Friends Journal

T he
The Lie of Politics
by David Oates
political season is over at last.
The ballots have been counted,
the predictions silenced. And, at
least in the circles I travel-teachers, fellow
Quakers, the various left-leaning
people encountered on Los Angeles's
Westside-an emotion approaching despair
is rampant.
A phone call pulled me from the television
on election night. " I'm so
depressed," said the friend. She laughed
a little, but she meant it. Her voice was
flat and had a where-do-we-go-fromhere
quality that you associate with
people in newscasts who stare at their
burned houses or wrecked farms.
In meeting on Sunday, others spoke
of their alienation from most Americans,
their sense that the nation's values
had become so distorted that we no
longer held anything in common with
them. People struggled to find sense in
this overwhelming catastrophe. They
did not find much.
It concerns me. In fact, the reaction
to Ronald Reagan's reelection concerns
me far more than the election itself. The
depression that afflicts us shows how far
we have all begun to believe the lie of
politics.
It is a common observation that politics
is theater. We joke about the makeup,
the false promises and speeches, the
shallow television performances, but we
often miss the deeper import of the observation.
Politics, like theater, is fiction. The
political theater is set up as a ritual combat
in which good guys may triumph
over bad guys, to the general satisfaction
of the audience. This may be a good
way to unite and express a people's will,
but it is, nonetheless, a mostly fictional
reality.
But aren't the stakes real? Of course
A member of Santa Monica (Calif.) Meeting,
David Oates is a writer, carpenter, poet, and
teacher who lives in Venice, Calif. His article is
reprinted with permission from the Other Side
magazine, 300 W. Apsley St., Philadelphia, PA
19144. Copyright © 1985.
10
they are. The presidency is real enough,
and so were the differences between
Reagan and Mondale. The actual lives
of millions of people will almost certainly
be affected for good or ill.
But the theatrical production by
which we choose our leaders only dimly
reflects these realities. It doesn't take
much thought to see that the real world
can seldom be reduced to a single eitheror
choice. And it takes only a little sophistication
to realize that the choices in
U.S. politics are always between two
fairly centrist positions.
On the global political spectrum,
Democrats and Republicans are very
close together, huddled around a consensus
that ignores the issues facing the
rest of the world: mass starvation, economic
development and indebtedness,
cultural invasion, ecological devastation,
nuclear survival. Whichever side
wins, it will make only a fine-tuned
change in U.S. actions.
From this perspective, our electoral
choice looks, if not unimportant, at least
a lot less than cosmic.
Nevertheless the political fiction lures