Congressional Sanctimony Theater

Just recently, the CEOs of the American “Big Three” automakers came before a congressional committee hearing to make the case for receiving huge, steaming hunks of taxpayer money to bail out their rapidly-failing businesses. Not the first time, not the last, certain.

What rapidly became the main object of this hearing? Allowing the individuals who were members of the congressional committee to play “My Righteous Dudgeon’s Bigger than Yours” as most of them used their free television exposure to excoriate the CEOs for the maximal sin of using their corporation’s private aircraft to make the trip to Washington.

Get that – they used their own transport rather than a domestic airline (or railroad? More on that anon) or road transport. These are, even if failing, huge corporations that have had their own aircraft (owned or leased, I don’t know) for decades, to service more efficiently the needs of the executive corps as they rode herd on their far-flung empire. These costs have been sunk for a long, long time, and the use of this corporate resource is likely as natural to the CEOs as franking a brag sheet every quarter is to the members of the panel.

These sanctimonious panelists seemed more worried about the appearance of this “heinous” act than the ostensible subject of the hearing, being whether or not private companies deserve to stick a siphon hose into the public purse just because they’re really, really big. Or maybe they were just worried about their street-sanctimony “cred” and in exploiting this opportunity to add to their personal highlight reels to impress the voters back home. And to proclaim what kind of car they drive and how old it is.

In the end, though some sort of waffling decision was reached viz. the car companies’ desire for largess and the hoops they need to swarm through to “deserve” such, the hearing played more as a piece of theater than as an actual attempt to forge a new policy path or uphold principles (whether congress critters actually have defined principles beyond the overarching need to gain and retain power is a subject for another time).

The panelists obviously wanted to spend time making themselves look better and their subjects back home feel better by being seen to spew scorn and chant “shame, shame” to the designated national villains of the week. They competed to see how much more “in sorrow, not in anger” they could appear, while disallowing any possibility of recourse or retort from the objects of their passionate performances.

I’m not necessarily defending the CEOs against all opprobrium - certainly not. They’re the ones with the ultimate responsibility, after all, for these huge, far-flung manufacturers’ empires and the immense, almost unimaginable amounts of cash and capital they embody. That responsibility for such vast masses of cash and cash equivalents (which all come from people voluntarily giving the corporations their money to husband and increase by buying their stocks) is why they get the really big bucks and the perks that come with a position of that gravity. They’ve overseen the current slide into the hole they’re all in by (a) not being objective in their analysis of the likely changes to their market and (b) jamming both hands into their money piles and raking it in for all they’re worth. (CEO overpay is a subject for another time, too.) There’s plenty there to discuss and debate about: legitimate lapses in judgment and incorrect decisions that could affect thousands upon thousands of people as directly as a lost job and as indirectly as a contraction of their investment portfolio.

That didn’t seem to the primary point of this gathering, though, as I’ve pointed out. Now, anent railroads: if using a tool you have available makes you appear worse to your inquisitors and drives them to a public “image-flaying” (or an attempt to do so), would it be better to dress the part of shamed supplicant from the beginning? If flying a private aircraft is this horrible, would flying a commercial carrier be that much better? (“You make cars, don’t you? Why don’t you trust your own product to carry you, like the struggling people of this great country are forced to do every day [although they should be riding eco-friendly mass transit, of course]?”) Then, if commercial air travel isn’t contrite enough, should they have ridden a bus or a train? To take it to an extreme, how about if these men had ridden to the meeting by hopping boxcars, and showed up looking like “Freddie the Freeloader,” complete with toes sticking out of shoes, torn clothing, and the aroma of forced poverty about them?

Would that have made it better, or would the panelists have turned and made that the subject of ridicule and called it “. . . an obvious and transparent attempt to gain the undeserved sympathy of the public”?

Frankly, the self-centered thirst for image-building displayed by these our “betters” is as unsurprising as it is disgusting. Most hearings, I believe, serve the panelists more than the truth for this same reason - the only thing important to them is their position of power followed closely by their being seen to be in that position. Thus and ever shall be, amen.

And we forget it at our everlasting sorrow. Unfortunately, many people in the nation seem to like being sorrowful.

And that makes me shake my head in sorrow.