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November 08, 2004
How the West Wing was lost
by Ian Bell
The Glasgow Herald
Perhaps I should apologise for returning so soon to politics and American affairs. It seems likely, after all, that there will not be much worth talking about where the United States is concerned for the next four years. Nevertheless, the re-election of George W Vader has sent a tremor through the Force, and it is having interesting effects on the television universe.
On Wednesday morning, for example, you could have caught Andrew Marr, the BBC's political editor, on The Daily Politics (BBC2) while he attempted to explain why the return of Bush was such an excellent outcome for Tony Blair. Andrew Neil, the show's host, exuded the smugness of a conservative vindicated. Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's former spin-master, told of how his old boss would take any number of "hits", especially from his own party, in the nation's interest. But Marr's problem was close to theological.
Why was Blair quite so wedded to Bush? How did it come about that a Labour prime minister would prefer a born-again and proudly reactionary Republican to a dull and decent Democrat? If there was an answer that did not involve sheer expedience, I'm not sure I followed it, but the sense of a profound change in America and the world endured. So much had been clear in the aftermath of the election. The citizens of the US might have translated a rational fear of terrorism into votes. On that, all the pundits were agreed. Their society might remain divided, 51% to 48%, as John Kerry had noted in his concession speech. But something else was going on, and it was baffling the sophisticated minds of every political editor. What Richard Nixon once called the silent majority had become an actual majority. Conservatism, however you define it, had become America's creed.
Whether the people of these islands have yet grasped the fact remains to be seen. When The Daily Politics got around to Prime Minister's Questions, nevertheless, it was striking to see how relaxed Blair had become. When Alice Mahon, one of his anti-war back-benchers, rose to ask about the pending "punishment assault" on Falluja, Blair all but swatted her away. In effect, he demonstrated a tendency common in Republican circles but little discussed, so far, on this side of the Atlantic: reality is what we say it is.
In the parallel universe of TV, the echoes of the Bush victory were everywhere. You could hear them in Marr trying to explain the Bush/Blair relationship. You could catch it in the voices of the correspondents embedded with the US Marines outside Falluja itself, now taking it for granted that a town would be flattened, that women and children would die. One of the people from Sky News explained, for example, that while the troops were forbidden to express political views they had told him "privately" that they were exultant over Bush's re-election. A new world order, nothing less, was already asserting itself.
On TV, even mundane effects were striking. Was it just this reviewer, or did The West Wing (E4, Tuesday) become instantly redundant as the election results rolled in? Lately, the series has attempted to balance its liberal instincts with Republican realities. The great John Spencer, as chief of staff Leo McGarry, has been given the job of voicing uncompromising Bushite attitudes. But with the real thing reannointed, and vastly more powerful than before, Martin Sheen's President Bartlet, a Democrat pure in heart and mind, suddenly seems ludicrous.
The character was not exactly realistic to begin with. Ever since Bill Clinton set out the template for the "new Democrats" – hence new Labour; you didn't think it was original, did you? – the idea of a genuinely liberal president has been fiction's territory. Nevertheless, the ballot was a convincing proof that a Bartlet would never have been elected, far less, as The West Wing pretends, earn a second term. The White House would not, and will not, be defending controversial medical research against cynical reactionaries, as this week's episode pretended. It would not, and will not, be trying to do the decent thing over judicial appointments. Bush has been packing every court in America. He isn't going to stop now.
The contrast between Bartlet and the president who gathered more votes than any candidate in US history has become glaring. Overnight, The West Wing ceased to work. It lost its point and its purpose. What was once regarded as an insightful fiction based on actual realities now has as much of a relationship to the truth as a James Bond movie has to the real MI6.
"We've got an image problem," Leo told press secretary CJ. "Stories aren't dying down." As a matter of record, the real Bush White House has a simple formula for dealing with difficult stories and troublesome journalists: the reports are ignored and their writers are excluded from the information loop, exiled without ceremony. After all, as a Republican might put it, who won?
CJ herself, attempting to rein in the president's rebellious wife, would later refer to the White House press corps as "the most cynical b******s on the planet". A fine sentiment overlooks the capacity of the real Republican presidency and its neo-conservative stalwarts for news management, for fiction, and for bottomless cynicism. Adam Curtis explained as much in the last episode of his riveting The Power of Nightmares (BBC2, Wednesday). Yet even this powerful documentary seemed to shrink and fade in the aftershock of Bush's re-election.
How much does it matter now, you wondered, to be told that al Qaeda was effectively an American invention, that bin Laden himself never used the term before 9/11? As Curtis showed, Islamist extremism was a failing fringe movement before the neo-cons discovered the need for an enemy. It was, moreover, little more than a loose association of disillusioned fanatics. Bin Laden was their funder, not their commander. Yet in order to secure convictions after the 1998 African embassy bombings US prosecutors had to make the evidence fit with American laws. In other words, they had to prove the existence of an organisation, such as the Mafia. Hence "al Qaeda".
Before the late 1990s, according to the film, "bin Laden had no formal organisation until the Americans invented one for him". That much, as it happens, is indisputably true. Yet even as you admired this investigation of a dark fantasy, even if you quibbled over some of the techniques Curtis employed, or worried about the facts he ignored to construct a compelling case, by Wednesday night it already felt like ancient history. Bush has the war that he wanted, a war endorsed by a clear majority of voting Americans. Subversive documentaries, whether from Curtis or Michael Moore, have changed nothing.
What was most remarkable as Tuesday became Wednesday was a series of images.
In effect, it was the same image: a queue, a snaking line of people waiting to tell the world that they were voting for Bush, not Bartlet, that they believed what the former had told them about terror and Christian values, that they required no international alliances or lectures. It was reality TV without a hint of trickery. We had better get used to it.
Posted by Jo at November 8, 2004 06:58 AM