As with many people this last weekend, I encountered something about the 9/11 attacks. My wife and I watched the movie, Worth, with Michael Keaton as the NY mediating lawyer, Ken Feinberg, whose job it was as a “Special Master,” to come up with the massive financial compensation package for the victims of the twin towers terrorist attack. We enjoyed the movie, but a line in it so stood out that I found myself pondering its resonance with the current state of America.

In a re-creation of the discussion on how to proceed in awarding compensation to the 9/11 victims, one of the lawyers at the table observes, “Pretty soon somebody’s going to have to do the vulgar work.” That line crystallized the monumental challenge the Special Master faced determining who was entitled to receive compensation and how much they were entitled to receive. I imagined the vulgar balancing act of objectivity and subjectivity that is crushingly inevitable. In the end, that vulgar number was seven billion dollars allocated among 5540 people via some calculated formula.

Life is filled with vulgarities as when the funeral home director tries to up-sell a casket to grieving relatives of the deceased. It is, after all, how funeral homes make their living. It is true; we don’t like to see how the sausage is made. We get offended or squeamish when we are forced to see it which may be why twenty years passed before someone made a movie about the wrenching process of compensating the 9/11 victims. This brings me to the current political situation in America.

The reason Trump detractors hated him and still do is that Trump is the vulgar still encouraging the deplorable. Trump forced Democrats to put on hip waders to protect their swamp. His supporters were ready to follow someone who would actually wade into the swamp and drain it. On the other hand, Democrats didn’t and don’t relish getting soiled. Both my wife and I have similar liberal friends who prefer their politics with tea and crumpets so they get their news from NPR where “all things” are considered. When they get together, they elbow & fist-bump their covid greetings and laugh—gag me.

People on the conservative side have stronger stomachs for what it takes to restore America. People on the liberal side don’t, so they let Antifa and BLM anarchists do their wet work for them. Biden and Fauci now have displaced Trump as the ones causing Democrats to put on their hip waders, what with Afghanistan, the insane covid messaging, and $3.5 trillion in spending. The Biden administration has forced their supporters to notice how their sausage is made, and it is gross and it smells. I don’t think Democrats anticipated this any more than they anticipated President Lyndon Johnson blowing it over the Viet Nam war.

In the end, the repellent “sausage making” at the core of the left’s political strategy is also the left’s biggest problem. Their slogan, by any means necessary, is coldly obscene, but it also contains a subtext: that the militant, political jackboots of the Democrat party will do the vulgar work so basic liberals can remain above the fray watching Rachel Maddow and PBS, put up virtuous yard signs, and leave their hip waders hanging next to the garage refrigerator. The problem is every day Biden and Fauci make it harder and harder to do that.

Photo credit: kitmasterbloke (cropped) CC BY 2.0 license

Spruce Fontaine is the pen name of an artist and retired college art instructor.

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