CT Blue

Tonight we held a public hearing for our Charter Revision Commission, meaning we heard from citizens who has suggestions for possible charter changes. One speaker, who was otherwise quite reasonable, admonished us to “keep politics out of it”. This has become a standard piece of rhetoric in the debased —(get ready, here it comes)–politics of the present day.

I guess we can keep politics out of it. I suppose when the Catholic Church holds a Council, it can keep religion out of it. I suppose when we discuss global warming we can keep science out of it. In either case, it’s not likely much useful would be accomplished.

Here’s the first definition of politics in my dictionary:

The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs.

I can’t come to any conclusion but that if we took politics out of our deliberations, we might as well disband, there being nothing left to discuss.

But, of course, that’s not what the speaker meant. A politician himself, he was using the word in a prejorative, dirty word sort of sense-the sense in which people use it when they say that the don’t get involved in “politics” (being much too good to sully themselves), preferring to leave it to scum like Bush and Rove. We see the results all around us.

There’s another dirty word sense of the word. Politics is what people I disagree with do. When my opponent takes a position, he or she is engaging in politics or is being political, when I take a position I am being or doing something else. Curiously, there doesn’t seem to be a word for what I am doing when I’m not being political, or if there is it varies because it doesn’t come easily to mind. Whatever it is that I do when I’m not being political, it is far nobler than “politics”.

For myself, I fully intend to be political during my time on the Commission. I think politics, rightly practiced, is a noble calling. I have decided political views and I have no intention of abandoning them for whatever it is one abandons ones views for in order not be be political.