Character v. Agenda
Another post written by our guest writer, Elizabeth Moon.
Everyone has an agenda–a plan of action to accomplish a goal. They want to lower or raise taxes. They want to favor labor or management, public health or economic health. Having an agenda is not evil: it’s normal. We gather with people who have the same or similar political agendas.
Everyone has a character, too. Character determines how someone attempts to carry out their agenda. Someone who has the same overt agenda as you may go at it in a way that damages the values of that agenda. They may hide their real agenda to make use of your resources. They may threaten violence or promise faerie gold. Or just lie.
Forty years ago, when we moved to Williamson County, in midsummer 1979, it was a Democratic stronghold just beginning to fray with the influx of high-tech Californians and New Yorkers. Our county government was all Democrats, including the highly regarded District Attorney. Over the next few years, the GOP took aim at one office after another, from school boards to county commissioners, sheriff and the D.A. The D.A. had a pretty normal DA agenda: lower the crime rate, get the really bad guys indicted and into jail, and do it economically. He had another agenda, which he didn’t mention: stay D.A. and then run for judge and then become the power broker in the county.
As the Republican tide rose, he chose his moment to switch parties very carefully. He ran as a Democrat when he would have a narrow win, and then–once sworn in–declared in a “more in sorrow than in anger” voice that his conscience made him become a Republican…and had two years to make more Republican friends and win as a Republican. Good politics, if staying elected is your primary agenda…not the agenda of either party. Democratic voters, like me, who had voted for him because he was a Democrat, were blindsided (and in my case furious) when he thumbed his nose at us by changing parties.
This D.A. pleased Republicans by constantly emphasizing that he was “tough on crime.” And he could be just as underhanded in his prosecutorial duties as in an election. A man’s wife was brutally murdered, and the police (understandably) looked at him. The D.A. needed a quick conviction on this one and despite contrary evidence, he pushed hard to get the trial and then–figuring he’d never be caught–withheld exculpatory evidence from everybody–the defense, the jurors, the judge. (Some of you have suddenly perked up–you know about this fellow.) His victim spent 25 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, losing his son as well as his dead wife, and the D.A. prospered and indeed became a respected (for awhile) judge.
It wasn’t just a mistake, either. I was on a grand jury when this D.A. was still a D.A., and realized partway through the process of indicting and not indicting various people that the D.A. was herding us like cattle through a squeeze chute with all the skills he had and we didn’t. He controlled what evidence we heard about (in one case I knew it wasn’t everything.) His skillful use of voice and facial expression and gesture cut out the one or two mavericks and convinced the rest we were just too idealistic, poor little innocents.
And later, after he was found out and and “punished” (10 days in jail with 5 of them waived, losing his law license) he came to a book fair in Georgetown I also attended, and I watched him lie like a rug about the KKK’s current activities. That was in 2015, or early 2016, when those who follow such things knew the KKK had been growing again in importance. He’d written a book on the KKK in Williamson County: he had to know he was lying.
Character and agenda are on two different axes of behavior. A candidate for office, a person in office, may say all the right things where your political agenda and theirs run side by side…but if their character is bad, you better deal with them with a very long-handled spoon.
I had no idea that was in your background. Thanks for sharing.
(Now I know where some of your courtroom drama comes from.)
1“I voted for him because he was a Democrat.”
First mistake.
2I’ve had the benefit of a very…um…eclectic upbringing. Unfortunately, the last two concussions affected my memory, and not all of it has come back, because things I witnessed as a young person had roots in the oil bidness, law, Texas border history, and some other interesting bits. Some of you may be old enough to have heard of “subterranean trespass” and much older legal actions about fracking…some of you may have heard of a lawyer named Judge Thompson from the Valley, Mayfair Minerals, Delhi Taylor, the Murchison brothers in Dallas and their dealings…and surely some of you will have heard of Percy Foreman, the famous defense lawyer in Houston at one point. (Foreman gave a talk to the women of my residential college when I was at Rice.)
Back in my childhood and young womanhood, nobody thought a quiet, obedient girl sitting somewhere reading had ears to hear and brain to think with, but there I was, mental ears stretched wide and gathering future material like one of those mist nets set up in a forest to catch every bird and small thing that passes by. I didn’t know I’d be a writer and that what I was learning would eventually emerge in stories.
3I don’t remember ever hearing it called subterranean trespass, but in the early eighties when we were tripping pipe on a well where we utilized directional drilling, we figured some landowner was getting scewed out of their mineral rights.
4Ormond–The alternative seemed worse at the time…The Red Tide was rising. But yes, it was a mistake to believe he would stay Dem for another term. I had, at the time, already voted for Republican candidates in some earlier elections (and the complicated politics behind *that* isn’t relevant here.)
P.P.– I suspect that by the early eighties, in a completely different political climate, the old decision had been ousted by newer legislation, challenge in another trial leading to a new ruling, or the short attention span of people who had a reason to ignore it. It was called subterranean trespass in the case, and my mother prepared the exhibits that made it clear to the court: yes, some landowner was indeed getting screwed out of their mineral rights and another one got the $$$. South Texas was a patchwork of oil leases, so adjoining property could easily mean one oil company was also getting screwed.
My mother started working for Mayfair in 1954, end of my third grade year, and if I recall correctly (which I may not) the original case was in court before 1960. A lot of things changed in the next 20 years.
5The corruption of Republicans is unlimited! It is also diabolical in the way that Republicans manipulate their weak minded minions!
6I look at it as means and ends. The ends don’t justify the means. In most cases, the means reveal the real ends.
7Dan Smith: Corruption exists not only among Republicans, but among any group seeking power, wealth, prestige, without an equal desire to seek justice for all, and hold themselves to account. Without the ability to see their own faults, and not just take pride in their virtues.
Solzhenitsyn said “The line between good and evil runs right down the middle of every human heart and shifts back and forth…” We are all vulnerable to being corrupted, and we are all capable of accusing others of corruption when they’re not. Our fingers naturally point outward.
(You will notice that I, too, am quite imperfect, and as eager to be judgmental rather than just, when considering the corruption of this president.)
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