WHISTLE BLOWER | POLITICAL OPINION
President Narcissus
The disastrous self-gaze of media-made presidents.
I was only one year old when JFK was elected, but I recall watching the television when the news of his assassination was reported at the age of three. Lyndon Johnson was elected in 1964 and I was far too young to understand all the anger and confusion over Vietnam during his presidency. I do remember my father giving me a little plastic Barry Goldwater statue that had a big head, a cowboy hat and black rimmed glasses.
I thought that man was scary, especially after I saw the famous “Daisy Girl” TV advertisement where I was warned that a Goldwater presidency meant a nuclear holocaust. My impressions about our presidents have since come mostly from ads, messaging and media, just like my impressions about many things in the world in our media driven age.
In essence, the media is how my generation has perceived, received and been deceived by presidents and their handlers since I was born. The age of media transformed the office of the presidency forever. After JFK, what a president said and how he said it became far more important that what he did or what he believed. It was the televised career, presidency, murder and collective media myth-making surrounding JFK that launched this current never-ending television series we call the American presidency.
At the age of nine I could sense that Nixon was an angry man and that Hubert Humphrey was a weak man from ads. After one and a half Nixon presidencies it was pretty clear to me that Nixon was a political gangster and that the images presidents projected were more made-up character than anything else.
We had become consumers and the presidency was a product.
I came of age with Ford and Carter and recall having the general impression that those two presidents were particularly boring and essentially unimportant. Not very interesting characters.
Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump, Biden. These men, though very different in background and content, were all well trained in the necessity of persona creation and appearance. They know the game and figured out how to play it well.
But something has happened on the 60-plus-year journey from the first televised game show debate on black and white TV between a sweaty and nervous Nixon and a cool, suave Kennedy.
As if guided by some sinister sci-fi power, the candidates who once played the game to win slowly but surely have morphed into game itself and disappeared inside the Matrix-Tron-Ready Player One world of the permanent presidential Gong Show we now watch day and night.
They slowly but surely became indistinguishable from the game itself, as if imbedded in the very software created by an algorithm that would make baseball statistical sabermetric wonks dizzy.
It is therefore somehow fitting that Trump and Biden are the two choices we citizens face this year. One the one hand we have Trump, the gold standard of American crassness and crude reality television. He is a created symptom of something very dark in our society. One the other, Biden, a lifelong careerist who has crafted his political image over decades of careful calculation and “best supporting actor” humility. Neither of these are men of substance, conviction, character or integrity. They are characters shaped as if written for the big stage and carefully directed by polls, marketing and salesmanship. Trump never had an authentic self to discard. Biden discarded his sometime after his remarkable first senate victory and the death of his first wife and daughter.
He became a political animal, a true survivor. Surviving is all he knows.
Thus, the common denominator between both of our current candidates is narcissism, which is the direct by product of our long societal journey from tube televisions to TikTok. The public gaze is now turned firmly on itself and neither presidential candidate we have can see that they have also succumbed to the reflection of themselves in the mirror of our times.
Narcissism is the curse of our times. It is the ultimate marketing tool, for if the consumer is self-obsessed enough, then the consumer will need products, lifestyles and behaviors that feed this obsession.
Biden, feeble and stubborn, refuses to pass the torch. He knows his time is done, but he feels he is owed a second term because he has played his supporting character role so well for so long that a “series” renewal with him as the star is only justice served. Trump, the ultimate narcissist who has made self aggrandizement into an art form, believes his own myth so deeply that there is essentially nothing behind his persona but more and more fame-need.
These two men behave very much like the ubiquitous teenage girls we see worldwide preening and dancing on social media 24/7. They are all about themselves. They are owed something. They need to be wanted and adored. Their public image is a continual work in progress and the substance of their characters is defined by filters, emojis, sound bites.
We should remember that the original Narcissus of Greek mythology died of starvation and thirst after being unable to tear himself away from his own reflected image in a pond. We should also remember that the Nymph Echo, who was cursed to only speak back words spoken to her, ultimately wasted away after falling in love with Narcissus and being tormented by not being able to respond to him with any words but his own.
It remains to be seen if either Trump or Biden can survive long enough to win the presidency a second time. If one of them does, we the people are doomed to watch our president stare into the pond at their own reflection. Unless the gods intervene from Olympus we are also doomed to be unable to convince either that they are not fit for office. Like Echo, all we can do is call out in despair and listen to our own voices bounce off the walls of the vast echo chamber that is the American political landscape.
We too, it seems, have found ourselves a studio audience in a bizarre game show that never ends. How do I turn this thing off, anyway?
