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The psalmist warned us: “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of a man, in whom there is no help.”
This bit of immortal wisdom from three millennia ago might be of help today as we seek to understand the fall of Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
The psalm uses the word “princes” to refer to the human authority figures who serve as our earthly leaders. We are advised not to put our faith in them, because it is foolish to put your faith in anything but the divine — “the God of Jacob . . . who keeps faith forever.”
A prince’s time, the psalmist tells us, is just as temporary as ours: “When his breath departs, he returns to his earth. On that very day, his plans perish.” As we have seen this week, the prince’s plans may perish owing to his departure from the governor’s mansion, as well.
Cuomo became one of the “princes” people had chosen not only to trust, but to place on a pedestal. This, despite a nearly four-decade career during which he’d made it surpassingly clear that he was about as trustworthy as the scorpion who convinces the frog to give him a ride across the pond.
His record as the state’s chief executive is undeniably mixed. For he succeeded in breaking through the paralytic status quo in the Empire State and getting the new Tappan Zee Bridge and the new LaGuardia Airport built. The same can be said of the Second Avenue Subway and the Moynihan Train Hall.
But there was also the corruption he winked at or implicitly oversaw. Recall that his right-hand man Joseph Percoco is still in prison for taking bribes, and we have yet to fully understand the maneuverings that led to the bizarre waste of an astonishing amount of taxpayer money in the so-called Buffalo Billion scandal. And he brazenly shut down the very investigation into Albany’s dirty politics he himself had ordered when investigators started sniffing too close to his dogpile.
It isn’t just the mortality of princes that should make us wary of putting them on pedestal. It is the fact as mortal men, they are prone to deep human weaknesses: greed, vanity, lust, including the lust for domination.
And yet we can’t help ourselves. We want to believe that the people we elect — or even, as in the case of the psalmist’s time and much of the planet even now, the strongmen who rule through force alone — are made of better stuff. And so we often impute to them moral strengths they don’t have, simply because we are so hungry to have someone to believe in.
That was where Cuomo came in. COVID was terrifying, and he gave good news conferences, where he talked about everything that was being done in New York to address the pandemic.
The fact that many of the policies he trumpeted turned out to be unnecessary or foolish or wrong — we didn’t need tens of thousands of ventilators, and we didn’t need the Javits Center or Central Park as field hospitals — didn’t matter.
An adoring press ignored, too, the barbarous horrors of the policies he put in place but didn’t trumpet: sending elderly COVID patients back to nursing homes, where the virus spread and killed by the thousands.
He was a hero, because liberals needed a hero. And they especially needed a hero, because they were so caught up in their own wrought-up melodrama in which COVID seemed to be an emanation spreading from the Orange Monster of their nightmares in the Oval Office.
They elevated Cuomo because they needed an anti-Trump. The liberal scorn for the hero-worship of President Donald Trump on the right was and remains all-consuming. But it didn’t prevent liberals from falling prey to exactly the same idolatrous condition.
Remember the elevation of Robert Mueller, the supposed Trump-slayer. Remember the deranged enthusiasm for porn-actress shyster-defender Michael Avenatti, thought maybe to be presidential caliber for 2020, now on his way to prison for extortion.
Leaders disappoint. They always do. Even the greatest have clay feet. The psalmist’s counsel is eternal. And our inability to follow it is also eternal, alas.
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