Where's Rigortoroise?

There's a particular flavour of American democracy that reveals itself when a man nobody has seen for months turns out to be the one holding the deciding vote.

The man in question is Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a state that has spent decades quietly competing with itself for last place on every list you would not want to top. Right now, the illustrious senator finds himself starring in a real-life drama nobody scripted, because nobody would dare.

This is tabloid gravity at its finest: in a windowless committee room in Washington, a relief bill for farmers whose crops are dying faster than the men meant to save them is stalled at twelve votes to twelve, and the man who could break the tie hasn't been seen in public since he was wheeled out of a Kentucky hospital in June.

His office announced this the way the Vatican announces a Pope's health,  a single sheet of paper, artfully vague, engineered to convey nothing while appearing to convey everything.

 Kentucky's governor, a Democrat, was reduced to publicly asking a sitting Republican senator to confirm whether he remains, technically, a biological entity or has quietly joined the heavenly choir invisible.

This is not satire. It’s just another day in the Capitol,

Eighty-four years is a long time to spend perfecting the art of being present without ever quite being there, and McConnell has now taken that art form and turned it into a national game of Where's Waldo, except the stakes are a farm bill and the prize, if you find him, is apparently just confirmation of a pulse.

What makes this particularly maddening is that this is the same man who, the day after the Capitol was stormed by people wearing his party's merchandise, stood on the Senate floor and delivered what many called the finest speech of his career, a blistering account of a president who, in McConnell's own words, had provoked a mob that came within a corridor of ending several of his colleagues.

Kentucky, for one shining moment, had produced a statesman.

Then, twenty-four hours later, he voted to acquit that same president at the impeachment trial, on the technicality that a man cannot be convicted of crimes committed in office once he has inconveniently left it.

Principle, it turns out, has a shelf life of about a day.

Trump never forgave the speech, which is rich coming from a man for whom forgiveness is not exactly a signature move. But true to form, rather than confront the man who'd actually delivered the insult, Trump did what he always does when a man crosses him: he found the nearest woman standing beside him and punished her instead.

Elaine Chao had served loyally as his Transportation Secretary for four years, resigning the day after January 6, presumably having concluded that a government incapable of securing its own Capitol was not one she wished to continue advising on infrastructure.

For that service, Trump's chosen thank-you was "Coco Chow," a slur masquerading as a nickname, deployed with the particular cowardice of a man who will call a woman a racist name from behind a podium but has never once, in his life, said an unkind word to McConnell's face.

And so here we sit: a farm bill nobody in Washington wants to be blamed for torpedoing, a senator who has become a Schrödinger's incumbent, simultaneously serving and not serving depending on who's asking, and a home state that has spent his seven terms quietly underwriting the whole arrangement.

Under McConnell's tutelage, Kentucky has parked itself near the bottom of nearly every table worth topping: last in adult literacy, near-last in infant mortality and life expectancy. The state legislature has mastered the art of not noticing, because noticing would require action, and action has never really been the McConnell brand.

Seven terms is long enough to fix a pothole, let alone a school system, yet McConnell spent his on mastering the filibuster instead. If longevity in office were a public health intervention, Kentucky would top every list. Instead, it leads the nation in a rather different statistic: the number of years it has been governed, at the federal level, by a man currently unreachable by phone.

Kentucky did not send Washington its best. Kentucky sent Washington its most patient, and it turns out patience outlasts everything: relevance, accountability, and, this month, apparently reachability too.

Somewhere, farmers are watching their fields turn brown while twelve senators wait on one man's pulse. If that isn't the entire arc of modern American governance rendered as a single tableau, I genuinely don't know what is.

Rigortoroise, wherever you are: your country would like a word.

Or at the very least, a sign of life.

Paul v Walters is the author of several novels and an anthology of short stories, and is fortunate enough to live on the island of Bali. His latest work, RITUAL, was recently launched at the Ubud International Readers and Writers Festival.