Election ’08: Season of Staggering Inauthenticity

There is nothing new about the political world being populated with phonies. There is nothing new about sound bites and photo ops so blatantly artificial they make us cringe. We’re getting use to fake issues and phony legislation has become more common, too. (A good and useful program stops being good or helpful when it begins to define “children” as 25 year olds. If Grad Students need health insurance why not create a low-cost co-operative for it rather than palm it off on the taxpayers? – but I digress.)

CBS’s Dick Meyer wrote almost a year ago that he was craving authenticity:

I find that after covering politics for 25 years what I really yearn for is not great leaders, smart reforms nor policies that I agree with. What I crave is authenticity.
[…]
Put another way, what I miss is the simple honesty, the genuine moment, the unscripted moment, the gaffe — anything that has not been run through the Cuisinart of marketing, focus groups and linguistic analysis. “The enemy isn’t liberalism,” the late columnist, Lars-Erik Nelson, said. “The enemy isn’t conservatism. The enemy is bullshit.” I’ll proudly swipe that as a motto.
[…]
…people at the left and right edges of the spectrum are more extreme and angrier than they used to be. And the political elite is absolutely more rabid and recalcitrant. Politically engaged individuals are more likely to be very attached to a single issue or to an ideology. There is a decline in tolerance of other views. And an increase in people feeling that their values and lifestyles are genuinely threatened by those they disagree with, their political enemies. It’s not polarization, but balkanization.

In other words, many of us are over-attached to our politics, to our own positions and perspectives. We cling to them. We’re brittle in arguments. Why? Well, it’s partly because the politics we see on television is so thin.

Linking to the piece here, I appreciated that Meyer’s search for the authentic was broadening to include our whole society, not merely our politics, but noted:

Some, of course, will blame the Clintons. Everyone else will blame Bush, who, standing atop a pile of rubble or holding the shield of a fallen cop before a joint session of congress – may have (along with Rudy Giuliani) managed the last authentic moments in our political memory.

Yes, much in life is illusory…what makes some so willing to believe that President Bush “lied” about WMD, while they accept that Clinton – who said all the same things – told the truth?

Even more troubling, in America, this very week, the president made a statement that – even hearing out-of-context – most immediately understood as metaphor, and some Americans still willfully misunderstood it to mean that Bush had declared Mandela dead at the hands of Saddam Hussein. I mean…are we talking about a willful suspension of disbelief, here, or a hate so strong some are willing to suspend their own intelligence? (“I want to believe he’s that stupid – they want me to believe he’s that stupid, so I will!”)

We’re surrounded by inauthenticity, it’s true, but what is staggering and frightening is that so many of us are so eagerly taking the fake and wrapping it around ourselves like a protective blanket, admitting phoniness into our reason and making it welcome. While it is happening on both sides, the “Bush said Hussein killed Nelson Mandela” truthiness idiocy is the most egregious example.

Peggy Noonan touched a little on this topic, today – in a way:

Domestically, the Democratic presidential candidates appear only before supportive groups. They don’t speak to antitax groups and talk about their own assumptions regarding tax policy. They don’t go to traditional values groups.

…it’s unworthy of a great nation. When people say the campaign feels artificial, that’s what they mean. It’s not John Edwards’s hairspray or Hillary Clinton’s makeup. It’s that they give every sign of being afraid to speak and listen to those who haven’t been patted down by thought-cops for unacceptable views.

The Republicans are the same. An invitation to debate on Univision, the Spanish-language network? They have scheduling conflicts. What about the Log Cabin Republicans? No time right now. How unserious.

Our politicians are pandering and over-careful-to-a-fault partly because what Meyer noticed about the extremists in each party, who have intimidated their candidates, monetarily and otherwise, into a droning elusiveness. No one wants to be pinned down as standing for much of anything. Candidates bob and weave their way through debates and interviews hoping nothing sticks. And they talk before vetted, friendly audiences because they don’t want the boos to end up on YouTube; most candidates will not have Viacom editing out the boos for them.

Candidates are doing a poor job of thinking on their feet because they’re not authentic enough to trust themselves, yet they want us to trust them. If you are genuine, and you trust yourself, if you are secure in what you believe, then you don’t hitch your breath or break into nervous laughter if the script deviates or if a moderator throws you a curveball – you can hit it straight on rather than deflect, dissemble or change the subject, which is pretty much all the current crop of candidates manage.

I think Dave Justus is on to something when he suggests there is a fear of speech occurring which is connected to the increasingly tribal mindsets we’re adopting. When we see something really real – unquestionably real – it stops us dead in our tracks and it moves us – possibly because it’s so damned rare. When we find an old profile of Hillary it fascinates and intrigues as she no longer can, because she seems incapable, any longer, of being that forthright and undisguised.

It occurs to me that – for now -there are only a few places wherein we are fully safe enough to be fully ourselves and let go of the fakery – one place is in the confessional, if we dare to be humble. The other is in the voting booth, if we dare to put aside hate, if we dare to – just for a moment – allow a willing suspension of knee-jerk hate so that reason might pull the lever.