The carnival of American politics is dizzying. Yet here we stand.

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18-05-2025

The bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln on the south lawn of the Kansas Capitol in April 2025. The statue, by Topeka sculptor Merrell Gage, was dedicated in 1918. (Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
One afternoon not long ago, I walked the south lawn of the state Capitol at Topeka, camera in hand, seeking inspiration. I wasn't looking for photographic subjects exactly, but something deeper, some sign or cypher that might be a key to hope in the early months of 2025.
Simply put, I was bone tired.
The American carnival of politics had left me numb.
During the five years I've written this column, I've shared my concern, anxiety, and outrage over state and national politics. I have at times warned of uncharted terrain and at others admitted fear, but now I must convey an existential cultural exhaustion. It is something that reaches down to the personal.
A week or so before driving the 58 miles from my front steps to roam the Capitol lawn, as we got into the Jeep to run some errand, Kim paused and pointed to the roof of our house. A course of shingles, about the size of a door, was missing on the south side, exposing the wood decking beneath. She had found the wind-ripped shingles on the ground on the other side of the house, but we hadn't known where they had come from until that moment.
The bare patch of wood deck was over the center of the house. Below it was our second-floor bedroom, and below that was the living room where I played acoustic guitar a couple of times a week. The house is more than 100 years old, but the roof was rather new, and as I looked up at where the shingles had been, I imagined rainwater pouring into the heart of the house. I'm handy with tools when I've a mind to, but I'm afraid of heights. I muttered something to Kim about not worrying, that I would find somebody to climb up and fix it, but inside me something was shrieking like a stall alarm on a Cessna 172. There had been a series of weather-related challenges at home over the past two years, including a favorite maple tree blowing down on the garage. Due to professional setbacks, money was tight.
The missing shingles felt personal.
Those shingles were still on my mind when I went to Topeka for lunch business. I had placed a call to the contractor who originally put on the roof but had not yet received a response. At least the sky was clear that afternoon.
After lunch, I drove over and parked at the meters on the other side of the street from Capitol Police headquarters. I plugged the meter with four quarters, enough for an hour, and then slung my old Canon DSLR camera over my shoulder. There were a few people on the sidewalk, bags over their shoulders coming to or from work, and a handful of workman at the east entrance to the Capitol. But when I followed the sidewalk to the south lawn I found myself alone, amid green lawns, a few statues, and the immensity of the copper-domed building rising before me.
The solitude was restful.
I passed a sculpture of a seated Abraham Lincoln on my journey, then approached the Capitol and photographed a number of architectural features, steps, columns, pediments. I circled the flower beds. I went over and examined a ground-level replica of the Ad Astra statue atop the statehouse dome, an eight-foot Kansa warrior with drawn bow. Then I wandered back to the Lincoln statue, which I found oddly comforting.
The seated Lincoln faces away from the Capitol. One hand rests on a lanky knee. The face is of the bearded Lincoln, the one familiar to us from the profile on our pennies and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and Alexander Gardner's 1865 'cracked plate' photograph. But while Gardner's portrait carries a hint of a smile, the Lincoln on the state Capitol lawn is full of care and sorrow.
This sorrowful Lincoln offered wisdom.
I'm no Lincoln scholar. I cannot tell you anything about the flawed and fated man who led the nation through its greatest trial that you cannot read in a dozen biographies. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who wrote 'Team of Rivals,' has said that Lincoln suffered from depressive episodes so severe that his friends removed all razors and scissors from his room. Jon Meacham, another presidential historian, author of 'There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle,' has said Lincoln 'was a politician — but a politician ultimately driven by conscience.'
Knowing that Lincoln went through dark periods of depression and managed to redeem the soul of America gives me hope. It isn't an expectation that I am personally destined for greatness, but it is proof that seemingly overwhelming burdens can be endured.
I sometimes declare in my weaker periods that I can't stand things anymore.
Kim observes: 'And yet there you stand.'
Indeed, here we all stand. We may be frightened, anxious, at the end of collective or individual ropes, but as long as we remain standing we are not yet beaten. The primary task before us is to endure. To help others, we must ourselves remain on our feet.
The bronze statue of Lincoln at the Kansas Capitol was the first public commission by Merrell Gage. It was unveiled Feb. 12, 1918.
Gage, a 1911 graduate of Topeka High School, later studied sculpture with Gutzon Borglum, a bigot who carved Mount Rushmore. Gage, who taught for 33 years at the University of Southern California, considered Lincoln an 'inexhaustible' subject. In 1955, Gage was the subject of a short documentary in which he sculpted the head of Lincoln from clay while talking about the president's life. The film won an Oscar. Gage died in 1981.
Gage was an artist of his time, an era when poet Carl Sandburg produced a hagiographic biography of Lincoln that is now recognized as being more literature and less fact. But it is Sandburg's Lincoln, perhaps more than any other single work, that shaped the perception of the 16th president as a benevolent and martyred father.
Each American generation interprets Lincoln anew. While Gage likely had Sandburg's Lincoln in mind, my interpretation of Lincoln has been shaped by Goodwin and Meacham and others, including Steven Spielberg. It has also been skewed by Richard Nixon's manic and impromptu visit with anti-war protestors at the Lincoln Memorial one night in May 1970. Lincoln continues to evolve in my understanding, as the dangers facing democracy have deepened.
These dangers have sharpened so fast that it is worth a moment to recount. It is the most grotesque freak show of any carnival midway.
Eighty years of global leadership has been endangered by the clumsy authoritarian urges of a president drunk with self-importance and enabled by a Congress controlled by a Quisling majority. The hunt for DEI in government is the new McCarthyism with a bigoted twist, due process is trammeled by mass deportations that send some detainees to a notorious foreign prison, and the U.S. turned its back on longtime military and commercial allies. The rolling crises lurch from the catastrophic to the absurd, from a tariff war that few credible economists understand to an apparatchik-worthy declaration that Veterans Day would be known as 'Victory Day for World War I.' And then there is DOGE, the revenge-driven wrecking ball dismantling the federal government in the name of cost-saving efficiency.
All of this was predictable. Anybody who had paid attention to Donald Trump's insane ramblings or was familiar with Project 2025 knew where we were headed. We are in the midst of a radical transformation of America into a bizarro-world of opposite values. The grifting of the presidency, from Trump's crypto scam worth billions to the Qatari gift of a $400 million luxury jet to replace Air Force One, should dismay all but surprise none.
What has surprised me is the apparent inability of Democrats to mount a coherent political response. Oh, there have been scattered strong voices –Bernie Saunders, Cory Booker, AOC, Elizabeth Warren — but these seem like cries in the wilderness. Mass political protests, including the May Day event in Topeka, seem to have the most momentum. But at some point, to be effective, protest has to coalesce around a leader with a conscience who is able to articulate the case for democracy and a path forward to a better America.
Meanwhile, we must remain standing.
We do not need another Lincoln — our allotment was one — but we do need a human being and not a seated statue. Where will this individual come from? I have no idea. But they are surely already among us, if only we take the care to recognize them, flaws and all.
This is a time not only for resisting, but for knowing why we resist. American greatness, in the Trumpian sense, is antithetical to American goodness. What is best for democracy — that is, what benefits the most fortunate as well as the least fortunate — is not efficiency but empathy. Governments are not businesses because the goal should be to serve all of the people, not the monied few.
Nobody wants waste. But the touting of cost-cutting efficiencies is a canard to distract us from the unchecked kleptocracy of oligarchs and the influence of foreign princes. To repair this rot, we must engage in a vigorous campaign to restore fundamental American values of dignity, equality, and robust democracy.
I finally reached someone who agreed to come take a look at our roof. He was a young man named Brian who took a couple of days to show up, but who was cheerful and talkative when he did. He extended a ladder above our gutter and climbed up on the roof, walking about as easily as I would in my living room.
He inspected the damage with a practiced eye.
'No problem,' he declared.
The repair was made in half an hour. Brian promised to send a bill, but I never got one.
My weariness will likely continue for a while longer. But I am helped by the knowledge that I don't have to remain standing forever. I will stand today, and after that I will stand tomorrow. For the places in which I am afraid, there are others who will stand for me. In the places in which others are afraid, I will stand for them.
Statues belong to the past and the future.
The present belongs to the living.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.