At the End of the Day

Or should it be, at the end of the week, month, season, year, or decade? 

“At the end of the day” is the most ubiquitous, trite expression in political discourse.  Listen to Barack Obama for more than 15 minutes and you will hear the phrase at least once.  Why?

To answer that question look to the context in which at the end of the day is embedded.   Invariably, you will find that the pontificating politician will have taken you through a complex issue that he is attempting to simplify and twist to his advantage.  All politicians understand the commonsense notion that one must at least superficially acknowledge counterarguments in order to give his own argument at least a superficial semblance of credibility.

As reported in the New York Times January 25, 2012 by Ronen Bergman, here is Barack Obama dismissing the importance of recommendations provided by American and Israeli military advisors regarding war with Iran:

As for the top-ranking military personnel with whom I’ve spoken who argued that an attack on Iran was either unnecessary or would be ineffective at this stage, Barak said: “It’s good to have diversity in thinking and for people to voice their opinions. But at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us — the minister of defense and the prime minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.”

In other words, I, in my infinite wisdom, am above mere mortal discourse, more like Zeus on Mount Olympus than a mere, imperfect servant of the people.  So, “at the end of the day,” I have decided what is best for all of you, even to the point of risking a thermonuclear conflagration, since I already did all the “tedious” higher level cognitive processing required to solve humanity’s problems.

At the end of the day pretty well summarizes political manipulation.  After taking us through the self-selected points of his agenda, the politician asserts his self-serving answer as the inevitable one.  End of the day epitomizes short-term thinking that dominates political discourse.  The implicit message is that citizens need not think past today or beyond what their ‘leaders” have told them about any given issue. 

Too often, we have fallen for that malarkey; it is the kind of mindless acquiescence that causes us to accept myopic “solutions” that the President and Congress recommend, recommendations that enable them to avoid hard decisions that they fear might imperil their political futures.   We are left with their cowardly, simplistic, short-sighted governmental conclusions, whether the conclusions are financial (irrational Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage policies) or social (permit illegal aliens to live in America with impunity and to collect benefits while doing so), and we are expected to meekly concur.