Curtain Up on the New Political Vaudeville

President Obama’s decision to place his required disclosure statement at the top of recent campaign ads markedly shifts the tone of presidential campaigning, though in a way not obvious at first. By spotlighting what we’re about to see, instead of acknowledging what we’ve just seen, he gives us permission to perceive his words in an entirely new way. A simple rhetorical shift admits a truth that has lingered beneath politics for years.

Since the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 made mandatory the “I’m <Candidate’s Name> and I approve this message” disclaimer, we’ve mainly heard these words at the end of an ad. Especially in ads meant to stir up strong negative feelings, that conclusion has distinct psychological impact. Notice this notorious 2004 ad, in which President Bush’s very name serves to relieve the fear of imminent pain and death:


This makes a seamless blend of theatre, politics, and storytelling. Notwithstanding how you perceive this historic ad, or its effect on the 2004 election, it makes good art. The cinematic production values make Ronald Reagan’s “Morning In America” ads look clunky by comparison. And the disclaimer at the end announces in essence: you have just watched theatre. I, George W. Bush, am real. In life, as in theatre, I am the solution to fear.

President Obama reverses this. He announces at the outset that we will now see theatre, and we go in expecting to see art. People who follow politics already know this, and the discourse is dominated by drama. Conservatives want to refight the “hippies vs. squares” culture war of 1968. Liberals play off the accomplishments of the labor movement after World War II. Neither wants to run on the powerful but incomprehensible issues which dominate current governance.

Traditional advertising tries to present itself as reality. Ad buyers want us to believe we could really make this car go zero to 60 in seven seconds, or get our shirts this shiny with this detergent. And political ads try to achieve this same goal: a vote for me will spearhead the reality I advocate, and a vote for my opponent will lead to dystopia. But they cannot achieve this goal if they acknowledge their campaigns are engaged in art, not governance.

So they move their disclaimers to the end. Even if it only lasts twenty-five seconds, we have to believe campaign ads as completely as we believe ads for Viagra or liquor. We withhold the admission that, oops, this is art. Not so President Obama. He admits—not implicitly, but explicitly—that a gap exists between campaign promises and the realities of governance. These, he says, are my words. Judge them only as that.

Commentators like Matt Taibbi have declared unambiguously that most of us cannot understand the real questions candidates have to deal with today. Events like the 2007 economic meltdown or global warming are so massively complex that, without extensive study, ordinary voters cannot encompass their labyrinthine nuances. Yet candidates rely on ordinary voters if they want to get their feet in the door.

By ballyhooing the theatrical nature of his ads, President Obama admits we cannot really understand the issues in play. We can listen to what candidates say, but we must also look at their respective actions. Thus Obama invites us to look at his record on the national stage, which he apparently believes Americans will find, on balance, positive. Thus he could not have made this choice in 2008, when many Americans still didn’t know him.

Calling attention to theatre’s theatrical nature could go either way. Shakespeare’s “rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream stage a play for the king’s coronation, but feel the need to remind the audience that they’re watching a play. Shakespeare plainly considers these amateur actors to be rubes worthy of our disdain.

But Thornton Wilder’s Our Town centers on the narration of the Stage Manager, who repeatedly calls attention to the theatrical conventions around him. He encourages us to consider the play with cool intellectual distance. Despite being adulterated by uncounted sentimental high school productions, this distancing effect has made Our Town a legitimate classic.

President Obama thus is taking a chance. He trusts us voters to perceive his campaign as Our Town, not Quince and Bottom. Anybody who has sat through a Bertolt Brecht snoozer knows self-conscious theatre can drain the audience. But current authors like Susan-Lori Parks draw attention to their art, and audiences love her. We, the President’s audience, will give our binding theatrical review this November.

Truth™—It’s What’s For Dinner

Jonah Lehrer

The saga of Jonah Lehrer's Hindenburg-like collapse continues to yield new revelations: he faked interviews, fabricated quotes, and failed to acknowledge sources. The best bits of Lehrer’s Bob Dylan chapter, the heart of the controversy, were lifted almost verbatim from Greil Marcus’ Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. But the revelations have also encouraged some stupid armchair speculations of why Lehrer did what he did.

The worst I have seen so far: Lehrer isn't a trained journalist. Though an Ivy League graduate with a substantial publication record, Lehrer didn’t go to school to study the Five W’s and the Inverted Pyramid. Leaving aside the obvious absurdity of this claim—journalism school graduates fudge too, and many good journalists don’t have degrees in the field—it still smacks of elitism, and an effort on the part of professionals to guard their privileged enclave.

Saying Lehrer licked the bottom of the barrel for want of journalistic training is like saying Enron imploded because Ken Lay lacked an MBA. The problem is not what training the guilty party had or needed; the problem is the lack of a moral core to push back against frankly banal pressures. Keeping going, or increasing the pace, provided more rewards, both to Lehrer and to Lay. Without a ringing conscience to stop them, both succumbed to ordinary temptations.

Jonah Lehrer received success worthy of somebody with twice his experience. Not only did he achieve the sought-after sinecure of a New Yorker staff writer position at the improbably young age of thirty, he made more money for one or two speaking engagements than many newspaper reporters net in a year. He owned a historic Los Angeles house at an age and in a time when many of his peers struggle to make rent on one-bedroom apartments.

Ambrose Bierce

But these rewards depended on his ability to produce bestsellers at an almost monotonous pace. To do that, he couldn’t simply state the same bullet points over and over; he had to package old knowledge and new discoveries in appealing anecdotes and comprehensible language. So he held forth on topics he knew little about, like Bob Dylan, Marcel Proust, Broadway theatre, Pixar’s building design, and more.

This pressure does not excuse his behavior. Rather, his rush to the top without stopping to earn his chops reflects worse on his actions, not better. Newspapers have provided journalists with the best training grounds. But Lehrer made his name as a blogger, and blogs don’t reward long attention spans. My own 750-word target, a lingering remnant of my newspaper days, pushes the limits of web audiences’ likely perseverance.

Throughout history, the best reporters were not trained journalists. Many had degrees in other fields, including Tom Wolfe (American studies), Bob Woodward (History), and Anderson Cooper (Political science). Barbara Walters, Brit Hume, Helen Thomas, and William Shirer studied English. Walter Cronkite, Carl Bernstein, and William Randolph Hearst never completed degrees. HL Mencken, Margaret Fuller, and Mark Twain never went to college. Ambrose Bierce never finished high school.

But today, most reporters go to journalism school. Just as business school graduates make lousy entrepreneurs, and film schools produced tediously self-conscious “cinema” of the 1970s, journalism graduates have a spotty record. As we saw in the Scooter Libby or Anthony Weiner scandals, trained journalists tend to robotically parrot press releases. Real breakthroughs come from engaged outsiders. And conventional newspapers keep boarding up their windows.

Meandering through the journalism department at the university where I formerly taught, and for whose newspaper I wrote in grad school, I was shocked one day to notice the emphasis in publicity. The honorary society for journalists had one dinky poster, but the advertising program had a whole wall of awards, flyers, and bulletin boards. The message to journalism students was clear: you exist to hold the space between ads.

Woodward and Bernstein

In that regard, Lehrer, who generated bestsellers with the regularity of the Nancy Drew factory, was a perfect professional journalist. While most publishers take a gamble on new books and regularly bleed money, they could take Lehrer’s name to the bank. But they could only keep doing so, just as he could only keep blowing his nose on Benjamins, if he produced a steady stream of easily digestible gruel.

As I said before, this stew of forces creates an environment in which scandal becomes nearly inevitable. We will almost certainly see more spectacular flame-outs in the near future, as we struggle to balance the demand for constant content with the ease of instant verification.

Singing the Voice of an Ancient Muse

Julia Older, Tales of the Francois Vase: A Poem

The François Vase gets its name from Alessandro François, an amateur archaeologist who discovered this rare Greek krater in an Etruscan tomb in 1848. How a hand-glazed Greek vase decorated with scenes from Homer’s Iliad wound up shattered in northern Italy remains a mystery to this day. But its history since its rediscovery almosts tops that, as controversy and violence have circulated around it for 150 years.

American poet Julia Older, who lived for several years in Italy, discovered the François Vase, not in its place of public display, but in the diaries of Alessandro François. Its story fired her imagination. So she recreated it over the course of the centuries: who are the craftsmen, Ergotimos and Kleitas, who created this artifact? How did it cross the Adriatic? How did it wind up entombed, shattered, recovered, restored, and shattered again—twice?

Older’s subtitle calls this “a poem,” as though she has crafted a single forty-page verse. But her intersecting voices, building urgency, and cycles of destruction and recreation resemble more a verse drama. Her characters talk over each other, diverse and contradictory, not the sound of one poet telling several stories, but several identities in orbit around one nucleus. Consider this story of the man who found an orphaned fragment, “Seduction”:

When I picked you up
I remembered my remorse.
You looked so lonely, so lost.
A hip, a breast. Gently I caressed
that fragment of you—earthen, burnished
like the essence of Sophia.

Though I could imagine my college professors disparaging the feeling in this passage as “sentimental,” I find it subtle and understated, a sense of the humility most thinking people would feel holding a millennia-old artifact in their hands. The shapeless verse reflects the fragmentary thoughts any of us would feel with something so ancient in our own mortal hands.

Older uses different verse structures to create different moods. Compare the blank verse above with this, from her speculation on how the Greek vase wound up hidden for the ages, in “Entombed”:

My heart is pounding. I ran
before they could rape me—
and escaped. We
have done what we can
to protect our dwindling race
from the Tiber warriors.
I load the mirrors
and my Mistress’ cherished Vase.

The François Vase

The form does not jump out and demand the reader’s attention, as it does in Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” yet its short, graceful lines and subdued rhyme reflect that these lines are spoken by an ancient Etruscan, a member of a race as old and enigmatic as the vase itself. The use of form conveys just how old the poet means us to perceive this voice.

Despite the age of her subject matter, Older does not craft a mere museum piece. Her language creates a view not just of the people she spotlights, but the time and the social position they represent. “Interior Cracks” presents the words of the conservator who sought to restore the Vase after it narrowly evaded the Arno River flood of 1966, which destroyed the Uffizi Gallery:

Just look around if you deny
that destruction comes easily!
One day the sun shone on Florence.
The next, she took a quantum leap to ruin,
and a gift in abundance turned us to beggars.

I can’t call this verse drama perfect. Though the individual poems created excellent voices that reflect their place and time, the linking narration is uncomfortably declarative and seemingly doesn’t trust us to follow the transitions, some of which cover centuries. That voice, presumably the voice of the Vase itself, lacks the subtlety of the verses it binds:

Through the hole in my side
I peep at hads and veiled faces
Where am I? I ask the Sphinxes
on my handles who are good
at such riddles.
Notwithstanding the choppiness of that linking narration, Older creates an arc of poetic identity complex enough to sustain readers’ interest. Her high degree of introspection nevertheless resists the solipsism that has left me disappointed with so many recent poetic journals and magazines. And she creates characters who have human depth and feel complete, even though we glimpse them so briefly.

The conceit of following an artifact over three millennia could devolve into silliness or cheap sentiment. Especially where we have gaps of knowledge—and in this case, the gaps are huge—it would be easy to fill them in with pseudo-mythological nonsense. Julia Older holds the line, presenting a story of real depth and intricacy, mining the human nuance of a true historic treasure.

Resisting the Nazis From a Bicycle Saddle

Aili and Andres McConnon, Road to Valor: A True Story of WWII Italy, the Nazis, and the Cyclist Who Inspired a Nation

At his prime, Italian cyclist Gino Bartali was most famous for winning the Tour de France in 1938 and 1948, the longest gap ever between Tour wins. In the struggle to rebuild democratic Italy after World War II, his victory helped unify the country when struggles between centrist Catholics and the Communist Party almost caused a civil war. Though unknown globally, he remains one of his nation’s icons of sportsmanship.

Only decades later did the world discover how Bartali used his fame and athletics to aid Italian Jews facing systematic persecution during the German occupation. Who better than a renowned cyclist, wanting to keep in shape, to convey sensitive documents and fake ID long distances? And when you want to distract the SS and Polizia from a train smuggling Jews across enemy lines, a sports celebrity can keep all eyes away from the refugees.

Siblings Aili and Andres McConnon reconstruct Bartali’s rise and heyday, from poor roots in an mountain village. At a time when most sports were the exclusive domain of rich sybarites, cycling was refreshingly egalitarian. With only a sixth grade education, Bartali worked for a local bike repairman, learning make-do maintenance skills that would serve him on the professional circuit, saving to buy the secondhand bike that changed his life.

But riding wasn’t a value neutral activity in Bartali’s youth. With the country under the heel of Benito Mussolini, the Fascists used athletes as propaganda instruments. They wanted to reawaken a perceived warrior spirit they believed Italy had lost. The rising star’s every victory got turned into a poster. Bartali, raised by a strict Catholic father to distrust Fascist power, found himself trapped in a monster he couldn’t resist.

So Bartali offered a perfect response: he ignored the machine he was forbidden to criticize. After his first Tour victory, he thanked everybody except Mussolini and the Fascist regime. You can imagine how Il Duce took that slight. But as the “poor boy made good” narrative took Italian fanatics by storm, the state found itself with only one way to silence Bartali: it drafted him, cancelled Italian races, and stopped international sports.

Like that would stop a True Believer. Bartali became Italy’s most famous (or infamous) deserter. And he came under the increasing influence of Cardinal Elia Della Costa, archbishop of Florence. Della Costa taught Bartali how to dance the fine line between law and conscience, and brought him into the conspiracy to rescue Jews from the encroaching machine. To this day we don’t know Bartali’s true contribution to this act of far-reaching heroism.

The McConnons go beyond retelling the story. They are no mere journalists, content to recount the facts of the case. They delve into the emotions behind the circumstances; the history behind seemingly unrelated events; the risk that these heroes took resisting a powerful, intolerant state. Many people involved in Bartali’s story, including his wife and several former teammates, are still alive, and the McConnons interviewed them, conveying their first-hand urgency.

The war put Bartali through serious turmoil. With all the races, and their attendant prize money, on hiatus for several years, he struggled to feed his growing family. His resistance activities nearly cost him his life, including one occasion when his sports heroism couldn’t even save him. Only brief twists of fate kept him off the train bound for Auschwitz. Yet he kept up the fight, because his Catholic faith told him it was right.

He also kept his secrets. Even his wife didn’t know about his heroic interventions until well after the war. Nazi resisters like Bartali often had to work in the dark, and few records were ever kept; even fewer survive. Therefore, we only know as much as survivors tell us, and Bartali said little. In a turn of humility that would seem alien to today’s glory-hungry athletes, he refused to let his sports celebrity take anything from the people he considered the real heroes.

Bartali could have traded on his war heroism. Catholic centrists tried to make him their poster boy after the war, but he refused. Instead, he electrified Italy, and the world, with a come-from-behind Tour victory. This man, prematurely aged by the war, older than nearly any other Tour winner ever, overcame a crushing handicap to win by one of the largest leads ever. Sort of a symbol for postwar Italy, really.

The McConnons brew an exciting stew of sports, history, conspiracy politics, and the war that redefined the modern world. Their narrative holds on tight and brings readers on an emotional ride you won’t forget soon.

The Dark Side of "Publish Or Perish"

I’m of two minds about neuroscience popularizer Jonah Lehrer’s spectacular flame-out this week. The claim that he plagiarized himself seems laughable on its face. John Fogerty demonstrated in court, back in 1987, that writers have distinctive styles, and even a very strong resemblance between two works is inevitable. Besides, in today’s media-saturated society, writers must recycle to get paid; even college courses emphasize this.

But that accusation, for which the New Yorker grudgingly forgave him, pales beside the accusation that he fabricated a prominent Bob Dylan quote in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. Reminiscent of James Frey, Janet Cooke, and Stephen Glass, Lehrer’s intrusion of fiction into his journalism makes it impossible to separate reality from imagination. Lehrer went overnight from top journalist to a case study in his own discipline.

One of the bromides of creative bullshittery holds that a lie works best sandwiched between two truths. Thus Lehrer’s decision to place his fake quote in the opening pages defies reason, as does his decision to take many Dylan quotes out of context, changing their meaning. Because this is the opening section of the first chapter, it looks like Lehrer wanted to get caught. Moreover, it looks like he wanted to cast doubt on everything that came after.

Which is exactly what happened. The book sold over 200,000 copies in four months, including one to me, but it vanished on Monday. The publisher recalled all unsold copies, and its Amazon page disappeared at midday. The response was so quick and complete that the New York Times bestseller list will still contain the title at #5 this Sunday. In other words, one of America’s top-selling titles is a book you can’t get anywhere now, for love or money.

Many critics have homed in on today’s widespread Dylanology: it was only a matter of time before some informed amateur caught the fabrication. But I don’t understand why Lehrer even felt the blatant fictioneering necessary. Dylan, formerly the music industry’s greatest recluse, has lately become a veritable quote factory. Between copious interviews, multiple volumes of memoir, and idiosyncratic speeches, Dylan has been remarkably forthcoming.

Despite Lehrer’s naked chicanery, I actually understand his decision, at least somewhat. He had a point to prove, a point backed up with abundant evidence and a corpus of research. Bob Dylan made a good illustration, and the writing of “Like a Rolling Stone,” Lehrer’s chosen example, has been well documented. But he lacked a single, unambiguous quote linking the evidence to the conclusion. This doesn’t excuse lying, but it at least makes sense.

Writers today, as I said above, have to publish—a lot—if they want to get paid. Our society has become so saturated with stuff to read, watch, and listen to, that only constant production staves off obsolescence. Books that don’t become instant bestsellers have a life expectancy of about six weeks before they get pulled and pulped. Gone are the days of sleeper hits like Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, which took several years to find its audience.

Nor do books have exclusive claim on this limitation. Actors who once made $300,000 per film now do free webcasts so their résumés don’t stagnate. Musicians release rough masters to YouTube just to keep their names in consideration. Publicists require artists to update their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds as often as every fifteen minutes. That’s saying nothing about producers trying to fill 500 satellite TV channels daily.

Sooner or later, somebody was going to plagiarize, fabricate, or misrepresent something. Lehrer’s bestseller status nabbed him a prestigious New Yorker staff writer job, the holy grail of writers, when he was only thirty-one. That means he made money coming up with ideas and writing them down. He would have continued doing so if he hadn’t warped such a stupidly transparent source. Watch for other writers getting on the gravy train.

Our society, unfortunately, will feed, clothe, and house lunatics and murderers for the rest of their lives, but which tells geniuses to go pound sand. People like Lehrer (and me) want to make money doing what we’re good at. But look around. Financial executives can crash the economy trying to spin straw into gold, and make multi-million dollar bonuses for it. Most writers are two steps removed from food stamps.

Jonah Lehrer’s fabrications are humiliating for those of us who write. But they sadly make perfect sense in today’s context. I fear we haven’t seen the last controversy of this kind, not by a long shot.