An Enduring Image

In some ways my mind is like a file of photographs. From time to time a new one is added. Anytime I want, I can call one up and look at it. One sometimes appears of its own accord. 

A new enduring image was added last week: that of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff addressing Republican colleagues who had called for him to resign because of his support of the Mueller Investigation and his efforts to uncover facts about Russian interference in U.S. elections, probable complicity of Americans in such criminal activity, and other threats to U.S. national security. 

“You many think it’s okay,” Schiff said repeatedly, each time reciting incontrovertible perfidious acts on the part of Trump, those associated with him, and others either hostile to or indifferent to the interests of the United States, “but I don’t. I don’t think it’s okay.” The enduring image is not only of Schiff’s soft-spoken, devastating rebuke of his colleagues, but of the obvious discomfort of those at whom it was directed: Any of them who were honorable would have slunk away in shame. None were. None did.

My enduring image is a portrait of Schiff’s grace, courage, and intellectual acuity and of his Republican colleagues, every one of them shot through with rot.