then the golden boy became leaden, and, when not snickering or tongue clucking, we should be asking ourselves, “How did John Edwards go wrong?”
We have to take a closer look at the effect the medium, our political system, has on our elected officials who too often become servants of power rather than of the people they purport to represent, obsessed with ascending a ladder of insider privilege, increased political potency, and wide recognition and doing so at almost any financial or human or ethical cost including the abandonment of the ideology that they first espoused to get elected.
Marshall McLuhan made the oft-quoted statement, “the medium is the message,” but later allowed for its modification, re-stating his famous nostrum as “the medium is the massage,” meaning that our senses are altered, “massaged,” by the medium.
When John Edwards lost his 16-year old son Wade in a freak traffic accident in 1996, Edwards was at a loss to find a way to grieve and to honor his dead son’s memory. He decided to run for public office because his son had wanted him to do so, and because his son wrote a prize-winning essay, “What it means to be an American,” focusing on his father’s vote at a local North Carolina fire house.
In that first Senate campaign, Edwards said, “We are a country that speaks out for those without a voice … we stand up for people.” He promised to any and all who would join his campaign that “the folks in Washington and on Wall Street will hear you loud and clear.” That was then.
Jeremy Larner, who wrote the academy award-winning script for “the Candidate,” insisted that politicians “don’t sell out,” but “they evolve into something else.”
We all know that wonderful morality play by Carlo Collodi, adapted to the screen as “Pinocchio,” a popular Disney classic, that featured a “pleasure” island that encouraged its island visitors to misbehave badly, to fight, to destroy, to engage in self-abusive practices, until each transformed, or devolved, into a jackass.
Edwards lost his “Jiminy Cricket” conscience, beginning his devolution, sometime after he arrived in the political pleasure island we call Capitol Hill, when he got a taste of real power.
Edwards betrayed his son’s expectation that his father would be “brave, truthful and unselfish,” the telling difference between Pinocchio being human or remaining stuck as a puppet.
Edwards falsely denied the affair that he had during his presidential bid, and made it appear that the love child he fathered was fathered by a campaign worker instead, and he funded the lie with mislabeled contributions from two close friends, pretending the monies were for furniture, rather than a cover-up.
This nation can’t trust its helm to a coward who lies about his self-centered behavior.
Unfortunately, we have a political system that corrodes the conscience of its elected officials – and routing out one bad one doesn’t address the problem we have.
We have to reform our system -- if we hope for this nation to survive as anything resembling a democracy.
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