As Donald Trump was draping himself in the corpse of the Republican Party, Ted Cruz chose to personify a moment of political apocalypse. It was a most astonishing and narcissistic turn of anti-politics. Yet it was aimed to elevate him further. A martyr out of time with a clear vision of 2020.
There has been much talk about the spectacular stage at the convention in Cleveland. At the core of Ted Cruz's trick was how he created the setting for himself. For there appeared with him an unscheduled presence. The Senator evoked the name of Caroline. A girl, issue of the loving hearth, picture of innocence, child of her future, woman of her past.
Of course, she was not physically there on the stage. Just an apparition emergent in the words of Ted Cruz. But we could almost see her there. Calling for protection. For guidance. For solace. In her name Cruz asks "how can anything ever be okay again?"
How, with Caroline at risk, can the true bearers of principle and the party ever be okay again? How can I, Ted Cruz, ever be okay again? As if with the seventh seal in hand, the person many have said should not even have been on the stage begins to unwind the suspension of history. It is not the biblical "about half an hour" filled with silence. It is cool insinuating self-measured timeless speech. A speech of reckoning.
Almost as Ted Cruz ascends to the podium he begins an evocation of Michael Smith. He calls to mind that officer gunned down in Dallas. Just weeks ago. Then he winds back the clock to a minute before midnight. There, Cruz intimates, there was a miracle. He wants us to witness it with him. For as that career policeman embraced his daughter Caroline in fact for the last time, these were his words. "What if this is the last time you ever kiss or hug me?"
This is heart-wrenching in a familiar way. It is a symbolic carriage of family, hearth, innocence, loss, and redemption. Yet, as we are distracted with grief, he loads it with another subtle message. We learn off hand, as if in passing, that Officer Smith had a wife named Heidi, too. If you did not remember Donald Trump's attack on Heidi Cruz you do now.
With this Cruz begins to shade away from conventional protocol. The story of the Smith's ceases to be an anecdote. It becomes an instrument for an almost mystical and deep identification between Cruz himself and the assassinated policeman.
At this point the voice of Ted Cruz comes lower into the vast arena. There is unusual intimacy in it. He is as in confession. Did you know, Cruz urges, that Officer Smith's "daughter Caroline is about the same age as my eldest daughter and happens to share the same name"?
For who stands amid the pulsing machinery of the Republican convention? It is the father of daughter Caroline. And while the refrain is charged with emotion, the speaker is restrained -- indeed at the end he will achieve a laser-like sarcasm. Now, still beginning, he burns with his mission. He holds to it. He searches the crowd with those small eyes. There before him are the ones who should cast votes for him. Yet a larger mass is there to cast him off.
As Ted Cruz repeats the unearthly prescient words of Officer Smith he assumes them like the mantle of a martyr. He is not preaching God and Country now. It is about the Cruz. Oh, how many times will the one from Texas be shot down? This will happen again. Watch. Me. The moment of truth is here.
With the one word Caroline two stories flash together, increasingly entwined in the mind's eye of thousands and millions of listeners. In the body of that word two fathers' fates align. The inexorable tears at the end of innocence make for a passion in the speech that is absent from the speaker. Calibrating Cruz measures between the evil that took a life and the life that "was a testament to devotion." The speech turns tick by tick from a representation of evil to the hard virtue of the saint.
The fathers of Caroline partake in the same devotion. They are not driven by partisanship but by service. Principle bears the weight as they carry the cross. This man -- for already this early in Cruz's speech they are nearly as one -- protected those who mocked him. This man turned the other cheek. "How could anything ever be okay again?"
This is an unexpected masterpiece of political intrigue. And at this point you may want to ask: to whom, for whom, exactly is this question proposed? It has taken only minutes for the story of the Smiths to become the story of Cruz. This is not the familiar course of speechifying. The typical listener will expect the terrible image of one father's death to be a vigorous but ultimately irrelevant anecdote. A crowd-warmer. If, however, you look carefully, you will see that Cruz brings it forward for another purpose. He exploits not the chance occurrence of the officer's murder but the coincidence of those last words to mark out the existential crisis of his own life.
As if in a slow motion that will take the next fifteen minutes to reach its target, the most Machiavellian schemer in American politics today explodes like a suicide bomber. As usual in a drama of critical choice, introspection is what triggers the explosion. "As I thought about what I wanted to say tonight, Michael Smith's story weighed on my heart." While priming the audience for tropes of retribution Cruz veers away. The tragedy is not a call to action. The story, its mystery, becomes motive for further contemplation. "For what if this is the last time?"
Cruz is in confession. The most successful combatant to have held the road to Trump makes a public spectacle of the private act of searching his conscience. We are called to witness as he is called to decide: who will Ted Cruz be? He presents himself to the Republican National Convention for that purpose and that purpose alone. Ted Cruz, Never the "puppy-dog" apprentice. Ted Cruz, the Man of Principle. The Paragon. The True Leader.
Or not. Indeed, Cruz's speaking out is a gamble. His posture tells of an extraordinary single-mindedness. He has looked squarely at his own power to influence the outcome of this and future presidential elections. And this is what he sees.
His calling is martyrdom. He conspires to political resurrection. That is why, in just a few minutes, the biggest loser in the Republican Party brings his speech to this astonishing turn.
What if this is the last time? He offers these words like a mystical incantation. They conflagrate Cruz. He burns with the narcissism of existential choice. He is fired with the political operator's greatest fear: that the moment will pass him by.
But these would be the motives of a nihilist. The martyr cannot appear that way. The Martyred-and-Resurrected-Father-in-Chief for an American revival in 2020 cannot appear that way.
What brings his act back into balance is Caroline. Her innocence is the justification. It elevates him as if a saint. For Caroline, he assures us over and over, and Caroline insures that his choice will not favor the chooser. It is for principle. For goodness. For America. For the future. For our future. For Caroline.
Behind the scenes of this spectacle, of course, Cruz's bet is on his return to dominance. He will have studied paradigms for this pulpit. A suspicion of JFK's "moon" speech lingers in the air. With greater proximity and effect he is conjuring the 2004 Democratic National Convention. That is where Obama's ascent began in earnest. And there is here, too, resonance from the Mason Temple in Memphis, 1968, where Doctor King registered those terrible words the night before he was shot down: "I may not get there with you." For what if this is the last time?
Cruz's contrived intimacy and disguised vision disarm us. In the astonishing scene he paints it comes to seem this way. That the choice before the assembly -- a choice in which everything good is at stake, a choice in which the world ends or begins anew, a choice in which innocence is rescued from degradation -- is not for Donald Trump. Rather the choice is that Ted Cruz is not being nominated by the Republican Party to run for president. And that you, electors, will come to see this as the error of your ways. Rue it in the hereafter. Until 2020.
It is now that canny Trump chooses to make his belligerent homeopathic entrance into the arena. Trump's victory and vengeance is at hand. All the more, vies Cruz. "How," between the speaker and his audience, between Cruz and the Republicans, between the martyr and his America, "can anything ever be okay again?" For what if this is our last time? Perhaps he is also talking about the party now. But it is Cruz on the stump.
The high probability of an irrevocable political death drives Ted Cruz over the edge. Everything emerges from the mysterious question of a martyr to the eager innocence of the ones who will suffer most his death. This is what you heard him say:
What if this right now is our last time? Our last moment to do something for our families and our country. Did we live up to the values we say we believe? Did we do all we really could. That's really what elections should be about. That's why you and millions like you devoted so much time and sacrifice to this campaign. We are fighting not for one particular candidate or one campaign but because each of us wants to be able to tell our kids and grand-kids, our own Carolines, that we did our best for their future and our country.
Although dressed for communion, this is an individual ritual of purifying self-immolation. It begins to work its effect on the crowd. The Cruz bomb is ripping apart the body of the Republican party. They don't feel it quite yet. They are barely beginning to howl. It is -- you have heard of this -- that moment of suspension before the brain catches up with the agony of the mortal wound. Cruz in confession, in the agony of the martyr, the seeker of redemption, broadcasts his true message. This is what you should have heard him say, for he said it:
- What if this right now, at the Republican National Convention, with Trump in ascension, is my last time to stand before you?
- What if this is my last moment to reignite my career by standing in the image of my evangelical religion for the principle of patriotic virtue?
- When I, Ted Cruz, live up to the values I espouse, is it not evident that Donald Trump is the anti-Christ?
- This, my existential moment of conscience, is as reprimand to you; I shift from singular first person back to the plural to draw you with me; I place before you the scorching question did we do all we really could because in this way I recast ethics as a matter of political force; I call on you, brothers, to stand and speak and vote your conscience and do all you really can to defeat Trump.
- While your first sacrifice was not in vain, now save me; witness my martyrdom and make it resurrection...for all of our Carolines.
This is the pivot if not the punch line of the speech. Republican neurons are beginning to snap. And at this point Cruz adds the most American fuel to the fire. It is God and Country now. Or is it?
"Freedom matters."
But look carefully where this goes. He immediately instructs us on "the five most powerful words in the English language." They are not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They are a perfect and ultimate form of narcissism that is brought to boil in the new phrase, the one he is dying to utter:
"I want to be free."
Peer into this. Once again, the subject here is not us. It is the speaker himself. Cruz is in this matter a literalist and we should follow him closely. "Never has that message been more needed than tonight."
Really? Not with Washington at Valley Forge? Not in Nat Turner's Virginia? Not in the street by street and field by field readings of the Emancipation Proclamation? Not at the liberation of Auschwitz? Indeed, it is difficult to imagine when a more meaningless imperative. For what, in Cruz's vision of himself and the world, is the exercise that elevates "I want to be free" just now above all other moments in the history-driving love of freedom?
Cruz stands for the will to not be a "puppy dog." He declares the freedom not to endorse Trump. Indeed, nothing ranks higher for Ted Cruz because nothing ranks higher than the scurvied ambition of Ted Cruz.
Now it is the moment of passing over to the other side. The catcalls and boos well up. Chants of "endorse Trump" arise and thicken. Cruz has armored himself and will not be swayed. He achieves almost Trump-like sarcasm as he allows that "he appreciates the enthusiasm of the delegation from New York." Then he comes to the brutal point. The nomination of Donald Trump is the non-nomination of Ted Cruz, and not the other way round.
We deserve leaders who stand for principle, who unite us all behind shared values, who cast aside anger for love. That is the standard we should expect from everybody. And to those listening, please, don't stay home in November. If you love our country and love your children as much as you know I do, stand and speak and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the constitution.
By now the crowd is pulsing with the anger of the one who does not get his way. Heidi, the martyr's wife, is "briskly escorted out of [the] GOP gathering after a jeering crowd rains down boos on her hubby...hecklers are targeting Heidi with cries of 'Goldman Sachs!'"
Cruz, cutting like a surgeon, inverts the whole picture. He tells in epigraphy the story of his father, a Cuban man likewise wounded by Trump, and shows what it means for the father to become a son and a son to become a father. It is a tale of honor. It is the return of that innocence for which the martyr is making his supreme sacrifice:
"And it is love that I hope will bring comfort to a grieving nine year old in Dallas..."
...there she is! Caroline again! Ted has become Caroline!....
and, God willing, propel her to move forward, and dream and soar, and make her daddy proud. We must make the most of our moment to fight for freedom, to protect our god given rights, even of those with whom we don't agree, so that when we are old and gray, and when our work is done, and we give those we love one final kiss goodby, we will be able to say, freedom matters, and I was part of something beautiful.
One could easily go blow by blow through this text and show that each reference and curation is at once about Caroline and Cruz. But the speaker affects his apotheosis with the terminal "I." Right now, right here, in this act, I, Ted Cruz the loser am part of something beautiful: I am becoming the Ted Cruz of history.
Such use of precious public space for this sort of infantile disorder is in a sense entirely the opposite of what it imagines. It can certainly help us to explain the American hatred of politics. Yet, that will not take us far.
Without politics -- without the impersonal powers and balancing and restraints and resistance of politics -- nothing but such self-righteous and "beautiful" mystical gibberish stands in the way of the growing strength of a fascist like Donald Trump. It will not be enough.