Needing something new to watch on my morning treadmill hour, I chose something old, so old I had forgotten watching most of it.
"West Wing" came out in 1999 and ran 7 years into 2006, starting with Bill Clinton in office and lasting through most of the reign of George W. Bush.
I had not watched it until 2008, when I moved to New Hampshire.
I don't know why I started watching it then, but I was quickly captivated, and returning to it now, I found myself loving it the second time around.
And that's how I knew there was something really wrong.
Of course it's escapism, but what's wrong with a little escapism?
What's wrong with escapism is it's like religion--an opium. I keeps people sedated and pleasured and it begets inaction and mellowness.
In the case of "West Wing" it's the experience of floating off on a cloud of emotionalism, over a sea of the tangled woof of fact and unforgiving reality.
The first episode begins with chatter that Josh Lyman, who works for the President of the United States (POTUS) is about to lose his job because he was indiscreet and undisciplined enough to tell a sanctimonious Evangelical leader on TV what he thought of her. She tells him as far as she can see he does not worship any God she worships and he replies that's because he can't worship any god indicted for tax evasion.
We are quickly informed that the President feels he needs the Evangelical vote and will have to axe Josh for speaking what most of the White House staff thought to be speaking the truth, or at the very least, being very amusing.
In the climatic scene where Josh is brought in by immediate supervisor, Toby, to apologize and make nice with the Evangelical lady and her cohort, Toby, sits stone faced, as Josh recites the apology they have worked on, saying he should not have used the TV as a platform for a quick joke and so on. Toby's boss, Leo, the President's right hand man listens impassively.
Things get even more interesting when the Evangelical shrew says she was offended by Josh's "New York humor" and the apology is not accepted, and at any rate, she knows Josh is about to be fired so an apology from him doesn't count for much. She has got her ounce of flesh but wants more.
Josh tries to cool things off by quipping he is actually from Connecticut, so it's not New York humor.
She doesn't quite realize it yet, but the tide in the room as begun to shift, as we notice Toby's face has gone from expressionless to dark anger. And Toby says, "She means Jewish humor, Josh. She's talking about you and me."
The woman says she doesn't like what she thinks she might have just been accused of, but she presses on.
Now is the time for power politics, and she looks to Toby and his boss, Leo, to satisfy her demands: They must endorse either school prayer, or an end of abortion or they have no deal. They have to give her one of these things. She knows she has the power to get Josh fired and now she is using that power to make the White House kiss her ring.
One of her group throws in that Josh has violated the first commandment: thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain.
The penitent White House officials realize this woman and her two Evangelical compatriots are now playing hard ball: If you want the Evangelicals to refrain from bringing Holy Hell down upon the White House, you have to give us something we really want, not some simpering apology.
At this point the President enters. We have heard about him for nearly 20 minutes, so his entrance has been well prepared, almost Shakespearean, and he enters amiably, correcting the pastor who has said the first commandment is to not take the Lord's name in vain, when, in fact, that's the 3rd commandment, and the first is "I am the Lord thy God and you shall have none other before me."
The President, smiling, avers he has read the Bible cover to cover and is as holy as anyone in the room and then turns to one of the congregants and asks him why he has not renounced one of the radical Evangelical groups the President particularly loathes. The man protests he cannot control every faction, and the President's rage boils over as he tells about his 12 year old grand daughter who was interviewed on TV and said she was for a woman's right to choose an abortion, and the next day got a doll in the mail, with a knife through its chest.
The President orders the Evangelicals out of the White House. He does not need them and they can go to Hell.
What we love about the President is that he blows by all the bowing and scraping and the careful parsing of sentences his staff felt compelled to engage in, and he hits the smarmy, sanctimonious Evangelicals between the eyes, just the way we'd love to do, just the way Josh had done, less emphatically, on TV.
He is a righteous man of character; damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.
But as I watched this scene, I realized what I loved about Josiah Bartlett is what Trump's fans love about him. He is brash and bold; he believes deeply in something and he doesn't care if he offends people he finds offensive, and he does not buy the proposition that he needs to prostitute himself before every interest group.
To Hell with you. I can get elected without you.
Politicians never do that, or never did that, before Trump.
They were always careful to not offend. If they could not agree, they tried to be soothing and respectful. But not Bartlett, who tells the Evangelicals to get their fat asses out of his White House.
And not Trump.
I've watched three episodes now and the sinking feeling that I've been susceptible to worshiping graven images has crept in.
What the folks at the White House love is their own sense of power. They are close to the sun there. Watching the President launch into an announcement of an attack on Syria from behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, the President's newly hired personal aide murmurs to Josh, "I've never felt this way before." And Josh replies, "That feeling never goes away."
Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the series gives us the emotional tide of working for the President, the sense of being something important, of being powerful. Most of the characters, at least the men, flex their power on lesser mortals outside the White House and you can feel powerful with them, as they intimidate Congressmen, as they humiliate random lawyers in a hotel restaurant, as people in Washington respect their position and power.
In Sorkin's world and in Trumps world emotion trumps reason. Hitler had the key insight that people want emotion, feelings not logic and graphs. "Trust only your heart! You mind can lead you astray, but your heart never will," Hitler told his fans. Politicians who fail to appeal to the emotions are lost. Just as low energy Jeb Bush, or more famously, Calvin Coolidge--when Dorothy Parker was told Silent Cal had died, she asked: "How can they tell?"
Every episode of "West Wing," thus far, has a tear jerking moment--President Bartlett in conversation with the Black naval officer who is the White House doctor learns the man is proud of his family's history of rising from slavery to prominence and when he shows the President a photo of his wife and new baby the President tells him: "You have more than the past to be proud of." He is saying, "You are part of a vanguard, the proud future." Not a dry eye in the house.
But when Sorkin tries to show the substance of what these Democrats in the White House are pushing for, it is less convincing. They want to pass legislation, over the objection of the NRA to outlaw "cop killing bullets" as if that is some holy crusade, as if that will really save 55,000 lives a year. They are not immune from sanctimony themselves.
Reading "Ahead of the Curve" by Shane Crotty, about David Baltimore has provided me a counter point to "West Wing."
Baltimore's career in molecular biology is not without arrogance or ego, but all that is just testosterone venting; what he really is about is trying to understand how cells work, and in doing so stumbles across clues to how cells go wrong and devolve into malignancy.
As Crotty outlines Baltimore's struggles to find the truth in complex cellular mechanisms, I'm reminded of what real power is.
Oncology has changed radically over the past 40 years. Time was at Memorial Sloan Kettering Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases, most of the patients on the wards were treated with "poisons" which were delivered in hopes of killing off the cancer cells faster than the normal cells--in hopes of killing the cancer before killing the patient.
Nowadays, for a wide variety of cancers, therapies are designed to meddle in the genetic expressions of protein kinases which throw switches in the cells from "off" to "on" and result in unstoppable cell growth, i.e. cancer.
That happened as people in Baltimore's world worked slowly, meticulously toward a new reality.
Halfway through the book Baltimore is hauled before John Dingell's Congressional committee on investigations, concerning an alleged case of research fraud, and we see the phony power of the bloviating, preening, Congressional staffer, who, when asked "You mean [Baltimore's] humiliation is a necessary part of your enterprise?" replies, "Yes...in science you have to lie to survive."
As if he had any idea what the hell he was talking about.
It turns out, years later, the accusation of scientific fraud was in itself fraudulent and the Committee had engaged in what one of Dingell's home town newspapers called a second "Galileo's Trial." Reality turned out to be a victim of emotion and the path to the truth required patient, meticulous unglamorous work.
There are truths which are constructs of human ego--I am important; I am doing great things; I matter. And then there are the truths which you might call, the truth reality and nature impose: When you have cancer. When you face fire in battle. When you see people dying all around you--that is a different sort of truth, and that sort of truth has a way of demolishing the other sorts of truth of the ego.
In his first three years, Trump was lucky. He was able to ride the roaring economy bequeathed him by Obama and the Democrats.
But then reality came to bite.
Disease, pestilence cannot be denied. Oh, Trump has tried, but bodies coming out of hospitals have a way are arguing eloquently.
West Wing gives us a President who has rock solid bone fides: He is a Nobel prize winning economist who spouts Latin phrases appropriate to the moment. He may also be a lawyer and he was governor of New Hampshire.
But he is every bit a puff of opium or marijuana. Puff, the magic dragon.
He is not actually what you need in a President.
Obama came as close to that image as any President in my lifetime, but he was stymied by a Republican Senate and his "shellacking" in the 2010 midterms spelled doom for any real change he might have wished.
He was wiser than Clinton, in focusing on Healthcare, and he spent his capital on that, as he should have, but he never could sell Obamacare; he was not enough of a fighter.
He never got us out of Afghanistan; nor did he manage to close down Gitmo.
He was everything we love about President Josiah Bartlett, but that meant he was too civil.
Mitch McConnell announced his only job was to oppose everything Obama wanted to do. McConnell looked forward to the white backlash election of 2010.
Obama should have got testy and mobilized, we can now see with the benefit of hindsight. But it was not in his character. He did not relish the battle, and he had no wish to humiliate.
Maybe our government needs imperfection to function properly.
LBJ was a womanizer, a buffoon, unsure of his own intelligence in many areas, inelegant, a man who could not wear a tuxedo and look like anything but an impostor.
But he was one of the most effective Presidents in history, passing the most effective Civil Rights legislation, so effective the Dixiecrats all bolted the Democratic Party and defected to the Republicans. No matter, he passed sweeping Great Society legislation and said he didn't need the Dixiecrats to win re election.
Then, LBJ ran up against a reality. He could not bluster or bluff past a lost war and he wasn't smart enough to get out.
Trump faces the same sort of ineluctable reckoning with COVID.
We can only hope it will bring him down, but I wouldn't bet on it. The American people have found in him the greatest and truest reflection of themselves, as H.L. Mencken warned they eventually would: a downright moron.
The first episode begins with chatter that Josh Lyman, who works for the President of the United States (POTUS) is about to lose his job because he was indiscreet and undisciplined enough to tell a sanctimonious Evangelical leader on TV what he thought of her. She tells him as far as she can see he does not worship any God she worships and he replies that's because he can't worship any god indicted for tax evasion.
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| Illustration--Alice and Martin Provensen |
We are quickly informed that the President feels he needs the Evangelical vote and will have to axe Josh for speaking what most of the White House staff thought to be speaking the truth, or at the very least, being very amusing.
In the climatic scene where Josh is brought in by immediate supervisor, Toby, to apologize and make nice with the Evangelical lady and her cohort, Toby, sits stone faced, as Josh recites the apology they have worked on, saying he should not have used the TV as a platform for a quick joke and so on. Toby's boss, Leo, the President's right hand man listens impassively.
Things get even more interesting when the Evangelical shrew says she was offended by Josh's "New York humor" and the apology is not accepted, and at any rate, she knows Josh is about to be fired so an apology from him doesn't count for much. She has got her ounce of flesh but wants more.
Josh tries to cool things off by quipping he is actually from Connecticut, so it's not New York humor.
She doesn't quite realize it yet, but the tide in the room as begun to shift, as we notice Toby's face has gone from expressionless to dark anger. And Toby says, "She means Jewish humor, Josh. She's talking about you and me."
The woman says she doesn't like what she thinks she might have just been accused of, but she presses on.
Now is the time for power politics, and she looks to Toby and his boss, Leo, to satisfy her demands: They must endorse either school prayer, or an end of abortion or they have no deal. They have to give her one of these things. She knows she has the power to get Josh fired and now she is using that power to make the White House kiss her ring.
One of her group throws in that Josh has violated the first commandment: thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain.
The penitent White House officials realize this woman and her two Evangelical compatriots are now playing hard ball: If you want the Evangelicals to refrain from bringing Holy Hell down upon the White House, you have to give us something we really want, not some simpering apology.
At this point the President enters. We have heard about him for nearly 20 minutes, so his entrance has been well prepared, almost Shakespearean, and he enters amiably, correcting the pastor who has said the first commandment is to not take the Lord's name in vain, when, in fact, that's the 3rd commandment, and the first is "I am the Lord thy God and you shall have none other before me."
The President, smiling, avers he has read the Bible cover to cover and is as holy as anyone in the room and then turns to one of the congregants and asks him why he has not renounced one of the radical Evangelical groups the President particularly loathes. The man protests he cannot control every faction, and the President's rage boils over as he tells about his 12 year old grand daughter who was interviewed on TV and said she was for a woman's right to choose an abortion, and the next day got a doll in the mail, with a knife through its chest.
The President orders the Evangelicals out of the White House. He does not need them and they can go to Hell.
What we love about the President is that he blows by all the bowing and scraping and the careful parsing of sentences his staff felt compelled to engage in, and he hits the smarmy, sanctimonious Evangelicals between the eyes, just the way we'd love to do, just the way Josh had done, less emphatically, on TV.
He is a righteous man of character; damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.
But as I watched this scene, I realized what I loved about Josiah Bartlett is what Trump's fans love about him. He is brash and bold; he believes deeply in something and he doesn't care if he offends people he finds offensive, and he does not buy the proposition that he needs to prostitute himself before every interest group.
To Hell with you. I can get elected without you.
Politicians never do that, or never did that, before Trump.
They were always careful to not offend. If they could not agree, they tried to be soothing and respectful. But not Bartlett, who tells the Evangelicals to get their fat asses out of his White House.
And not Trump.
I've watched three episodes now and the sinking feeling that I've been susceptible to worshiping graven images has crept in.
What the folks at the White House love is their own sense of power. They are close to the sun there. Watching the President launch into an announcement of an attack on Syria from behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, the President's newly hired personal aide murmurs to Josh, "I've never felt this way before." And Josh replies, "That feeling never goes away."
Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the series gives us the emotional tide of working for the President, the sense of being something important, of being powerful. Most of the characters, at least the men, flex their power on lesser mortals outside the White House and you can feel powerful with them, as they intimidate Congressmen, as they humiliate random lawyers in a hotel restaurant, as people in Washington respect their position and power.
In Sorkin's world and in Trumps world emotion trumps reason. Hitler had the key insight that people want emotion, feelings not logic and graphs. "Trust only your heart! You mind can lead you astray, but your heart never will," Hitler told his fans. Politicians who fail to appeal to the emotions are lost. Just as low energy Jeb Bush, or more famously, Calvin Coolidge--when Dorothy Parker was told Silent Cal had died, she asked: "How can they tell?"
Every episode of "West Wing," thus far, has a tear jerking moment--President Bartlett in conversation with the Black naval officer who is the White House doctor learns the man is proud of his family's history of rising from slavery to prominence and when he shows the President a photo of his wife and new baby the President tells him: "You have more than the past to be proud of." He is saying, "You are part of a vanguard, the proud future." Not a dry eye in the house.
But when Sorkin tries to show the substance of what these Democrats in the White House are pushing for, it is less convincing. They want to pass legislation, over the objection of the NRA to outlaw "cop killing bullets" as if that is some holy crusade, as if that will really save 55,000 lives a year. They are not immune from sanctimony themselves.
Reading "Ahead of the Curve" by Shane Crotty, about David Baltimore has provided me a counter point to "West Wing."
Baltimore's career in molecular biology is not without arrogance or ego, but all that is just testosterone venting; what he really is about is trying to understand how cells work, and in doing so stumbles across clues to how cells go wrong and devolve into malignancy.
As Crotty outlines Baltimore's struggles to find the truth in complex cellular mechanisms, I'm reminded of what real power is.
Oncology has changed radically over the past 40 years. Time was at Memorial Sloan Kettering Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases, most of the patients on the wards were treated with "poisons" which were delivered in hopes of killing off the cancer cells faster than the normal cells--in hopes of killing the cancer before killing the patient.
Nowadays, for a wide variety of cancers, therapies are designed to meddle in the genetic expressions of protein kinases which throw switches in the cells from "off" to "on" and result in unstoppable cell growth, i.e. cancer.
That happened as people in Baltimore's world worked slowly, meticulously toward a new reality.
Halfway through the book Baltimore is hauled before John Dingell's Congressional committee on investigations, concerning an alleged case of research fraud, and we see the phony power of the bloviating, preening, Congressional staffer, who, when asked "You mean [Baltimore's] humiliation is a necessary part of your enterprise?" replies, "Yes...in science you have to lie to survive."
As if he had any idea what the hell he was talking about.
It turns out, years later, the accusation of scientific fraud was in itself fraudulent and the Committee had engaged in what one of Dingell's home town newspapers called a second "Galileo's Trial." Reality turned out to be a victim of emotion and the path to the truth required patient, meticulous unglamorous work.
There are truths which are constructs of human ego--I am important; I am doing great things; I matter. And then there are the truths which you might call, the truth reality and nature impose: When you have cancer. When you face fire in battle. When you see people dying all around you--that is a different sort of truth, and that sort of truth has a way of demolishing the other sorts of truth of the ego.
In his first three years, Trump was lucky. He was able to ride the roaring economy bequeathed him by Obama and the Democrats.
But then reality came to bite.
Disease, pestilence cannot be denied. Oh, Trump has tried, but bodies coming out of hospitals have a way are arguing eloquently.
West Wing gives us a President who has rock solid bone fides: He is a Nobel prize winning economist who spouts Latin phrases appropriate to the moment. He may also be a lawyer and he was governor of New Hampshire.
But he is every bit a puff of opium or marijuana. Puff, the magic dragon.
He is not actually what you need in a President.
Obama came as close to that image as any President in my lifetime, but he was stymied by a Republican Senate and his "shellacking" in the 2010 midterms spelled doom for any real change he might have wished.
He was wiser than Clinton, in focusing on Healthcare, and he spent his capital on that, as he should have, but he never could sell Obamacare; he was not enough of a fighter.
He never got us out of Afghanistan; nor did he manage to close down Gitmo.
He was everything we love about President Josiah Bartlett, but that meant he was too civil.
Mitch McConnell announced his only job was to oppose everything Obama wanted to do. McConnell looked forward to the white backlash election of 2010.
Obama should have got testy and mobilized, we can now see with the benefit of hindsight. But it was not in his character. He did not relish the battle, and he had no wish to humiliate.
Maybe our government needs imperfection to function properly.
LBJ was a womanizer, a buffoon, unsure of his own intelligence in many areas, inelegant, a man who could not wear a tuxedo and look like anything but an impostor.
But he was one of the most effective Presidents in history, passing the most effective Civil Rights legislation, so effective the Dixiecrats all bolted the Democratic Party and defected to the Republicans. No matter, he passed sweeping Great Society legislation and said he didn't need the Dixiecrats to win re election.
Then, LBJ ran up against a reality. He could not bluster or bluff past a lost war and he wasn't smart enough to get out.
Trump faces the same sort of ineluctable reckoning with COVID.
We can only hope it will bring him down, but I wouldn't bet on it. The American people have found in him the greatest and truest reflection of themselves, as H.L. Mencken warned they eventually would: a downright moron.
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