The Republican concept of failing upwards
In the Showtime documentary on The Eagles, Joe Walsh recalls how he started out playing in bands as a teenager. He explains how bad he and his first band were, but notes that the great value of going through that experience was that “you learned how to suck in public.” Basically, his feeling was that if you’re that bad and you know you’re that bad and you can live through the embarrassment and agony of it and not let it kill you, then somehow gather up enough fortitude to get back onstage the next night and risk going through it all over again, you may just improve a little bit that next night. That’s when you start to realize that there’s a possibility that you might actually be able to be good one day.
When I hear that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is going to run for governor of Arkansas and that Kayleigh McEnany may go to work for Fox News (there’s a big surprise), it reminds me of that Joe Walsh story. Not that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Kayleigh McEnany, and Sean Spicer knew that they were beastly and abysmal, suffered on account of it, but pushed through until they improved. Obviously, none of that was the case. It was the Joe Walsh story inverted. We who were on the receiving end – the press and the public – were the ones who were undergoing the learning process. We were being forced to develop a tolerance for vomit-inducing, press water-boardings in lieu of a White House press briefing that resembles what Jen Psaki now delivers.
I have never known how it was that the White House Press Corps sitting in that briefing room for those bullying, contempt-filled, force-feedings of propaganda and lies could restrain themselves from pitching styrofoam drink cups, wadded-up lunch bags, or anything else at hand that wasn’t nailed down toward any of those “practitioners.” Let’s call them that. But, as has always been the case, Republicans prey upon and bank on the decency and respect for decorum that non-Republicans possess and so civility prevailed.
I first heard the term “failing upward” as a characterization of Richard Nixon’s career. How could this person, given the failures he’d already experienced in politics and who, like Ronald Reagan, like George W. Bush, and like Donald Trump, so many people strongly disliked and distrusted, rise to the level to which they aspired.
It’s what Republicans have trained us for: to expect mediocrity at the very best, and everything below mediocrity as the norm. And we’ve all seen what the new low is.
Just as Joe Walsh got better, we need to get better, but not at accepting the inevitable upward mobility of their failure, but in refusing to stand for it.
As for the thought of Sarah Huckabee Sanders as the governor of a state, I can only say that I know very little – practically nothing – with respect to the state of Arkansas and its inner workings and I find Sarah Huckabee Sanders so objectionable a figure that I dislike even admitting her into my consciousness, so I’m at a loss for words on the topic.
As for the thought of Kayleigh McEnany joining Fox News, the best comment I can think of is this: last week Jim Carrey released a few more pieces of artwork which he uses to consistently and deservingly kneecap Trump and Republicans. It included a particularly great piece that depicts a doctor in an exam room with a troubled look on his face speaking to a patient. There’s an X-ray image of the patient’s head on a screen that the doctor is pointing to. The X-ray shows the presence of a large mass that happens to be the blue and white Fox News logo. The doctor tells the patient “it’s brain cancer.” If Kayleigh McEnany goes to Fox, she’ll be right where she belongs.
