Politics for Grownups

This autumn night
Dawns, yet unaware
An insect sings on-
Just as am I,
Is he sunk in sadness?

Another thing that struck me in the brief Jon Stewart-Peggy Noonan interview was Mr. Stewart's visceral frustration at politicians' meretricious use of slogans, catch-words, and symbols as stand-ins for defined terms, argument, truth, or clarity. I believe two examples he gave were Conservative pack-mules 'legislating from the bench' and 'strict constructionist.' These could mean all sorts of things, but in practice are code for rather specific anathemas and goals. As Stewart pointed out, rather than risk alienating some groups of voters by railing against gay marriage, a candidate can remain in good stead with both his more Conservative core and moderate voters by espousing his distaste for the first and his fondness for the latter. A major point in Noonan's book is that the bulk of the American populace, regardless of political views, is as angry at being talked down to in this fashion as is Stewart.

And I think this is part of Sarah Palin's appeal. Unlike 'managed' and 'handled' long-time 'insiders,' she says what she thinks. She may get flustered, she may not always make sense, but until recently, when her logorrhea and lack of self-censorship became blunted by those same managers and handlers, she could be relied upon at least part of the time to say what she meant. I don't mean to say that she any more than the rest of us always acted in accord with her values, but she was largely upfront about them and the extent to which they informed her decisions. Nor do I mean that she was entirely unsophisticated politically or did not sometimes choose her public words judiciously, but her back-country candor, her physical expressiveness, and her fitted pink jackets undoubtedly do seem fresh, and more 'real' than the blandly and painstakingly contrived 'brands' of other national figures.

Perhaps tonight in the VP debate, with Palin's recent intensive training and the 90-second limit on responses, she will say as little of what she means as anyone else. She may even have a new more 'professional' haircut and style. Perhaps those ghastly faltering interviews with their exaggerated expressions and gestures and the incoherent strings of 'talking points' were a necessary intermediary step between her original shoot-from-the-hip/ take-no-prisoners/'Joe-Six-Pack' upfrontness, and she will now be ready to respond to any and all questions in a perfectly-clear and meaning-bereft coherent iteration of the same populist 'talking points' minus the nose-wiggle and the finger-licking, but with added 'y'alls' and more consistently dropped terminal G's. Should she remain on the national stage, whether the point is reached tonight or later, she will eventually be able to say as little in as many words as anyone else -- but succeed in doing so with appropriate punctuation and breath stops.

I enjoy subtlety in the right places as much as the next person. But this isn't Edo Japan, and foreign policy can hardly be confused with a lone heron on a foggy marsh. Evocation is not called for: clarity and direct speech are. I don't want synechdoche or stand-ins; I want facts, actual positions, and exposition! It doesn't matter to me in the slightest who pulled whom up by whose bootstraps -- or whether there were bootstraps involved in anyone's 'narrative' at all. I am not a medieval Japanese, and neither are you, so a symbol-ridden terse tanka is of no use to me whatever in parsing your actual stance on a specific issue. God help me, I, as much as anyone else, support 'freedom,' 'democracy,' 'democratic values,' 'rights,' and wish the best for the 'American taxpayer' and the 'American Dream' - but from my espousal of these abstract concepts here you still have no idea in what way I believe they are to be defined, pursued, implemented, or served. Like a bugling stag weary in the browned bush-clover, or a departing goose calling a distant farewell, the autumn mountains echo with my mournful cry: Say something, one of you, any of you, that isn't fully, patently, abhorrently inane!