Stagecraft

Thanks for all the support. I love the comments – smart stuff that makes the blog so much more entertaining to read as well as write. I’ll try to keep the posts coming and make it worth your time to check back if you don’t have an RSS feed.

I’m wondering about the integration of politics into the site. Entertainment is easy because, as Mr. Looky Touchy (see links right) emailed me last night, because it’s essentially “it's fun to argue about and goof on something trivial. It's fun to laugh at politics too, but we do it for a different reason -- because if were didn't laugh, we'd be crying.”

Well, I don’t believe in crying over politics because it’s just as vicious a business as entertainment and elicits just as much psychological projection from its audience, so no crybabies allowed.

We create fantasies around our leaders like we do around our movie stars. Stagecraft is deployed, both small (local) and grand. Survivors are rewarded with our love and job security. And in our hearts, we believe they do matter. In our hearts, how we spent our verdant hours does matter to us, and why shouldn’t we care who rules there.

We’re in a particular age of stagecraft where we are accustomed, even comfortable with not believing our eyes. When a President is caught in an 18-word lie in the most widely and closely watched political speech of the year, at a time of heightened tension and anger, after that we don’t have to believe anything he says, not unless he can really back it up and so far it doesn't look good. Because now there’s only stagecraft – Social Security, Katrina, UAE, a plastic turkey for an in-country Thanksgiving photo op.

I don’t think our response is all that different any longer from watching a New York City freeway trestle roiled like a picnic blanket by an invisible alien force in The War of the Worlds. We all know the rules of the spectacle, we’ve come to expect it. For me, when I go to the movies, I’m fine with the expertly deployed stagecraft. Make me believe the most amazing things, feel something I haven’t quite felt before, I’m a happy eyeball.

Whereas with politics, I’m fine with a little stagecraft (there’s a reason they call them political parties). I like a little uplift, I like a little earnestness, I like to be able to laugh along with my favorites players and feel we're on the same wavelength.

But what I don’t like, and maybe you’ll agree with me, in politics or after I buy my movie ticket, is to feel cheated. To feel that the showperson didn’t focus a keen intelligence, deploy a powerful humanity, imbue a compelling point of view, or harness all available apparatus for their endeavor, the results of which are going to affect us directly: our world, our time.

We want to feel that no matter their ambition, those who make our laws or deliver our entertainment ultimately have our best interests at heart, and if we're clear on that, then we ultimately demand that they deliver on all that promise.

There has to be something real and good somewhere behind the stagecraft. Otherwise, sooner or later, it all turns to bitter rot.