Accosting a man sitting on a street corner holding out a begging can, beside him a little ape performing, Inspector Jacques Clouseau asks, “Do you have a lizanze for your minkey?” And proceeding in the same ridiculous pseudo French accent, he rattles off the ordinances apparently violated.

Looking more impressed than intimidated, the street impresario asks back how Closeau has come to know all that, at which he explodes, “Ah you blind?” In fact the man is blind, as signaled for one thing by his opaque spectacles, and therefore unable to see the policeman in full gendarme dress hulked over him.

For all his perfect vision on the other hand, Closeau, for one petty case, meanwhile misses all the crime going on all around him—literally.

This is the scene that quickly comes to mind as I watch the impeachment trial, which, if it were not so tragic and the stakes not so high, would be the funniest reality show on television yet, one on which hysterical blindness is triggered by a great fear of the truth.

I watch the trial for many reasons, and an emerging dominant reason may seem desperate, though not for me; it is part of an old treasured wisdom: Human effort makes for the minimum effort required to attract divine intervention. And as I watch, I’m careful not to blink, lest my effort, small enough as it is, may yet be diminished.

It’s an effort not easy to sustain, to be sure, especially since, more often than we’d like, a stiffly coiffed senator hogs the mike and does to the King’s English what Sellers does to Moliere’s French—she sometimes victimizes Virgil’s Latin, too.

It’s all sound and fury and spittle to me by my normal senses, but she beams her pleasure with herself for every soliloquy she mounts (as well as for her monopolistic part in any colloquy she allows). Curiously for someone self-served, she ends up in the clinic with self-raised blood pressure.

Pretenders

Oh, how these times cry for superheroes! And what do we get but one or two pretenders who, unaided now by movie tricks and looking definitely ludicrous in crimson cloaks, can throw nothing more than a piropo, a street compliment of the most casual kind, not necessarily sincere, at a real witness in a real trial in real life. Should we even wonder where they stand in a case so serious as an impeachment?

Ultimately, in any case, it’s what we see and what we do about it that counts. Blindness, no doubt, is a widespread affliction, and perhaps the biggest single case is the Nazareno possession, but that has been brought on by legitimate despair; it’s a case of a religious ritual reduced to a fanatical spectacle because its point is desperately missed.

The impeachment trial, too, bears all the signs of a missed point, but this is due to selective blindness—selective blindness to the truth. And in order for it to work, it must infect us all.

One thing to watch for is apathy. Apathy critically lowers our resistance to this form of blindness. We should therefore go on caring and watching, wizened seniors like us in particular, who, having lived long enough, have no excuse for not knowing enough. Otherwise, we’re merely old fools, and undoubtedly there’s no fool like an old one.

Becoming one is indeed easy to manage and never too late; all you need is a suitable trickster, and there’s enough of his kind at the impeachment trial. Here, one can get lost in the legalities—also called proceso collectively, and by abstract and weighty-sounding trick names specifically.

Now and then some truth manages to emerge free from all the suppressive legalities, and we feel rewarded; we feel a fresh stomach—and with it a fresh hope—to keep on watching without blinking, to keep on waiting for that unstoppable intervention.

Still, living as we do on senior time, we get naturally impatient—but surely only righteously—thus we find ourselves beseeching Thee: Por Dios, how much more untrustworthy does the chief justice have to be proved before he is gotten rid of? How much more wealth and property should he be found to possess excluded from his sworn Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth?