Got Epiphany?

Epiphany is one of my favorite words. It conveys melody, magic, and meaning all at once. It pops off the tongue and into the ears with alacrity, just as an epiphany itself should pop off this mortal planet and into the eyes with alacrity. (It is a wonder that in an age of baby girls named Uniqué and Tiffany and even Khaleesi we do not have more Epiphanys.) Epiphany’s natural home is in religion, where I first encountered it as a communicant and later studied it as a seminarian. It has such a distinctive definition in religion…the divine becoming manifest…that there’s a holy day to mark it…the day the Christ child, as son of God, was introduced to the three magi. It has since been appropriated by other human undertakings to connote a sudden awareness. Even in science--where an epiphany is practically the exact opposite of the scientific method—we often hear how a discovery was the result of a light going on, which is just another way of saying epiphany. That’s a lovely bit of irony, but there are fields of human endeavor which really have no business throwing around the word epiphany. For instance sports, where over-educated announcers may claim that a baseball pitcher experienced an epiphany throwing his slider. Or in economics where a hyperventilating Jim Cramer might declare that the market experienced an epiphany in broad sell-offs. And surely not in politics, the least epiphany-appropriate realm of all. Yet there was Joe Biden this week profaning the word by predicting that “the thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. … You will see an epiphanyoccur among many of my Republican friends.” I know that given his history of past campaign gaffes, there are probably worse ones to come out of his mouth in the months ahead…but this one was a doozy, especially for an old altar boy and career politician like Joe. If the three magi had been Joe’s Republican friends, they would have looked at the baby Jesus and said, “We’ll wait to confirm and come back when he performs miracles.” And then when they watched him change water to wine and raise the dead, they would’ve said, “We’re going to hold off until we see him crucified.” And even after that, Senators McConnell and Cornyn and hysteric Lindsey Graham would’ve insisted on sticking their dirty little hands in his wound. That is not an epiphany. That is banging your head against a brick wall. This is not the first time Biden has underestimated the challenge of putting the country back together again. Faced with the same intransigence, obstruction and outright hostility from his Republican friends in the 2012 campaign he expressed the belief that after the election when he and Obama had won, the Republican “fever” would break and a new dawn of bipartisan legislative achievement would dawn with a grand "A-ha!". It’s baffling and frightening to think that someone this naïve is the leading candidate to try and pull the nation out of its downward spiral.  In the wake of Biden’s embrace of Pollyannaism, I had a day of TV watching, which began with a 60 Minutes segment on The Restorative Justice Project, a program from the University of Wisconsin for bringing convicted criminals and their victims together for the sake of reconciliation. It is quite amazing to watch a woman whose brother was killed by a drunk driver ask for his forgiveness or a woman shot in the head and disabled for life become emotional support of the man who did it to her. Neither of these stories includes epiphanies. There is a long process of letter writing, phone calling and mediating involved before the two ever meet. And then the meetings take place over years before anything approaching peace of mind becomes possible. On a small, one-to-one scale, it is reminiscent of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.At the end of the day we watched a film entitled The Fortunate Man. Although it is based on Danish author Henrik Pontoppidan’s 1917 Nobel prize-winning 8-part novel, the main character Peter Sidenius embodies many of the attributes of Joe Biden’s Republican friends and the political party they represent. Sidenius goes off into the world as a resentful, stubborn, entitled, arrogant, self-absorbed, win-at-all-costs narcissist. At a pivotal point in his life, he remarks, “When one has found himself, God is superfluous.” He is a god unto himself without need or concern for the human virtues of charity, cooperation, or compassion. Think of him as a precursor to Howard Roark, Ayn Rand's uber-individualist hero of The Fountainhead, and you see why I didn't have to stretch much to make him an embodiment of modern Republicanism. 

And no epiphany to be found here either. It takes eight volumes to trace his character arc in the novel and four hours in the film. In the end his smallness, casual meanness and take-no-prisoners will-to-win leads to his downfall. The story ends on a grace note, but only his humiliation, suffering and alienation make him worthy of it.  

That should, I think, apply to Joe Biden's Republican friends. We will be lucky if we get through this existential Constitutional crisis they've brought down on us without bloodshed. I get more pessimistic on that score every day. But if we are to survive it with a minimum of violence, it is going to take monumental pain, imagination and courage to resurrect our national spirit and identity. As much as I love the word, if your plan for achieving all that is to rely on an epiphany, you’re really not up to the task.