Arianna Huffington (http://ariannaonline.com) had a conversation with some guy at the University of Judaism (U of Jew) tonight. It was part of their "continuing education" programming and I purchased tickets online (www.uj.edu) in the form of 10 units as if I were enrolling for college courses.
They set it up so it would play out like an intimate conversation between two old friends except instead of warm cups of tea or coffee which is the quintessential social fluid, glasses of water were present-- more indicative of a pontification session where enough wind expels from the throat to cause slight concerns of drying.
The contrived "conversation" spent considerable introductory time on Arianna's history: where she was born, her age (born in 1950), her relationships and marriages, her upbringing, the Oxford period, and so forth. It glided over these epochs in a breezy manner.
Then the anticipatory meat-n-potatoes political discussion ensued. It was largely all things I've heard her and others say before. If you had not heard her speak much, it would have been more revelatory.
With a sexist and distracted mindset, all I could think was how great she looked. She has aged well and has the elegant bearing of a dethroned baroness.
The audience had submitted questions prior to the interview and after an hour of bantering loosely on the political climate today, the moderator announced their time was up and that there'd be no time for audience questions. Ho-hum! Quite a few of the audience actually vocalized disgruntlements. I had written her a question which paraphrased was: Reagan was dubbed the "teflon President" and now we have Bush and all the scandals from Abu Ghraib, the trashing of the environment, WMD's, and historically significant job loss on his watch and yet the race by standard counts has the two dead even. Is it "teflon" or some iniquity of the electorate that these piles of shit just slide right off?
I think the contention that Reagan was the Great Communicator and had an archetypal affability that would absolve him of everything is a theory of convenience to explain in simplest, bite-sized portions what in reality is complex social and political dynamics of the time. For Bush, the Texas simpleton persona, while appealing to a large segment of Americans who desire to look up to their leader and see themselves rather than someone they would follow, is a populist political myth that is being spent at the expense of the realities of catastrophically successful and ethically bankrupt policies. Bush can hardly be mistaken as some great communicator but in an epic backdrop where the 9/11 attacks loom large, you can almost hear George declare, "Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my closeup." Smiles at photo-ops and assured slogans pitched like ripe cantaloups into the electorate fulfill the American mythology that a leader is guiding this nation in resolute and morally informed ways. Americans have a vision of America that is frozen in rhetoric and idealism and we try to match the candidates to this picture and the less a candidate is registering within the lines of that cartoonish outline, the less likely it is for him to win the HEART of Americans. I say HEART in opposition to MIND because rationality has all but left much of the discourse and mindset of much of America. We now operate on a primitive level of signs, grunts, defensiveness, myopia, and selfishness.
