Zak
Zak
Aug 22, 2017 · 8 min read

“LINCOLN” AND THE 2016 ELECTION — AN OBJECT LESSON IN INTEGRITY ON THE LEFT

I found this last presidential campaign uniquely painful. Bernie’s surge raised the stakes for me and I found myself paying much closer attention to the fine print of the campaign coverage, to scrutinize more closely where the line of integrity was drawn. The central argument I saw repeatedly was one of Realpolitik vs Values, and over time I came to frame the Integrity issue around this question.

LINCOLN, SPIELBERG, AND OBAMA — “LINCOLN” = REALPOLITIK

As I look back on this, I think of Spielberg’s 2012 film, “Lincoln”, which caught this zeitgeist remarkably. The screenplay by legendary playwright Tony Kushner, adapted from Doris Goodwin’s book, is a strikingly thorough analysis by of our current political climate, which gels with other probing works from this dramatist. Basically, in the film, Daniel Day Lewis’ Lincoln is Obama, and Tommy Lee Jones’ Thaddeus Stevens is the Left, and the narrative traces the dance between Realpolitik and Values, largely from the POV of Realpolitik. The most direct statement of this is a scene invoking a compass — Lincoln invokes Stevens’ “idealistic” moral “compass”, saying that such a compass will not show you how to navigate the swamp of political realities that one must traverse to achieve actual results in the real world.

EVEN HERE, THE GAME IS RIGGED

The thing is, if you look at the screenplay itself, it is very conflicted about this question — a genuine debate — how far can you stray from the righteous direction and still say you’re heading there? The filmmaking, on the other hand, is beautiful but sadly far less conflicted — Spielberg takes every possible opportunity to tilt the balance by deifying Lincoln in an ongoing series of (beautiful) painterly, sculptural tableaus and soaring strings, and basically turning him into Jesus Christ who must Bear Our Sins. So, Spielberg is on Team Obama — no great surprise there, but he deserves credit for using Kushner as his vehicle.

“LINCOLN” AS HILLARY

So, as I followed coverage of the latest Democratic Primary, Lincoln morphed into Hillary, and Thaddeus Stevens became Bernie Sanders. (Of course, the Lincoln in the film is honestly trying — in his own way — to abide by these principles, which is far more than I could say for Obama or Clinton, but let’s set that point aside — I’m considering these figures not as individuals, but as points of reference in an ideological debate on the part of their supporters). I would peruse my favorite media outlets with increasing dismay as I watched to see how fairly they would represent this debate. This Lincoln/Stevens lens turned into an X-ray device that showed up all the dirty rhetorical tricks in the Media Psy-Op Manual. And always, always, always, these dirty tricks were deployed on behalf of Lincoln against Stevens — I never saw it going the other way, even when the two figures morphed again.

“LINCOLN” AS BERNIE

First it was Hillary/Bernie. Then, increasingly, Bernie became Lincoln, and Thaddeus Stevens’ role was adopted by Jill Stein. And I started to see how even my more trusted media outlets began playing similar dirty tricks on behalf of Bernie against Jill Stein. Again, I’m not talking about honest straightforward debate — I mean blackouts, distortion, gas-lighting, shaming — the same bag of tricks we’d seen the more mainstream media adopt against Sanders.

JILL STEIN’S MEDIA JIU JITSU

I also realized the absolute brilliance of Jill Stein’s media sense — how she would say to the other side — Let Me Be Your Instrument, and, in doing so, call their bluff, and draw media exposure to the issue and to her party. You love Bernie and he’s being railroaded? Let him join my Family. I will step aside and run alongside him. Bernie has gone over to Hillary? I feel your grief. Come join us and my party will carry your fight forward. Your priority was to stop Trump and your candidate lost? Are you sure she lost? Join me and we will challenge this verdict and expose this rigged system; we will fight together to keep Trump out of the White House, and you will see the principles of my party at work.

THE RECOUNT

This last example stung the most. Throughout the campaign, we’d been hearing increasingly how Trump was the Beast Himself, here to usher in the End Times, and that Nothing, Nothing, Nothing was more important than stopping him from getting to the White House. And then the Unthinkable happens — Trump is declared the winner. There is a moment of shock, building to mounting panic, and then Stein is there again, mounting the legal challenge, as if to rewrite history and undo the painful memory of Al Gore’s milquetoast defense of his own 2000 campaign. Stein is offering to wield the sword and save Hillary (and the world, presumably) from the Demon Usurper! Was she acting as Hillary’s “puppet”? (There’s that “puppet” image again — a gas-lighter’s favorite) Far from it — she was playing a deeper game. She realized that Bernie’s base constituted a mother lode of potential Greens — in fact, much of the DNC’s psy-op energy here was focused on demoralizing the Bernie-crats and preventing them from realizing that they were basically Greens squatting in the Democrats’ house.

Her campaign was an ongoing courtship of the Bernie-crats, and her one message was My Party Is Your True Instrument, and, whenever possible, she sought to back up these words with Action, to show these exploited and abused citizens what it’s like to have a Party that genuinely represents them and acts according to their Priorities. You want to Stop Trump? Here is the Path. And with this new digging, the evidence showed that Hillary may indeed have actually won — more and more we saw the staggering extent of state level tampering by Republican administrations, until they seized back the Shovel from Stein and derailed her investigation. If Hillary’s supporters in the media and on the ground had exploited this opening Stein provided and applied the same fanatical energy to calling for recounts that they’d used to vilify Trump (and Putin), we might have wound up with a very different 2017.

THE RECOUNT AFTERMATH — THE BLUE DOGS REVEAL THEMSELVES

What happened instead? First of all, their fearless leader Hillary herself withdrew into the shadows. Next, the denizens of Hillary’s echo chamber suddenly (and all too briefly) ratcheted up their standard of evidence a thousand degrees and started splitting fictional hairs about what constituted true evidence of misconduct, and said Let’s Show Some Restraint Here, until the momentum dissipated and the topic fizzled out. Next, once they had slinked away from facing an opponent their own size, who very likely DID steal this election from them, the Hillary-bots turned resoundingly and viciously on Stein and the Greens, tearing at their 1 percent turnout like a rabid dog shaking a kitten. I can’t get over the revolting cowardice of this — these Democrats were too afraid to actually face down Trump’s supporters for the real prize, so they turn around and take out their frustration by brutally scapegoating and excoriating the only people who were offering to help their cause at that point. Is this any less animalistic than the flailing about of Trump’s people?

AND THE GREENS? WTF? OR, “LINCOLN” AS JILL

At least as striking was the way Stein’s own party recoiled from her at that point. They said she was going too far in blurring the distinction between the Greens and the Democrats. Are these people wedded to their obscurity? Their candidate’s strategy was scoring them record headlines, which are like oxygen itself in this game, and many of these headlines were, miraculously, addressing the very nuts and bolts political content that they’ve been calling for in the media. And yes — she was playing to all those Sanders people in the very moment of their trauma, so many of them teetering on the fence about whether to suck up this travesty they’d experienced, or storm out of this Party and go … somewhere.

This was perhaps the first time during the 2016 election where I sided with “Lincoln” over “Stevens”, and actually saw the proceedings from that film’s point of view. But the difference here is that I could see clearly how Jill Stein’s actions were very obviously advancing her party’s principles and their media exposure on a practical level, in relation to their most important audience of that moment. In any case, I truly wish we’d had more left media commentary on this debate at this point in the election, between Jill and the Greens, and more examination of why the Democrats and their media were not seizing this recount opportunity, and what this might imply about their real motives.

HOW THE CORPORATE MEDIA STEER US INTO A BACKWARD VIEW OF THEM

And now, it looks like Jill Stein and the Greens have faded from view — although, of course, such a statement is backwards — they are as active as they have ever been — it is the mainstream media that has now lost interest in them, and these journalists will spin it as always to put the blame for this attention shift on their subjects rather than on themselves. This tactic reflects an attitude that has polluted our media and our discourse — their idea is that everything is just some form of horserace, that it is everyone’s job to chase after the cameras for attention, like a dog performing tricks for biscuits, immaterial of the content (in this department, Trump won out as top dog), rather than the MEDIA’S job to chase after the questions that would have the greatest impact on their audience and our society. So, for instance, the true question about access to the Presidential debates was not who had the highest numbers, but what RANGE OF PERSPECTIVES the media owed us, the public, in this conversation about what direction we, the sovereign public, want to take our nation. And again, the media put the focus on their subject, “the debate” or “the Commission”, rather than on themselves — it was always the corporate media who were making the choices for us about what to see, Playing God with our Minds, and who is taking this question back to them?

WE NEED TO KEEP A CLOSE EYE ON OUR LINCOLN

Over the past few weeks we’ve seen quite a bit of movement around some of these issues in the platform — healthcare, education — and Sanders appears to have again comfortably settled into the role of our Lincoln of the Moment. I would say that we need to watch the progression of these issues, and his conduct, very closely (where is he with John Conyers’ House bill, HR 676, the Gold Standard of Expanded Medicare for All — Sanders talks about Single Payer, so why has he opted to compete with Conyers, instead of offering a companion bill for HR 676 in the Senate? http://www.medicareforall.org/pages/HR676_and_S915 ). We have a great hunger to be swept off our feet and “rescued”, and such thinking is stoked everywhere we turn, but we cannot afford ourselves the luxury of bowing to “Saviors”.

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    Zak

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    Zak