In Praise of The West Wing ii

Oh! Wash my mouth out!!
WARNING: This post contains nice things about America and may offend.

I can’t believe what I am about to say. Well, I can, of course, otherwise I wouldn’t be saying it – which is not to say that I never say things I don’t regard as The Truth – but praising the American political system!!? Expect the sky to fall. But I’ve got to say this. I have been converted to the American political system. All because of watching The West Wing.

I was fourteen years old when John F Kennedy was assassinated. Like many others my age I was devastated. And I have retained my sense of the Kennedy Presidency as the zenith of human achievement. As a historian I am aware of why I should not cling to such a myth. But as a human I willingly and enthusiastically embrace the myth that others cynically call Camelot. There is a defining photograph from that era. It is a back shot of Kennedy, head bowed and hands grasping his desk in the oval office, enduring a moment of what the most powerful job in the world is all about. Whoever took that photograph should get a medal. So much of what happened when I was a boy is summed up in that photograph. I heard Kennedy say that he was a Berliner. I heard him say that America would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. I shook with fear for the beat part of two weeks as Kennedy faced down the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis. And I cried with rage for weeks when he was murdered in Dallas, Texas. This was the era when Civil Rights was not only put on the agenda but became the agenda, in the service of which a number of truly great human beings died. It was a time when a very rich man could say, without being hypocritical: Think not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. At fourteen I want my life to be about doing it for my country. I don’t have the words to describe the gut wrenching moment at 57 years of age, when I saw the re-enactment of that photograph at the beginning of The West Wing for the first time. There’s all sorts of theories about what West Wing is all about. But for me that photograph says it all. It’s about the kind of American Presidency you would hope for – a presidency that while taking account of the realities of power, attempts not only to uphold the rule of law, but to be just in the best sense of that word.

Every episode is a meditation on the human condition. It uses events just like those we are familiar with to illustrate some insight about what it means to be human. Contrasting points of view are laid out and sometimes the good guys win and sometimes they lose. Who the good guys are depends on your point of view. That’s what’s so astounding about the way it is written: you would normally expect the people the story is about to be the good guys. But this story is not about the President and his administration. It is about humanity, and there are no good guys. No bad guys. Just people going in to bat for positions they hold conscientiously, sometimes tasking advantage of ambiguities in situations to get an advantage over their opponents. Both sides do this, and every time they do they come out looking less than pretty. When they use intelligent and informed strategies and succeed you feel really good. When they use intelligent and informed strategies and fail you fel really good, because you know they failed with integrity. Failed with integrity!!? What the… Well for anyone who thinks that’s a bit of a platitude, let me point out that this is being posted four days after Anzac Day. Failing with integrity is celebrated in this country as the touchstone of who we are as a people. The Bartlett Presidency is not the monumental failure that Gallipoli was, but nor is it the triumph that the Regan Presidency is now being said to have been (sic!). Is the Bartlett Presidency a success then? Let me answer with another question: Does heaven exist?

The program reached its most astounding heights in it closing stages. After eight years of the Bartlett Presidency there’s to be a new president. Will he be a Democrat or a Republican? To illustrate what I have said about there being no good guys or bad guys in this show all you have to do is look at the two candidates: a not altogether inexperienced Democrat, but someone who would not normally have come to anyone’s attention were it not for the astute vision of one of the people on Jed Bartlett’s staff. The Democrat is a reluctant candidate at first, not because he doesn’t have good ideas about which he is deeply passionate. Rather, he’s been in the House of Representatives for long enough to be ready to move on – a bit like people who go into the military thinking that can do some good (ask me about that some time) and leave hoping to be able to do some good outside of the military. Once he’s convinced he can do it, he takes command – as distinct from control – of his campaign and does the Primaries with the same kind of risk taking courage that has characterised Jed Bartlett as President. The Republican Candidate comes to the position by means of one of those ruthless manoeuvres that have been the substance of the story for the whole time it has been running, but then fights off win-at-any-cost apparatchiks to show how a real man fights and, in the end, loses with integrity. Oh God!! Why can’t the real world be like this!!?

I have known about the American political system since 1972 when I did my first unit of American history at University. But in 1972 Richard Nixon was in the White House. I had been to Vietnam and made the journey from wanting to do something for my country and the world (I volunteered for National Service to save the world for democracy) to hating America, not only for having betrayed Camelot and the Great Society (Lyndon Johnstone’s somewhat more practical vision) by electing the Loathsome Liar, but for what appeared to be summed up in the massacre at Kent State University. Massacre!!? Compared with recent events, the National Guard’s contribution to American identity seems almost like the bungling of innocents. Like everyone else, I have been appalled by much bigger events, like Waco, Oklahoma City and September 11. But, for me, the end of the world as I knew it occurred on 4/5/1970 and Richard Nixon was in charge. Even though I was old enough to know and do better, I allowed my hostility to Nixon to colour my understanding of the system to got him to the White House. I regarded the Primaries as the height of wasteful stupidity. Why don’t they have real parties like we’ve got and save all this money and hoopla by having their leaders selected by the people who know best?

Well, when you look the election of Mark Latham to the leadership of the Labor Party you see why not. And while Kevin Rudd is the person I have long wanted to see at the helm (I have emails to my friends saying that Rudd should be the leader when Simon Crean replaced Kim Beasley) there are at least half a dozen others who would be as good but don’t get to put their case. What The West Wing showed so compellingly, was how a virtual no body, albeit one with good ideas, can come from no where and make his mark. It may be that in practice it doesn’t work that way in the US. But it CAN. If we had that system here, we’d know a lot more about people like Lindsay Tanner, Julia Gillard, Bob McMullan, Nicola Roxon, Stephen Smith, Wayne Swann, Anthony Albanese to mention but a handfull already in the public eye. Did I mention Peter Garrett? And what about the scores of equally capable people not in the closed shop who could do just as good job, bringing to it a freshness of perspective that comes from being involved in the wider community, rather than processed through a political machine that regards its own machinations as more important than the polity it is meant to serve. We’d have had to choose between candidates at several levels instead of just accepting the person on whose behalf the most effective secret deals were made to get him up. We’d participate more in the electoral process and we’d be a great deal less cynical about politics if we had a system that worked the way it is portrayed in The West Wing. That, of course, is the point: the way it is portrayed. If it turns out on close inspection to be what some people would cynically call a myth, then that’s a very good reason to embrace it, because a myth it has the power to make a difference in our lives.