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From the
Atlantic Monthly’s joint special report with New American Foundation, The Real State
of the Union, James Fallows (yes, the “bad boy” of journalism in his second
act) compares the televised State of the Union address to a kabuki play with
all its ritualized staging, costumes and secondary actors so essential to the production. Likewise, the
political union of government with its people is also acted out with symbolic
ceremony in Inauguration ceremonies, and annually, in our Fourth of July
celebrations. These are highly
involved reenactments, like renewing wedding vows or family reunions, which
remind us of who we are. Apologies to
all FWers not interested in understanding these events as sociological and
psychological markers from which Much Ado is being made in global
geopolitics. Excerpt: The
Forgotten Homefront @ http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/01/fallows.htm “In its
substance as in its procedural pomp, the State of the Union address has come to
represent all that is ritualistic and insiderish about modern politics. It is
the one major speech a President is sure to deliver each year. Therefore, the day after one address has
been given, much of the government gears up to influence the content of the
next year's. The impetus comes in
the coded language of Washington: a sentence here about the "high
priority" of some new education program, which can be used to defend
an extra $100 million in budget requests; a mention there of a "strong new
partnership" with a certain country, which can settle a dispute between
the State Department and the Pentagon. Speechwriters dread this speech as they do no other
assignment (or at least I did, when working for Jimmy Carter), because so many
forces conspire to make it a clotted, committee-bred document whose hidden signals the ordinary listener
will completely miss. The closest
thing to a memorable line in recent addresses was Bill Clinton's declaration,
in 1996, that "the era of big government is over. The oddity of
this situation is that although the State of the Union in the Washington sense
has become stylized and removed from everyday American concerns, the real
state of the union is of enormous social and cultural interest. Pollsters have known for years that one
question above all indicates Americans' satisfaction with public life and
confidence in their leaders—the question that is typically phrased as "In
general, do you feel that things in America are moving in the right direction
or the wrong direction?" This is another way of asking
whether the state of the union is sound—and when answering the question, people
consider a wide range of concerns: How they and their family
members are doing, materially and spiritually. What they observe or believe
about others. What they think the future will bring. To what extent they feel
in control of events, rather than feeling like objects or victims. Some
components of this real state of the union are purely private matters, but many
others are part of the environment that public life is supposed to help
determine. The education system,
the robustness of the national economic base, the physical safety of citizens,
their pride in what the nation stands for—these and many other areas involve
politics to some degree.” … Lasting
principles and clear, simple statements do rise above the specifics of any
situation. But it is startling how
out-of-date and out-of-touch each party's platform seems when
compared with the details in the essays that follow. Indeed, if one theme emerges from these essays, it is how disconnected our
official politics has become from the real-world,
fast-changing, interesting-in-their-details elements that constitute our
national welfare. After the recent midterm elections everyone said that the
Democrats had suffered because they had run out of good ideas. That was partly true. But the Republicans don't have much to
brag about either. The Democrats
have over the past two years stood for the ideas that the Republican tax policy
was unfair but not unfair enough to actually vote against, and that the
Administration's strategy toward Iraq was rash but not rash enough to oppose.
Meanwhile, the Republican domestic agenda can without too much violence be
summarized as: reduce income taxes and eliminate the "death tax." Karen Watters Cole East of Portland, West of Mt Hood Outgoing mail scanned by NAV 2002 |
