false premises

We're all sick and tired of hearing about my personal life, right? How about a nice thought-provoking entry about politics, or art, or better yet art and politics!

I've been reading a fantastic book, one which I think everyone in America should run out and get. I'm half-way through the essays and I've already dog-eared half the pages. It's funny that a book published in 2001 (just after 9/11) and featuring pieces that were originally written from 1988-2000 should seem like such imperative reading to me. There's nothing "current" about the topics of Didion's essays (Jesse Jackson's 1988 Presidential campaign, the Reagan Administration's meddling in El Salvador, Newt Gingrich), rather it's her stance on these issues and her analysis of them that so compels me. It's as if she's tapped right into the thoughts that have been formulating in my brain over the last several months and has given voice to them, the thoughts of a disaffected Leftist who has (finally) decided that he is no longer a Democrat (because the term "Democrat" is now an empty concept).

Strangely enough, Didion -- the high priestess of the extended essay, the doyenne of the New York Review of Books -- here speaks for all kinds of "marginal" Americans who are never catered to in American politics, rarely even considered, notably the urban poor and those whom she calls the "largest political party in America": those who choose not to vote. Rather than condescendingly lumping these non-voters together as "apathetic," Didion takes them seriously as a disenfranchised class who've come to see that voting in late 20th and early 21st Century America doesn't actually give you a voice in the American political process.

I encountered this dispiriting view back in August of 2004, when I ran an open at a voter registration event I conducted with the formerly homeless tenants at the building where I work. I responded to their cynicism with the traditional platitudes of the high school civics student ("Well, if you don't vote, you're definitely not going to let your voice be heard...") I don't think I would respond in quite the same way today. People should vote, I believe, they should say something, but voting alone in this country is never going to make any fundamental changes in our society -- not when we have a choice between two parties that in such essential agreement about core issues (or worse, core "values") that the purported "opposition" party can't even bring itself to articulate a challenge to the philoophy of the party in power. I consider it relatively clear-cut that any truly sentient, ethical person ought to be against the agenda of the Republican crusaders, but does that mean that they have to be "Democrats"? In the voting booth, it does and until we organize to create an effective alternative to the two party system, maybe it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to vote.

Our electoral system is currently configured to make it really hard for anyone outside of the two-party system to meaningfully participate (unless they happen to be a billionaire). That's where the disaffected tenants in my building have it right: voting is not going to solve their problems. It only would if every disaffected poor and minority citizen decided to mobilize one day and vote -- but that doesn't happen without major work, by which I mean grass-roots organizing, political education, "empowerment." You've gotta put in time, build a meaningful constituency whose votes will seem to matter to the big guys. And that's an uphill battle.

Even back in 1988 (a year in which both of the parties' candidates were noticeably uncharasmatic), Didion saw clearly that our fixation on the personality of the President served as a narcotic that occluded the real issues of import (I would argue that liberals' active personal disgust for Bush creates similar results and brought us the horrifically failed candidacy of John Forbes Kerry):

In other words, what 'it came down to,' what it was 'about,' what was wrong or right with America, was not an historical shift largely unaffected by the actions of individual citizens but 'character,' and if 'character' could be seen to count, then every citizen -- since everyone was a judeg of character, an expert in the field of personality -- could be seen to count. This notion, that the citizen's choice among determinedly centrist candidates makes a 'difference,' is in fact the narrative's most central element, and its most fictive.

It doesn't surprise me that many of the early reviews of Didion's book, coming on the heels of 9/11, stress its "irrelevance." This book, for all of its skewering of conservative targets, challenges a lot of notions that mainstream liberals desperately want to believe in, most importantly the essential "fairness" of our political system in general. But that collective myth is the chief "fiction" that Didion is documenting.

Three years after the book's publication, it's the simple-minded victim rhetoric that so overwhelmed our national discource after the terrorist attacks which now seems irrelevant. Where is the irrevocable break with the past that so many armchair pundits spoke about in the aftermath of our national "calamity"? As we live on in the post-9/11 world, everything actually seems more continuous than ever. One only has to read Didion's "The West Wing of Oz" (her account of Reagan's passivity, his buying into the rhetorical fictions on which his Presidency was predicated) to see its immediate applicability to our current President and the fictions he seems to buy into (even as his Machiavellian aides try to sell those same fictions to the public to support more pragmatic but nefarious ends).

9/11 hasn't changed anything; we're grappiling with the same disconnect between our political class (by which I include not only policy-makers, but also the media that report on them and frame the stories) and the endemic problems that are truly destroying our society as a whole. The liberal media (and it is liberal, who cares? "liberalism" is about as bankrupt a political stance as they come...) makes it easy for the right to control the discourse by continually taking their bait, by ofcusing incessantly on superficial issues instead of talking about the underlying dynamics of inequality and injustice in this country.

What's the worst class division in this country? It's probably the division between most of us and the "political class," the people who have the influence, who have a chance someday of calling the shots. I have some experience with this distinction, having spent most of my Rhodes Scholarship among young people actively training to join that class, whether as actual politicians or journalists or think-tank policy wonks. This is a narrow field, not necessarily defined by wealth and education, though certainly so in large part. How "robust" is our democracy when of the last three Presidents two were father and son and the wife of the other is poised to become the leading opposition candidate to succeed the son? There are not a lot of people who "break in" to American politics these days -- there are very few Shirley Chisholms. Those who rise, no matter what they're economic background, must do so by appeasing the interests of the moneyed elite (either the liberal moneyed elite or the conservative, take your pick). There is no such thing, really, as an "insurgent" in American politcs anymore, no chance of rising to power from the bottom up.

And the hard truth about this "political class" is that their jockeying for power seems to have less and less to do with ideology than with a hunger for power. There was more ideological distinction in a Yankees-Red Sox playoff series than in the 2004 Presidential election. What do Democrats really want to say anymore but "See, we were right!" "Gotcha!" or "Isn't it our turn yet?" When winning the Presidency becomes a goal unto itself, then the Presidency is no longer about being an employee of the people. It is about being a successful charlatan.

Where does Joan Didion (or me, for that matter) get off saying things like this? What does she (or I?) know about how politics works? Therein lies the problem, and maybe the solution. Didion is known as an essayist, but not a "political insider." She's no Bob Woodward. But her outsider's perspective serves to constantly remind us that politics in America has become an insider's game. This is no longer a democracy on the Athenian model (if it ever was!) in which a man may set aside his plow for a term and head up to Washington to represent his fellow citizens and then return (like Cincinnatus) to his private life. We ought to rethink the idea that one must be a politician in order to govern.

Harold Pinter delivered an address when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature that touched (somewhat more crudely than Didion, it must be said, but, hey, Pinter's penchant has always been for terse, spare dialogue) on some of the concerns I've been covering here. Pinter says essentially what I've just been saying about politicians' self-interest and contrasts it with the artist's pursuit of truth (in all its ambiguity):

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

Pinter goes on to bludgeon his audience with the assertion that the invasion of Iraq was predeicated on a web of lies about WMDs. That argument, while worthy and necessary, has been heard before but the paragraph I've quoted above is more thought-provoking. It's an example not of political grandstanding (as, no doubt, many people took Pinter's address to be) but an essential explication of the dangers of entrenched political power in general. (Interestingly, Pinter later refers to the massacres conducted with American support by the Alcatl regiments in El Salvador, to which considerable space is also devoted in Didion's book.)

Whenever I hear anybody bemoaning the fact that Pinter (or Susan Sarandon or Kanye West) shouldn't be talking about politics, or worse "imposing their political opinions on the public," I'm going to ask them why they think politics is such sacred ground. We need more outsiders who can see through the fictions and challenge the unacknowledged assumptions. If we think too highly of our politicians, then only politicians will be involved in politics.