Why the President doesn't set gas prices (and why we want him to)

Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

Would we not shatter it to bits - and then

Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's desire

-Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat, 73                   

  This really isn't going to be about politics, or petroleum, or the President (or feature much more alliteration).  The real thrust of the post is a discussion about a particular problem and what I suppose is a coping mechanism to deal with, but first some site news by way of lengthy disclaimer.
  
   You, dear reader, may not have noticed (because I hardly have), but I haven't been posting much lately.  For awhile I thought, erroneously, that I should wait until I had something worthwhile to talk about to post.  Although I hadn't really used that metric in the past to guide my blogging, this sudden attack of scrupulosity prevented me from putting any passing notions to digital paper, as it were, and launching them forth to bravely make their way in the cold, indifferent blogosphere - an SOS to the world.  The actual effect was that I instead simply thought about things awhile, got bored or forgot them, and never blogged, thus depriving you, the blogee, of anything to read.  I've decided instead to throw caution to the wind: to occasionally ramble on about various things in a public forum - an exciting return to the founding principles of this blog.  None of this should be taken to mean that I think my thoughts so important that, no matter how half-formed or ill-conceived they must find light for the betterment of mankind, rather that I'm bored today and thought I'd write something.  All of this long, tiresome palaver isn't intended to be a guarantee of frequent posting in the future, but rather that all future posts will be of dubious quality.

  With that out of the way, we may proceed in earnest.  A lot of the debates surrounding the coming election concern things that the President has little, if any real influence on.  The price of gas, for instance, has much more to do with the geopolitical situations in other oil-producing countries and their effects on the global market and futures than any decisions the President of the United States may happen to make.  The economy, too, is such a vast complex of relations in both domestic and international markets that even if the White House with all its attached Cabinet positions and advisers could understand it in full (an impossibility), any influence they exert would be a drop in the ocean.  Yet people consistently attribute imagined, almost miraculous influence to the President (for good or ill); this post: which only asserts the first part of its title; i.e. the President doesn't set gas prices, will seek to explore its parenthetical portion (I "buried the lead" in media parlance).

  The most obvious reason, and the most cynical, is that it is a creation of media hype- pure rhetoric to: A) denigrate whomever the President may be based on the prevailing conditions (that is to say that both sides are guilty), B) prop up the President if things (read: the economy) are going good (so both Reagan and Clinton are held up as "good presidents" by their respective partisans because their terms coincided with prosperous times), and C) (most cynical of all) for ratings- "You need to choose the right man or disaster will strike - famine, plague, pestilence! - only our coverage will help you make the informed decision for your family.  Stayed tuned for more after the break."

   But I'm of the opinion that hype, while it does play a role, isn't the end of the story.  Hype is effective because it plays on real desires; the media isn't simultaneously creating the things it sells us, it merely leeches off of them.  Faced with an incredibly complex world filled with mitigating circumstances and obscure causes and divided up into the realms of various experts, the desire is for simplicity and agency- the thought that what I decide matters and, even more, has a tangible effect on the world outside myself.  Someone (although the source escapes me it was likely one of those disaffected 19th or early 20th century philosophers or novelists I'm so fond of reading) said that in an infinite universe, there is no place for finite man.  The terror that that statement arouses is precisely what this desire for either a savior or devil in the White House plays on.  Incidentally, it really doesn't matter to the desire whether you think the President is a savior or a devil, what matters is that he has the influence to be an agent of change for good or ill, that someone, somewhere can lay hold of the whole confusing system and make it move, shape it to his will.  An omnipotent politician is a handle by which we can grapple with reality.  We may not understand, but He does, and has at His call a thousand experts that He can weigh against each other and make earth-shattering decisions with. 

  It is, of course, not so.  The President is a man, and neither the monster nor rescuer we'd hoped.  The world may, indeed, be incomprehensible and our actions inconsequential.  A vision of sin may be our only refuge from despair: even if our actions have no real effect on the outside world, the soul, the inner man is made and unmade by our decisions, the Image marred or perfected, and the line between good and evil, obscured at times in the public sphere, yet runs, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says through the heart of every man and that the salvation will arrive from somewhere else.

  "The opposite of sin is not virtue, but faith." -Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death

Walker Percy and Depression

A few ground rules here before I start:  I will not be arguing brain chemistry here.  I have known several well-meaning Christians who poo-pooed the use of drugs for psychological problems because they thought the root cause was spiritual.  I have even heard of others saying that the use of anti-depressants or similar drugs to be evidence of a lack of faith in God to heal.  I really have very little to say to such people (if you can't say something nice...), but that they need to at the very least be more loving and not use illness, like Job's friends, as an opportunity for questioning others' relationship with God.  On the other hand I'm not content to simply chalk it up to chemistry, suggest medication, and call it a day, anymore than I am willing to reduce love to that chemical reaction that occurs in one's brain in the presence of certain other persons.  Something more is going on in both cases.  There is a reason there are so many different schools of psychiatry each roughly as effective or not as the others- man is complex and our knowledge of him is perhaps more limited than in any other sphere, except for our knowledge of God; it is impossible to measure distances in the Infinite.

Lengthy disclaimer now out of the way, I would like to talk about one of my favorite novelists/essayists, Walker Percy.  He eventually settled in Covington, right near my hometown and lived and wrote there until his death in 1990.  A brief background is probably in order, Percy was raised by an uncle, also an author, after the suicide of his father and the death of his mother in a car wreck (which WP seemed to think may also have been a suicide).  He then went to UNC, studied medicine, and interned at Bellvue in New York where he caught tuberculosis.  His medical career was of course over and while convalescing and reading philosophy in a sanatorium, Percy made two important decisions: he decided to become a writer and he joined the Catholic Church.

Percy drew on his medical background to inform his writing, as he sought to write the diagnostic novel, a book that pointed to the disease of modern society.  He noted how the illness as the doctor sees it is in fact the body's response to the latent disease; for example, an infection does not cause a fever or runny nose, the body responds by raising it's temperature and secreting mucus in an attempt to fight off the disease.  Thus Percy argued modern depression, malaise, and alienation were not themselves diseases to be treated as such, but signified that something was deeply wrong with man, or society, or man as he finds himself in society.

The problem then is not as simple as "getting over it" or taking increasingly more pills in an effort to cope (not that medication or treatment is bad), but addressing the problems that cause this response of displacement.  In fact as Percy says in the book I'm reading now (the satirical, fake self-help book Lost in the Cosmos), something is probably wrong if you are not at least the slightest bit depressed by modern living.  Recognizing then by our own response to modern life that something in fact is wrong, that there is a sort endemic disease in man, what is our response? To point to a cure.

The problem is of course we ourselves bear the disease; we are part of the problem.  Like Percy as he worked in the sanatorium  as a doctor-patient while recovering, even as we work to alleviate the problem we ourselves carry the contagion that is its source.  So we ourselves cannot be the cure, we would have, in the end, to destroy ourselves to destroy the disease.  But if someone was able to grapple with our disease, bear it, and defeat it, then He would be inoculated, He could cure.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
                                   T.S. Eliot- The Four Quartets, East Coker