I never knew Paul Wellstone, never met him, never interviewed him. I once saw him walking down Grand Avenue, alone, in a knit shirt and short pants. I was driving by with a friend, and I said, "There’s Paul Wellstone," and I was a little taken aback when he looked up and waved, apparently hearing me, even though it was a private conversation inside a moving car. Inside every loudspeaker is a powerful magnet–that’s the image I still have of Paul Wellstone.
I liked him okay. I think I voted for him in 1990, when he most resembled a third-party candidate. I vote for third parties mostly on the principle that our system desperately needs to give real representation to minority parties and interests, which it still doesn’t do–except through the wacky, sometimes naive filibusters of a guy like Paul. I was both proud and embarrassed when he was the sole vote of dissent in the Gulf War back in 1990–and president Bush allegedly asked, "Who is this little chickenshit?" Frankly, that was the last time he really impressed me–which says more about me than it does about him. (That is: I apparently stopped paying attention more than a decade ago).
Even if I wasn’t paying attention, it still seems to me the Democrats never embraced Wellstone in life the way they have done in death. This probably has to do with the fact that he has become an accidental but convenient symbol for all that the party is not, maybe never was, but sometimes wishes it would be. One thing is for sure–he was not a New Democrat. Clinton, Gore, Lieberman; these guys held Wellstone at arm’s length. If anything, he was Old School Democrat… a podium-hammering man with the strength of conviction to continue the highly uncool but traditional role of speaking for the voiceless, the powerless, the unrepresented. He was P.C. thirty years before the odious phrase was coined.
Or was he? I’ve grown mighty tired, in a very short time, of all the disingenuous tributes. Aside from the normal extravagance and sentimentality that writers afford themselves in times of national turmoil, I am highly suspicious of critics who suddenly make a show of wiping away their crocodile tears for the man. It’s just as bad as having to listen to nit-witted conservatives, lifelong enemies, damning him with the faint praise of being "a man of principle who believed in his [essentially flawed] convictions."
But writers are more devious than that. Writers are fundamentally not doers but watchers. Inevitably this makes us critics, in the worst, arm-chair sense of the word. We are a scurrilous and spineless bunch who are the self-appointed experts we’re constantly affecting to decry. There was nothing easier in the world than sitting back and taking shots at Wellstone–or any other public figure, for that matter.
What does a writer "do" compared to a public servant or even a rock star? He sits on a chair, at a keyboard, wrestling with the language, and that’s the end of it. He hides behind the conceit that more direct involvement in the world will corrupt his work. He says he would have gladly engaged the public man, personally and professionally, wishes he would have–Oh, how they might have wrestled over the vagaries of public policy!–a few days too late.
What a writer creates is a page full of words. That is his creative act, and it’s a tough one, to be sure, but it’s not really much in the grand scheme of things. Writers, I’m afraid, are not nearly as evolved as lots of other human beings, and whatever we have to say about the passing of a person like Paul Wellstone should be looked upon with the same scrutiny you all save for us the rest of the time.
Just so: I’d prefer not to live in a world where Paul Wellstone is considered radical. More than that, I’d prefer not to live in a world where good and noble people–someone’s mother, father, daughter, son–simply fall from the sky and leave our lives so brutally fast, with so much unfinished business.
The rest is moot. May they rest in peace.
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