Tommy Tuberville teaches me how ideology cultivates irresponsibility

Looking at how newly elected Senator Tommy Tuberville has handled his first solo controversy as a member of Congress is instructive to seeing what's wrong with today's political right. When asked what he thought about one of his screwballier colleagues, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, he deftly dodged the question by announcing, in effect, it was snowing too much for him to read the news. 

"I haven't even looked at what all she's done," he said. "Travel in this weather it's been a little rough looking at any news or whatever."

Now one online friend read that precious quote and concluded Tommy Tuberville is an idiot, that he possibly couldn't read regardless of the weather. But I think that's wrong. He's many things, but he ain't dumb. But lots of smart people, when it comes to politics, end up saying and doing dumb things. It was probably in service of not saying something stupidly inflammatory that Tommy played deer in the headlights and sputtered out such a lame dodge. It was poorly played, but the instinct is both understandable and revealing.

He's been a very successful football coach. That means he knows how to motivate, how draw out personal excellence from young men, how to teach athletes to think strategically. That's a wonderful skillset. But it doesn't relate to his current job, which is writing laws, overseeing the management of government by the executive branch, vetting political appointees for personal competence, comprehending and successfully communicating the critical issues of the nation.

He doesn't seem to understand the concept of public service, how to look out for the greater good.  That's the real tragedy of today's Republican party. First they doubled down on an ideology of governing over a duty to look out for the public good. That quickly led to a desire for power and a personal discomfort when the lack of control meant they couldn't service their ideology. So now they've devolved into a love of power for its own sake. Hypocrisy and horrible social consequences don't matter to them anymore. They want to win, to control, to destroy whatever stands in the way of their winning. And failing to win causes them psychological dissonance. 

Many literally can't summon cohesive arguments to express their views. That's why they rely on slogans, ridicule of others, and the smug gratification of a [b]#winning[/b] mentality. Our country is in a pickle today, a horrible deadly pickle, and it's primarily because one half of our political spectrum has taken a nosedive into the shallow waters of ideology. To be fair, I think there's a growing share of lefties also prizing ideology over logic. But I don't have time to talk about San Francisco un-naming its public schools today. 

I am a Jones

For years I've not known what I am--not generationally speaking, that is. At times I've been known to even say, with some pontification, that I was born on the cusp of the Baby Boom generation and Generation X. I joined the race in 1963, at the tag end of the post-WW2 baby explosion, but just at the start of the post modern zeitgeist. I'm too young to have protested Vietnam, but too old to get anything more than my ears pierced.

I was an American without a convenient marketing tag.

It turns out, I was not alone. I was part of a lost half generation--Generation Jones. Born between 1956 and 1965, we were the target audience for the first run of Schoolhouse Rock, but got out of college before dudes with pony tails was cool. We knew driving a VW was crunchy, but didn't get tattoos unless we joined the navy or had a midlife crisis after the first divorce. We have a dim recollection of Hef once being relevant, but still can't get used to the fact that he's so freakishly old. Hippies were passe before we got to high school, but the whole grunge scene came too late to get us dirty.

We're Generation Jones, though our years don't quite add up to a whole generation. Up till now, we didn't have a stereotype, or even a sense of being part of a real generational shift in history. We just had a vague 80s sense of not being able to keep up with feeding our empty, hungering Joneses. But that was before. Now we not only have a marketing tag, we even have our own president. And he's a lot cooler than yours.