COMMENTS: "The Prez Doth cut a Goodly Figure . . ."
Hux, Samuel
When we talk politics at home, in a bar, or at a party—that is, wherever there are no bulbs flashing or cameras rolling—there's at least a good chance we'll speculate, "Will the...
...The citizens of Ruritania may know that if the Radical Populists win the parliamentary elections Adalbert Branko will in all likelihood be named prime minister...
...so I'm not reassured...
...Now, the politics of boredom-and-excitement belongs neither to right nor left exclusively but to those who possess some vague political urge, feel some necessity to manifest themselves publicly, yet tire of or have no taste for the often boring business of public affairs: to see to jobs, incomes, food, housing, health, and the prospect of a good life for the citizen without whose quite ordinary existence there would be no government in the first place...
...Fascism appealed to the petty men and women whose patience with the hard, taxing, often boring regimen of "ordinary politics" was so small that they could be moved only by flashy "aesthetic" simplisms that struck them as large and poetic . but were only trivial and dangerous...
...Well, they "still count" under the aspect of eternity...
...I'd like to be hopeful...
...The political circumstance and the pomp were usually in proportion to one another...
...lie is utterly bored...
...It's disturbing because there is more involved here than "merely" a vulgarization of the political process by electronic "journalism...
...But I don't know how many times this tippler can be replicated...
...I COMING — IN OUR NEXT ISSUE: Literary Radicalism in America by David Bromwich daresay it did...
...But, over the centuries, more differences have developed...
...Even if it is in fact conservative or reactionary, it must seem radically so...
...Or: "The president's tone was moderate and his language restrained, and one can only wait to see what will be the posture of the new old boys of the Kremlin...
...However, our theater is naturalistic and prosy too, that's our dramatic style now...
...But they go together...
...So, given an electoral process that both allows and encourages the politics of personality and gesture over issues, and given the persistent temptation of the politics of boredom-and-excitement, when network television heightens the dramatic gesture, posture, stance, and style, it is not merely focusing on a dimension of politics...
...I don't think there's much need to argue that network television elevates style above substance...
...It may seem the other way around because the past's theatricality seems showier to us than our own (its foreignness helps us to see it) and the domain of its actual politics seems limited in comparison to our own, having less to do with jobs, incomes, and so mundanely forth...
...He sits at a desk, writes a couple of notes that he places in the outgoing box...
...The politics of boredom-and-excitement is a lust for interestingness in the public sphere (which usually betrays an incapacity to create or sustain 394 one's own private excitements...
...Marx said that "all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second as farce" (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte...
...We'll return to the election in our Winter issue...
...sniffs, drinks, nods...
...But the obvious fact that those posturings were brutal nonsense tends to put them at a remove from us, to make them seem exceptions, freaks, foreign to the political tenor of our time...
...Or we mean an inflexible system of sociopolitical thought not subject to revision by sociopolitical facts...
...When we talk politics at home, in a bar, or at a party—that is, wherever there are no bulbs flashing or cameras rolling—there's at least a good chance we'll speculate, "Will the Democrats/Republicans raise/lower taxes and the Congress vote in/out a jobs program...
...to the north, crippled and vulgar reenactments of dark Teutonic rituals...
...We end up with a substitute for a real politics, not (as in the theatricalization of politics) an appreciation of it...
...I'm not really looking over my shoulder and listening for jackboots...
...Nonetheless, the citizen of Lower Ruritania does not vote for Branko (who's running in Central Ruritania) but for his own regional candidate, Otto Lenska...
...Ruritanian television might wish to focus its report of a debate on the observation that "Lenska upstaged his rather too stiff opponent, slipping with marvelous aplomb in and out of the Niederruritanische dialect, an argot wonderfully suitable to subtly comic abuse...
...that all the Comments & Opinions in this issue, though prescient, were written before the Republican and—except for Harold Meyerson's comment—the Democratic party conventions —before the distinguished choice of Geraldine Ferraro...
...Both the general politics of boredom-and-excitement and the specific eruption of fascism share a tendency toward theatricalization as politics...
...EDS...
...Ted Koppel has argued (in "The Myth of the Medium," New Republic, February 6, 1984) that we exaggerate the political power of television: "It is not the medium but the candidate and the message that still count...
...More impor393 tant: this phenomenon joins (1) an essential feature of the American political system and (2) a pervasive mood of politics in this century in (3) a chilling configuration that should not allow one to dismiss as innocent inanity the media's love of the politics of performance...
...Of course, times have never been free of public flourish and politics dramatized: the ElizabethanJacobean courtly pomp, the Renaissance notion of the world as stage, its major scenes regal...
...This does not mean that Lenska will not kiss babies or dye his hair for photogenic purposes...
...It is in this century that politics has too often been long on show and short on substance...
...That seems its way of approximating the stylish ennui of the titled or untitled aristocracy it superseded decades ago...
...There were poor laws and trade regulations, of course, but not the extensive social and economic legislation of our times...
...One need argue only a little more that our political system makes the dramaturgical manipulation of the electronic media easier...
...Now he looks more in place...
...In the industrial and postindustrial West, this has not been a century for jacquerie: without significant thousands of bourgeois citizens bored stiff with "ordinary politics" such a political movement may be mass, but it will also be inert...
...rises, stretches, pours himself a dark liquid, sherry or cognac apparently...
...Who gives a goddamn...
...There would be a certain built-in resistance to interesting triviality...
...TV on...
...such gibberish so intoxicating to the bored...
...Still, I'm not presenting some disguised argument that Reagan is really a fascist with sycophantic Goebbelses chattering on camera...
...These party conventions simply conflict with our publication's schedule...
...They were violent manifestations of a mood and a cast of mind that are often enough our own...
...Not for the hero the day-to-day balancing of political ledgers, the compromises of petty administration...
...IMAGINE A STAGE setting with very handsome props, eclectic, tasteful, but a little threadbare, suggesting generations of use: a room where weighty decisions have been made...
...But ideology should mean a coherent, and flexible, set of assumptions about human nature, social possibility, and cultural values, which dictate interlocking public policies and programs...
...No longer overwhelmed, he dominates...
...But it does mean there's a better chance the citizen will vote for Lenska because he likes the Radical Populist program...
...Another is that with the democratization of politics the populace that once was a tolerated audience has become a needed participant, so that when we speak of politics we refer not only to the regime but also to the population and its movements, opinions, and even moods...
...And in the main I think that a good thing...
...The president seemed particularly energetic tonight...
...Finally he moves to a chair center stage, sits, looks about, slumps, and stares...
...It's one of the ironies of American electoral politics that our privilege of voting directly for the head of government—which makes our system apparently most democratic—is also what makes it easy to avoid taking the democratic process with complete political seriousness...
...seemed more sympathetic than really cross...
...The domain of politics in the Renaissance was indeed more limited...
...But one might hope that in its indulgence of "performance critique" it might eventually reveal itself sufficiently, so that the citizenry will have to notice its political distractiveness...
...I would add that some world-historical facts and moods occur first as farce, sustain themselves as such, and yet erupt now and then as tragedy...
...Historians still debate whether fascism had any ideology...
...His countenance and posture undergo slow changes conveying pleasure, then hesitation, finally discomfort...
...Ideology is not the enemy of ordinary politics where "things get done": in politics without benefit of clercs, intellectuals, gaps get stopped for a week or two...
...But under the aspect of the medium, the gesture of the candidate clearly counts more than the gist of his message...
...396 commentator's predictable remarks about presidential style, personal popularity with Washington press corps, and so on...
...I recently stopped at an unfashionable watering hole an hour north of New York City...
...But the farce of the politics of boredomandexcitement predates and outlasts that eruption...
...His presentation was brisk and his manner self-assured, an obvious challenge that has to put his detractors on the defensive...
...But there is a difference between the theatricalization of politics, and theatricalization as politics...
...I would also argue that apart from the unfortunate cooperation of electronic media and the electoral process there is a dangerous mood in this century, usually latent but easily tapped, which predates television and can corrupt any political system...
...I don't think a political person without an ideology is quite to be trusted...
...one may simply dread being subjected to a long-running farce...
...To note that, one doesn't have to fear the return of tragedy...
...Ideology has a bad press...
...a distrust of the reasonable as insufficiently heroic, and a disgust with the ordinary (which when felt by an ordinary person convinces him that he's extraordinary...
...My point is that they are not...
...But it's disturbing that more and more the media in their coverage, and the casual commentary of citizens when mikes are thrust before them, tend to sound like the appreciative judgment of a courtier: "The prez doth cut a goodly figure today...
...And farce is seldom very funny...
...Now theatricalization as politics is not the same thing as the rejection or lack of ideology...
...and he sloshed the contents of his beer mug across the screen...
...The result is a weakness for symbolic politics, flashy postures...
...For reasons I doubt I will ever fully grasp, the bourgeoisie seems to enjoy nothing so much as detesting its own accomplishments...
...And they share a tendency to ignore, downgrade, or keep a tasteful distance from ideology...
...The first is a matter of public affairs accorded an appropriate ritual...
...And perhaps it's reassuring that any staginess in our politics today is relatively drab, workaday, and sit-comic, hardly a high aesthetic affair— wattles, pompadours, white shirts not black, and avuncular smiles...
...He notices and walks to a wardrobe in the corner, pulls off his rather garish plaid jacket, pulls out a more sedate herringbone and dons it, nods approval...
...The nationalism—whether You Will Have Noticed...
...A man enters, strolls, and stands about...
...But in the second, the ritual itself becomes important and its meaning an incidental what-have-you...
...if the theatrical is what's appreciated, why bother having any ideological baggage...
...But the point is that Ruritanian television would not get a direct assist from the nature of the electoral system itself...
...It is, rather, playing with fire by rewarding and encouraging our most inane and potentially most dangerous political habits...
...And it was the radicalism (of a sort) of fascism that appealed to the bored...
...Fascism was one tragic eruption...
...We get the point: all this is newly his, but he's not yet quite its...
...One creates the facilitating context for the other: if you're not burdened by hard ideological concerns it's much easier to cultivate theatrical gestures...
...In our century the sheer ceremony and theatricality of politics is, generally, muted...
...395 Hitler's Blut and Boden and Jew-hatred or Mussolini's "proletarian nation," or what-have-you, provided a more lustful excitement and fervor than could gray questions of economics and social justice, which do not always move real and potential followers of aspiring mass movements...
...Politics should be heroic: somehow at once an austere classicism and a fierce romanticism (which is why the fascist always looked classier in Spanish garb: the Spaniards have a talent for that paradox...
...So the politics then was naturally theatrical or ceremonial: military adventure, dynastic matrimony as foreign policy, confrontation between royal prerogative and parliamentary ambition, and so on...
...That is: a pathological boredom, which in ordinary times is obvious merely as a certain elevation of cheapness in the social body but that can, when times are ripe, take on an organized political expression, without which the fascisms we have known in the West would never have been more than the neurotic dreams of d6classê ideologues...
...He returns to the desk, writes, thinks, doodles, walks about, returns, writes, thinks, doodles, walks about—repeating this cycle with increasing agitation and impatience...
...The setting represents the halls of power, the stage time a dramatic foreshortening of the last 80 years or so, give or take a decade, and the character the liberal bourgeois...
...One is that the area of circumstances recognized as essentially political has grown immensely, at the same time that pomp has tended to recede into the landscape of the everyday or to be reserved as a kind of classy entertainment for high patriotic occasions—July parades, inaugurations, and such...
...I APOLOGIZE for getting carried away...
...growled a patron, "I've worked six months in the last twelve...
...I think our first impulse is to see theatricalization as politics as the older mode, and theatricalization of politics as ours...
...But there is a persistent danger here—for politically respectable people in this century also have a tendency to keep a tasteful distance from ideology...
...But its publicists generally preferred to insist that it was not an ideology, nothing so Marxist or bourgeois as that, but was instead a process, a movement, a transcendence, a heroic Weltanschauung creating and transforming itself in the glorious, violent, on-going transcendence of the movement of process...
...The theatricality we can recall historically is a rather shabby style: Mussolini mugging before assembled mobs imagining themselves Roman legionnaires...
...So now: in our century politics still means war, foreign policy, executive privilege confronting legislative responsibility, and so forth, but even more social and economic regulation...
...And yet, no matter how we may compliment ourselves on our good sense, it is precisely in this century that humankind has suffered from theatricality as politics, with truly disastrous effects...
...Its alternative names— "national syndicalism," "national socialism," "revolutionary corporativism"—lent it a certain undeserved panache...
...But I think we are wrong, or half so...
...We often subscribe to a rough approximation of Karl Mannheim's ideas in Ideology and Utopia: ideology is a set of views justifying the power of those in power...
...The Ruritanian, unless he's totally besotted, is more or less compelled to vote the issues...
...before the speeches and the votes...
...Yet my excursion into fascist "theater" is no idle trip...
...Call it the temptation of the politics of boredom-and-excitement...
...I don't count on television to reform itself...
...He does not have the luxury of the American who may vote for the Democratic candidates for Senate and Congress because he's a union member afraid of union-busting, and then vote for the Republican presidential candidate because he's responsive to a certain style...
...The bartender"Dammit George, you'll work the damned mop...
...So this is what it entails...
...More often than not, boredom is actuated into political expression by some cause that seems sufficiently "radical...
...397...
Vol. 31 • September 1984 • No. 4
