Them's my sentiments

National Review, March 30, 1992 by James Bowman

WHAT do you run on, America? Well, as "Rocket" Morton of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band used to say, we run on beans. We run on laser beans. The laser beans of sentiment keep our nation's psychic thrusters powered. In the absence of an established church, sentimentality is the nearest thing we have to a national religion-one which even provides us with a de facto Test Act if we would but use it. To wit: any candidate for political office who adheres to the national faith should be instantly disqualified. That would rid us of Bill Clinton and George Bush at a stroke.

Because I go to a lot of movies, I am perhaps more aware of the place of sentimentality in our national life than most people. In the current hit Fried Green Tomatoes, for example, it fairly drips from the celluloid and gums up the projector. Such films are designed to make us "feel good about ourselves," which is to say they invite self-congratulation. Our sensibilities, we are assured, have been properly arranged because we hate the wife-beating Ku Klux Klansman (we might feel out of sorts sometimes but we would never go that far) and we love the gutsy restaurateuses who kill him.

Such feelings don't, cost us anything. Sentiment; by its nature is cheap. We, may indulge ourselves in it to our hearts' content and then forget it when the movie is over. In ordinary people, sentimentality is funny or revolting, like the Mother/Daughter Beauty Pageant in which the contestants are invited to "express their feelings for each other" on national television. In the great, however, it is a terrifying vice, characteristic of fools-like Shakespeare's lung Lear, whose inability to distinguish between love and sentiment leads to disastrous misjudgments-or tyrants. Caligula was sentimental about his horse, Hitler about his dogs.

In short, sentimentality is feeling divorced from action. It is the first cousin of hypocrisy. But where the hypocrite deceives others, the sentimentalist also deceives himself with worthy feelings that he is unable or unwilling to act on. Both Clinton and Bush are by this definition rank sentimentalists. They have the right feelings but somehow they have never learned that claiming credit for them without doing anything about them is itself discreditable.

Look at Clinton's now-famous letter to Colonel Holmes. What stands out is the emphasis on feelings. He attempts to win the colonel's sympathy by telling him that the latter's "saving me from the draft" came at a time "when I was as low as I have ever been"; he writes that "the anguish and loss of my self-regard and self-confidence" that came from accepting the draft deferment led to compulsive eating and loss of sleep. Finally, he says that he had written a letter requesting to be drafted and then didn't send it. Did he expect to get partial credit for having some decent impulses which he never did anything about?

If after 22 years he were ashamed of his youthful sentimentalism it would be something, but. his refusal to apologize for it now suggests that he still believes his "anguish" over the war makes up for his actual behavior in it. George Bush, by contrast, has grown into sentimentality. When he claimed that his management of the economy would produce thirty million new jobs, it was clear that he had no plan of action actually to bring this about. When he announced his intention to be "the education President," he meant that he was going to say-very loudly-that he cared a lot about education but that he was going to leave it to others to figure out how to do anything about it.

Is it any wonder that such a man can now say that he "never took the pledge" not to raise taxes? It turns out that "read my lips" was intended far more literally than anyone supposed at the time: the good feelings never proceeded farther from his heart than his lips. In New Hampshire he showed that his campaign strategy was to stress his sympathetic feelings. Repeatedly he assured audiences that if he could leave New Hampshiremen with one message it would be this: We care. We care. Privileged as I am to be President, Barbara and I are not isolated from the feelings of people in this state that are hurting. And that I think is an important message. Friends have to know, and I think it's important to the people that are hurting that their President knows and the President cares. And in this case the President is going to do something about it. Like young Clinton putting the letter in his pocket, Bush shows in his feeble assurance at the end that he knows there ought to be some connection between feeling and doing. But it is the feeling that he wishes to take credit for; as for the doing, well, we just have to trust him.

HERE ARE some words to live by: Never, trust a sentimentalist. If his actions are untrue to his professed feelings, he won't even know that he has betrayed you. Sentimental politicians, however, get away with such betrayals time after time because we are sentimentalists too, with the sentimental patriotism of the Right, or the sentimental "compassion" of the Left, or the sentimental guff about "self-esteem" of the squishy middle. We will deserve what we get if we persist in asking our politicians to show that "we care" without its costing anyone anything.