American Document/How Does the State Imagine?
Updike, John
with Power, since it questions the ethics and not the efficacy of their tricks. St. John is alleged to have an 85 percent success ratio. His low-blow commercials never backfire. In truth, the link...
...The imagination of the modern artist, on the contrary, is committed not to conservation, which is carried on by the libraries and museums devoted to his art, but to exploration and danger,to expansion...
...this is because its imagination is composed of the wills of thousands of its administrators, almost none of whom wish to lose his job...
...No one in the movie has very much of it, or is obsessed with pursuing poweras an end in itself...
...John neither talks about power nor seems interested in attaining more of it...
...The place where my personal hopes and dreams and the intentions and pro-visions of the state intersected most vitally was the postal system...
...But Erich von Stroheim already used that title, and not even a political consultant could convince moviegoers to overlook the irony of a Hollywood film criticizing that motive...
...Many political con-sultants are con men, most talented at convincing candidates that they can't win without paying their ransom...
...All this, of course, for the cause of tribal well-being...
...What real-life political consultant would show weakness when intimidated, as St...
...Lumet should be taken to task for his credulity...
...It can imagine only a continual health, the vigor of a gently inflationary status quo...
...This is above all true for writing, which can be cheaply produced and since the invention of printing has been a popular art, an art that seeks to draw its support from below and not from above...
...Myself, I ask mainly that my tribal officials keep the mails operating—no small task, and one where many tribes fail—and continue to safeguard the freedom of expression that my particular state's founders rashly promised its citizens...
...Caddell has represented McGovern, Hart, Mondale, and New Coke, among others...
...The individual options of altruism and self-sacrifice and weary withdrawal and anorexia are too intricate and perverse for it...
...If he has a single passion, it's money, and the things you can buy with it...
...Its instinct is conservative, I would say, more than, as is often charged, expansionist...
...this is true of its government as well...
...The state, like a child, wishes that each day be just like the last...
...Power, in the Orwellian sense of the term, is not even a theme...
...By accepting their own assertions of skill, the film inflates still further the reputation political consultants enjoy as wonder workers...
...by John Updike Our title challenges the literary man's traditional duty to be concrete and real...
...I never see a blue mailbox without a spark of warmth and wonder and gratitude that this intricate and extensive service is maintained for my benefit...
...It seems to me the writer's imagination and the imagination of the state have opposite tendencies and should keep a respectful distance from one another...
...As portrayed by the somnambulant Gere, he's not very interested in anything...
...Automobile seatbelts become mandatory by law and by law warnings from the surgeon-general are printed on cigarette packages...
...Compared to a human individual, the state is a relatively rudimentary organism...
...Instead of being suckered by their pretensions, Lumet should have examined the history of someone like Pat Caddell more closely...
...AMERICAN DOCUMENT...
...And by suggesting that political consultants have complete control over the platforms of the candidates who hire them, it also exaggerates their importance...
...We might also ask why this film is called Power...
...It desires, we must conclude, its citizens to be in touch with one another...
...And Lumet gives the sleazeballs too human a face...
...r HOW DOES THE STATE IMAGINE...
...This is plenty, and this is enough...
...but the numerous workers beneath them are no longer subjected to such a risk...
...Now, what do these hollow blue monuments on streetcorners from here to Hawaii tell of how the state imagines...
...Just as bone counters every injury with the production of more calcium, more bone, so government tends, under every stimulus, to ex-tend its connections with its citizens and the services it proposes to render them...
...John does...
...However, a state will almost never, without a fight, submit to its own diminishment...
...Its workers, whom in my small town I knew all by name, brought to the house John Updike's most recent novel is The Witches of Eastwick...
...It is an awesome sight, in Washington, D.C., around five o'clock, to see the armies of government workers swarm like locusts into the sunlight...
...In truth, the link between the magic of political consultants and winning at the polls is unproven, to say the least...
...the printed journals—the newspapers and magazines—that represented to me a world where I wished to locate my future...
...The state imagines solidarity, and resists secession and nonconformity, which is secession on the personal scale...
...the tribe seeks interconnection and consolidation...
...I do not know why, in 1967, the United States government felt obliged to create endowments to encourage and fund the arts and the humanities...
...This is still true for me...
...art, like a youth, hopes that each day will bring something new...
...I send manuscripts away, I sometimes get praise and money in return...
...His career is a case study in victory through defeat...
...It is the United States mails, with the myriad routes and mechanisms that the service implies, not to mention the basic honesty and efficiency and non-interference of its thousands of employees, that enable me to live as I do, and to do what I do...
...Lumet more aptly might have called his film Greed—the ambition he confuses with power...
...Each day's mail brought potential treasure...
...Like almost everybody in the world I was born into a tribe, with its rites and obligations and mystic signs...
...Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products, an actual audience for their performance...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986...
...If he really wanted to damage the profession he so disdains, he should have portrayed Pete St...
...In those days when a postage stamp cost three cents, I sent letters to great and distant men, cartoonists and writers, some of whom deigned, to my eternal gratitude, to respond...
...A democracy wisely provides an electoral process whereby most of the top officials must periodically run the risk of replacement...
...only when the territorial enlargement is made to seem necessary to conserving what already exists is the effort of tribal aggression enthusiastically undertaken...
...the artist for millennia has been in league with the state, and has chiselled its propaganda and its gods on the appropriate temples and mausoleums...
...I was early introduced to the flag called the stars and stripes, and to the eagle with his claws full of arrows, and the symbols for dollars and cents, and the map showing our westward expansion...
...This article was his contribution to a panel on "How Does the State Imagine...
...But an alternative patron to autocratic government, an affluent and varied popular audience, has arisen, and the notion of a perpetual avant garde with it—the notion of an art wherein change, like that in fashion or the climate, is amusing and desirable in itself...
...It was not always so...
...John as more hustler than gigolo...
...Which of them ever dropped a client whose "hardball" tactics were too tough...
...as part of a week-long PEN Conference on "The Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State," held in New York last January...
Vol. 19 • April 1986 • No. 4
