{"id":78250,"date":"1998-06-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1998-06-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/politics-about-nothing\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T08:36:31","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T12:36:31","slug":"politics-about-nothing","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/politics-about-nothing\/","title":{"rendered":"Politics about nothing"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/font>f anything so emphatically and inescapably present as television
\ncould be said to have a history, the final episode of “Seinfeld” is
\ndestined for an honored place in its oxymoronic annals, if only
\nbecause of the record $1.5 million and upwards it was said to have
\ncharged for thirty seconds of advertising.
\nWho will care about this astonishing number in a few
\nyears’ time, when it is as meaningless as the rates charged by “The
\nHoneymooners” are today? Yet the “show about nothing” may deserve a
\nspecial place among the hits of yesteryear because it has refined to
\nits essence the art of television—
\nwhich is also about nothing. Even
\nthings that are something, like world news events, are reduced to
\nthe status of nothing when they become television. Just as the
\ntornado that flattens your house is not the one that was on TV<\/font>, so
\nthe one that is on TV<\/font> is by definition the one that happened to
\nsomebody else. And if it never happens to you, it’s not real. You
\ncan take it or leave it, like an episode of “Seinfeld.”<\/p>\n

\nNot that “nothing” is not a big subject. Boring, but big. People who
\nlive lives as cavernously hollow as those of the “Seinfeld”
\ncharacters must fill them with something, and the insubstantial odds
\nand ends of pop cultural triviality and personal self-absorption
\nwith which their nothingness is stuffed could supply—and doubtless
\nhas supplied—the material for many a long summer’s day toiling over
\nponderous analyses in the academic vineyards. Such pointless labor
\nat least fills in the time for those whose own lives, spent in
\nfantasy worlds of post-capitalist, post-imperial,
\npost-patriarchal,
\npost-heterosexual ideologies, have also been drained of substance.
\nThe trouble is that the habit of meditation on nothing does not seem
\nto be containable, and what used to be the matter of real history is
\nincreasingly becoming mere TV<\/font>—a succession of gestures and
\nattitudes which no one any longer expects to correspond to anything
\nreal.<\/p>\n

\nA good illustration is the anti-tobacco hysteria which seems these
\ndays to take up so much of the time of our public men and women. In
\nApril there were a particularly amusing few days in which the
\nRepublicans, doubtless in pursuit of Newt Gingrich’s avowed goal of
\nnot allowing President Clinton to portray him as soft on tobacco, as
\nit were, tried to turn the tables on the Democrats by proposing a
\nlink between legislation aimed at preventing teenagers from smoking
\nand a more general anti-drug measure, since teenage drug use is said
\nto be up. Democratic claims that they were blurring the focus
\non the unique evil of smoking seemed to be lent substance (if
\nanything in this whole sorry spectacle could be said to be
\nsubstantial) when Gingrich made the mistake of saying that teen
\nsmoking “has nothing to do with Joe Camel” but a lot to do with
\n“Leonardo DiCaprio smoking in the movie Titanic.”<\/p>\n

\nThe words were scarcely out of his mouth when President Clinton
\nseized the opportunity they provided to attack Gingrich: “Now, some
\nin Congress say that teen smoking has nothing to do with Joe Camel,”
\nhe said, not mentioning the Speaker’s name. But both “medical
\nscience and common sense,” he insisted, took a contrary view: “teen
\nsmoking has everything to do with Joe Camel—with unscrupulous
\nmarketing campaigns that prey on the insecurities and dreams of our
\nchildren.” Talk about your unscrupulous marketing campaigns!
\n“Medical science,” of course, is silent on the subject of
\nadvertising and its influence, but social science and common sense
\nare at best divided and, in one study at least, suggest that
\nbanning advertising actually increases teen smoking.<\/p>\n

N<\/font>ot that the facts ever mattered in the slightest, any more than
\nthey do in the frequently reiterated but demonstrably untrue
\nassertion that “smoking-related illnesses” impose costs on “us” that
\nmust be recovered from the tobacco companies. In fact, smokers are
\nnet assets to the public weal as they not only pay more in taxes but
\nalso die sooner and of less lingering illnesses than they would
\nif they lived on into extreme old age. It is a fact of apparently no
\ninterest on either side of the political aisle. Certainly it had no
\ninfluence on the legislation crafted by the Clinton Administration
\nin collaboration with the Republican Senator John McCain which
\namounted to a blatant shakedown to extract from the tobacco
\ncompanies over half a trillion dollars for purposes to be determined
\nby politicians.<\/p>\n

\nAs Tom Daschle, the Senate Minority Leader, said in taking up the
\nPresident’s quarrel with Gingrich: “I think the Republican
\nleadership has to make a decision
\n—whether they’re for Joe Camel or
\nwhether they’re for the kids of the United States of America who are
\nlooking to us for leadership on tobacco policy… . Newt Gingrich
\nseems to be hinting now that he’s more on Joe Camel’s side.” Never
\nmind that these alternative allegiances—hmm, kids of
\nAmerica or Joe
\nCamel, which should I choose?—are comically unrelated to any
\nreal-world choices. The gesture is all that matters. Clearly,
\nDaschle himself cannot possibly suppose that Gingrich wants the
\nyouth of America to take up cigarettes.<\/p>\n

\nIn fact, he would have a good argument available to him if he did,
\nas Michael Kelly showed in The Washington Post<\/i> when he pointed out
\nthat smoking was the safest form of teenage rebellion there is. But
\nsuch subtleties are irrelevant in the gestural politics of fin de
\nsi\u00e8cle<\/i> America. As John F. Harris and Juliet Eilperin of the Post<\/i>
\ncommented, “the alacrity—and obvious glee—
\nwith which Democrats
\nchallenged Gingrich’s motives raised questions about their own”
\nsince “a senior Democratic congressional aide and some
\nadministration officials said many House Democrats have already
\nabandoned any expectation that a tobacco bill will pass this year.
\nInstead, they are looking forward to attacking Gingrich and
\nRepublicans as handmaidens of the industry in the fall campaign.”<\/p>\n

\nAnd what an easy job they’ll have of it too, at least if Gingrich’s
\nfeeble attempt to match Clinton in cheap demagoguery is anything to
\ngo by. His parry to the president’s thrust was to condemn him for
\nsmoking cigars, and particularly for smoking one when the sexual
\nharassment lawsuit by Paula Jones was thrown out. “I don’t smoke
\ncigars when I’m celebrating,” Gingrich is quoted as having said. “I
\ndon’t send the signal that smoking is okay
\nwhen you’re winning.”
\nClinton, who has so far shown not the slightest sign of shame or
\nembarrassment about anything else—though there is abundant evidence
\nthat he has much to be ashamed of—was embarrassed about his
\ncelebratory cigar, and apologized for it.<\/p>\n

\nBut within a day the Democrats had unveiled their new ad campaign. A
\nposter labeled “Smokin’ Newt and the Hard Pack,” featured a
\ncomputer-morphed photo of Gingrich made to look like Joe Camel and
\noffering an open pack of cigarettes to (presumably) the children of
\nAmerica. This promises to be the
\ncenterpiece of a more general Democratic campaign extending through
\nthe congressional elections in November and focusing on the supposed
\nRepublican coziness with the tobacco companies coupled with their
\nopposition to “caring” issues such as a minimum wage increase,
\nsubsidized daycare, and the extension of Medicare benefits. “It’s an
\nissue that can remind people why they dislike Republicans,” the
\nDemocratic consultant Geoff Garin told The Wall Street Journal<\/i>:
\n“they side with big business against the public good.”<\/p>\n

\nThe Republicans seemed briefly to have found their own mount in the
\ndemagoguery stakes with hearings into abuses in the Internal Revenue
\nService. She might have been a nice little runner, but she was
\nnobbled at the post by Clinton when he instantly acquiesced in
\nRepublican demands for reform of the IRS<\/font>. Who knows what that means
\nanyway? Meanwhile, Gingrich, terrified as usual by the grinding and
\nclanking of the Clinton propaganda machine, insisted that he was as
\nmuch in favor as Clinton is of extorting money from the tobacco
\ncompanies—just not quite so much money. And he wants to return the
\nproceeds to the people in the form of tax cuts instead of spending
\nit on new government programs. He added that he would also join
\nMcCain in opposing a limit on the tobacco companies’ legal
\nliabilities, noting as others had done the damning evidence that
\nthey had engaged in marketing “targeted” at children. Indeed, he
\nclaimed that “the McCain bill gives them more than I would give
\nthem.” Hanging’s too good for ’em!<\/p>\n

W<\/font>e ought to be ashamed to be represented by politicians who get up
\nto such transparently disingenuous antics. Yet the really amazing
\nthing about them is that they seem to have so little resonance in
\nthe general population. The anti-tobacco frenzy seems largely
\nconfined to politics and the media, where it has taken on a life of
\nits own, like some ghastly game that, once begun, must be played to
\nthe end. Polling data suggest that the American people, for whom the
\nshow is ostensibly being put on, do not care all that much one way
\nor the other about punishing the tobacco companies. About a fifth
\nthink the McCain legislation is “too lenient” while two-fifths think
\nit “too hard” on the tobacco companies—and the rest don’t care.<\/p>\n

\nOf course, they ought to care. That governments at every level can
\ndemand and are demanding money with menaces (in the threat of
\nruinous lawsuits), over and above the tax liability common to
\neverybody, from people engaged in legal activities, ought to be a
\nmatter of extreme concern to even the most casual of civil
\nlibertarians. But somehow the Seinfeldian haze has descended on
\neverybody. Our politics, like our TV<\/font>, is now “about nothing” and we
\nlike it that way. As R. Emmett Tyrrell, editor of The American
\nSpectator<\/i>, has observed, “Now that the
\nCold War is over and the Welfare State is a dead issue one is struck
\nby the paltriness of the issues that fire the politicians’ phony
\npassions,” and he cites Henry Kissinger’s aphorism about academic
\npolitics being so savage because so little is at stake. <\/p>\n

\nIt is an observation that might be made from either end of the
\npolitical spectrum. Frank Rich—commenting on what he takes to be the equivalent
\nnastiness of Bill Clinton, who attempted to make the Nixonian claim
\nof “executive privilege,” and the Republican congressman, Dan Burton
\nof Indiana, who called Clinton a “scumbag”—
\nwrote in The
\nNew York Times<\/i> that<\/p>\n

\nin a political war in which all sides insult our intelligence at
\nevery turn, there’s no longer any hope of finding a hero. Our only
\nchoice is to pick our poison. This week’s menu featured Presidential
\nstonewalling and Congressional thuggery: Bill Clinton explicitly
\ndonned the mantle of Richard Nixon while his most noisy current
\nantagonist, Dan Burton, expertly conjured the sleaze of Joe McCarthy
\nand Roy Cohn. The race to the bottom doesn’t get any lower than
\nthis.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet the shock of seeing Mr. Tyrrell and Mr. Rich agreeing about
\nanything begins to dissipate on closer examination. The comparison
\nof Congressman Burton to Joseph McCarthy turns out to depend on
\nBurton’s
\nsupposedly having “doctored” evidence from tapes made of
\nconversations between Webster Hubbell and his wife. This
\n“doctoring,” which Rich comically calls “almost
\na verbatim rerun
\nof the Army-McCarthy hearings,” consisted of Burton’s having omitted
\nfrom his transcript of the tapes a remark by Hubbell which would
\nhave exonerated Hillary Clinton on the charge of having participated
\nin the billing fraud for which he, Hubbell, went to prison—as if
\nthat charge were the only one, or even the main one, that had been
\nbrought against her.<\/p>\n

\nYet Rich was only joining in the howling of the media pack,
\nwhich pretended to suppose
\nthat this remark was more generally, if not universally,
\nexculpatory and that it
\nhad been hidden deliberately by
\nBurton—
\nthough he made the complete tapes available to journalists
\nand urged them to listen to
\nthem to understand the context.
\nThe extravagance of comparing his action
\nto McCarthyite tactics was admittedly Rich’s own idea, but
\nit points up the extent to which the
\nSeinfeldian politics of the Nineties is working to the advantage of
\nClinton and the Democrats. They
\ninvite the Republicans to get into a contest of competing
\ndemagogueries as an indirect way of
\ninviting long-headed and allegedly nonpartisan pundits like
\nRich to conclude, more in sorrow
\nthan in anger, that each side is as bad as the other.
\nIt was by the same method that the campaign
\nfinance scandals of 1996 were rendered innocuous.<\/p>\n

\nThe recent film of Joe Klein’s Primary Colors<\/i>, under the guise of
\noffering us a
\nglimpse behind the fa\u00e7ade of American politics at the
\nreality beneath, put the case in stark terms. John Travolta in the
\nBill Clinton role wins over his young assistant, who
\nis temporarily
\ndisgusted with his chicanery and ready to leave the campaign, by a
\ndazzling speech in which he excuses his cynical, dishonest, and even
\ncriminal behavior by claiming that all politicians, including
\nAbraham Lincoln, were just as much “whores” as he was. It is the
\nclaim of the whore throughout the ages, of course, that others are
\nno better. In the same way, the most revealing comment on
\nthe Webster Hubbell tapes was the one where he admits to his wife
\nthat he did the deed for which he went to jail, but that every other
\nlawyer in America (except, presumably, Hillary Clinton) had done the
\nsame.<\/p>\n

\nThere was once a time when any decent person would have seen through
\nsuch an appallingly self-serving claim, but now we are agnostic
\nabout it. It would not be quite hip to call it a damnable lie; that
\nmight even be thought to imply na\u00efvet\u00e9—than which no charge is more
\ndamning to journalists and others who fancy themselves as
\nadornments of the cognitive elite.
\nIn any case, in a time of peace and absurd
\nprosperity, there really is little at stake in our politics. It is a
\npolitics about nothing—or at least we feel at liberty to present it
\nto ourselves as such—
\nwhich offers us the chance to laugh at the
\nBill Clinton scandal follies and the comically overearnest attempts
\nof the Keystone Kop Republicans to bring the president to book,
\nshould we find such things funny. Or we can turn them off like
\n“Seinfeld”—which, like so much else that we used to care about, is
\nhistory now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On recent developments in the tobacco wars<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1248,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tags":[635],"department_id":[559],"issue":[3128],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":57,"value_formatted":57,"value":"57","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page 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