http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-weary-of-relativity.html?ref=opinionWeary of Relativity
MAY 23, 2015
SAY anything critical about a person or an organization and brace for this pushback: At least he, she or it isn’t as bad as someone or something else.
Sure, the Roman Catholic Church hasn’t done right by women. But those Mormons have more to answer for!
Yes, there are college presidents with excessive salaries. But next to the football and basketball coaches on many campuses, they’re practically monks!
Set the bar low enough and all blame is deflected, all shame expunged. Choose the right points of reference and behold the alchemy: naughty deeds into humdrum conformity. Excess into restraint. Sinners into saints.
Arkansas into Elysium.
I mention Arkansas because of a classic bit of deflection performed last month by one of its senators, Tom Cotton. He was rationalizing a so-called religious freedom bill that would have permitted the state’s merchants to deny services to people based on their sexual orientation. And he said that it was important to “have a sense of perspective.”
“In Iran,” he noted, “they hang you for the crime of being gay.”
I see. If you’re not hauling homosexuals to the gallows or stoning them, you’re ahead of the game, and maybe even in the running for a humanitarian medal.
Like I said, you can set the bar anywhere you want.
And you can justify almost anything by pointing fingers at people who are acting likewise or less nobly.
Naturally, this brings us to the current presidential campaign.
Earlier this month Hillary Clinton not only made peace with the “super PACs” that will be panhandling on her behalf, but also signaled that she’d do her vigorous part to round up donations for one of them, Priorities USA.
She did this despite much high-minded talk previously about taming the influence of money in politics.
She did this without the public hand-wringing of Barack Obama when he reluctantly embraced his super PAC, which happened at a later point in his 2012 re-election effort.
She did this because Jeb Bush and other potential Republican rivals were either doing or poised to do this.
And she did this, no doubt, because of the Koch brothers and their political network’s stated goal of raising and spending nearly $1 billion on behalf of Republicans during this election cycle. For Democrats, “the Koch brothers” is at once a wholly legitimate motivation and an all-purpose exoneration, a boogeyman both real and handy, permitting all manner of mischief by everybody else. True, I’m vacuuming up money like an Electrolux on Adderall. But in a Koch-ian context, I’m a sputtering Dustbuster.
Democrats tell themselves that they have a ways to go before they sink as low as Republicans do. Republicans tell themselves that none of their machinations rival the venal braid of conflicting interests and overlapping agendas in the Clintons’ messy world.
The Clintons tell themselves that their assiduous enrichment since the end of Bill’s presidency still doesn’t put them in a league with the fat cats whom they’ve met and mingled with, and that they earned their wealth rather than inheriting or shortchanging shareholders for it.
Other politicians tell themselves that if the Clintons are lapping at the trough so rapaciously, surely they’re entitled to some love and lucre of their own.
When it comes to money, almost everybody looks up — not down or sideways — to determine how he or she is doing and what he or she might be owed. There’s always someone higher on the ladder and getting a whole lot more, always someone who establishes a definition of greed that you fall flatteringly short of.
One titan’s bonanza becomes the next titan’s yardstick, and the pay of the nation’s top executives spirals ever further out of control.
In the warped context of their compensation packages, the $8.5 million that Richard Levin, the former president of Yale University, received as an “additional retirement benefit” after he strode out the door in 2013 probably struck some of the enablers who gave it to him — and perhaps Levin himself — as unremarkable.
Never mind that Yale is a nonprofit institution or that the values of higher education are supposed to diverge from those of Wall Street. Now Lee Bollinger, the current president of Columbia, can feel modest about the nearly $3.4 million package that he received for one recent year.
THAT magnitude of compensation didn’t dissuade him from musing last week about how completely content he and his wife were back when their apartment hosted roaches and dinner was Lipton noodle soup. He recalled that distant past in remarks to graduating seniors, whom he urged, without any evident irony, to address “persisting inequalities, especially of wealth.”
And if Bollinger can feel modest, Drew Faust, the president of Harvard, can feel positively ascetic: She makes less than a third of what he does. Of course she supplements that by sitting on the corporate board of Staples, an arrangement that some Harvard students and faculty have understandably questioned and quibbled with.
Then there’s the moral jujitsu that American voters have become especially adept at in these polarized times. Many of them unreservedly exalt their party’s emissary — and inoculate him or her from disparagement — simply because he or she represents the alternative to someone from the other side. Being the lesser of evils is confused with being virtuous, though it’s a far, far cry from that.
President Obama stumbles or falls and is pardoned by all-or-nothing partisans on the grounds that he’s not George W. Bush. Those same partisans wave off any naysaying about his foreign policy by bringing up the invasion of Iraq. And the bungled rollout of Obamacare? A mere wisp of inconvenience in comparison with the botched response to Hurricane Katrina. Everything’s relative.
Except it’s not.
There are standards to which government, religion and higher education should be held. There are examples that politicians and principled businesspeople should endeavor to set, regardless of whether their peers are making that effort. There’s right and wrong, not just better or worse.
And there’s a word for recognizing and rising to that: leadership. We could use more of it.
