It should have been an awful scandal, but – guess what? – it wasn’t. Yes, there was some quarreling as to whose fault it was, and some legislators raised a fuss about the vast bags of bogus mail descending on them not just from the departed but also from living people whose names had been used without their knowledge. But it was barely a blip on our screen here. That, I believe, is because we have been living in virtual reality for so long in the capital that we hardly remember the other kind anymore.
I say all this by way of explaining something about the atmosphere in which our titanic budget confrontations are taking place. We have just temporarily set aside one and are gearing up for another scheduled to occur in about three weeks. Don’t get me wrong: some very big, real and important issues will be affected by what happens. But they will not necessarily be the ones that either the participants or the press or the public spend the most time being agitated about, and the who wins / who loses thing will almost certainly be fabrication and fluff – many phony claims, fake victory statements, short-lived polling results taken as the final word and so on. I keep asking myself, as I watch the combat being conducted in this snarly dog-play mode, whether the principals actually know the difference any longer. Are they being merely cynical and duplicitous? Or have they deluded themselves that the phony public stakes they have announced are the real thing?
To begin with, except for the people actually negotiating between the White House and Congress and a relatively small number of others, practically no one could tell you, if his life depended on it, what the several separate legislative items-the “continuing resolution,” “the reconciliation bill,” the “appropriations”-actually are, that is, which is which and what the fight, so hot and heavy on TV, is about at any given time. Likewise, all the shorthand and allusions to differences in numbers of years to get to budget balance or changes in Medicare premiums have become more symbolic than precise, there being much less difference between the sides on some of the issues they howl loudest about than you have been led to suppose. That is where the virtual part of the virtual reality comes in. For a whole odd little universe has been created this fall with its own “facts” and “issues,” and conflicts have been simulated that are supposed to be taking place over them. It is as ff we in Washington, or the participants in these battles, anyway, were sending bogus messages back to the constituencies, fake telegrams of our own.
What distinguishes the situation today from traditional political hocus-pocus in the past is its unashamed openness, its easy acknowledgment by those who take part. The political line (and often subterfuge) is established; its cleverness is lovingly explained by its architects and practitioners to us in the press and we naturally pass the information on; then everybody in the country, as it seems, stands around to see if it’s “working,” even though it is supposed to be “working” on them. The first polls come in. Zounds! It’s a success. Who remembers or cares that it was at least half phony to begin with? The success becomes part of the political wisdom. It also becomes an obstacle to be overcome by the other side, which confides its own brilliant new tactics to the press. We all seem to be watching ourselves manipulated and not minding. Participants even tell us, as White House aides did last week, that owing to a downward twitch in the polls it is time to back off a position, and the most that anyone says is, “Oh, right.” Talk about weird.
We are coming up toward the year-end, and this is the time when people are expected to identify large trends that eluded the day-to-day documentation of the newsies and political people. The Big Picture and that sort of thing. My candidate is this unstoppable slide into political virtual reality. I think it is a phenomenon well beyond your ordinary, age-old, two-faced campaign rhetoric. It is as if, via modern technology and modern propaganda technique, we were bent not just on inventing a fictional political life, complete with fictional figures and issues and conflicts, but on moving into it as well. It seems to be an easier place for all of us to inhabit.
If you point out that some of the congressional assertions a-bout how and when they will reach a budget balance are misleading, or if you note that Clinton’s budget would pretty much do to Medicare premiums what he professes to detest and to be saving the elderly from in the Republican budget, you will be seen as skunking up the picnic. That is because the simple good guys versus bad guys clarity with which the phony issues are framed requires so much less of us than the unwieldy and inconvenient truth does. I’m saying that there is some level at which everyone is in this game-the gums who make up the line, the pols who follow it, we journalists who convey it and the public that responds to it with impassioned ff ever-changing positions. Everybody is manipulating everybody else and seeming to have an awfully good time at it.
Except I think the whole thing is ripe for overturning. You can see this in the exceptional national reaction whenever someone or something authentic briefly interrupts the national fantasy. Politicians know this. Some of them have even gotten pretty good at faking authenticity – the ultimate ruse. But finally no one is good enough to get away with that for long. I’m not talking men on white horses or political saviors given to heroics of any kind. We have plenty of those as it is. But someone speaking in authentic tones is going to break through one of these days, and all the fake telegrams in creation won’t be enough to stop what happens then.
