The Road to Nowhere (1996)

TV Review from the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you are unlucky enough to be reading this in the middle of the British party conference season, spare a thought for those who stayed up into the middle of the night a few weeks back to watch the Republican and Democrat conventions in the US choose their Presidential candidates. Ignoring wiser counsels, this reviewer stayed up till four in the morning in an attempt to understand the alleged significance of it all, but to little avail.

In one sense it was an education — it certainly taught me a lesson. But in virtually every other sense it was at best a badly acted pantomime. The purpose of the BBC’s Road To The White House coverage (BBC1, 1 a.m., various nights) appeared to be to convince British viewers that mainstream politics over here does really have a purpose and is really about issues, in obvious distinction to its American counterpart. If so, it almost succeeded — but not quite, for the obvious similarities between the two served to override any superficial differences. Most notably there was an unashamed party of the Right opposed by a party heading at a rate of knots to meet it from the other direction. taking all the liberals and reformists with it. Then there was the glitz, choreography, leader-adulation and even much of the phraseology that was used which could so easily have graced Blackpool or Brighton just as it graced San Diego and Chicago. And to the extent that any issues were addressed— however fleetingly—they were the same too: jobs, mortgages, crime, education, health care, war and the other problems that flourish under the market economy. The "solutions" offered were little different — tax-breaks and subsidies, the restoration of “family values", and economic growth as a panacea without the first idea where it was going to come from.

Deep doo-doo

This was all as bad as it was familiar. But there was worse—much worse — and it would be possible to fill a whole edition of this magazine with examples of it. For those of you who missed it, there are just three samples of the political excrement served up at the conventions, and which will no doubt be manifesting itself here in some form or other shortly as the General Election campaign gets underway.

1. The pathetic sight of former Superman Christopher Reeve, paralysed from the neck-down and barely able to speak, wheeled on stage at the Democratic convention during TV prime-time to boost Clinton’s re-election chances with a halting plea for more compassion for the poor and disabled. Though Reeve isn’t actually a member of the Democratic Party, his appearance was exploited to the hilt by the Democrats’ spin doctors and even made the headlines on British TV news bulletins. Hasn't anybody told him the Democrats— like the Republicans—aim to crack down on welfare expenditure not increase it? Or that Clinton has in this very policy field just signed one of the most anti-working class pieces of legislation to be passed through Congress in recent years?

2. Bob Dole during his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination declaring that anyone in his party with racist views "knows where to find the door marked Exit". This of a party supported and funded by people who think the United Nations is run by an international Jewish cabal, whose candidates for office have included former (and unrepentant) leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, and half of whose membership believes that anyone without faith in the Christian god will burn in hell for all eternity (quite literally). Oh, and Dole’s party supports tougher immigration controls against the Mexicans, courting the Southern Redneck vote with all the subtlety and aplomb of an old-fashioned lynch mob.

3. Vice-President Al Gore, bringing tears to the eyes of the would normally have been expected to be in a catatonic trance during one of his mind-bogglingly tedious speeches. The reason for this unexpected bout of audience participation? The Veep's stomach-churning display of ham acting over his sister’s death from lung cancer caused by smoking cigarettes. This was so wooden and contrived that it would have been sufficient grounds to have him removed form even the most mediocre of amateur rep companies. If you are tempted to think this assessment is just a touch harsh, remember that Gore's wealthy dynasty of a family made much of its fortune through its ownership of Tennessee tobacco farms . . .  a fact which he didn't mention once.

There was a lot else besides worthy of comment from Pat Buchanan’s sinister appearance on the Republican platform to the sickening parade of rat-bag Kennedy’s for the Democrats, each one feted like royalty. But BBC pundits Charles Wheeler and Gavin Esler summed it all up quite nicely in their comments that the conventions really are too long these days, with viewers turning off in their millions. The fifty percent-plus of American voters who refuse to go to the polls in November will be demonstrating a similar contempt for a political process which increasingly relies on ignorance, trickery and blind acquiescence to sustain it. One day—just one day—they might turn their passive resistance to this nonsense into something more energetic and vibrant, and leave the political tricksters to play with their placards and balloons to their heart’s content, just like a baby shakes its rattle while grinning inanely at passers-by. They and the rest of the world who have seen through these fakers can then get on with doing something really useful—shaping a world truly fit for intelligent human beings to live in.

Dave Perrin

Hands up for a recount (2000)

TV Review from the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month this column focussed its attention on the coverage of the US Presidential debates by the BBC, thinking that little would need to be said on the subject of American elections for another four years. How wrong this assumption now appears with hindsight. It is therefore with some gusto that we return to the subject after probably the craziest election in the history of Western democracy.

The television news networks, being reflective of the ideological status quo, were keen to present the election as a shining example of American democracy in action, a beacon to the entire world, and an exemplar of sound democratic practice. What they got was an utter farce that could have been scripted by any number of political satirists but rejected on the grounds of its unbelievability.

There was much to be fascinated about in this election, e.g.:

• the fact that the candidate with the most votes had a better than evens chance of coming second
• the fact that the political gangs of Belfast clearly have a lesson or two to learn about voter fraud (and primarily from the state which has the brother of one of the Presidential candidates as its Governor)
• that segments of American society and its state apparatus were shown once again to be endemically racist (let’s just add at this point that it would appear wise for any readers of this journal travelling to Florida on their holidays in the next few months to make a precautionary check for ‘misplaced’ or hidden ballot boxes when they arrive in their hotel rooms, especially if they are staying anywhere near a voting precinct mainly populated by Afro-Caribbean residents)
• and finally and most appropriately, that the society with more lawyers per head of the population than any other in the world should eventually descend to choosing its head of state via the courts rather than through the ballot box (or the dumped and abandoned voting machines—whichever you prefer).

But in addition to all this (as if it wasn’t enough), the US television networks came up trumps. Not content with just reporting on this entire dreadful farrago of democratic malpractice they had to get in on the act by contributing to it as well. In fact, as the evening unfolded it was the news networks which appeared to set it all off in the first place.

Rather in a lather 

The networks are in competition for advertising—their life-blood—and to attract advertising they need to attract viewers. The news networks, some of whom already have niche markets, try to increase their established audience share by being the most up-to-date with the news, marketing themselves as the channel “where it all happens”. It was the pursuit of this strategy which led them to make colossal mistakes on election night. A similar thing has happened previously in Britain with news networks trying to gazump one another with the earliest projected result and getting it quite wrong (a fact which went largely unmentioned by the television news media here, which has been overcome by an all pervading and totally unjustified bout of smugness).

In the US, where opinion polls—especially exit polls—have a far better reputation than they do in Britain, “calling” results before the votes are actually in has a long history. Rarely, if ever, has it caused problems. This time, though, was different.

The networks “called” the key state of Florida, primarily on the basis of an exit poll before it was wise to do so (in actual fact, one network did this and all the others followed within seconds of hearing of it). This, combined with a couple of other “calls” for bell-weather states, led to commentators claming that the election was pretty much wrapped up for Gore before the polls had even closed on the west coast.

A couple of hours later came the first hiccup: an adjusted pronouncement which put Florida back into the column of being “too close to call”. A couple of hours after this, the networks announced that Bush had actually taken the state and would therefore become President and then a couple of hours later still, the networks revised their prediction yet again and put Florida in the “too-close-to-call” column once more. As Dan Rather, the veteran news anchor man put it, it was one of the darkest days in the history of US network television.

Since then the networks—as anyone who has watched CNN can testify–have been on a political feeding frenzy. To be fair, some of their coverage has been surprisingly good, including their investigative, discussion and talk show programmes. But this has, by and large, been an attempt to make amends for their own rather shabby role in one of electoral history’s shabbiest episodes. If anything good comes out of it at all it will be what is the apparently re-awakened interest of a lot of workers in America in political matters. And it is only to be hoped that this renewed interest will lead to a questioning of the entire political system in operation not just some of its component parts, a political system which has been revered or ignored in almost equal measure in the US but never seriously and actively opposed by anything other than small groups and parties. After all, real meaningful democracy is going to have to mean something a lot more than hand recounts in Palm Beach county and Al Gore with his feet up in the White House.

Dave Perrin

The Making of a President (2000)

TV Review from the November 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

What exactly is it that tempts people to stay up until four o’clock in the morning to watch Presidential debates? In the United States they only have to stay up until ten or eleven o’clock, and that is bad enough. Over here BBC News 24 obviously decided to target insomniac political junkies with its coverage of the three US Presidential debates between Al Gore and George W. Bush, and the Vice-Presidential debate between Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney.

While most viewers in the UK were counting sheep, it became apparent soon enough to those that weren’t that the Democrats in the US were clearly counting on George Bush to win them the election. Each debate was preceded by commentators anticipating that Bush would render the US public senseless with laughter through his propensity for malapropisms, mispronunciation and periodic fits of verbal madness. Newscasters even referred viewers to the existence of a web site run by the Democratic Party called Bush Lite, where the Republican candidate’s verbal contortions are on parade for everyone to see. But on each occasion the hopes of the Gore campaign, the TV commentators (and much of the audience, presumably) were dashed as Bush succeeded in mimicking his opponent’s legendary capacity for soporific oratory, with barely a misplaced syllable.

Not once did Bush tell Americans, as he had done previously, that they “ought to make the pie higher”, nor did he encourage parents to protect their children from foul language on TV by “turning the ‘off’ button on”. And neither—luckily—did he, as on a previous occasion when railing against trade barriers, conflate the two words and promise to knock-down “terriers”. Instead, just like his opponent, he was the typical politician—staid but with a folksy edge to give him the necessary “common touch”, evidently overly-ambitious, in possession of a highly selective memory and with an in-built propensity to be economical with the truth at every given opportunity. It was no wonder everyone was waiting for him to slip up.

A Gore draw

There would not, of course, be much justification for the BBC to show this spectacle at all if the pretence wasn’t maintained that there was some real difference between the contenders and that something of importance was at stake. If it was just knockabout stuff and comedy people were after, they could have scheduled it with all the other left-field and experimental stuff on BBC Choice. Instead, the coverage had to be justified in some way, although it is doubtful whether the BBC made a terribly good job of this aspect of it. The two political analysts it had hired for immediate post-debate discussion were, naturally enough, a staunch Democrat and a strong Republican. Naturally too, they were both academics. The sting in the tail was that they happened to be married to each other. Quite why the BBC chose to pick this couple is anyone’s guess but it simply had the effect of reinforcing the very attitude that the BBC was trying to disabuse its viewers of—that there was no major disagreements between the two camps and that the only differences in existence were superficial and cosmetic. Wives and husbands may not agree about everything but this couple certainly created a subliminal image of unity beneath a façade of disagreement (to get a real handle on this, when it comes to marriages between political animals rather than the only vaguely committed, how many dyed-in-the-wool socialists are contentedly married to raving fascists?).

The truth, of course, is that in its coverage the BBC was probably on a hiding to nothing anyway. Few people in Britain have ever taken US elections seriously and they do not show any sign of changing. What is interesting – and what the BBC’s coverage didn’t quite bring out as it might have done – are the parallels between politics in the US and politics as it is now becoming in Britain and many other parts of the Western world. This is a politics based not on differences of ideology, whether real or imagined, but the politics of competing managerial teams. Gore and Bush were like two putative chief executives invited before the board to give their presentations and to expose the other’s perceived weaknesses.

Gore versus Bush was a precursor to what Blair versus Hague will be like if ever such a debate takes place at the next election over here (something which is certainly possible, though at this stage, still unlikely). It will be—as the BBC billed the Presidential debates to be—a battle between gladiators. But they will be, again like their American counterparts, gladiators without a purpose, veritable “soldiers of fortune”, political mercenaries high on ambition but woefully low on content.

Dave Perrin

The Great US Presidential Election Show (2000)

From the October 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

US workers, who are getting poorer and working longer, settle in for another edition of the great US presidential election show

Like an over-extended series of sequels that have long outlived the originality and vitality of the original blockbuster, so comes the current edition of the US Presidential Election. When looking at the scripted positions of the extended cast of four candidates (yes four, count ’em) registering in national popularity polls an apt title for this sequel would be “Mission Impossible 2000”.

But first the plot as hyped by the current administration and fully supported by the media. It goes something like this. The United States of America is on a roll of the longest uninterrupted period of prosperity in its entire history. This unforeseen and unprecedented prosperity has positioned the United States in the prime spot to be the economic and political dynamo for the entire new century. The question is who is best to maintain this phenomenal convergence of conditions which America has carefully crafted and is benefiting from.

It sounds like an old story and it is. Like any tired sequel the plot gets weaker, more porous the closer one watches and actually thinks about the drama unfolding before one’s eyes.

The CNN.com web site on August 29 2000 featured a story based upon a Justice Department study that showed nearly 1.5 million children in America had a parent in prison in 1999. That is an increase of over 500,000 to be added to this unfortunate class from 1991. Children with mothers incarcerated rose a startling 98 percent over the past eight years. The prison population as a whole grew by 62 percent from 1991-1999. A rather peculiar trend to parallel the longest period of uninterrupted economic growth, one would think. President Clinton himself unwittingly let a cat out of the bag at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. He announced the findings of a study he commissioned on as to why voter participation was steadily declining. The finding was “Lack of time. People just don’t have enough time now to go and vote.”

We the audience can logically conclude that both of these trends are due to the population’s effort to make ends meet. Thus crimes are committed and jobs worked at for longer hours so increasing the extent of not being able to care for one’s own children or participate in the political process. A most flimsy and inconsistent plot indeed. When one looks at the stars and their dialogue this sequel takes a real nosedive.

Bore and Gush

Vice President Al Gore of the Democratic Party plays the role of the dashing lead actor. “I will fight for you!” is his signature line in this year’s political drama. With his book Earth in the Balance and anticipation of the elimination of the internal combustion petroleum engine in his lifetime, he brings a depth and insight not usually found in such a role.

At the 1988 Democratic Convention he gave a heart-wrenching speech about his sister dying of lung cancer after years of smoking cigarettes. It was later revealed that Al Gore himself was a generous recipient of blood money from the same evil interest that he railed against at that convention. His most infamous line, in a typicaly ridiculous hammy fashion of an overgrandiose actor on the political stage, is: “I took the initiative to invent the internet”.

He opposes the Republican Party plan of a $250 billion tax cut saying it would “benefit the rich”. He instead proposes to use the money for paying for prescription pills for the elderly. Now after the elderly have purchased $250 billion worth of prescription medicine guess who will pocket the money? Yep, the rich pharmacutical companies. The same with food stamps, subsidised housing, whatever, they are all about subsidies to the rich. His signature line should be: “I will fight for you to hand over all the money you created to the rich!” Then again this is political theater, not reality, so you will never hear an actor utter such a line in capitalist politics.

It is interesting to note that both lead actors represent a clash between contemporary political oligarchies. Al Gore picked up the mantel of political power from the same political district that his father held in the State of Tennessee. His arch-rival George W. Bush is the son of the recent American President of Gulf War fame.

As the Republican Party arch-rival in the cast, George W. Bush’s signature line is: “I am a uniter not a divider”. This has to be one of the most laughable and politically naive lines ever uttered by a capitalist politician, particularly coming from an actor who as Governor of the State of Texas, has presided over 300 executions in his state and has vigously defended each one of them, including the execution of a retired grandmother. The cold reality is we live in a class-divided society and, like his father, George W. Bush’s means of “uniting” involves being prepared to slaughter people who pose a “problem” for it, whether they be an Iraqi soldier or an American citizen. The Bush family oligarchy has shown a most sinister means of “uniting” people.

In college he was noted for cocaine use and once dancing nude atop a table at a frat party. That alone tells you what an absurd sequel this election has become. His signature line should be: “I am a death presider and class divider”. But alas, such real life preformaces will not be found in the theater of American politics.

Peculiar populist

It is significant that for the first time ever four different candidates are registering in a national poll on the eve of a US Presidential election. This is because two other parties are starting to gain national support, another indicative trend amidst eight years of so-called unprecedented, uninterrupted prosperity. The American voter is starting to look beyond the two major parties for political solutions.

“The two-party system has become a delusion. On foreign and trade policy, open-borders immigration and corporate influence, Republicans and Democrats are carbon copies of one another. Neither offers voters a real choice. Both parties backed the illegal war in Kosovo. ”

No, the above quote did not come from the World Socialist Party of the United States but was from an internet release by the Reform Party. What was once considered off-the-wall assertions are now gaining currency in the commonsense of American political thinking.

The Reform Party though trots out a most peculiar populist in former Republican lesser player Patrick Buchanan. He is a former speech writer for Presidents Richard Nixion and Ronald Reagan and now fancies himself a wannabe “Peoples President”. True, in the 1996 Republican primary he referred to Senator Bob Dole as “a bell hop for the business round table”. What with those dark suits Dole wore, it was an apt description.

Buchanan decries the loss of jobs in America to overseas factories, giving rise to his “America First” slogan. But, as a vigorous defender to this day of the Nixon administration, he seems to forget about a trade agreement signed under it that dumped cheap China cotton on the American market forcing the closing of dozens of textile factories in the south-eastern United States. But then those commercial interest were prone to donate money to the Democratic Party. And one can also suspect such motives in Al Gore’s crusade against the tobacco industry closely associated with key Republicans. Using state power to wreck the financial backers of one’s opposition party is an accepted scorched earth tactic in American politics. Thus one can see why such a man as Buchanan would strike fear in the two major parties should he attain the White House.

It is only in this context could he be seen as anything remotely resembling a “populist”. Otherwise, he has perfected divisiveness to an art form and generally strikes fear into most everyone else’s hearts as well. This odd populist opposes a woman’s right to an abortion and homosexuals in general. He is also an ardent defender of the 1950s racially-segregated Washington, DC, that he grew up in. To top it off, Patrick Buchanan has raised the alarm that America itself is becoming “balkanized”.

One can plainly see that, far from an alternative to the two major parties, he himself is just another supporter of capitalism having his doubts.

Saving capitalism

This brings us to another doubting supporter of capitalism, Ralph Nader and his Green Party. Unlike Buchanan who relies on cultural observations to express his doubts, Nader in his acceptance speech of his party’s’ nomination has facts to support his doubts. And plenty of them come from this professional “consumer advocate”:

• Consumer debt is at an all time high, totalling over $6 trillion.
• American workers are working an average of 163 more hours per year than 20 years ago.
• Over 20 percent of children were growing up in poverty over the last decade.
• A majority of workers are making less now, inflation adjusted, than in 1979.
• The top one percent of the wealthiest people have more financial wealth than the bottom 90 percent of Americans combined.

Nader correctly proclaims “we can have a democratic society or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both“.

And what is his scheme to defend democracy?

“Pluralistic democracy has enlarged markets and created the middle class. Yet the short term, monetized, minds of corporatists are bent on weakening, defeating, diluting, diminishing, circumventing, coopting, or corrupting all traditional countervailing forces that have saved American corporate capitalism from itself.”

Ah! To save American corporate capitalism from itself! Why has not anyone else thought of that? Or is he really that naive as to the other parties political agendas?

Well, at least he knows his role in this madcap, absurd sequel. Ralph Nader, in his quest to save corporate America from itself, is himself the nadir of struggling actors in “Mission Impossible 2000”.

Hopefully this silly series will soon end to give way to another blockbuster like . . . World Socialist President. If the World Socialist Party of the United States at some point in the future were to run a candidate for President and won, their mission would be to abolish the very office they were elected to. A socialist society would have no need for the United States of America or any other nation for that matter. Much less of a head of state. Such an episode would be a sequel to the real hit watched all across America and the world: WORLD SOCIALIST REVOLUTION IN THE FORMER USA!

Wesley J Lawrimore

(World Socialist Party of the US)

The Election Farce in America (2000)

Editorial from the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who won a majority in the US elections? Actually, neither Bush nor Gore. The non-voters did—by far. More people chose that option than voted for both Bush and Gore put together. Not that it made any difference who won since everyone knows that the Republican and Democrat parties—whose champions were both millionaire members of the ruling class—stand for the same thing: the maintenance of capitalism at home and abroad.

The farce in Florida did, however, raise an important point that will still be relevant in socialism: the need to have clear agreed-on standing rules for deciding how to count votes and settle any disputes before the vote takes place.

For socialism will of course be a democratic society with elections and referendums.

It is also a basic tenet of the Socialist Party that the establishment of socialism involves the capture of political power via the ballot-box. For this to happen presupposes the existence of a "bourgeois democracy". But while such an arrangement is undeniably preferable to political dictatorship we don't entertain any illusions about the nature of this "bourgeois democracy". It is a very limited kind of democracy indeed.

Under this kind of democracy, the population is permitted to choose between representatives of different political parties to supposedly "represent" them in parliament. This is more or less the extent of popular participation—once every other year in America—in the "democratic process"; thereafter control is surrendered to the politicians. But the politicians themselves are constrained to operate within parameters set by the economic system for which they stand. Based upon minority ownership of the means of living, capitalism can only ever operate in the interests of the capitalist minority, not the electorate as a whole.

There are other aspects of bourgeois democracy, such as free speech, which are similarly compromised by the nature of the system. In this case by the disproportionate power it bestows on those who own and control the media. And even where workers are able to exercise some measure of democratic control over their own organisations, such as trade unions, their capacity to influence events is limited by the essentially defensive nature of such organisations and their inability to circumvent the dictates of the profit system.

Socialism, by bringing to an end minority ownership, will remove these fundamental structural impediments to genuine democracy. Along with this, it can be assumed, it will bring about a marked change in the form of decision-making—from representative democracy (a weak form of democratic control) towards stronger manifestations of democratic control, notably the use of mandated delegates and direct democracy—aimed at encouraging popular participation and preventing the emergence of a new ruling class in the form of a decision-making elite.

Greasy Pole: Making the President (2000)

The Greasy Pole Column from the October 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

To accept the spectacle of the presidential election requires a massive feat of amnesia or delusion by the working class

Throughout almost the entire length of this year's American presidential elections the pollsters—those obsessive people whose finger is always firmly on the pulse of public opinion—said that Republican George W. Bush was the nation's favourite. And then they suddenly changed their mind and put Democrat Al Gore out in front. This sent all the strategists and analysts into confusion but it did not take them long to come up with the reason for the dramatic turnaround. It was all down to what happened at the Democrats' convention in August. Gore's success since then was due, not so much to what he said—indeed he had assured the convention that he is a pretty boring man—but because he had kissed his wife. Nothing unusual in that, of course—politicians often kiss their spouse at moments of intense vote-cadging or before numbingly compliant audiences. The difference was that the Gore kiss was, in the words of more than one witness, a snog—prolonged and smothering enough to raise anxieties about whether Mrs Gore was about to be suffocated. But she survived, breaking and smiling and supportive and Gore's ratings began to rise and rise . . .

It was just as well that Gore did something out of the ordinary because there was nothing in his speech to the convention to set the blood racing. "Every hard-working American family," he said, "deserves to open the door to the American dream." This is not the first time we have heard about this elusively defined thing. It has been around in politicians' rhetoric for long enough to make us wonder why, after all this time, there are any people in America who are stopped from enjoying it by a closed door. "I ask for your support," Gore clamoured, "on the basis of a better, fairer, more prosperous America." He did not explain why, after eight years as Vice President, he still thinks there s so much room for improvement in the country. But he did say he wants another four years.

Images

It was no better with Republican candidate George Bush. In a sideswipe at Bill Clinton and his peculiar handling of cigars he promised to change the tone of Washington to one of "civility and respect". Shortly afterwards he gave an example of this by describing a journalist at one of his press conferences as "a Major League asshole". After outlining some of his policies to the convention he assured them, "We will seize this moment of American promise. We will use these good times for great goals . . . We will extend the promise of prosperity to every foreign corner of this country . . ." The assembled Republican faithful loved it and gave it, according to one reporter, an "ecstatic, deafening response". They would not have been in the mood to reflect that Bush spoke in the vaguest of platitudes; to analyse his rantings would have been like trying to hold smoke.

The ringing, empty phrases spewed out by Bush and Gore had been painstakingly crafted over hours of toil and argument, to promote an image of each of them as historically clever, strong, sincere, honest. This is not an original technique. For example in May 1991, Bill Clinton, then a rising star in the Democratic Party with his ambitions centred firmly on the White House, said to the party's leadership council: "Our burden is to give the people a new choice rooted in old values. A new choice that is simple, that offers opportunity, demands responsibility, gives citizens more say, provides them responsible government, all because we recognize that we are a community." It sounded very will, enough to convince a lot of people—a typical piece of Clinton oratory. An earlier speech, on the same lines, had persuaded a disillusioned campaigner to become enthused enough to tell Clinton "I feel two emotions in this room that I haven't experienced in a long time—pride and hope." It would be interesting to know what emotions that man feels now, after eight years of Clinton sleaze.

Kennedy

Yet the fact is that such blind enthusiasm is capable of surviving the most compelling reality. No American president has come to power with such favourable prospects as John F. Kennedy. Rich, handsome, politically slick, bathed in glamour and the style which came to be called Camelot, he convinced millions of people throughout the world that we would leave the place in a much better state than it was when he took office. Such was the devotion for him that nobody threw up when Marilyn Monroe, in that dress, before a huge audience, sang Happy Birthday to him.

In all the excitement it was largely overlooked that the Kennedy family fortune was principally due to some nasty deals during Prohibition. There was a convenient blanket of amnesia over the President's father, the odious Joseph Kennedy, who can best be described as a ruthless gangster with an obsession that one of his sons would one day inhabit the White House, whatever it costs. In the massive publicity surrounding Kennedy there was little attention given to his connection to Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana—a friendship fertilised with large, regular bundles of money. Giancana's influence was applied to ensure that Kennedy won the 1960 presidential elections. At the time the defeated Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, knew that the election had in effect been bought. But he was no slouch himself at such tactics so he allowed that particular sleeping dog to lie.

In 1963, before the Vietnam war got under way, the president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, was showing a willingness to negotiate with the Vietcong. If the negotiations had happened it is possible that tens of thousands of people on both sides might not have been killed. But at that stage a negotiated settlement did not fit in with the Kennedy government's policies in the area. The situation was dealt with by Washington tacitly supporting a military coup in which Diem and his brother were executed. The fact that Diem was supposed to be a personal friend of Kennedy did not save him. It was a solution worthy of the president's Mafia friends. Diem's charge d'affaire in Washington remembered the affair: "You had a group of people who pursued personal and political ambitions. It was like the Mafia."

Affairs

Kennedy's Mafia connection was useful to him in other ways. He had an affair with Judith Exner, who at the time was in a relationship with that same Sam Giancana who had manipulated his 1960 election victory. Exner was only one of a veritable mass of such liaisons for Kennedy. One of the Secret Service agents assigned to protect the president "grieved that he would conduct himself in such a way as to make us so vulnerable and make the country so vulnerable."

These activities would have been of no concern except that at the same time as he was devoting so much of his time to them Kennedy was being portrayed as a devoted husband and father, with the kind of family ideal to society. After his assassination a memorial fund was set up and publicised with a photograph of Kennedy walking barefoot along a lonely beach hand-in-hand with his toddler son—a touching picture of a supposedly caring family man. The contrast with the reality of Camelot illustrate the extent of the cynicism which powers the presentation of political leaders—and the miseries of delusion among the voters.

Nixon & Reagan 

Kennedy was not unusual in this. During Richard Nixon's time as president he was represented as very different from the man who drank too much, depended on prescribed drugs and sometimes beat the wife who, in the customary pattern, was supposed to be the object of his adoration. Nixon died with the reputation of the president who brought peace to Vietnam. In fact, in the run-up to the 1968 election he tried to boost his chances by doing his best to undermine Lyndon Johnson's first moves to negotiate an end to the war.

Ronald Reagan's popularity was so overwhelming that one Democratic strategist moaned that the party had given up running against him. His support was based on an image of a decisive, self-confident representative of homely values, modest courage and happy endings, like an old cowboy movie. In fact he was often detached from the process of government, with the job of articulating the myths so beloved of the voters—America the best country in the world, strong and proud and free where every decent main's wife was called Nancy . . . He was very, very adept at playing that role which the political manipulators around him polished and packaged and publicised.

That is a good point at which to sum it up. The majority of people—the working class, the useful, productive people in this society—are content to keep capitalism in being under the delusion that it is rather like a movie in which the baddies come to a sticky end and the hero and heroine just have time to embrace before the end. The problem is that there are so many baddies—war, poverty, starvation, mental stress, homelessness, alienation, crime, disease . . . And the "heroes" and "heroines"—Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan and the rest—are powerless to do anything about it. To accept all this and to forget the impotence of those leaders requires a massive feat of amnesia or delusion by the working class. And to help them to be like that there are all those speech writers, strategists and spin doctors—the kind of people whose job is to tell Al Gore that if he didn't stop being boring and serious he would lose the election so he had better get out on stage, get hold of his wife and . . .

Ivan

An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

Film Review from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

An Inconvenient Truth (2005), directed by Davis Guggenheim

This film is advertised as 'a passionate and inspirational look at one man's commitment to expose the myths and misconceptions that surround global warming and inspire actions to prevent it'. That one man is Al Gore: company director, author and professional politician for the Democratic Party of the USA. Thus, it is perhaps unsurprising that a substantial portion of this so-called documentary feels more like a political broadcast. The film is based on footage of a lecture on climate change given to a sympathetic audience, interspersed with short asides on Gore's career as a professional politician, his privileged upbringing, his personal life and accounts of him driving and flying around the world to lecture on the effects of fossil fuel usage.

Gore presents quantitative and anecdotal evidence for climate change in an easily digestible way. Some time is spent on the history and methodology of atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature measurements. The data is clearly presented in graphs, diagrams and photographs but Gore doesn't distinguish between measurements and extrapolations. Some of the graphs are presented in a way that magnifies small differences in data, and effects of climate change that are speculations are presented as inevitable with no reference to the likelihood of their occurrence or other theories.

At one point Gore seems to be arguing that Ice Ages are caused solely by declining greenhouse gases; he says 'when there is more carbon dioxide the temperature gets warmer'. He does not point out that among the theories for the causes of Ice Ages changes to the composition of the atmosphere are seen as just one component, or even as a result of the Ice Age not a cause itself.

As the film progresses Gore increasingly overstates the effects, or evidence for the effects, of climate change. Species loss, re-emergence of suppressed diseases and the emergence of new diseases such as SARS are all implied to be a result of climate change without evidence. The importance of the climate change issue does not need to be exaggerated.

In an aside, Gore reflects on his time in Congress promoting action on climate change, he laments: 'the struggles, the victories that aren't really victories, the defeats that aren't really defeats, they can serve to magnify the significance of some trivial step forward'. He blames the present administration of the state and their links with the oil and gas lobby. For Socialists it is obvious that the government will rarely go against the interests of capital, especially a section of the capitalist class as powerful as the energy industry.

Gore states that climate change 'is really not a political issue so much as a moral issue'. His remedy for the problem is to advise people to exercise their power as consumers in choosing energy efficient appliances and cars and use 'our political processes, in our democracy', and he just happens to be a professional politician concerned about climate change. He states it is a false dichotomy to say that the choice is economy or the environment, we can have both: 'If we do the right thing, then we're going to create a lot of wealth and we're going to create a lot of jobs . . .'. The details of this were left sketchy but it seems that hope triumphs over experience and he still has faith in capitalism.

In conclusion Gore states, to rapturous applause, that 'We have everything we need save perhaps political will . . . We have the ability to do this . . . The solutions are in our hands'. He is correct, but for him this means more of the same old futile politicking. Socialists realise that profit will always be the priority for capitalism, the solution in our hands is to bring the means of production under direct democratic control so that everybody can take part in deciding how global resources are used.

This documentary film follows a novel format and is visually impressive. It is a good introduction to the basics of human-made climate change problem, but is tarnished by the lack of convincing solutions.

Piers Hobson

Piers Hobson blogs at Border Fever