I had this idea that instead of watching the State of the Union speech tonight, I would sit at my computer and react while Tucker Carlson blogged the State of the Union speech minute-by-minute. It seemed to me the only approach now that the State of the Union Speech seems to have turned into a Super Bowl night of blogging. My guess is that in several years everyone who tunes in to the State of the Union speech will be blogging it, or blogging the bloggers blogging it, but no one will actually be watching it or listening to it in any real sense.
Anyway, I was pretty sure I had heard out of one ear earlier today about Tucker's blog, so just before the speech began I rushed to my computer. But unfortunately I couldn't quite remember exactly where he was meant to be doing all this minute-by-minute stuff that I was fully prepared to react to on a minute-by-minute basis. Was it CNN.com or MSNBC.com? I looked on them both but couldn't find him.
So I had to fall back on my fallback position and try instead to watch the speech. But of course that can't really be done. It's not possible. Everyone attempts to. Everyone is dutiful. But everyone is just faking it. You sit there, and before you know it, you drift away. That's the truth, and it's true even when you're watching Presidents you like -- the State of the Union is just one of those awful rituals that cannot be conquered.
And all that standing up and sitting down. It's so Japanese. Soon you find yourself wondering what it would be like to be there, in the Congress, and have to figure out every 45 seconds or so whether you would dare stay seated for a reference to the American military or Coretta Scott King. You drift back to the speech itself, and the President of the United States is using the word "victory" and talking about some utter cock-and-bull story that 9/11 could have been prevented if we had had the ability to listen to two telephone calls made by guys whom we couldn't even nail when they were taking lessons in crashing planes.
I repeat, it cannot be watched.
So you drift off again, and soon you find yourself noticing at all the things you look for on the Golden Globes. Mrs. Bush in her little pink suit. Hillary, who, no matter what Chris Matthews said afterwards, was not chewing gum. (I vote for a lozenge.) All those congresswomen in their amazing shades of blue and blue-ish and teal and teal-ish and aqua and aqua-ish. And that strange new governor from Virginia and his eyebrows and Gore-like hand motions.
Then, finally, the formal part is over -- the speech itself, the opposition reply to the speech -- and all the blah-blah afterwards begins. You attempt to focus once again, hoping you will discover whether anything has been said. And it's very interesting: everyone on television sounds as if they have actually absorbed the State of the Union speech -- which is, may I say for the third time, not remotely possible. And this is perhaps the worst moment of all: you realize that you've spent the last two hours attempting to watch a parallel universe that is entirely based on invented truth, and what's more, it's running the country.