So Our Politics is Reduced To This

At age 19 I was flying from Tel Aviv to Amsterdam and a man seated next to me asserted, deep into a conversation about some political absurdity or another, that government was in fact entertainment, show business. I was incredulous; I could comprehend the idea as metaphor, but no, he insisted that he meant it quite literally.

This morning as I listened on the radio to Arlen Specter's "Town Hall" meeting in Lebanon PA, I realized that this assertion, which I have returned to in my mind many times over the ensuing years, has now met its fullest flowering.

The election of Barack Obama did not, as I and many others (I assume) had hoped, fulfill the dream of a return to a more elegant and reasoned discourse. Oh, I realize now that I should not have dared hope that the process of the election itself was the last gasp of a dying coarseness, ignorance, and sensationalism. Like other romantic fools before me, propelled by what I saw as Bush's supreme failure (not any particular policy, but arrogance and poor communication style), I fantasized that Obama's urbane, eloquent demeanor signalled a return to intelligence. Of course, it was not to be.

Our politics now are cheaper, and more brutish, and more vapidly melodramatic than ever before. Our discourse over healthcare reform is precisely, in both substance and tone, the intellectual equivalent of a Jerry Springer program. The so-called "tea-bagging" Republicans (so nicknamed by the cleverly crude left) play the standard roles of the impossibly stupid rednecks and low-lifes whose monosyllabic rants don't simply appeal to, but actually work to reduce us all to, society's dimmest consumers. And the haughty and powerful Democrats are both the knowing TV audience (it's a guilty pleasure) looking on with uncomfortable disdain AND Springer himself--portrayed, of course, by the President; calm, knowing, above the fray, and subtly introducing just the ideal soupcon of encouragement to fan the flames of stupidity ever higher, where go the ratings.

Just like local weather "storm teams," the government do-good-niks would never waste a good crisis (whether it is a crisis or not; many a morn has a Channel 29 reporter, intrepid but nervous-faced, relayed live from the intersection of Rio and 29 that "the roads are looking pretty good so far," a dry, clear dawn behind them ironically raining on their parade). If we expect the Fourth Estate to act in any fashion other than to optimize profits we are fools; and if we expect that the way to do so is anything other than to create rooting interests in the extreme, we are unthinking. I observe the credulous comments and positions of many of my wisest friends and realize how thoroughly the agents of antagonism for profits' sake have insinuated their reductive talking points into the culture.

Well, the gent on the plane was right. So was the one who said we get the government we deserve.