The crazy show continues post-election
On every channel last week, my TV was playing the same program 24/7: The U.S. Midterms Show.
Every late-night host morphed into a public service announcer (“Get out and vote!”). Fox News drove one more nail into the coffin of its journalistic objectivity by having two of its hosts, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro, join Trump onstage at a Republican rally, along with Rush Limbaugh. (One wag called them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.)
Saturday Night Live ran three great skits about the midterms — the ad showing Democratic voters nervously insisting that they were optimistic was especially genius — and when they dared to do two bits that weren’t political, I stared dully at the TV, not understanding what I was seeing. John Oliver on Last Week Tonight was levitating with anxiety and delivered a crushing report on the trauma experienced by the immigrant children who were ripped from their parents.
On Tuesday, election day, my Twitter filled with adorable selfies of celebs, including Kerry Washington, Lin-Manuel Miranda, John Krasinski and Emily Blunt, sporting “I Voted” stickers, and I started flipping channels around 3 p.m. An NBC pundit got off an early zinger: Commenting that the world felt crazy, he asked, “And who is the president of crazy?” When Sen. Mitch McConnell posed for his obligatory “Here I am in the voting booth” picture, a fellow voter photo-bombed him, giving a thumbs down in the background.
As the night wore on, I flipped between CNN, ABC and PBS — with a quick trip to local Buffalo news to watch Republican Rep. Chris Collins, who is under indictment for felony charges on insider trading, stare down the cameras and say yes, he won his seat, he’s staying in Congress. Early evening, Van Jones was sad to report the “blue wave” of Democrats didn’t appear to be coming; later-evening Jones was more optimistic, citing historic wins in the U.S. House: first African Americans, first Native Americans, first Muslim women, first Latinas. Colorado’s Jared Polis became the first openly gay person to be elected U.S. governor.
Various pundits said things like, “It wasn’t a blue wave, but it was a rainbow wave”; “It was a pink wave” (a historic number of women won seats); and my favourite, “It wasn’t a tsunami, but it wasn’t a puddle either.” Stephen Colbert went live; so did Seth Meyers, where his guest Billy Eichner said this: “A Native American gay woman flipped a seat blue in Kansas. Kansas! That’s the gayest thing to happen in Kansas since Dorothy’s house fell on the wicked witch.”
Under the confetti, though, I kept hearing this grim funeral drum. Everyone agrees that Trump plays politics as if it’s a reality show.
But in this past week, it’s become clearer than ever that he’s taken us in his teeth and dragged us along. We all see the U.S. this way now. We’re all players or commentators on the Crazy Show. People say things like, “Will the hideous mass murder at the Pittsburgh synagogue be good or bad for Republicans at the polls?” and none of us blinks.
So if you thought Tuesday night’s instalment was the finale and we can go back to regular life now — well hah, surprise, it’s just the mid-sea- son twist! By 11 p.m., the talking heads had switched from giving election results to parsing what the results mean and they really sounded like they were previewing upcoming episodes:
“Blue suburbs vs. red small town and rural voters — what will happen now?!”
“The big losers were moderates on both sides, so expect both sides to double down on divisiveness!”
“What we are looking at is increasingly divergent Americans who are moving in increasingly opposite directions!”
Accepting life as a reality show is dangerous, because reality TV functions only one way: it plays up the extremes in people’s personalities to make them symbols rather than humans — the Nice One, the Nasty One, the Unstable One — and then pits them against one another. It teaches viewers to find enjoyment in reducing every contestant to his/her worst self, to snicker at misery. It is anti-empathy; it teaches us to scorn and even loath each other. To go from demonizing women who hope to marry The Bachelor to demonizing refugees who hope to cross the U.S. border turns out to be a horrifyingly short step.
I’d hoped the election would be a referendum against this reductionist, reality-TV view. And some of the winners do give me hope. But we’re a screen-obsessed culture. We’ve internalized the rhythms of TV. Instead of feeling scary or mean, they feel comforting because they’re familiar.
We didn’t cancel the Crazy Show on Tuesday. We renewed it for two more years.