America’s political soul
As Election Day approaches, our home screens are sending wildly mixed messages about democracy in action
Here’s howthe Oxford English Dictionary defines theword “politics”: “The activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.”
We’re in it, all right, neck-deep and gasping. Less than twoweeks before our quadrennial democratic experiment in terror, division, heartbreak and the art of the possible, our home screens are sending wildly mixed messages about democracy in action— howitwas, howit is, howit should be and howwe might save America from itself.
For every left-leaning TV reunion showdesigned to get out the vote or combat voter suppression, issues that shouldn’t belong to any one party, there’s a FoxNews celebrity yelling at people to just calm down and stay the course.
Meantime, a flood of passionate streaming and cable programs jockey for our attention, dealing with democracy and politicking head-on, no apologies— and with no illusions about real life versus, say, “TheWestWing.”
NowonHBOMax, director Thomas Schlamme’s elegantly mounted, lavishly nostalgic“WestWing” reunion showrestages creator Aaron Sorkin’s 2002 episode “Hartsfield’s Landing” on the stage of the Orpheum Theatre in downtown LA. The result is the highest grade of meat loaf; it’s political comfort food, hitting the spot for millions of“WestWing” devotees, however they happen to vote. Well. Let’s be honest: It’s especially tasty for those who miss the rounded, heightened gentle-left political discourse favored by fictionalPOTUS Jed Bartlet, played once again byMartin Sheen. The actor, now80, ranks as the only POTUS in the popular culture with the standing and longevity to call either Biden or Trump a punk kid.
TheHBOMax showofficially titled “AWestWing Special to Benefit When We All Vote” never mentions the currentWestWing occupant by name. No need. The hourlong program’s between-acts public service messages call him out, over and over, by deed and reputation. As Los Angeles Times TV critic Robert Lloyd wrote: “It’s clear the point here is not just voting but voting out Trump.”
If you care about “free speech, a free press, awoman’s right to choose” or “a Black man’s right to breathe,”“West Wing” alum says at one point, then you care about politics. Later, from Samuel L. Jackson: “If you see science mocked and politicized in a health crisis, and knowwe’re smarter than
that, then you have to vote in this election.”
“Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda reassures viewers that the results of this pandemicU.S. presidential election remain supremely unlikely to be settled byNov. 4, orNov. 5. But don’tworry: The mail-in votes simply need some extra tallying time.
Also, Miranda says, “In American elections, candidates don’t declare themselves the winner.” Thewording there reminds us that forever and always, “TheWestWing” dwells in devoutly wishful thinking.
In contrast to Sorkin’s political wonderland, the mess and sprawl of modern-day Chicago politics belongs to a separate universe. Premiering on National Geographic on Oct. 29, available onHulu Oct. 30, director Steve James’ five-part documentary “City So Real” began as a multistrand account of the 2019 Chicagomayoral election. By following all the candidates, James
figured he’d capture the city in all its neighborhoods, factions and tribal skirmishes.
He got that and more. The trial of Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke, after 16 shots killed Laquan McDonald; the ongoing Ed Burke scandal, pretty rich even by Chicago aldermanic standards; and the win for Lightfoot, which gave the original, four-part cut of “City So Real” (premiering at Sundance in January, just before COVID-19 changed everything) a culminating note of progressive affirmation. At least for Democrats.
Then the rest of 2020 happened. Egregious federal pandemic bungling; more Black men dying under the boot of lawenforcement; protests here, looting and property damage there; economic, physical and psychic devastation everywhere. James and his crew hit the streets to film an additional
episode. And now“City So Real” ends on a note of harsh but necessary honesty about wherewe are.
“We can’t continue to tear each other apart,” Lightfoot says in the new footage, even under the strain of “back to back to back crises.”
In that same “City So Real” episode, Tim Tuten, the co-owner of embattled Bucktown bar and music venue The Hideout, points to the bane of his existence, the controversial Lincoln Yards redevelopment project threatening to obliterate the neighborhood. Tuten notes that the pop-up drive-in this summer, located on the Lincoln Yards site by the river, featured “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Thiswas what might be termed “white privilege counterprogramming,” a tra-la-la to everything going on in Chicago and America at the moment.
“This is their idea of what Chicago is,” Tuten says, regarding his corporate nemesis. “A bratty, entitled rich kid, a suburban tourist who comes in, trashes the city— and then leaves.”
Filmmaker James revisits aspiring politicians and everyday Chicagoans introduced earlier in the series, including mayoral candidateNeal SalesGriffin. He lost to Lightfoot, but he got on the ballot, at least, whichwas encouragement enough. Whatever Chicago’s political future, he says, “new systems of power are going
to be required.”
What’s past is prologue. Streaming on the Facets Virtual Cinema platform Oct. 23-Nov. 5 via distributor Kino Lorber, the William Greaves documentary “Nationtime— Gary” resurrects a remarkable 1972 time capsule of American politicking at the root.
It’s a snapshot of ground-level organizing (however disorganized, in some eyes) lifted up by sky-high oratory. Greaves’ camera enters the fray at theNational Black Political Convention, held over a contentiousweekend in March 1972 in Gary. So much Black royalty showed up thatweekend, from Coretta Scott King to “Shaft”’s Richard Roundtree toHarry Belafonte, along with 10,000
activists, organizers, politicians and citizens eager to establish a clear, effective Black political agenda for America.
Narrated by Sidney Poitier, featuring the poetry of dramatist and poet and conventional co-organizer Amiri Baraka (then known as Imamu Amiri Baraka) and of LangstonHughes, “Nationtime” circulated briefly in an edited, less “militant” version. The 4K digital restoration, now streaming, devotes a full quarter of its 80-minute running time to a speech delivered by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, directed at Black parity to be carved out of the white-establishment political machine.
The memory of the bloody 1968 riots in Chicago hangs over the proceedings, along with the war in Vietnam and the assassinations ofMartin Luther King Jr. andMalcolm X. Comedian Dick Gregory points out that the National Black Political Convention managed to stir hearts and minds that weekend in 1972, and without violence.
“We can bring more radical Black folks together in Gary,” Gregory joked, “than they can bring radical white folks together (in Chicago).”
RichardHatcher, then mayor of Gary, sets the tone of defiance and purpose, and hiswelcoming speech contains what sound like portents of injustice yet to come.“We demand that any party which asks our support acknowledges the inhumanity every Black man, woman and child faces in a hundred differentways, each and every day,” he says.
Later, Hatcherwonders: Will this convention come to nothing? When it concludes, with or without a clear political agenda, “will wewalk in unity— or disperse in a thousand different directions?”
America the fractured: The beauty of the nation has never hidden the societal cracks for long. Now streaming on Amazon Prime, Heidi Schreck’s fabulous, despairing stage play “What the ConstitutionMeans toMe” finds the author/star revisiting her 15-year-old self, as she toured American Legion halls around her part of the country(Wenatchee, Washington) and beyond. She competed, successfully, for college scholarship money by delivering oratory about the meaning, and durability, of theU.S. Constitution.
The art and thrill of political debate informs every part of Schreck’s work, shrewdly captured for the camera. She links larger judicial and political shifts in the country, as the founding document comes under constant, often flagrantly partisan reinterpretation, to her long, painful family legacy of battering husbands and terrified wives and children, unprotected by the law.
Like so much in the culture today, “What the ConstitutionMeans toMe” is angry as hell, and it’s both small- and capital-D democratic in itsworldview. Schrek sees the Ninth Amendment “equal protection” language, in particular, as an endangered species of American idealism. The Constitution, she concludes, remains an inspiring and malleable framework. But strict constructionists such as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (the showwas taped long before the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett), she argues, will only keep us mired in outdated notions of “a culture, and a country, that is making it clear every single day it has no interest in protecting you.” The “you” refers towomen and people who are not white.
Is nonpartisanship even possible in these times? From“TheWestWing” to “HappyDays,” old TV shows are getting their acts together largely to support Democratic causes and candidates. This, truly, is the season destined to alienate conservatives who hateHollywood forwading into politics.
Howcan any of us begin to “reset this conversation,” asMayor Lightfoot says in “City So Real,” whenwe’re at each other’s throats ideologically? The last four years in American politics has done something to us. But it’s not new. These rifts divide every speech and conflict in “Nationtime.” The nation’s divisions became more pronounced when GeorgeW. Bush got reelected, sending roughly half the country into a snit, orworse. When Barack Obama got reelected, the other half felt the same way. Orworse.
Maybe this is why the nostalgia/agitprop combo platter offered by the“West Wing” get-out-the-vote reunion special goes down so easily for so many, on all sides of the political spectrum. With American political discourse where it is today, who doesn’t take some solace in Sorkin’s earnest yet quippy dreams of reason and empathy in national politics? It’s a lovely break fromthe ongoing American argument. That argument, aswe see in “Nationtime,” “City So Real,” “What the ConstitutionMeans toMe” and “TheWestWing,” holds no promise (let’s hope) of a season finale, nor of a fixed definition of politics, or liberty, or justice for all. The argument is America, the fractured, beautiful and ever-changing.