E G O S P E W

My next concert, in the Hobart & William Smith Colleges Community Chorus,  Tuesday, April 13th, 8:00 pm, St. John’s Chapel, 630 S. Main Street, Geneva, NY 14456.

Massa Unpeeled

I managed to peel the Eric Massa bumper sticker off our car today.

How did we get so fooled? He seemed pretty smart back during the campaign, at the living room chat and the log cabin barbecue fundraiser. He reminded me a little of Senator Jim Webb, with that ex-career military kicked-around-the-world and wrote-a-book-or-two kind of wisdom. We helped get him elected in a solid Republican upstate New York district that hadn’t voted a Democrat into office for decades. (Though we couldn’t quite tip the county to Obama, embarrassingly.)

Massa’s arguments against our Afghanistan involvement were pretty brave; I love seeing an ex-military officer go ballistically anti-war.  He had long been vocal over the abominable folly of the war in Iraq.  But then he disappointed us with his stand against the health care legislation because “it didn’t go far enough.” . . .A classic case of allowing the Perfect be the enemy of the Good. Or of the Better-than-Nothing. A chance to advance civilization comes around only once every fifteen or twenty years; don’t let it slip through your fingers because it ain’t perfect.

And now this bizarre resignation: for medical, or political, or personal reasons? I hope the doctor’s reports turn out to be good news for him. But as for all his bad news, the blame lies with Eric Massa. These wounds are self-inflicted. True, he accepted limited responsibility in the coded admissions about not “living up to his own standards.” Which only makes his subsequent ranting at environmental or political pressures seem more like attempts at deflection or dissemblance. Sadly, in this strange behavior and abandonment of his post, he has disappointed many, many people who had given him their support and trust. What emerges with each rambling interview is an intuited truth, disconnected from his admissions and protestations; a truth purposely unspoken. This exercise in deception is the saddest act to witness: an aware, worldly man so unable to come face-to-face with his own self-knowledge.

I didn’t know what to do with the bumper sticker. . .it was laden with so much history and personal investment, I couldn’t just throw it away.