This is xlnt>The art of politics now is acting
By Michael Phillips
Published November 10, 2002
Arthur Miller, America's grand old superstar playwright, calls television "the great trivializer" of the political process. He believes politics, today more than ever, is a matter of mastering a relaxed, vaguely threatening sincerity for the camera.
He could be talking about Chris Matthews and his hardballus interruptus blather, or he could be talking about George W. Bush. It's all the same, no? Talking-yelling-screaming head or leader of the free world, both apparently were coached and coiffed by the same acting instructor.
Tuesday, at the precise instant "CNN Crossfire" co-host James Carville plunked a wastebasket on his head, televised political commentary found a new, comically desperate sweet spot it didn't know it had. Carville picked the right sight gag, a small-scale version -- perfect for parties -- of what was happening to his Democratic Party nationally, Illinois notwithstanding.
But Carville was merely taking his cue from the people he has advised and now comments on: politicians who are actors as much as policy-makers. Before the wastebasket incident, surfing viewers riding a big, cold "Republican wave" (as Minnesota's newly elected Sen. Norm Coleman put it) saw Illinois Gov.-elect Rod Blagojevich quoting Elvis Presley, relaying to his throng that he had a "whole bunch of hunka-hunka burnin' love."
Had he seen Gov. Presley's audition, would Miller have been surprised?
Last weekend, the author of "Death of a Salesman" and onetime foe of the House Un-American Activities Committee was in town to receive the first Tribune Prize for Literary Achievement. As part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, Miller delivered a speech drawn from his recent book, "On Politics and the Art of Acting," in turn adapted from last year's National Endowment for the Humanities lecture.
"The presidency," he said Sunday on stage at Symphony Center, "in acting terms is a heroic role. It is not one for comedians, sleek lover-types, or second bananas. In a word, to be credible the man who acts as president must hold in himself an element of potential dangerousness. Something similar is required in a real star."
Miller is not the first literary statesman to decry the notion of image as substance, or politics as performance. But in his speech before a full house Sunday, focusing on the increasingly distant 2000 presidential election and the rather ghastly animatronic spectacle of the Bush/Gore debates, Miller managed to do what he, at his best, always has done. He reminded us that our civic life matters too much to be treated like sport.
Resorting to violence
Miller argued that the foundation of political power through the ages relates directly to "a leader's willingness to resort to violence should the need arise." This explains why Bush's threats against Iraq have played so well in the national arena -- why his "act," in Miller's observation, is a "hit."
And yet, Miller said, in his speech's freshest passages, there are moments when the routine palls, and "consequences suddenly loom up before one's eyes."
"I spent the month of October in France, Ireland and Spain," Miller said. "And after a half-century of visits to the continent, (I) found myself facing a kind of hostility as an American that I had never known before. . . . Bush's tough-guy cowboy image may thrill audiences in Abilene, but it scares the hell out of them in Paris." On Thursday, however, France signed on with the United Nations' Iraq resolution. Perhaps Bush's "truculent image," in Miller's words, is working just fine after all.
Even the Irish, Miller continued, "not widely known for their opposition to boasting and truculence," expressed anxiety regarding Bush's furtive, tight-lipped warmongering.
"Having lived a long time with terrorism, [the Irish] are hungry for peace, it seems, and the image of an American president sounding like the leader of a posse is not reassuring. The question is whether this threatening figure is real, or an act. But either way, it has certainly contributed to the 180-degree turn from Europe's post-Sept. 11 sympathy, to her alienated suspicion and hostility in the space of a single year."
A year can mean so much; in other instances, a change of heart takes longer. In the "no small irony" department, as already noted by the Chicago Reader, here was Miller receiving the Tribune's inaugural literary prize, a coup for the paper from any number of angles. Yet in 1956, the Tribune -- like many other Republican newspapers -- wrote an editorial [sneeringly titled "Arthur Miller and His Friends"] urging Miller, who was being held in contempt by the House Un-American Activities Committee, to name the names so eagerly sought by HUAC. Miller refused.
It was a finer hour for Miller than for the Tribune.
`A corporate-driven state'
This August, in an interview in Minneapolis, Miller -- waiting backstage at the Guthrie Theater for someone to bring him a sandwich on "any kind of bread other than white" -- reflected on the Bush White House.
"What we've got now," he said, "is a corporate-driven state. It's exactly what Eisenhower dreaded. The oil business is running the country; Bush and Cheney are up to their necks in it. And the idea of a president independent on these kinds of pressures seems kind of remote now."
Then he landed on the other foot. "But who knows? I think people might react positively to someone who takes a principled position on something."
In last weekend's lecture, in his plays, in his life, Arthur Miller has made that prospect as attractive as it is elusive.
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