Demosophia

Angels in America: The Ensemble Lie, Part II

As I said after viewing Part I of this HBO series, I was pretty concerned about what I call the "ensemble lie." This is what happens when a bunch of very talented people get together who can shade the truth and deftly pull the right manipulative emotional strings to present a distorted version of reality. That's the sort of thing that happened with Oliver Stone's JFK. I was mainly concerned that Angels would propagate the myth, almost universally believed in the gay community, that the AIDS epidemic was manipulated in order to create a kind of genocide of gays. I worried about that because I hadn't seen the play, and all I had to go on was the testimony of some people like Andrew Sullivan, who had. Now, I've seen it and it's not what I expected.

The movie version seems to have omitted that detail about the cynical manipulation of the AIDS epidemic, or else I just completely missed it. It may have been a prominent aspect of Kushner's original stage play, but apparently Nichols saw fit to make some adjustments. Although it's clear that Kushner's understanding of "conservatives" is cartoonish at best, and only the "liberals" (including one converted "liberal") participate in the togetherness wrap up at the end, it's not surprising that Kushner doesn't perceive conservatives as part of the same community of understanding. But the main thing I noticed about the film (or mini-series) is how dated its ideological references are. That pre-9/11 theme, that "movement" depends on a progressive-left political outlook, now seems almost quaint. The silly notion that America is essentially conservative and that the latter eschews change (personified in the "Angel of the American Continental Principality"), naturally casting "progressives" as the sympathetic and heroic agents of change, has been completely reversed since 9/11. So the plot simply doesn't make sense in todays terms. It is now the so-called "progressives" who are dragging their feet, apparently stuck in the past.

Because, actually, America isn't conservative in that sense at all. It never has been. It has a conservative-leaning business establishment, but what nation doesn't? Business people always prefer stability. And sometimes, if they're reasonably well informed, that longing for stability leads to constructive change. The emergence of the Rule of Law in England after the Norman conquest was such a case, where the cost of feuds became so clear and distasteful that the barons chose to place themselves under the authority of the King's Bench rather than continue to tolerate the social (and economic) disruption. And something like that is happening now, as the world wakes to the fact that autocracy and local sovereignty, coupled with the growing threat posed by superempowered terrorists using WMD (the direct analog of medieval feuds) is just too costly in just too many ways.

What has happened to the left reminds me of the reaction someone might have at an unexpected crossroads. Informed mainly by their wishful thinking map of the human endeavor they see that we've taken a fork they had not planned for, and that wasn't on their map. So they stand at the crossroads and complain incessantly, whining that we all need to backtrack and stick to their plan. This detour shouldn't exist, so it must be a mistake. And this genuinely understandable "conservative" attitude prevails across the spectrum of the left "establishment" from communitarians like Amitae Etzioni to big media, and even to the US State Department. They'll just have to get over it, eventually, because we've taken a road seldom travelled. And we know where the well-travelled road leads...

Scratch an American "conservative" and you'll find a liberal idealogue under the skin. In fact, the most conservative elements of the government are to be found in the US State Department, which to my mind doesn't understand political change or democracy very well at all. Nor, for that matter, do they understand the world very well, or the nature of the enemy. If they were running things they'd, without a doubt, be busy setting the stage for the next total war.

Perhaps the clearest example of how things have become stirred up and how unfamiliar the territory has become concerns the role of the conventional media. I'm not sure what's going on with them. They are clearly left-leaning (except for FOX and a few radio outlets), but they're also lazy and hidebound, which might be a more accurate term than "conservative.". I saw Andrea Mitchell's incompetent wrap up of the state of knowledge about the Saddam/Qaeda link on CNN yesterday, reflecting assumptions that are about 5 months old, and apparently oblivious to the fact that there's pretty much an intelligence consensus that the link is real and long-standing, and probably involved support and training of the 9/11 hijackers. She has a media persona, is married to Greenspan, so doesn't have to do much homework or catching up. She has automatic credibility so yesterday's news is "good enough" for today's analysis Thank God for the blogosphere. Without it we wouldn't know what the heck was going on.

So, I don't think Angels in America lived up either to its negative or positive hype. It was really rather innocuous--almost a nostalgic look at what the left thought it was in a bygone era. It was almost sweet, and unintentionally revealing. Times sure are a-changin', huh?

Have a happy holiday season everyone. Justice broke through yesterday in Iraq. May we see more of it.

Posted by Demosophist at December 15, 2003 02:31 PM | TrackBack