Some time ago, John Berger drew scorn for making these remarks on (Michael Moore’s vision of) George Bush:
What do we see? Bush is visibly a political cretin, as ignorant of the world as he is indifferent to it.
Disgraceful. As is, presumably, this in last week's Guardian (courtesy of A Gauche):
But, as one of W's Yalie frat brothers tells Kelley, it's not the substance abuse in Bush's past that's disturbing, it's the "lack of substance ... Georgie, as we called him, had absolutely no intellectual curiosity about anything. He wasn't interested in ideas or in books or causes. He didn't travel; he didn't read the newspapers; he didn't watch the news; he didn't even go to the movies. How anyone got out of Yale without developing some interest in the world besides booze and sports stuns me." New Yorker writer Brendan Gill recalls roaming the Kennebunkport compound one night while staying there looking for a book to read - the only title he could find was The Fart Book.
Perhaps he thought it said the Frat Book. Not that I’m suggesting George Bush sometimes gets tangled up in his own language. Indeed, it’s precisely because language isn’t quite his own that he gets tangled up in it.
Yes, Bush is an easy target, but not an undeserving one. My American students admit to embarrassment that a paid yet apparently underqualified autocue reader, a karaoke president, a man who wipes his arse with the word ‘meritocracy’ is the leader of their country. And they don’t have to worry about the motor-response charge of anti-Americanism (although they find the facility with which the charge is used frustrating and trivial).
But if he’s an easy target he is also perhaps a decoy. This, the seduction of the decoy, is partly my objection to Moore’s film. The term ‘decoys’ was used some years ago by John Berger, author of the vile calumny quoted above. Before the emergence of Bush ii, he wrote of what he’d noticed about the new type of politician. He begins from the apparently impressionistic:
Unconvinced, they have to listen to themselves. When they move, they shamble, for they have no innate sense of aim. (Aim here must be distinguished from ambition). They dress smartly, but they look as if they have just stolen their clothes so as to make their getaway easier.
Their gestures, far from being sweeping as were the gestures of traditional politicians, are smallish and their gaze is close and uptight. Their anxiety seems less to do with what they already know and more to do with the latest unknown news they are awaiting.
They make many references to the future, yet it is clear they cannot see anything beyond the next election;suffering from extreme and chronic myopia, they speak about what they believe is on the horizon.
The space their words create is as uninhabited as that of a waiting room or a doorstep. Yes, it is as if they were talking on the doorstep while the hi-fi, the camera, the old man’s savings and the wife’s jewels are beginning a one way trip through the back window.
Their role, their on the doorstep, is to talk about something else while elsewhere the job is being carried out. Their profession is to create not a political debate but a diversion. Their speaking heads have become decoys.
How did this arise? Because the “free market” became the “triumphant global system”.
Now, everything everywhere on this earth can finally be sold or bought by those who have the means. [..] This power is more or less concentrated in the hands of the 200 largest multinational enterprises. It follows that many decisions determining life on the planet and its future are being taken, not by governments or elected bodies, but by those who grasp the market.
In relation to this, the decoys, “with their empty words, are as if speechless. They possess no language of endurance or struggle” with which to address what is happening. It's a shadow language. They might perform the traditional rhetorical moves, make the same dramatic speeches, gesture towards ‘history’ and so on, but the actual content over which they exercise determinate power is too small, too meagre for these gestures, which are therefore peculiarly empty, puppet-like, forlorn. They are managers acting the part of politicians.
The gap between the phantasmagoria of speeches, press conferences, rhetorical spats and lilliputian policy differences, and the overarching economic framework, the market decisions, the global and abstract logic of capital which render our lives intelligible, has become absurd, incomprehensible. And the traces of this absurdity are visible in the mien of our politicians. They shuffle in the foreground. They have the awkwardness of impostures. They bear symbolic, titular power whilst real power has migrated elsewhere. They are, constitutively, bluffers, stand-ins.
The most significant political division becomes that between those who buy into and are detained by this phantasmagoria (someone like Andrew Marr is an obvious example) and those who refuse and pass beyond it.
But if we live in an age where managers play the role of politicians, might not the ideal politician for this situation be someone who is guileless by default, incapable of seeing the truth of being a manager posing as a prime minister/ a president and innocent of the necessary cynicism that accrues to that truth; someone who signifies candour but is in no danger of revealing any truth. One thinks of the prescience of Forrest Gump, an idiot savant, whose ingenuous blunders somehow coincide with the demands of world history.