HINGS used to be simpler in America. You could go to a movie and marvel at the special effects without knowing exactly how they were achieved. You could read about your favorite celebrities without wallowing in the lurid details of their personal lives. You could hear of a political accomplishment without knowing the machinations behind it or the depredations of the officials who effected it. In a sense, we lived in blissful ignorance.
Sometime after World War II, all that began to change. In an era of postwar disillusionment, the ignorance and innocence gradually gave way to hard-boiled skepticism. Over the last 50 years, journalists began peeling back the layers and fully revealing the people and institutions in which Americans placed their faith. What they found underneath wasn't pretty — namely, that so much of what we cherished was a sham. Now, after the legal wrangling last week in Florida, this long process of demystification may have reached a kind of climax with the shattering of one of our last illusions — that our vote, the source of democratic power, is pure.
This is no small matter. But it may have led to something more important. By demystifying the vote, Americans have effected a transfer of power from the traditional political realm, where the franchise is what mattered, to the more amorphous cultural realm, where what mattered most was seeing things without illusions, even the illusion that the electoral process was sacred.
Before this final epiphany, Americans had discovered that they had been the victims of a series of deceptions, which is what the historian Daniel Boorstin was getting at back in 1961 when he coined the term " pseudo-event" in his path-breaking book "The Image." Pseudo-events were manipulations by public relations operatives to gain public attention. They looked genuine, but were confected, and, as Mr. Boorstin observed, quickly began to "flood our consciousness." Movie premieres, award ceremonies, press conferences — all were pseudo-events operating in the guise of reality, and we had been the dupes.
Though this sort of deception was omnipresent in America, politics was one of its main arenas. What we saw during a campaign was a candidate addressing the faithful on the stump or engaged in debate or answering voters' questions to show who he was and what he thought. What we didn't see was that the faithful had been bused in and prepped to cheer, the debate answers scripted and the voters' questions screened. In fact, as late as 1968, it came as a shock when Joe McGinniss revealed in "The Selling of the President" that Richard M. Nixon's presidential campaign had been stage- managed by media advisers not to show who Nixon was but to conceal who he was.
STILL, the demystification of politics may have been harder for Americans to accept than the demystification of Hollywood or athletics. It wasn't that they were deluded enough to believe the system was pristine. They knew about the old Pendergast machine in Kansas City and Tammany Hall in New York. They knew, too, about Teapot Dome, where corruption invaded the inner sanctums of the White House and the Capitol. But these were regarded as abuses of the system, not endemic to it. Americans clung to the belief that the system was sound and democracy inviolate. They even believed their leaders were generally decent and honorable men, statesmen rather than hacks, which is why the president nearly always topped the list of the most respected people in the nation.
But in an atmosphere of demystification, even this belief could withstand only so many blows before it began to crumble. The whacks came swiftly and often: the scandals of the Truman administration; Eisenhower aide Sherman Adams receiving gifts, including a vicuna coat, from a lobbyist; the swindles of Lyndon B. Johnson's crony, Billy Sol Estes; allegations of banking violations against Jimmy Carter's budget head Bert Lance; the Abscam scandals in which congressmen were trapped in an F.B.I. sting; the conviction of Dan Rostenkowski, powerful head of the House Ways and Means Committee, for misusing federal funds and padding his payroll, to name only a few on a long, long list.
And graft was the least of it. One could always understand the temptations of lucre. It was more difficult to excuse the weakness of the flesh, in part because it had always been carefully hidden from public scrutiny through a sort of gentleman's agreement between the press and the politicians. When it was finally revealed, it arrived not as high tragedy but as low comedy. Wilbur Mills, a predecessor of Mr. Rostenkowski as Ways and Means chairman, was found to have had a drunken frolic with an Argentine stripper named Fanne Foxe; Representative Wayne Hays, chairman of the House Administration Committee, was found to have had an affair with a staff member named Elizabeth Ray, who admitted her secretarial skills did not include typing, filing or even answering the phone; and the Democratic presidential aspirant Senator Gary Hart was found to have had a dalliance with a pretty young woman on a yacht aptly named Monkey Business. Once the wall of silence fell, demystification proceeded apace. We learned of Franklin D. Roosevelt's relationship with Lucy Mercer, Dwight D. Eisenhower's alleged relationship with a military aide, Kate Sommersby, and John F. Kennedy's with several coquettes including, if rumors were believed, Marilyn Monroe. By the time Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky was revealed, it wasn't a break with the past. It was a confirmation.
One effect of these revelations, and one reason they were so devoured by the public, was that in lifting the scales from our eyes they served to empower us. No longer were we credulous. In a kind of national "Blue Velvet," Americans not only saw the ugly realities beneath the bright veneer of politics, just as they had come to see the realities under the shiny veneers of almost everything else in American life, they felt a superiority over them because they were finally in on the game. This wising up was not necessarily a bad thing. They were seeing things more cynically, perhaps, but also more realistically.
THAT sense of empowerment may explain the seeming obsession in America today with pulling back the curtain and revealing the wizard there. Magazines like People and Vanity Fair, gossip columns, cable television shows and, above all, the Internet, are all largely dedicated to taking the public behind the scenes. Politics, again, has been a major target of the deconstruction. Indeed, one could make the case that political coverage was now primarily concerned with stagecraft and back-room deal making, presumably because that is what the audience wanted to know. As a result, from a situation in which there had been the manipulators and the gulled, the media had now made everyone an insider.
But revelation had another effect. It not only demystified; it also delegitimized. It was difficult to unmask the depravities of the leaders of a system without undermining the legitimacy of the system itself. How could one feel respect for the congressional leadership when one now knew so many were grafters or hypocrites? How could one feel the same way about the dignity of the office of the presidency knowing what Bill Clinton had done in that office with Monica Lewinsky? Idealism falls hard, but it does fall.
Still, there had always remained one beacon of hope and belief: the election process itself. Whatever our political leaders did, however much our political institutions may have been compromised, the ultimate authority rested with the people through the exercise of the vote. The vote was holy. When one entered the voting booth with a pencil (or, as we now know, a stylus), pulled the curtain and cast a ballot, one was entering the real cathedral of democracy. Here it was simple again. You made your choice. Your choice was registered. The candidate with the most votes took office. The Republic endured.
Then came Florida. Whatever else the electoral fracas there has done, it has helped demystify this last redoubt of American political idealism by demonstrating that not even voting was as sacrosanct as we believed just a few weeks ago. It wasn't just that we learned about undervotes and overvotes, which essentially meant your vote wasn't registered at all, or about hanging chads, pregnant chads, dimpled chads and chads à la mode. It was that despite the Democrats' declarations that they were making their challenges to uphold the sanctity of the vote and the Republicans' declarations that they were opposing recounts to uphold the sanctity of election law, the entire voting process was exposed as being hostage to partisans who cared little for anything but winning. If Florida's secretary of state had been a Democrat, Vice President Al Gore would now be president-elect. On the other hand, if the canvassing boards of Palm Beach and Broward counties were Republican, Gov. George W. Bush would probably have been certified president-elect without a recount. It all depended on which partisans had the advantage.
Knowing all this has demystified the vote, and the effect has been the same as in other demystifications — a new sense of power over those who had deceived the public. When you hear people say the Florida vote is all "just politics" or that they are tired of it and just want it to stop, what they mean is that they have finally seen the process for what it is and are no longer in thrall to it. They feel, in effect, that they are better than it is.
The power of demystification is that it serves as the great equalizer. Demystification of the vote, then, sapped legitimacy from the political process and put it into being in the know — another kind of empowerment, the kind that said we were too smart to get fooled again.
In this way the electoral process itself has been both demystified as just another hoax and delegitimized, so that whoever becomes president cannot possibly be a symbol of our idealism. Rather, he will be the one whose party managed to work the system better. That is where 50 years of revelation and cynicism has brought us — to the point where the presidential election has become the biggest pseudo-event of all and power resides not in the electoral system but in those who feel they have the perspicacity to see through it.
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To: Antiwar Republican
Florida's secretary of state had been a Democrat, Vice President Al Gore would now be president-elect.
The secretary of state followed the advice of lawyers in her office, who are all Democrats. If the secretary of state had been a Democrat, at least a somewhat honest one, she would have done the same thing as Harris leaving Gore without a foil and making Bjush the president.
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To: devin_
I wonder how the Secretary of State's political affiliation would have made any difference. Even if she had allowed the late recounts, Gore would still have been behind.
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To: Antiwar Republican
One of the great recurring pseudo-events is the State of the Ego Address. I would love to see Bush's first State of the Union MESSAGE--i.e., delivered IN WRITING to Congress, begin: "In keeping with my administration's commitment to governing only according to the powers given to it BY THE PEOPLE in THEIR CONSTITUTION, I am not continuing the long-standing practice of delivering my Constitutionally-mandated State of the Union MESSAGE in the form of an address before Congress. I call on those who serve in ALL THREE BRANCHES of the Federal Government to examine all their customary practices in the light of the powers delegated to them BY THE PEOPLE in the Constitution. Accordingly, I am delivering this message to the Congress in the manner in which the majority of Presidents in our history have done so--in writing--without ceremony and fanfare that is not called for in the Constitution. I intend to conduct all my duties as the Chief Executive according to this same principle."
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To: devin_
If the secretary of state had been a Democrat, at least a somewhat honest one,...
And how many honest Democrats do you know?
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To: devin_
exactly right, devin.
equally wrong is the Democratic canard that if the numbers were reversed Bush would be doing the same thing.
Gore did not win Florida. I do not believe he won the national popular vote (due to vote fraud). The best I can agree with Democrats is the Republicans have some work to do winning hearts and minds, but winning the election is indisputable.
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To: Antiwar Republican
It will be interesting to see what the voter turnout numbers are in the next presidential circus. Like Jeremy Sapezia said: "If nobody votes, nobody rules."
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