Richard Knoebel is the chief of police in Kewaskum, Wisconsin. Not long ago, distracted by a truck stopping on one side of the street, he drove past a school bus stopped with its lights flashing.

He then pulled himself over and wrote himself a ticket. $235. Even more amazing: 4 points on his driver’s license.

When we get someone for not stopping for a flashing school bus we give them a citation. So I shouldn’t be any different so I did.

You’d think this would be the perfect example of a feel-good story, and, on one level, it is. But on another level, I find it almost depressing. Not, of course, on account of Chief Knoebel’s action, but in the light of the beginning of the 2008 presidential campaign, and for the light it sheds on the increasing unlikelihood of finding that kind of integrity as one moves one’s gaze up the ladder of political ambition.

That’s due, it seems to me, to the essential pathology of political ambition. It may be that everyone starts out truly intending to be servants of the greater good, but those who can resist the siren song of power over others, at any level, are rare indeed. And at the top? Well, for me, I find it impossible to conceive of any candidate for president doing anything remotely like what the Chief did. Packaged by consultants, consumed by ambition, and compressed into the straight-jacket of sound bites and the echo chamber of political discourse, our presidential contenders dance across the national stage like puppets, slaves to image, empty of substance, and, in the end, incapable of integrity.

Not, I add, because they are necessarily bad people, or lack integrity in smaller settings. The pathology, and the tragedy, lie in the fact that regardless of their personal qualities, they cannot obtain the prize they seek without the sacrifice of their integrity. In politics, honesty is rewarded by crucifixion, while lies and dissimulation garner the laurel. Candidates must empty themselves of meaning to become multivocal symbols of other people’s aspirations, and in the end, they demonstrate only that, as Jesus told us, he who would gain the world must lose his soul.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

From a Christian perspective, it could hardly be otherwise, given the New Testament understanding of earthly powers and systems of coercion, and their hollowing effect on the human soul. As it says in Ephesians 6:12: “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” As Walter Wink explains in The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium:

The Powers are simultaneously an outer, visible structure and an inner, spiritual reality. Perhaps we are not accustomed to thinking of the Pentagon, or the Chrysler Corporation, or the Mafia as having a spirituality, but they do. The New Testament uses the language of power to refer at one point to the outer aspect, at another to the inner aspect, and yet again to both together. What people in the world of the Bible experienced as and called “principalities and powers” was in fact the actual spirituality at the center of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of their day.

We do not need to project these powers out into the universe in the same way as 1st-Century Christians. Instead, as Wink says, “we must withdraw the projections and recognize that the real spiritual force we are experiencing emanates from actual institutions.” Nonetheless, our basic understanding of evil is the same: it is not merely personal. It is structural and spiritual. When a New Testament writer talks about “the world,” the Greek word is “kosmos,” which relates not to physicality but to order, and for which a more accurate translation might be “the System:” an interlocking set of Powers organized around idolatrous values.

And herein lies the real tragedy of politics. Those who climb the ladder of political action to presidential heights are not monsters of ambition, but victims of the American portion of what Wink calls the “Domination System,” over which no individual has, or can have, control. Every four years they promise—must promise, to attain their goal—to carry us away from our problems in their beautiful balloons of political rhetoric. But in the end we’re left behind in the same grinding impotence, while our leaders can’t admit, or perhaps don’t even realize, as did the Wizard of Oz, that they don’t know how to work the machinery.

Of course they don’t. No one does. It works itself, and its goal is not the general welfare, as ordained by God, but the maintenance of its own existence. Its fuel is human lives, and its gods are Marduk and Moloch: he who promises order from chaos through violence, and he who promises security in return for our children’s lives. Empty promises, both, but they rule us nonetheless.

So powerful is this System that it even captured the Church little more than 300 years after that first Easter. Christians lost the understanding of Christus Victor, he who led the System captive by repudiating violence and showing its futility in the face of Life Himself, and were given instead the bloody imagery of the sacrifice of Innocence to a dominating and furious God. We lost Love and gained a legal transaction. We lost the the God who welcomes the unwelcome to His table and got instead the One who would return in awful vengeance at the end of Time to punish the Other. In short, the System recreated God in its own image.

But the Spirit is patient, and works through all men and women of good will, regardless of their particular faith, or lack of it. In every generation we find “the good raised up” to challenge the Domination System and call us back to authentic humanity. Some streak across the firmament of human history like comets, proleptic not of disaster but of redemption: the Kings, the Mandelas, the Gandhis. And some we find closer to home, and certainly easier to emulate, like a quiet man sitting in a squad car in simple humility, writing a ticket for himself without counting the cost. It is in such actions and examples that we find the promise of true life, a promise that is

not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.