A Political Education

Apart from the brief moment when Sarasota has a film festival what is on offer the rest of the year is pretty much studio dreck.  So my husband and I have gravitated into yet another feature of the years of senectitude: the television series.  And I have found it highly instructive in teaching me about politics and the legal profession.  I mean The Good Wife, West Wing, and Veep.  We got on to The Good Wife first and at the moment are watching the final season, I believe.  As a human drama we are divided in our opinion in this house.  I think Alicia Floreck is a pill, that slightly opened mouth suggesting shock and discomfort whether her companion is asking her to commit perjury or pass the mayonnaise, shows a woman I would never want to know.  And indeed she seems to have no friends, and scarcely communicates with her children, not to mention her dismal on again off again relationship with her husband. But then she is scarcely off her cellphone long enough to talk to anyone actually in her presence.   But that's beside the point.  I love watching her and her partners and their opponents in court.  The way in which everyone maneuvers, their valiant attempts to catch people in legal corners from which there is no escape is fascinating.  But is the judges!  The judges in this show are played by a variety of great character actors who display temperamental dictatorship that would send me around the bend, but not Alicia  or her colleagues who suffer the rulings from the bench with incredible serenity. If you have not learned to suck it up before, this show will teach you. I can see now why retired people flock to courtrooms as to theater;  the former is free and twice as much fun.  And it's good to remember, as this show emphasizes, that the legal profession is a revenue enhancing activity.   These guys may do their pro bono stuff, but they never cease to concern themselves with the revenue.  And, God love them, they deserve the big dollars.  A quite kind of entertainment is The West Wing which is also winding down, I believe, but it's been great all along, and allowed me to read the new Bush biography with considerably greater sophistication.  I never knew life in the Oval Office was so hectic, everyone darting in and out all day long, everyone with a dozen people at their side giving them messages, handing them phones to answer.  The drama has two great bromances, one between President Bartlett and  Leo, his chief of staff, long time friends whose evident concern for each other is tonic in what seems to be a Washington of cut throat egos.  Two younger figures Sam Seaborn and Josh Whitborn, college friends who came to Washington together are amazingly handsome, intelligent, devoted to each other, flirt with each other constantly and remain heterosexual, and true to the peculiar indifference to women in the series, they are without any serious romance in their lives.  Only the press secretary (Alyson Jenning) manages to intrude into the sacred circle of guys, and she is six feet tall.  A friend of mine who has worked in the West Wing says the series is realistic but overly idealistic and romanticized.  I guess bromance does that to the atmosphere.  So it is a relief to turn to Veep which my Washington informant says is the more realistic.  I remember watching this from the start and growing immediately fond of every one of the characters who appeared in the story until I suddenly realized that every last one of them from the Veep on down were soulless, selfish, narcissistic, ego mad, political operatives whose major skills were in promoting a scenario, an image, an idea of what might be the truth, without for a moment worrying about its proximity to the actual reality staring the world in the fact.  I've never seen spin done so well, nor laughed so much at such marvelously witty dialogue--such awful people, but so funny!  And now I am deep into Jean Edward Smith's biography; President Bush has long since given up the bottle and is drinking deep from the well of the ideas of Paul Wolfowitz and the USA is off to the races.