"Political language", George Orwell famously observed, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." In a culture as obsessed with politics as ours, this deathly language is often the only one being spoken. Missing in action are the stronger languages of poetry, of revolt, of prophetic ecstasy, of genuine outrage. Observe that the pundits who make millions by expressing something like outrage never seriously question the political system under which we live; they only cast rhetorical pebbles at certain of its public faces, when a boulder is needed.
The two parties often have more in common with each other than the general populace has with either of them (observe Congress' consistently dismal approval ratings). Neither party will seriously address the "war on drugs" (really just a war on any drug that the FDA has not approved), or the fact that America has far more people in jail than any other country on this planet, or the real consequences of America's massive, unsustainable military presence throughout the world, or the dangers of overpopulation on a planet more and more poisoned by human activities (not that we really want a government like ours to address these things; but that's part of my point). Yet they put on quite a show of jousting with each other, and the media reports on their every melodramatic outrage like announcers at a pro wrestling event, feigning astonishment at their utterly predictable and picayune antics, while the serious issues are obfuscated by all the clamor.
As the great art critic Robert Hughes pointed out in his 'Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America', a brilliant and still-relevant cultural critique penned in 1993: "Polarization is addictive. It is the crack of politics--a short intense rush that the system craves again and again, until it begins to collapse. The exacerbated division between "right" and "left" in American politics comes from reality loss. It no longer fits the way that most voters respond to politics or envisage their own needs." His words still ring true today, yet the average voter remains firmly within the two-party system, lamenting that there's nothing else that can be done, that one must "work within the system" no matter how weary one is of that system.
The 10th Amendment to our Contitution, which states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people", has been totally forgotten, and part of the reason for the national obsession with the presidency is that the president is the public face of a power-drunk bureaucracy that refuses to reasonably limit its involvement in our lives. Since government vastly expands under presidents and legislative majorities of both parties, the average concerned citizen, unable to imagine a world less dominated by the charade of two-party politics, only disputes the details and the nature of that involvement, rather than going to the heart of the matter and asking what moral right the federal government has to so dominate our daily thoughts. And he does this partly because he is still speaking their language, the language of politics.
There are times when a system of governance is so decadent, so corrupt, so distracting, and so forceful in its inertia that the best way for the average citizen to contribute to its demise, and to its replacement with something more reasonable, is simply to repudiate its entire mode of discourse, rather than merely attacking its policies or its politicians. A culture whose media is dominated by political intrigues, with no room for the arts, philosophy or just plain good fun, is not much of a culture at all.
American politics will not be satisfactorily altered by more politics; it needs to be confronted by a stronger force. In order to accomplish this, the artists and thinkers of our time have a lot of work to do; they must be willing to dream big again. One way to do this is to re-claim the heritage of great literature--the tone of Whitman, Robinson Jeffers, or, for that matter, Allen Ginsberg, is stronger than that of any statesman--and to speak in a language that will last beyond the politically correct, or patriotically correct, tones of our day. Those who have the talent to do so must try their damnedest to become bold, public faces, immune to the commercially popular "ironic" tone of our meek, timid little countercultures. If they cannot accomplish this, we will continue to live in a country whose public life and public language is dominated, without competition, by a senseless drone, the elevator music of a corporate poet with a teleprompter for his instrument.
