Politics is Like Bad Theater

Too often, politics is like bad theater. The mass media simplifies stories and personalities into their most basic, digestible and familiar bits. Listeners prefer songs they have heard before, after all.

The most real characters in a great play are those who are so meticulously drawn that the audience could predict how many pairs of shoes they might have in their closet, or how many close friends they had in grade school. Have any of our public figures been as fully developed in the media?

The political world that we observe on television and in the newspapers is less real than a typical well-written play. Think of it as a play within a play, Bottom as Pyramus. Sadly, the best model of political discourse of the moment is that of competing plays-within-plays. Each party presents its own version of Pyramus and Thisbe, and the viewers sense that neither is real, but have no way to identify the truth beneath each (although one can be excused the suspicion that the facts that exist in both versions are correlated with reality).

The political world that exists is real indeed, as rich and nuanced as the rest of life. And the characters, with rare exception, much different from the public personas they have been assigned. I worked closely with John Bolton for years, for example, and never once thought of him as volcanic. Knowing him well, I understand why the President has chosen him for such an important job, and puzzle over the caricature that has sprung to life in the popular press. But how could anyone know that without having had the pleasure of his acquaintance?

The problem is that there is no reliable source of information left, no way to accumulate trusted accounts of the plusses and minuses of any given political choice. Those unwilling to immerse themselves in the alien world inside the Beltway are left with a very unsatisfying show.