Sheer chutzpah - political ambition - Editorial

I first laid eyes on television at age 19, a man-of-the-world Infantry second lieutenant reduced to administrative work because the Emperor had surrendered. I dined most nights with an aging uncle and aunt who had an impressive black-and-white television set about the size of my computer screen. There was not very much to look at in 1945, but my uncle, a retired lawyer and a scholar, would never miss a wrestling match, and these came two or three times every week. I would look at him with amused condescension as he egged on this hunky man or the other, roistering in the drama. It wasn't until I had looked in on several of these that, calmed down to have dinner, he mentioned nonchalantly that of course the wrestlers were faking it.

This did more merely than take me by surprise. To begin with it was hard to believe, except that Uncle Claude knew everything so it had to be as he said. My first reaction was extreme indignation, of a kind only a teenager can really generate. The very idea that two men should go out there feigning a fight to the death while apparently everyone over 19 knew that the whole thing was a charade. I was upset both by learning that the wrestling matches were simply histrionic exercises, and by confronting the fact that even knowing this, the audiences nevertheless tuned in. I did not accost my uncle with the apparent pointlessness of watching such a match because to have done so might have suggested I thought him senile, which was far from the case.

The same disillusion crystallizes on the broad capital front. It is hardly on the order of a great discovery to know that politicians are frequently guided by ambition. Politicians need to be aware of the political warp and woof of democratic practice. When I was a college student an illustrious professor of political science brought to his classroom one morning a dour elderly man dressed in dull blue, his sparse hair neatly splayed over his forehead. He was the Mayor of New Haven, invited to acquaint the class with municipal government.

Mayor Celentano got right to the point. He opened his briefcase and withdrew a packet of letters. "These," he said, "are this morning's mail. I'll open that mail in front of you. That will give you an idea of what my responsibilities are." He proceeded, with little gold scissors withdrawn from a vest pocket, to open 24 pieces of mail. Twenty of them contained parking tickets. Since the mayor didn't smile, we didn't smile, not on the outside.

But that kind of thing is now done on so grand and systematic a scale. Once again, resentment rises less from one's inside knowledge that the wrestlers are phonies, than from the fact that knowing them to be such, we tolerate it. I mean, tolerate the President of the United States and his blatant manipulations designed to effect his re-election.

Time magazine, in its April 22 issue, gives us several illuminating and dismaying pages in which is analyzed the strategy of Bill Clinton to win a second term. What is required of him is fine rhetorical performances commemorative in character (where possible), as in his eulogy to Ron Brown, and his elegy for the Oklahomans killed a year ago by the terrorist explosion, and transcendent sound-bites after shaking the hands of emperors and such.

That gives us President Clinton, Great and Sentient Statesman, Concerned for All Mankind and Observant of All That Goes On in the World.

But there is then the nitty-gritty of the campaign, and Time does a nice job of singling out examples. E.g., Long Beach, California, "$16 billion to buy 40 C-17 transport planes from McDonnell Douglas." San Francisco: "$1.1 billion to extend the rapid-transit system to San Francisco airport." East St. Louis, Illinois: "$295 million to extend the light-rail system." And then my favorite: San Diego: "$13.7 million to dredge 7 million cu. yds. of sand out of San Diego Harbor to make room for three aircraft carriers, and then pump the sand onto the city's eroded beaches."

What galls is less the pork than the public knowledge of it. It is as if you and the wife were taken to dinner and the theater, and on the drive home the host detailed what he expected of you in return. There is an extraordinary insouciance written into the business of streetwise cosmopolitan reporters and editors writing in a national magazine about the utter abuses of the President of the United States in full knowledge that advertising what they are will by no means generate resentment in the citizenry. In a better world, such events as are routinely reported by Time mag would have got Time the Pulitzer Prize and generated bipartisan anti-Clinton citizens' committees in California and Illinois.

But no. We are not to get in the way of the fantasy world of disinterested public service and democratic probity. Bring on the next wrestler, and tingle with the excitement of it all.

COPYRIGHT 1996 National Review, Inc.
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