Holy Hopeful Society, Batman!!
I know the SOTU (State of the Union) is a huge deal on Capitol Hill. Lobbyists work weeks to cram a phrase into the language. Staffers are up late nights, revising verb tenses and muscular imagery.
But can't we just delete this practice and the obvious theater of the moment? Nobody reveres American presidents anymore and only weirdos like me watch the speech. Oddly, I googled "SOTU" today and got sent to the White House press room site where I read a speech that had the applause lines marked. It talked about HIV/AIDS and creating a mentoring program for prisoners' kids. I finally realized it was the speech from 2003. I think it was the last one posted on the site.
So three years ago, we had an equally meaningless SOTU.
What I heard:
American Competitiveness Initiative
Make teachers work harder with fewer resources
Freedom
Prosperity
Violent crimes down
Welfare down 50%
Fewer abortions than any time in past 30 years
Fewer teen moms
We are witnessing a revolution of consciousness. Adoption and abstinence are working!
Gay marriage, bad.
We're a hopeful society (don't look at the man behind the curtain). Don't be depressed (take your meds). We have two fabulous new white guys on the Supreme Court (Spanish Inquisition).
Human cloning also way bad.
Big applause on "betray." Evidently as I learned recently, that's a very LOADED word, people.
Hopeful society. Mentor kids, this time not of prisoners.
Encourage kids to stay in school and study science and math (while their unemployed parents struggle to pay the bills so they don't get kicked out of their double-wide trailer).
Once again, maybe in a Hail Mary pass to the Log Cabin Republicans, "HIV/AIDS."
I watch as our president without lips keeps talking. He is very well coached. He dares to utter the names "Lincoln... Martin Luther King, Jr. ..." and of course the ever-popular references to the Last Good War, WWII.
We're taunted not to "turn back" because we have to "finish the job." Stop asking questions about why and just start paddling fast for us all. More words fall from his straight white lines, "Courage... Americans... Freedom... Compete and excel... Moral commitment... Optimistic, faithful, confident of the victory to come."
Oh, Mr. President. You keep saying we're a country at war. What you don't get is that we're having a little play-within-a-play. We're at war internally and you've gotten us into a war externally. That's the state of this union.
If anyone is paying the least bit of attention, they should be able to see that this guy's just trying to play out the clock. He's gotten two Supreme Court justices in, he's already golden with the party and the conservative right. Time to hit the weight room.
Dubya does have the look and the star power to pull this off. Not much else, but that and some really strong advisors. Please, god (if there is a god), let the Democrats find that person somewhere.
Where are the charisma police when you need them? Finally - the obvious next job for Bill Clinton.
Why Politics, Murder and Other Distractions?
Everybody's got their issues. I've got mine. I grew up in a liberal, Irish Catholic family in Washington, D.C. during the 1960s and 70s. I used to think the "assn" at the end of cab company names meant "assassination." It was a word I saw a lot as a kid.
As I grew up, I took the artistic route. Eventually, I gave up art and moved to Hollywood where I worked in television. It was then that I began to understand thinking like your audience. In sitcoms, it's very important to know where the audience is at any moment, so you can surprise them and make them laugh.
Then I moved home. I finally figured a way into being paid as a writer: writing for political campaigns. I learned that you take the poll numbers, you work with the team to develop the messaging and strategy from the poll, then you bombard the public with as much info as you can to support your candidate - given the amount of money said candidate has.
And so, political candidates are born and told what their stance on issues should be. If you want to win, you pander to where people already are, then you try to move them from that position closer to yours. It's called "persuasion." Now I see that kind of thing everywhere and feel like I speak a language everyone else in America speaks - but I KNOW I'm speaking it. They're just absorbing. Hence, my obsessive need to pay attention to what goes on in our elected officials' work lives.
Murder: well, I'm from DC after all. Murder is one of our key exports - though that's not to discount all the locals we slaughter every year. Our children do a fine job of killing each other for North Face jackets and all manner of stupid reasons. I tutored a kid once whose grandmother (probably my age) had been raped and murdered in her home and the guy was never caught. Then the girl was at the Zoo on Black Family Day (the day after Easter) when a guy opened fire on Connecticut Ave. She was standing about 10 feet from him and was saved by jumping on the bus. She was 12 when she told me these stories. She had no emotions about them, they were just facts that had happened in her life. I found that scary.
Then I had a murder in my own personal life, of someone I cared a lot about. It wasn't til then that I understood the ripples that any murder sends through a group of people, a family, a community. Once I saw that, I never read the paper the same again. It all seems to be about murder and our lack of sympathy for other humans. Scary - and sad. I'm running a campaign for DC mayor-in-exile (see future posts) based on the "Stop Murder" ticket. Stay tuned for more details.
And finally, other distractions. Well, too many years in Hollywood and too many years around the tube with my family have made me waaaay too tuned into pop culture. Thank god I never had a weight problem, or I'd be blaming it on eating disorders caused by too much ingestion of the VH1 stories of anorexic actresses. I'm fascinated by our fascination with fame. I wanted it myself as a kid, then saw up close and personal what a price people paid for fame. Luckily, my acting teachers always encouraged me to write.
So that's the explanation of the title of this blog. Today's political thought comes from having seen Jimmy Carter on TV this morning. I see what he's done since leaving the White House and think how much better his style of forging democracy has worked than Bush's. The Carter Center's monitoring of elections has led to two peaceful elections in Indonesia and a clean bill of health for the Palestinian elections. They work in 60 countries that are conventionally ignored by the American government and media, but I would bet you lots of money that their work reaps much longer and deeper benefits than the current Administration's policies.
Pre-emptive war? Secret prisons? Tortured condoned by the hiring of "consultants" and the use of foreign countries? Guantanamo Bay? Abu Ghraib? Does anybody think this kind of tactic works in the long-haul - except those in the situation room?
How far does the delusion have to spread in our leadership before the rampant failure of these policies starts to wake Americans up? Or are we so in love with our fun house image in the mirror that we'll continue to ignore the pain we're causing and just figure everything will eventually work out for the better?
Two blogs and already I'm repeating myself. I guess it's time to go read that People Magazine about Brad, Jen and Angelina. SOOOO much more interesting.
The End of Our Infallibility
Twenty years ago today we started to have some serious chinks in our wall of Infallibility, of grace bestowed upon us by whatever good our country had done in the past.
Twenty years ago this morning as I got ready for work, I watched the Challenger launch on TV out of the corner of my eye while I had my coffee and got dressed. It took a second to realize, after it had exploded, that that's what really had happened.
I got in the elevator a little while later to go down to my car. I asked the woman in the elevator on the way down if she'd seen it. She hadn't. We both didn't know what to say.
That time, all the testimonials turned out to be true. Back in those days you didn't have to worry about spin so much. The media hadn't turned into the ratings monster-product placement idiots they are now, though they knew a good story when they saw it.
The funny thing is, I thought I had a short attention span then. I'd never have guessed it would get as bad as it is now.
Now I need the 24-hour news cycle and my internet connection. It's the Sudoku puzzle of politics and media that fascinates me. I was never schooled in advertising, but I've worked in various forms of it. Once you become aware of the sales pitch, you see it everywhere.
Advertising and PR has become the invisibility cloak we wrap around our failings. We screw up in Iraq and they invent the Jessica Lynch story. Suffer 9/11 and you get the Saddam connection fable. Have the public learn they're being wire-tapped illegally by the government, and you send out the Armies of Truth to repackage it as "terrorist detection." Find your message, repeat, repeat, repeat. Stick to the words. If you say it enough, you can sell anything.
I don't mind being from a country that's imperfect. They're all imperfect. I mind sitting still in a country that can't tell the lies from the truth anymore. That's been so inured with fear and arrogance that we're not surprised anymore by failures that cost lives, like Challenger did. We just don't like having it pointed out to us.
Only now our failures and our distraction has gotten a whole lot of people - American, Iraqi, and others - killed and it doesn't look like the end is anywhere in sight.
I don't mind being infallible. But being naive (or asleep?) and arrogant is a deadly combination.
