Obama's Political Theater
Years ago, most savvy political writers correctly diagnosed that electoral campaigns (on both sides) had become conducted almost entirely in code. Think Sarah Palin and George W. Bush's folksy speakin' styles and knowing evangelical-ese, or John Kerry's coded attacks on working-class reactionaries as he slagged the educated and successful Scott Brown for preferring pickups to Porsches. Yet in the past decade, and especially in the past year of the Obama administration, the art of politics as nothing more than a series of symbolic (and largely empty) gestures has risen to a truly frightening degree.
The current trend towards "Politics as Metaphor" began as the culture wars of the '70s and '80s boiled over into the hyper-polarized Clinton era and the internet began to take off. The first attempt at a partial-birth abortion ban failed in 2000 because pro-lifers refused to allow language into the law making an exception for those (rare) instances where the mother's health was directly at risk. ("What if some pro-choice doctor said that her psychological health was at risk?")
Similarly, a gay rights bill that California's (in)famously dysfunctional legislature once tried to pass in 1991 was spiked not by a card-carrying member of the Schlafly/Falwell/Anita Bryant right, but by the outspokenly pro-gay, Rockefeller Republican Governor Pete Wilson. Why? At first the law as written didn't exempt specifically religious institutions (such as Christian schools or Jewish and Christian seminaries), making it an absolute certainty to be struck down when it was inevitably challenged in federal court. Separation of church and state. When moderate Dems and Republicans forced the bill to be amended, the hard left was apoplectic at this concession to right-wing religion at the height of the AIDS crisis. Lose-lose, for all concerned.
What makes politics as metaphor so perverse -- and so perversely rewarding for its career-politician practitioners -- is that in almost every instance, for all the high-PR, media-hyped sturm und drang, no visible or positive change ever gets effected in the end. Except, of course, for the grandstanding politicians who use these hot-button issues to ensure that their core, mad-as-hell constituencies will keep returning them to office.
As Charles Krauthammer noted, so long as Joe Lieberman, Max Baucus, and Olympia Snowe were in the Senate, the much-vaunted healthcare "public option" was a "sideshow" from the very beginning, no matter how many petitions that Daily Kos might send their way. (As that great political philosopher Judge Judy might have said, it was "not gonna happen, Cookie!") Yet instead of simply dealing with this inconvenient truth and forming a coherent, working- and middle-class based reform package, with truly generous subsidies and/or tax credits for middle-class families and the self-employed, they allowed the false promise to build to such a frenzy that when it was inevitably defeated, even Democrats like Howard Dean were urging their fellow liberals to "kill the bill." Considering that the resultant bill ended up as little more than an unsubsidized, uncredited individual mandate, it's probably just as well that it was sent to the euthanasia room.
But even worse -- and far more potentially dangerous -- comes the pretentious pomp and empty symbolism of the latest post-OJ "trial of the century", that of notorious terrorist and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Even the Obama Administration itself seems to concede that this will be a show trial. So why bother trying him in civilian court at all, much less even consider trying him walking distance from Ground Zero in New York City, where thousands of innocent civilians could be endangered? (When has evidence ascertained under waterboarding ever been admissible in civilian court? And really, in a civilized society, when should it ever be?) Because a "show trial" is exactly the point. We must march, my darlings, not to seek justice but to send a message: that the era of the torture-happy, secretive, "Cheney-Bush Junta" isn't merely dead, but really and most sincerely dead. (Heaven help us if the trial is televised, speaking of speaking in code.)
Film and TV critics live for symbolism and subtext; our profession has more Freudians than a meeting of the American Psychological Association. On one film discussion forum I happened to see, a poster was discussing one of the few people who managed to intimidate and escape from Javier Bardem's hit man in No Country For Old Men. The perplexed poster asked the immortal question, "But what is the symbolism of the trailer-park lady?" (Anyone who could ask that question with a straight face is arguably as talented as any of the principals of No Country.)
It might be entertaining and cinematic to have a government that has more raised eyebrows, tokens of respect, and subtext than a season's worth of Mad Men or The Sopranos. But for those of us who crave an efficient, effective government that works for the greater benefit of society -- from hands-off Reaganites who want every dollar's worth of the taxes they pay for, to domestic social reformers of the LBJ/Nixon school -- politics as symbolism can be as dangerous and deadly as Anton Chigurh's cattle gun.