Politics as Spectacle

As you know, the Los Angeles Dodgers, putatively a baseball team, decided to honor a drag group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. As it happened, protesters surrounded the stadium and no one showed up for the baseball game. The Dodgers suffered their worst loss in franchise history.

More than a few people noted the deeper meaning-- that there is a God, and that He does not like being mocked. 

In truth, the spectacle could only achieve one purpose. To piss people off. It produced nothing more. As David Brooks said, it’s a question of propriety, not of rights:

In a pluralistic society, decent people don’t dishonor what others find sacred.

Propriety means that if you fail to exhibit common decency people will reject you. They will reject your cause. They will have no choice but to do so. You might have a right to make yourself a public spectacle, but you will not be attracting anyone to your cause. You will be marginalizing yourself, by showing that you are not ready to function within polite society.

As for the Sisters, Brooks describes them thusly:

As you might have read, the Sisters are a group of L.G.B.T.Q. activists who have provided invaluable services to those in their community, especially during the AIDS crisis, but who also dress up as over-the-top nuns, adopt names like Sister Mysteria of the Holy Order of the Broken Hymen or Sister Sermonetta of the Flying Phallus, and who have been known to mock the crucifixion by hosting a re-enactment of it as a pole dance.

Evidently, if you want to take this show on the road and perform at nightclubs, no one is going to have a problem. Defiling America's national pastime is another story.

Now, Brooks suggests that these cross-dressers are offended because the church does not allow them to be who they are:

They are justified in protesting a church whose teaching doesn’t acknowledge their right to be who they are, but they do it in a way that dishonors the nuns who live in poverty serving the poor. They do it in a sophomoric way designed to cause offense. In a healthy society, we try to assert differences without demeaning one another’s identities.

Perhaps we ought to notice the absurdity of this notion, not unique to Brooks, about being who one is. These people are in costume. They are in drag. They are precisely not showing anything about who they are. They are pretending. It takes a decided warp of mind to think that Sister Sermonetta of the Flying Phallus is who someone really is. Besides, the name itself is vapid at an extreme. One should at least hear something more clever.

Now, Brooks is correct to say that gay rights have progressed because community members have acted with dignity and decorum. They have not chosen to make a mockery of anyone’s religion.

L.G.B.T.Q. rights have progressed so far over the past decade or so because members of those communities have displayed their own dignity, not because they’ve denigrated the dignity of others.Donald Trump — the love child of professional wrestling and reality TV — is spectacle. Tucker Carlson presented TV news as spectacle. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence perform activism in the form of spectacle.

Brooks wants us to tone down and to dial back the spectacle. Political and social life should not be entertainment. It should promote sober reflection and democratic deliberation. Naturally, Brooks does not mention that one political party indulges all manner of defamation toward the other political party and seems to have little to offer beyond slander. 

I’d add only that it’s not just politics that has taken over everything — at least if you think about politics as arguing over policy. It’s more accurate to say that it’s politics as spectacle that has taken over everything.

Spectacle is the sphere that achieves public titillation through public combat. In Rome, gladiatorial combat was spectacle. Professional wrestling is spectacle. Reality TV is spectacle. Donald Trump — the love child of professional wrestling and reality TV — is spectacle. Tucker Carlson presented TV news as spectacle. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence perform activism in the form of spectacle.

Brooks does not mention that politics have become spectacle because our educational system is producing idiots and imbeciles, people who are incapable of understanding very much beyond spectacle. Besides, we have a president who is brain damaged, senile and demented. The same applies to the junior senator from Pennsylvania. And then, we have a vice president who is a certifiable imbecile and a White House press secretary who needed a backup, because she was incapable of doing her job.

So, yes, politics has become spectacle. And surely Donald Trump counts as a leading practitioner of the art. And yet, the problem is pervasive. And it does not speak well of us.

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