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PARTISAN REVIEW
sound bites wherein images and facile utterances replace issues and sus–
tained analysis. Yet while television trivializes political discourse and
journalistic interrogation can demean political debate, one can hardly as–
sume that modern politics would be more substantial without such cover–
age. Much of the present indictment was anticipated as early as 1922 by
Walter Lippmann in his book
Pllblic Opiniorl,
where he depicts "the news
of the day" as a blur without sequential meaning, in which reporting is
bereft of consecutive reasoning and the reader experiences events without
comprehending them. Nor can it be assumed that it is television which
has made the visual more important than the conceptual. "Men as a
whole," wrote Machiavelli, "judge with their eyes rather than with their
hands ... because to see belongs to everyone, to feel to a few." For all
the cry about addressing issues, images will continue to determine politics,
because we continue to assume that it is possible to accurately judge can–
didates by how we "see" them. Thus today we have the "Gergenization"
of American politics, where someone like David Gergen can go easily
from one party to another, serving as a spin doctor to control our view of
reality.At the same time, because people do try to listen as well as to see,
politics will continue
to
be determined by language as well as by vision.
Does language distort politics and frustrate leadership? The question
scarcely troubles some political strategists and literary theorists, who share
the conviction that language has no obligation to refer to anything in the
real world of objects and actions. Campaign politics traffics mainly in
words, but words as sounds signifying nothing specific lose their credibil–
ity, as Falstaff told his Elizabethan audience:
Honor pricks me on. Yes, but how if honor pricks me off when
come on? How then' Can honor set a leg' No. Or an arm? No. Or
take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery
then' No. What is honor? A word. What is that word honor? Air. A
trim reckoning!
Once language is seen as so much air and political speech as simply a
performance, people can hardly be expected to believe in words any
more. Even when the strategist combines the visual with the audible
("Read my lips!"), politics loses its capacity to make truth felt.
Can leadership restore that capacity and make words ring true? "The
corruption of man," wrote Ralph W. Emerson, "is followed by the cor–
ruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of
ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of
riches, of pleasure, of power, and praise, words are perverted to stand for
things which are not." The prevailing "secondary desire" to maintain
