ideas: from people

How Bartlet made me an idealist

Channel Nine used to relegate The West Wing to its graveyard shift of 10:30pm, the slot reserved for all the programming much too smart for its audience. It pitched the political fairytale into a weekly battle with the late-night news bulletins on other channels. The juxtaposition between the fictional White House and the real-life geopolitical events played out on the news was part delicious, part unpalatable.

I remember watching one night, tucked up in bed, and doing some channel surfing during the ad breaks. I landed on the horrified face of Channel Ten sultress Sandra Sully, stuttering her way through news that a plane had flown into one of the towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. I watched the ongoing news coverage transfixed until early morning. But not before finishing the episode. As escapist fare, The West Wing was more needed than ever.

West Wing creator and initial scribe Aaron Sorkin offered no contest against this reality TV. George W. Bush’s Texan drawl, his belligerent naivety, was a woeful mismatch for the Ivy Leagued genius and warm and fuzzy liberalism of President Josiah Bartlet. Over on Nightline and Lateline, Howard and Costello, too, looked positively inadequate in comparison.

Those cold Wednesday nights in front of a tiny flickering television stoked a burning cynicism of the political process. More than that, it planted the seed of hopelessly romantic idealism over how the world should work that continues to nag me every day. I’ve seen nirvana – and now nothing is any good.

It wasn’t just Sorkin’s brand of pragmatic compassion, which helped make The West Wing the veritable wet dream for liberals. There was something much bigger than left-v-right ideology at play. This is a show that celebrated intelligence. Smart counted. In fact, it most often won. Smart was worn proudly on the sleeve of the impossibly likeable characters. This was naked intelligence, unashamed.

I’m no rocket surgeon. So I appreciate and recognise intelligence in others. Above all else. As I’ve ranted previously, there can be no such thing as too smart. That’s not to value innate genius over anyone, simply for all humans to harness every neuron we’ve managed to engineer to speak and share and proudly revel in our collective human intelligence.

It occurred to me recently in watching Sorkin’s flawed episodic masterwork Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip that this is really the thesis running through his creations. From The West Wing to the criminally-underrated dramedy Sports Night, even his script for last year’s biopic Charlie Wilson’s War. In Sorkin’s drug-fuelled fantasies, the smart guy gets the pretty girl – and team up to save the world. I want what he was on.

The folk of Studio 60 – impossibly charming, too, with the same knack for rapid-fire quips while hurrying along corridors – weren’t out to save the world, just put on a network sketch comedy show. But Sorkin couldn’t resist waging war against innocuous, derivative television and the corporate entities and government regulators who perpetuate it. In a homage to that famous scene in Network, Sorkin opens the show’s one and lamentably only season with a suicidal on-air rant from the executive producer. It’s well worth watching the full clip below:

“This show used to be cutting edge political and social satire, but it’s gotten lobotomised by a candy-ass broadcast network hell-bent on doing nothing that might challenge their audience. We’re all being lobotomised by this country’s most influential industry that’s just throwing in the towel on any endeavour to do anything that doesn’t include the courting of 12 year old boys. And not even the smart 12 year olds. The stupid ones. The idiots.”

THE BATTLE: SMART V NOT

In The West Wing, Sorkin pitched his too-good-to-be-true Democrat against a southern simpleton Republican for re-election. The battle was brilliant drama, not for the inevitable result but as an exploration of the political tightrope between competence and arrogance. We went deep into the psyche of a populist wrestling with political perception. Communications Director Toby Ziegler took on a reluctant Bartlet in the Oval Office:

“You’re a good father, you don’t have to act like it. You’re the President, you don’t have to act like it. You’re a good man, you don’t have to act like it. You’re not just folks, you’re not plain-spoken… Do not – do not – do not act like it!

“…Make this election about smart, and not. Make it about engaged, and not. Qualified, and not. Make it about a heavyweight. You’re a heavyweight.”

I want politicians who aren’t afraid to be the smartest man or woman in a room. Who don’t pander to some groups and demonise others for political gain. Politicians who say things because they mean them, because they believe them to be true, not simply because they are electorally palatable. I’d hand out how-to-vote cards for them. No matter the party they represented. Said Bartlet once:

“If a guy is a good neighbour, if he puts in a day, if every once in a while he laughs, if every once in a while he thinks about somebody else and, above all else, if he can find his way to compassion and tolerance, then he’s my brother, I don’t give a damn if he didn’t get past finger-painting. What I can’t stomach are people who’re out to convince people that the educated are soft and privileged and out to make them feel like they’re less than, you know, ‘he may be educated, but I’m plain-spoken, just like you!’ Especially when we know that education can be a silver bullet. It can be the silver bullet, Toby! For crime, poverty, unemployment, drugs, hate…”

And that’s why this matters. Not smart for smart’s sake. But exercising our minds because it is, truly, the silver bullet. Intelligent thought, unencumbered, ends wars. It promotes tolerance. It eradicates bigotry. It fosters the sort of compassionate society most of us want to live in.

Barack Obama’s White House is one of hope. But he’s still confronted with the political reality of Congressional mollycoddling and perennial campaigning. He holds his tongue when you wish he wouldn’t. For those of us of the Bartlet era, the hopeless political romantics, it is somewhat depressing.

Obama won office against a ticket that included perhaps the most intellectually bereft vice presidential candidate, cheered on by someone so aptly dubbed Average Joe. During the campaign, the New York Times asked Sorkin to pen some words on what Bartlet might have to say about the race. It is thrilling rhetoric, a portrait of American exceptionalism that, of course, “doesn’t extend to Americans being exceptional”. Bartlet’s advice to Obama?

“Call them liars, because that’s what they are. You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word ‘patriot’ back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!”

Sorkin doesn’t parody the Right, I’d argue, only insults dumb ideas. The willfully stupid, he argues, are ripe for ridicule. Candidates more qualified, more intelligent, shouldn’t be afraid to say so.

That life isn’t perfect, with happy endings set to soaring soundtracks, is not a new revelation, nor a grand delusion. But the idealism on politics stems from the fact there is really no reason why it can’t be better. No reason why the smartest guy or girl shouldn’t win. Why smart shouldn’t count.

And until it does? There’s always the DVDs…

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© 2009 importance of ideas….