IN POLITICS, TOO, YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT
Whitmire, James
REFLECTIONS In politics, too, you are what you eat fames M. Whitmire It was noted long ago by that tiresome but perceptive sage, Aristotle, that each polis produces a unique form of government,...
...Image and appearance have interposed themselves to blot out reality, while they slyly wrap themselves in its lingering penumbra (thus gaining credibility...
...History abounds in examples of governments and politics shaping James M. Whitmire, a free-lance writer, has taught at the University of Virginia and at Anatolia College in Salonika, Greece...
...But there are troubling aspects, too...
...Inherently meaningless skirmishes, whose significance was shamelessly hyped by the media and by politicians expecting victory, have already been staged in Florida and Maine...
...11 this is not lost on the politi-IM cians...
...Politics becomes the art of juggling loose perceptions and expectations...
...The very vocabulary of politics reflects our society's emphasis on appearance and neglect of reality...
...Only in America could there be talk, as there was in the 1960s, of a "credibility gap...
...A substantive test of the various Presidential candidates' strength will not occur until the New Hampshire primary in February, but the shadow-game of posturing and image-making is already well under way...
...At this stage of the race the politicians are vague and airy, like those blown-up balloon creatures in New Year's parades...
...The candidates try to make hay with the media, but are more likely to be laid low by a psychological ambush or an image pitfall...
...We are nearing that fateful stage of the Presidential campaign at which one beholds a total eclipse of what is real...
...Books have been writ-m mm ten on the importance of projecting the proper image, and consultants are paid extravagant fees to steer politicians away from substance and specifics...
...They appear on the electronic box in dreamlike impressions, a phantasmagoria of unpleasant sights: the sophomoric vehemence of George Bush, the bombastic hucksterism of John Connally, the Jesuitic hipsterism of Jerry Brown, the reptilian cool of Howard Baker, and so on...
...Sociologists observe that our cities breed impersonality and uniformity, and that our factories transform humans into dulled-out automatons...
...It is as though the act of seeing it on the television screen authenticates or legitimates the event...
...In modern Greece, every tavern in every village overflows with men and precocious boys each of whom is utterly convinced, amidst a cloud of ouzo vapors and foul tobacco smoke, that he would make a better prime minister than that poser down in Athens...
...Our heroes are football players, movie stars, pop singers, while our great writers and thinkers languish in obscurity...
...We admire material ostentation, but we are incapable of appreciating riches of the spirit or intellect...
...Aristotle's theory stands the test of history...
...This being the case, we should ask whether the theory might not be put to use to aid us in coping with the Presidential campaign so ominously facing us...
...REFLECTIONS In politics, too, you are what you eat fames M. Whitmire It was noted long ago by that tiresome but perceptive sage, Aristotle, that each polis produces a unique form of government, a particular style of politics conforming to the people's collective psyche and compatible with their special mix of idiosyncrasies...
...We spend hours each day staring at two-dimensional, stereotyped television images, and if offered the choice of seeing a Walt Disney special on Paradise or actually going there, the majority of us would opt for the special...
...The political history of modern Greece also demonstrates the point: a bitter recurring cycle of democracy declining into anarchy, provoking military dictatorship, eventually yielding again to democracy, and so on around and around...
...all that is required is that an assertion have the flavor of truth, that it be believable, credible...
...And the candidates now lavish fulsome attention on Iowa, hoping to repeat Jimmy Carter's 1976 public relations coup in that state's first-in-the-nation caucuses...
...Superficially, it would seem that American government and politics reflect the democratic habits and basic decency of our people...
...Just as the sun is periodically blocked from our sight by the interposition of the moon, so at quadrennial intervals an analogous phenomenon is observed in our political cosmos...
...Everything seems to be blowing in the wind...
...The pretentions of Gaullism were the inevitable manifestation of France in her decline...
...Perhaps a sounder intellectual grasp of the events about to unfold can be obtained by inquiring into the nature of American politics and the structure of the social-psychological landscape on which those politics so wantonly tread...
...The wonder is that from this outrageous surreality will emerge the next President of the United States...
...Our politics is, indeed, a unique reflection of our society...
...The very expression is revealing, for it implies that it is no longer important for something actually to be true...
...and there are those who viewed the government of Richard Nixon, a man reelected by an overwhelming popular majority, as the symbolic incarnation of a corrupt and cynical generation of Americans...
...The politics of Presidential primaries is an illusory, whimsical affair...
...In the case of our own country, historians suggest that the bland Eisenhower Administration reflected the mood of American society in the 1950s...
...The surviving politician is one who can adapt to the vagaries of the changing political environment, while the master politician is one who can actually manipulate that environment by conjuring the right image in the voters' eyes or by mesmerizing the media...
...Who would dare to claim that these preposterous images are real human beings, or that they will not at the hour of midnight resolve themselves into inconsequential puffs of dust...
...The polls on a candidate are up and down, sometimes both simultaneously...
...Television has, in a sense, institutionalized the ascendancy of appearance over reality...
...The three Democratic and ten Republican hopefuls court these backwoods provinces not for votes, but to strike poses for the national media, to be seen, to carve out a winsome image that will set them apart from the faceless pack of campaigners...
...One need only recall the playfully anarchic regime of Mount Olympus, the totalitarian rigor of Sparta, or the democratic felicity of Athens, to be persuaded that each political system molds itself to the contours of its constituency...
...The effect of such a hyperdemocratic populace is to render the country virtually ungovernable...
...How appropriate and predictable a political history for a people of whom it might be said, "They are too democratic for democracy...
...The rise of Hitlerism in Germany between the world wars was an accurate if unfortunate expression of that nation's afflicted Volksgeist...
...The press spends one week building up the prospects of a particular candidate, and the next week begins the dismantling process...
...it filters and neatly packages it, making it "real...
...In many ways we are a people who value style over substance...
...We fault a politician like Lyndon Johnson, who made little pretense of concealing his deceit ahd thus offended the sensibility which demands decorum and the appearance of rectitude...
...On the other hand, we harbor a subliminal admiration for a sophisticated politician like Nixon, who could lie to us with a straight face and thereby not deny us the all-important veneer of credibility...
...themselves in the image of their people...
Vol. 44 • January 1980 • No. 1
