The Show That Never Ends...

February 15, 2008

There’s a scene in Alice in Wonderland in which Alice, distraught at her not being able to fit through the keyhole of a magic doorknob, begins to cry profusely, an act which eventually – and unintentionally – allows her to swim through the otherwise impenetrable barrier. Alice shares this reflex with at least one other troubled blonde, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose New Hampshire tears helped her ascend through the otherwise impenetrable glass ceiling of electoral politics. Of course, in Hillary’s case, the move was entirely planned out, displaying once more the pathetic lengths to which this woman is prepared to go for a vote and for power.


As Christopher Hitchens importantly reminded readers in Slate last month, Hillary has never shied away from a chance to portray herself as an underdog and unlikely winner. He writes that in a visit to Nepal in the 1990’s, Hillary met with a true against-all-odds ascender, Sir Edmund Hillary, who daringly made it to a summit in humanity’s history of adventure. Taking advantage of their shared name, Hillary declared that her mother had in fact named her in honor of Sir Edmund. Interesting, though, is that Hillary Clinton was born in 1947, six years before Sir Edmund climbed Everest.


But, in fact, Hillary is a much more opportunistic creature than even this event would suggest. I find this to be particularly evident in the dreamy words with which she describes her husband, a clear violator of various norms of international peace and justice. Two of the more telling examples of President Clinton’s callousness are his instigation of the Serbian war on Albanian Kosovars and his bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, though there are of course others. More horrific was his support of the UN sanctions on Iraq, arguably a crime against humanity. As was well documented at the time, the sanctions were enormously destructive, crippling Iraqi infrastructure and killing scores of innocent civilians. In 1998, a top UN officer in Baghdad, Dennis Halliday, resigned because of the policy’s devastatingly inhumane effects, with a collection of other UN officials later following suit. Estimates vary, but the BBC reported that the death toll reached about 4,000 to 5,000 infant fatalities a month at one point, with around 400,000 and 500,000 Iraqi civilians dying because of the sanctions throughout that decade. These facts are forgotten or just nonexistent in the minds of the deluded nationalists who cheer when Hillary embraces this criminal. Politics thus becomes performance art, as obvious breaches of human ethical intuitions are explained away, suppressed, or simply ignored.


While we can be sure similar scenes of ethical depravity will carry on for a couple more months, they’ll always pale in comparison to the theatrical posturing of Mitt Romney, who, for my money, was the most transparently full-of-shit candidate of the primary process. I’ll never forget an early Republican debate during which the moderator asked Romney what he disliked most about the country. Confounded, Romney responded by quipping “Gosh, I love America, I’m afraid I’m going to be at a loss of words.” This is a curious remark from a presidential candidate, bringing up what I hope is an obvious query: Then why are you running?


In the two-bit comedies which used to pleasantly shape cinematic humor, before pretentious flicks like Garden State and I Heart Huckabees took over, a common motif was to have super-slimy politicians and business leaders foiling the naïve decency of the anti-hero. Watching Mitt Romney talk, I always got the impression that he had spent the better part of the 90’s locked in a room watching Tommy Boy, Black Sheep, and Wayne’s World, taking his idiosyncratic cues from those movies’ overdone villains. Romney strikes me as an actor doing a bad job of playing a decent human, or a great job of acting like a caricatured asshole. This existential loop-de-lies is a fascinating occurrence so late in human history, when humanity’s naiveté is often seen as on the retreat, at least relative to the inanity of the 1950’s.


But with Romney now out of the race, Mike Huckabee seems to be this election’s most performance-oriented politician. What more would one expect from a religious preacher? So far, though, he’s kept his act relatively secular, playing good ol’ favorites like “Sweet Home Alabama” on his bass. This plays into American voters’ curious requirement that their president seem like a decent guy, the type with whom you’d want to have a beer. In and of itself, such a criterion should rather obviously be irrelevant to electing public officials, whose managerial decisions aren’t going to be too decipherable from how they talk into a camera or how they play a musical instrument.


Regardless, it’s absurd to act as though these political figures are being sincere when they share their personal sides. These people are, in fact, power-hungry and strange. In the more extreme cases, politicians exhibit symptoms of classifiable personality disorders. Elected officials are not recognizably normal people, and we need to stop encouraging the behavior of this group. It’s an unfortunate state of affairs to recognize, but it seems that our species has a handful of individuals who rabidly crave power. Just as we create institutions to manage the behavior of individuals with criminal tendencies, we need to be realistic about applying similar standards to the politicians who kill, lie, and steal in the name of some vacuous moral rant.


Of course, such an outlook is branded as unrealistic in our society, which is precisely what one would expect, given the system’s structure. By the very nature of its interests, this power-craving segment of the population will be the same group which controls the relevant political and social aspects of our civilization. To this end, our mainstream society is relatively effective in ensuring that people happily bow to authority, just as the rest of our fascinating bi-pedal species has done for the last few thousand years. So long as the requisite pane et circensias are provided, a large segment of the population will readily acknowledge the obvious deficits of the system, but will consistently fail to act because, after all, things aren’t so bad and the theatrics of politics do carry some entertainment value.


With regard to matters of life and death, the marked content of Americans Joe and Jane is coherent, albeit simple-minded. After all, the U.S. president often affects people in Beirut more than those in Boston, living as we do in a globalized age of asymmetrical power. But if we’re to even pretend we exhibit some signs of compassion, we’d hold our government accountable for the suffering it inflicts on people who don’t speak English, too. Fortunately, this system of corruption and dominance works only insofar as people buy into the theatrics of the performance, so long as they cheer at the fighter jets flying over a football game, the anti-evolutionist playing the bass, the war criminal squinting empathetically into the camera. So long as, in other words, politics is not recognized as another performance art.


Check in next week for Brian McLoone’s theatre review of Julius Caesar. Have feedback? Log on to www.tuftsobserver.org and comment on this article.