POLITICANS AND PERFORMERS: The World is Now a Stage
By Mel Cooper
Shakespeare
said that “All the World’s a stage” and that all the men and women of
this world are merely players on that stage. They play their parts and they
have exits and entrances, just as in the theatre.
Well, the
realm of politics seems to me to bear out this metaphor spectacularly these
days. Indeed, I would say that sometimes watching the politicians on the news is
the most interesting show in town.
Certainly,
given the proliferation and increasing influence of all the new media, a lot of
political discourse and events have become, essentially, reality TV shows (or
Reality YouTube?). We follow them with the same verve and voyeurism as people
follow the Big Brother House or Love Island. Perhaps it would make our lives
easier if we simply accepted this and saw the news every day as another form of
theatrical entertainment? So here, at Performance Now, we are going to
give that a try.
Of course, in
America, this is doubly so because of President Donald Trump, who treats
everything he does as if he is competing for ratings. He even runs elections
that way; and the media give him the platform he wants for that purpose. He used
that platform not so long ago to whip up chaos and rioting; and finally to show
incontrovertibly what he is about. It is not so much that he is the
Liar-in-Chief; more that he is a Propagandist Extraordinary in the mould of the
Fascists of the 1920s and 1930s, and therefore has, I think now, been working
these past 5 years and more to brainwash his followers into becoming his Storm
Troopers. He has succeeded, and the USA is now at a very dangerous moment in
its history. He has succeeded through, I believe, extremely calculated and
consistent performance.
This seem to
me also to be true in the UK where the Prime Minister has been auditioning for
his certification as a Genuine Professional Clown for decades. That is a good
cover for what he may actually be up to, folks. And these self-serving, power grabbing
performances to get support for toxic hidden agendas are happening in many
other places as well, especially in the territories of the more right wing neo-populist
regimes.
I have been
struck by this idea all over again because of two performances that I caught just
recently, before the events at the Capitol in Washington. The first was on Sky
News. They invited Peter Hitchens to
comment on the newspaper headlines. His basic stance and argument was that the
whole Covid epidemic is simply exaggerated. Hitchens insisted vociferously that
Covid is not much worse than any seasonal flu; that the reportage of so many
deaths is fake news, that people die from things all the time and especially in
midwinter, so there is no need to get excited about it. The whole Covid thing
is exaggerated. The motive for them to exaggerate is that they want to scare us
so that they can control us. So don’t
believe this lie and you will be free, free. It is all about liberty!
Now, in some
ways he was merely reading from one of the standard scripts of the people who
like to deny. I have heard it all before. So why was I so exercised this time?
Firstly, because in playing his part as a Covid Leaver, the Peter Hitchens Act
was especially well-prepared and his performance was very confident and
therefore he might have convinced some people who would rather believe a
comforting fantasy than the evidence that is actually available.
Secondly,
because he was saying all this when the very news programme he was on had just
read out the latest figures of infections and deaths and shown charts that
demonstrated that the Covid plague has now been more out of control for the
past weeks in several countries including the UK than it has ever been before;
and that that this is at least partly because there is a new strain to the
virus that is far more transmissible. Hitchens was also not prepared to concede
that perhaps the schools – and indeed the whole country – might need to be
locked down as a crude but effective way of trying to suppress the spread of
the virus until enough people can be vaccinated. I am not sure he even thinks
we need vaccines! He is probably even one of those cranks who thinks the
vaccines poison us. As someone who was given the first polio vaccine and knew
people with polio as a child who have suffered immeasurably all their lives
because they got polio before the vaccine was available, I promise you I’m a
full believer in vaccines . Yes, there may be side effects; but that is rare;
and the vaccines are always rigorously tested and monitored by law in our
society. What is the bigger risk: Covid or the vaccine?
What struck
me more than all this Hitchens illogical thinking, however, is that the presenter
and the other guest who did not agree with Hitchens were at no point willing to
treat what Hitchens was saying as anything but another opinion. No one reacted
to the flaws in his position, the shallowness of his stance; no one said he was
lying (which he effectively was doing), nor did they challenge him for his
irresponsible and dangerous statements that play directly into the prejudices,
fears and dangerous actions of a proportion of our citizens.
And that is
the nub of why people are not learning or facing the truth. This is one of the
ways that the Brexit debate was lost too. It seems that the priority for almost
all broadcasters these days is to be so balanced and neutral that whatever is
said is a matter of opinion, nothing more, that must be respected like any
other matter of opinion. It also seems that they are more interested in
entertaining you and pressing your emotional buzzers than they are in
presenting you with cogent, intelligent and logical truths or debates. Hence
all the many appearances of people the likes of Nigel Farage on TV over the
years, all the articles he wrote, all the interviews he gave, being given huge
amounts of space; effectively giving his lying agenda a platform that he could
not hope to buy with all the money available to him. The same with Boris
Johnson and when he promoting Brexit. The propaganda he was spouting was
treated as an alternative truth.
But Covid is
not a matter of opinion. It is a complex and possibly fatal disease and you
cannot simply argue it away by stating that government or medical practitioners
are exaggerating. Ask hospitals in the UK or in California at the moment. On
the other hand, Hitchens, like Farage, is in his way provocative entertainment
and so he is both given the platform and treated politely without any real
challenge. He is, in effect, performing.
Later in the
same news cycle, came the tape of President Donald Trump phoning the Secretary
of State in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger. On this call Trump was clearly playing
Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
Actually, Brando was somewhat less sinister and more direct. All the requests by
Trump for Raffensperger to find a few thousand more votes; and all Trump’s
appeal for loyalty to himself, through the fact that the Secretary of State was
a Fellow Republican, sounded as if he was building up to making Raffensperger
an offer he could not refuse.
Fortunately, Brad
Raffensperger had enough integrity (amounting to the heroic under the
circumstances) simply to stick to the facts. There is no evidence of fraud in
the voting; there is no evidence of rigged machines. So what did Trump do next?
Having spent quite some time summoning his cohorts to Washington to try to
disrupt the process of counting the electoral votes, he went to the crowd. He
brought his son, he brought Rudy Giuliani, he brought others; and they all
wound up at the gathering of Trump Storm Troopers and set them loose. I love
the bit where he was playing the part to the hilt and promising to go with
them, march with them, to the Capitol. Of course he didn’t! He was having a
party to watch what he clearly hoped would escalate so that he could declare a
State of Emergency, bring in the troops, declare Martial Law and refuse to step
down as President. At least that is how the subtext of that play looked to me!
Maybe you
could give Trump the benefit of the doubt and decide Trump was not “lying”?
Maybe he is so delusional that he is
stating what he really believes? If so, then maybe he is simply mentally ill.
He is so damaged and narcissistic that he cannot accept that he lost the
election and so the only possible explanation he can understand is that somehow
the election was rigged against him. The election must have been stolen because
losing was not an option – and he truly believes this even after being told
over and over that this is simply not the case.
That is another
possible subtext to read into the Trump movie script.
However, I
believe another possibility. He is actually acting his part quite consciously
and cynically. He is playing out his own TV reality show. And he is craftily
setting things up so that he can move on after 20 January 2021 to a career with
an audience of about 74 million loyal fans. Of course, the two possibilities
are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
All this fits,
with increasing certainty, into the proposition that all the world truly is now
a stage for politicians and others; that YouTube and Facebook and Twitter are
nothing but “reality” entertainment and performance platforms; that most of the
women and men are playing their parts as scripted by themselves or their
supporters who have their covert agendas; and that many of these politicians
truly are actors and not much more.
Fortunately,
though they have their entrances, sooner or later all these people will have
their exits. Mel Cooper, Oxford, Jan
13th 2021
