Lewis Latpham is among the most trenchant observers of American society (see his Wikipedia entry for a bio). This is an excerpt from “Lights, Camera, Democracy”, a chapter in his book Waiting for the Barbarians (1997).
These are observations from a dinner party on East 64th Street. It was originally published in August5 1996.
To most of the 40-odd people in the room … the result of the November election was a matter of little consequence. Both candidates were as sound as J. P. Morgan or Ronald Reagan in their belief that money was good for the rich and bad for the poor, and what else was it important to know. Most everybody in the room was in the business of managing the world’s traffic in expensive images – rendered as Hollywood movies and programs of political reform as well as stock-market symbols and Italian silk – and because the traffic was international, they found themselves more at ease with their economic peers in Boston, or Tokyo, or Berlin, than with their poorer fellow citizens encountered, preferably at a safe distance, in the streets of Miami or Chicago.
Note: this is the usual state in the west, as true today as in 1770 or 1907.
… But the guests also wished to think of themselves as patriots in stead of exiles; worried about their own degrees of separation from what was once a familiar plot, they were reluctant to concede that the American political system grants parallel sovereignty to both a permanent and a provisional government, and that it is always a mistake to let them be seen as different entities.
The permanent government, a secular oligarchy of which the company at dinner was representative, comprises the Fortune 500 companies and their attendant lobbyists, the big media and entertainment syndicates, the civil and military services, the large research universities and law firms. It is this government that hires the country’s politicians and sets the terms and conditions under which the country’s citizens can exercise their right – God-given but increasingly expensive – to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
… The provisional government is the spiritual democracy that comes and goes on the trend of political season and oversees the production of pageants. It exemplifies the nation’s moral aspirations, protects the citizenry from unworthy or unholy desires, and devotes itself to the mending of the American soul.
The tribunes of the people mount the hustlings to give voice to the as many of the nation’s conflicting ideas as can be recruited under the banners of freedom and fitted into the time allowed, ideas so at odds with one another that the American creed rests on the rock of contradiction – a self-righteously Christian country that supports the world’s largest markets for pornography and cocaine; a nation of prophets and real estate developers that defines the wilderness as both spiritual retreat and cash advance, the pacifist outcries against the evils of the weapons industry offset by the patriotic demand for an invincible army; a land of rugged individualists quick to seek the safety of decision by committee.
Positing a rule of laws instead of men, the provisional government must live within the cage of high-minded principle, addressing its remarks to the imaginary figure known as the informed citizen …
The genius of elected politicians consists in their ability to sustain the pretense that the two governments are one and the same while simultaneously the very different expectations of their temporal and spiritual constituencies. The effort calls for a sense of occasion. When standing in the well of the Senate or when seated in a TV studio opposite Tom Brokaw, it is the duty of the politicians to denounce sin and read from the American book of virtues, to insist that the drug traffic be stopped, Saddam Hussein punished, and the federal budget be brought in to balance.
Offstage and between appearances of C-SPAN, it is the duty of politicians to arrange, in the manner of bootleggers during Prohibition, steady supplies of subsidy and debt. Speaking to a national TV audience on a Wednesday night in the spring of 1995, Dole presented himself as a member of the provisional government and waxed indignant about the immorality of Hollywood films that exhort honest and upstanding citizens to misplace their children and abandon their wives. A few days later, reconstituted as a member of the permanent government at a fund-raising dinner in Las Vegas that provided $477,450 to his presidential campaign, Dole assured the owners of the city’s gambling casinos that he would scotch any misguided attempt on Capital Hill to pass a law limiting their profits.
As with the different forms of polite language, so also with the different rules of proper conduct. Acts deemed praiseworthy when performed by agents of the permanent government (staling trade secrets, rigging balance sheets, selling junk bonds) appear blasphemous or obscene when attempted *under the rubrics of foreign espionage and inventive fiscal policy) by the servants of the provisional government.
… By confessing to the monstrosity of their sexual appetites, movie stars add luster to their celebrity; Senator Bob Packwood tells his diary about his bungling search for love in a harem of staff assistants and finds himself expelled from Congress.
The quadrennial presidential election is the most solemn of the festivals staged by the provisional government, and the prolonged series of ceremonies … belong to the same order of events as the songs and dances performed at a Zuni corn harvest. The delegates gather to invest the next President of the United States with the magical prowess of a kachina doll, embodying the country’s ancestral truths and meant to be exhibited in hotel ballrooms and baseball parks.
Bustling with images salvaged from the costume trunks of American history, the amplified voices of conscience ascend the pulpits of liberty to proclaim their faith in nobody knows exactly what, but something that has to do with a noble spirit, a just society, and America the Beautiful. As always, the language is abstract, the speakers being careful to avoid overtly specific reference to campaign finance reform or the depletion of the Social Security Trust Fund (questions best left to the sounder judgment of the permanent government) and directing their passion to the telling of parables – about character, thrift, integrity, family values, individual initiative, points of light.
The intention is to make a loud and joyful noise in a cloud of balloons or march triumphantly out of the convention hall with one of the high school bands.
… The company at dinner had noticed that something was amiss in the engine room of freedom. … {I}t was increasingly difficult to bind together what was once the American polity with a common narrative. It was getting harder and harder to pump up the parade balloons with the willing suspensions of disbelief, which was why the news media was sending 15,000 correspondents of various magnitudes to the summer nominating convention, why the networks already had granted free time to both candidates in October, why the campaigning season never ends.
If the American Commonwealth was nowhere to be found among the strip malls between Boston and San Diego (a wilderness in which the squares of safe suburban lawns begin to seem as isolated from one another as the fortified stockades on the old Western frontier) maybe it could be simulated on TV – not only with the convention broadcasts and the pious commentary of David Brinkley but also in the exemplary displays of egalitarian good fellowship presented by Seinfeld and Murphy Brown.
Reminded of the media’s ceaseless advertisements for a democratic reality, I understood that the evening’s lament was also part of the necessary ritual. The guests might as well have been shaking cornstalks and beating feathered drums. As statements of fact, none of the points of complaint about the November election made any sense.
Few of the people present had any use for politicians who weren’t paltry, for the perfectly good reason that non-paltry politicians disturbed the status quo. Nor did they wish to engage in serious discussion of any issues that might seriously inhibit the sovereignty of money.
The country was being asked to vote for TV commercials because only in the happy far-off land of TV commercials could the American democracy still be seen to exist. But understood as ritual chant, the remarks at dinner sustained the nostalgic remembrance of time past. …
Afterword
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Posts about solutions, ways to reform America:
- Diagnosing the Eagle, Chapter III – reclaiming the Constitution, 3 January 2008
- Obama might be the shaman that America needs, 17 July 2008
- Obama describes the first step to America’s renewal, 8 August 2008
- Let’s look at America in the mirror, the first step to reform, 14 August 2008
- Fixing America: shall we choose elections, revolt, or passivity?, 16 August 2008
- Fixing American: taking responsibility is the first step, 17 August 2008
- Fixing America: the choices are elections, revolt, or passivity, 18 August 2008
- What happens next? Advice for the new President, part one., 17 October 2008
- What to do? Advice for the new President, part two., 18 October 2008
- How to stage effective protests in the 21st century, 21 April 2009