"go upright among those who are on their knees"

I was thinking about Scott Jennings this week.

He’s a Republican political consultant and CNN commentator who frequently appears on Abby Phillip’s 10PM ET show CNN Newsnight.

Full disclosure: I like that show. From time to time over the past year, I’ve appeared on it (unpaid). But that’s not why I say this: With that program, Abby Phillip and her colleagues at CNN have achieved something rare in our country these days. She presides over a civic space where people on both sides of the Great Divide in America engage one another in conversation.

Now, sometimes that conversation is not very enlightening, or even discernible. There’s a lot of cross-talk, and some bluster and bunkum and hollering, and it can get downright tense at that table. We’re not talking the Oxford Union here.

But I don’t see any other place in American popular culture where this kind of conversation is happening, and the mere fact that the program’s large audiences on CNN and on social media get the chance to see other Americans trying out their talking points and delving into each other’s arguments is healthy for our country, even essential.

To me, civic conversation is the only way out of this mess we’re in, and sometimes—just as in our own lives and workplaces and families—it can get ugly and not particularly fruitful. But we can’t stop talking, because that would mean the slow death of our friendships, our workplaces, our families. Our democracy.

Scott Jennings is a staunch supporter of President Trump, and his arguments are often tinged with the scorn and disingenuousness that characterize the dominant strain of MAGA discourse. People may find that annoying, but Jennings fights his corner with swiftness and bite. He’s clever.

But sometimes, the mask slips.

This week, Abby and her panel were on the air as work crews at the Kennedy Center began the court-ordered removal of Donald Trump’s name from the building, and from all other materials associated with the Center. It was a small but significant moment in our constitutional history, in the effort to check and to roll back Trump’s lawlessness in the executive office of our federal government, and to stand up to his ridiculous need to glorify himself above all other presidents, all other humans.

Trump and his lackeys, in the words of US District Judge Christopher Cooper:

“…violated the Kennedy Center’s organic statute in purporting to rename the Center for President Trump, and in taking steps to effectuate that official renaming, such as installing signage with Donald J. Trump’s name on the front portico of the Center, altering the Center’s website to name the Center for President Trump, and in issuing official materials naming the Center for President Trump.”

So it all had to come down. And Abby Phillip and her guests—including Jennings—were on the air, live on CNN, as it happened. Take a look.

Jennings had a tough draw on this one. No normal American approved of this act of vandalism. Trump slapping his own name on the Kennedy Center, in clear violation of the spirit and the letter of the law that established the place, reminds most normal, decent people how bizarre and indecent our president is. That is a lot of water—dirty water—to carry for Trump on national TV.

But when Abby Phillip reminded Jennings that what Trump had done was illegal, Jennings went full MAGA.

“What about the law?” she asks.

“What about it?!” he snaps back at her.

And there you have it.

The moment when your devotion to one man destroys your loyalty to your country and its laws. For Scott Jennings in that moment, and for many in MAGA, Trump is the law.

And that is fundamentally un-American.

Scott Jennings’s moment came on live TV, and went viral with a vengeance on social media. And so he’s dealing with the mockery, rage, hatred and worse that this kind of moment produces. Praise, too, I’m sure, from the MAGA faithful. The algorithms feasted on him.

I feel a different emotion, though. Pity.

Scott Jennings was once a serious man. He was a rising star in Kentucky Republican politics, a protégé of Senator Mitch McConnell, and worked in the George W. Bush White House.

And on the afternoon or January 6, 2021, as Trump’s mob was attempting to seize control of the US Capitol—attacking police officers and baying for the blood of the Vice President and members of the House and Senate—Jennings wrote and published these words on the CNN website:

What happened to the man who wrote those words—spoke those truths? Did he change his mind? His heart? His civic soul?

I don’t think so. Jennings is too clever to go all the way down the MAGA road of worshipful delusions, gleeful falsehoods, and constitutional vandalism. He knows better. But he also knows what pays in Trump’s America, like so many other prominent politicians and corporate chiefs and talking heads.

So when the mask slipped on CNN last week, I think what we saw was not Jennings’s true colors, an anti-democratic willingness to trample down our laws for Trump. What we saw was his insincerity. He didn’t change his mind. He changed his clothes, you might say.

There are always men like Scott Jennings in times like these. Always women like Nikki Haley and Tulsi Gabbard. They can change their principles like you might pick out a new suit or pair of glasses.

And it sure does pay. That’s the thing. That’s what so many Republicans and CEOs and talking heads have learned. It pays to bend with the winds in the Age of Trump.

But the cost to the rest of us, to our country, is devastating.

I said earlier that civic conversation is the only way out of the mess that Trump and MAGA have plunged us into. We must be able at some point, once again, to argue with one another productively, to share our beliefs and values and ideas for our country, to explain why we think each other wrong when it’s important to say so, and to do it all in such a way as to make progress together possible again.

And there is only one thing that civic conversation demands of each one of us as citizens: That we tell the truth about what we believe.

Our poem this week comes from Eastern Europe—again. The poets of the era of Soviet domination of those nations have much to teach us, alas.

It is by the Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert,who wrote it in the late 1960s, a time of deep darkness for Poles. After the Nazi occupation had come the Soviet tyranny, and so this is not a hopeful poem.

Herbert invented an alter ego for himself, a character he named “Mr. Cogito.” In this poem, Mr. Cogito offers us a ringing yet hopeless manifesto: Bear witness, hold fast to truth, give thanks, stand up for what is right—even though none of it will save you.

—Terry

by Zbigniew Herbert

Go where those others went to the dark boundary

for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees

among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live

you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous

in the final account only this is important

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea

whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

let your sister Scorn not leave you

for the informers executioners cowards—they will win

they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth

the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

and do not forgive truly it is not in your power

to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

beware however of unnecessary pride

keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror

repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring

the bird with an unknown name the winter oak

light on a wall the splendour of the sky

they don’t need your warm breath

they are there to say: no one will console you

be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go

as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends

because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain

repeat great words repeat them stubbornly

like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

and they will reward you with what they have at hand

with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls

to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland

the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

Be faithful Go