Commentary: Theatre has been derided as a deceptive art going back as far as Plato, so it is hardly surprising to see our rascals in Washington, DC denigrate theatre even as they avidly practice it.
The game is simple. When you draw attention to your own message, you are practicing politics. When your political rival does the same, they are merely engaging in a "publicity stunt." When Democratic lawmakers staged a sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives for 25 hours last week, it was pro forma for Speaker of the House Paul Ryan to call it a publicity stunt.
Publicity is most of what politics is about, and to some extent that is well: for a representative politics, one must communicate to the masses. Electoral campaigns are burlesques to lure your money and your vote, street demonstrations and labor strikes are designed to draw public notice to a message or cause and impede "business as usual," and even the decorum on the floors of Congress, with its business attire and quasi-parliamentary language, makes a show of order and dignity to proceedings where generations are sent to die in wars and the economy is carved into finer and finer slices to be doled out to speculators while the poor and working class are left to twist in the wind. The business is ludicrous and indecent yet looks and sounds eminently legitimate. Nothing to see here, folks, please move along.
For a moment it was thrilling to see the influence of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter seem to rouse liberals in Congress to direct action, to behave as activists and actually use collective power to intervene against regular order and issue a demand for legislation targeting mass shootings in the United States. These now occur with such frequency and with such easy access to high-powered weapons and magazines that it is fair to call it an epidemic.
John Lewis, the last of the "Big Six" in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, whose head shows scars from police brutality in Alabama, gave a soulful speech on the House floor before leading dozens of Congress members in a sit-in, shutting down the House for an entire day. This closely followed a 15-hour filibuster in the Senate led by Chris Murphy of Connecticut, but the leadership of Lewis brought a unique gravitas to the second action. Neither will lead directly legislation. Members of Congress are instinctively followers, rather than breakers, of rules and order. It was nice all the same to see some spirit of rebellion, a fighting spirit they might mobilize against funding endless wars, foreign aid to oppressive allies, or the squeezing of struggling classes here at home.
The showmanship of the Democrats was so moving that, as usual, it distracted much of the public's attention from their actual demands. House Democrats called for bills on a variety of gun control measures, but the central demand was sloganized "No fly, no buy." They would exclude anyone on the federal "no fly" list from buying a weapon, which sounds deceptively sensible. Yet for this, House Democrats fully embraced the notorious Terrorist Screening Database in their hunger for political traction. Lewis himself once criticized the terrorist watchlist for wrongly criminalizing masses of innocent people, many simply because they have muslim-ish names, with no transparency or clear process for clearing oneself.
Evoking the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement now to defend arbitrary government power is a dark irony indeed; but in the end, it was more for show than policy anyway.
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Algernon D'Ammassa writes the "Desert Sage" column for the Deming Headlight and Sun News papers. Write to him at DesertSageMail@gmail.com