MYTH AND THE AUDACITY OF REALITY
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Sam Smith
The Progressive Review
Living as we do in what seems at times a second Middle Ages - complete
with Christian crusades against Islam - we inevitably find our struggles
centered on myths rather than on facts and competing philosophies. For
the past quarter century - ever since we elected the our first fully
fictional president, Ronald Reagan, we have bounced from legend to
legend increasingly indifferent to their effects or costs until we find
ourselves today engaged in a war that we can't afford, nobody wants and
nobody knows how to end.
At first, it just seemed like another problem with Republicans, but with
the rise of the Vichy Democrats under Bill Clinton, it became clear that
our absorption with fantasy had become not only bipartisan but
omnicultural. Neither politician nor media, intellectual nor ordinary
citizen, appeared all that interested in reality any more. We had
permanently entered a land of make believe. And so now we find ourselves
facing an election in which no one really knows what any of the leading
candidates in either party stand for or what they would do - and with
not all that many seeming even to care.
It isn't all that surprising given that America, once known for making
things, has become a nation obsessed with selling them or gambling in
fiscal markets on how well they will sell. From factory to TV
commercial, from farm to hedge fund, from Rosie the Riveter to Willie
Loman and Ken Lay, it is a new America.
It is hard for reality to hold its own in such an environment and as
Americans increasingly became preoccupied with selling and speculating,
our collective psyches became ever more removed from substance and our
language, our minds and our souls ever more trapped in the syntax, style
and morals of the pitch.
It is small wonder that our politics has followed suit. Or that the
media has lost interest in lowly facts, preferring instead to
deconstruct propaganda, images, semiotics and efforts to manipulate the
same - becoming critics of spin rather than as narrators of reality. Or
that the public has come to see politics increasingly as a religion
based on faith rather than philosophy, and sustained by conviction
rather than true self-interest.
The shift probably had its roots in the advent of television. Since TV
had an enormous capacity to turn all of existence into a puppet show, it
is not surprising that politicians - long accustomed to responding to
the tension of attached strings - should be among those adapting most
readily to it or that a movie star should be one of the first
beneficiaries.
To be sure, there had been quasi-fictional presidents earlier such as
Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and John F Kennedy. But typically
their myths at least revolved something as real as military heroism -
Rough Riders, World War II, PT 109 - rather than being concocted of
whole cloth. Of the current leaders in the 2008 campaign, only John
McCain fits this earlier model. The rest are beneficiaries of heavily
rewritten or suppressed history (Clinton and Giuliani) or, in Obama's
case, the audacity of using hope as a trademarked campaign gimmick. Even
McCain's reputation for common sense and moderation is completely out
of sync with his voting record.
Perhaps most striking is the fact that the leading candidates in each
party - Clinton and Giuiani - had close friends and major business
partners who ran into serious problems with the law - the Mcdougals of
Whitewater ending up in prison and Giuliani's pal Bernie Kerick pleading
guilty to accepting $165,000 worth of home renovations from a contractor
who was later convicted in the case as well. This is not the normal
stuff of legend for a leader of the free world.
But an actor is a person who learns someone else's lines so convincingly
that the audience thinks they are that other person. This has been,
since Reagan, the primary goal of our major politicians. All of the
current leading presidential candidates are pretending to be people they
are not.
To be sure, after Reagan, the country did momentarily slide back into
traditional ways with the inalterable George Bush the elder, but with
Bill Clinton, politics as fiction became institutionalized.
Although not a professional actor, he certainly did audition for the
part. It may have happened as early as his college years. Clinton,
according to several agency sources interviewed by biographer Roger
Morris, worked as a CIA informer while briefly and erratically a Rhodes
Scholar in England.
By the time in the 1980s that he was the young governor of an
insignificant state (except for its drug trade), Clinton had already
attracted campaign funding from Goldman Sachs, Payne Webber, Salomon
Brothers and Merrill Lynch. He was also scoring points with the
Washington establishment by cooperating with the Reagan administration's
covert Contra activities emanating from the tiny Arkansas town of Mena.
A few years later, conservative Democrats began holding strategy
meetings at the home of party fund-raiser Pamela Harriman. The meetings
-- eventually nearly a hundred of them -- were aimed at ending years of
populist insurrection within the party. They were regularly moderated by
Clark Clifford and Robert Strauss, the Mr. Fixits of the Democratic
mainstream. Democratic donors paid $1,000 to take part in the sessions
and by the time it was all over, Mrs. Harriman had raised about $12
million for her kind of Democrats. It was at these meetings that Clinton
was anointed.
By the 1992 New Hampshire primary, the establishment press would be
overwhelmingly in the Clinton camp. Hendrik Hertzberg in the New
Republic reported he had surveyed several dozen journalists and found
that all of them, had they been a New Hampshire voter, would have chosen
Clinton.
In other words, Clinton didn't really campaign for the presidency; he
auditioned for it. He proved to the producers and directors that he
could play the part.
This shift was in some ways even more dramatic than that which
accompanied Reagan. After all, for the better part of a century, the
Republicans had traditionally been mired in self-serving myths and
Reagan merely took them to a new level. The Democrats and those to their
left had been responsible for nearly all the political progress that
America had enjoyed. With Clinton that all changed. Neither party was
interested in real change any longer. The two parties now got both their
money and their politics from the same sources.
And so it has been ever since. No more Jimmy Carter or Michael Dukakis
to foul things up. When a wild card like Howard Dean appears, you dump
him like Simon Cowell would, complaining of his poor stage presence one
lone night in Iowa. If a rejected former auditioner, John Edwards,
decides to go his own way, you just turn off the mikes and the lights of
the campaign - aka news coverage - and reduce the election to the
acceptables. A Gene McCarthy-like candidate can't even get off the
ground.
Now, instead, we are offered the choice in the GOP of competing heroes -
9/11 vs. Vietnam - and in the Democratic Party of competing sociological
icons - woman vs. black. In fact, Giuliani was no hero in 9/11, John
McCain has learned little from being one in Vietnam, Hillary Clinton
offers nothing to the waitress or the stay-at-home grandmother raising
her daughter's kids, and Barack Obama has no plan for the millions of
young blacks and latinos deserted for decades by both parties. None
among them has a way out of Iraq or misbegotten empire nor a way towards
economic decency and social justice. But it doesn't matter for we are
not choosing a president but selecting a myth.
This poses a problem for a journalist. Journalists are supposed to
either ignore or expose myth and help the reader find the way back to
reality. But once political positions have more in common with
evangelical fundamentalism into which one is born again than with
philosophical differences that demand logical arguments and defenses,
skepticism and exposure become the political equivalent of heresy and
invite excommunication.
Although I had written critically of every president since Lyndon
Johnson, it wasn't until the Clinton years that I was told - directly
and by inference - that this was no longer permissible. The Clintons had
helped create this climate by inventing the notion that to criticize
them made you into a "hater" - sort of like a Nazi or member of the KKK.
Once two friends - one of them a journalist - told me I should stop
writing articles critical of the Clinton. "Even if they are true?" I
asked. Yes, they replied. I knew I had entered a different time.
This tone has become increasingly familiar in some of the letters I
receive. Leave Obama's 15 unpaid parking tickets alone. Are Clinton's
anti-Jewish remarks the best you can come up with? In short: how dare
you criticize people in whom we have put our faith?
The web has contributed to this aura by creating places that are more
congregations than sites, internet cathedrals where people go for
confirmation rather than information, and where the holy book is the
game plan of one candidate or another.
To follow instead where the story leads one, to face the
imperfectabilities of the world, to engage in the audacity of reality is
just too uncomfortable for many these days.
For journalists, at least, it wasn't always like that. Here, for
example, is an except of HL Mencken's coverage of the 1920 convention:
"No one but an idiot could argue seriously that either candidate is a
first-rate man, or even a creditable specimen of second-rate man. Any
State in the Union, at least above the Potomac, could produce a thousand
men quite as good, and many States could produce a thousand a great deal
better. Harding, intellectually, seems to be merely a benign blank -- a
decent, harmless, laborious hollow-headed mediocrity. . . Cox is
quicker of wit, but a good deal less honest. He belongs to the cunning
type; there is a touch of the shyster in him. His chicaneries in the
matter of prohibition, both during the convention and since, show the
kink in his mind. He is willing to do anything to cadge votes, and he
includes in that anything the ready sacrifices of his good faith, of the
national welfare, and of the hopes and confidence of those who honestly
support him. Neither candidate reveals the slightest dignity of
conviction. Neither cares a hoot for any discernible principle. Neither,
in any intelligible sense, is a man of honor."
One might be tempted to plagiarize some of the above to describe the
leaders in the Democratic race, but it is largely myth and not morality
that would prevent this. It is against the rules to even hint that there
may be no good solution awaiting us, at least as far as the media is
wiling to let us know. Try to think of a single contemporary
establishment newspaper that would publish HL Mencken today and you can
sense the problem.
It's much like the Iraq war. No matter how bad or stupid it is, we must
still support the troops by letting them get killed there another year
or whatever. We are not allowed to say that the administration, the
Washington establishment and the media have failed us as has happened
seldom before.
The Columbia Journalism Review even ran an online piece criticizing
those few publications (including the Review) that reported Obama's
unpaid parking tickets arguing, "This is a story that never should have
made it beyond local Boston TV news, if that. It's the kind of lazy,
picayune nonsense that passes as a 'character issue,' but really adds
nothing to our understanding of a candidate."
If we can not even report that the "next JFK" had over a dozen parking
tickets that he didn't bother to pay until he was about to announce his
presidential candidacy, then where do we get our clues of a candidate's
character, especially one about whom the media has told us so little?
I come from a school of journalism that said, to the contrary, that if
you didn't report the parking tickets you should turn in your press
pass. What people did with the information was their business; reporting
it was yours.
I also can remember a liberalism that assumed every good Democrat was
fighting a two-front war: against the GOP on one hand and against the
SOBs in the Democratic Party on the other. I suspect many of today's
liberal mythmakers would have wanted us to adapt to Carmine DeSapio,
Richard Daley, Strom Thurmond and George Wallace in the interest of
beating the Republicans and maintaining party unity. But the funny thing
is that the party was stronger back when it lacked such phony unity.
Fundamentalism in religion or politics comes to no good end because life
always contradicts itself. How else do you explain so many Democrats
voting for No Child Left Behind, the Patriot Act and the Iraq War? What
fundamental beliefs led them to such absurdly contradictory positions?
Just when you think you're among the faithful, someone betrays you.
Similarly, when you walk into the voting booth, artificially implanted
illusions, false faith and naive hope won't do you any good. It is far
better to take some reality along, even if you have to take a barf bag
as well. To be sure, you won't have the exhilaration of delusional faith
but you will be one more voter who knows how the magic really works and
when you know that, the magic will no longer fool you and yours will be
one more ballot cast for the real.
In the end, no matter who are our leaders are, we, at best, come in
second place next to their own interests. Knowing this and why - and
not pretending otherwise - may not be the meat of myth, but it is
certainly at the core of our survival.
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