I’m watching “The West Wing” again. Yes, all seven seasons of the fictional presidency of Josiah Bartlet.
I bought the complete collection on DVD a little more than a year ago. At that time, I had only a small collection of movies in my dorm room to watch over and over again, and I had just received a pocketful of Christmas money with which, my parents commanded, I ought to buy something to make myself happy; so I was movie hunting. I certainly never expected to buy “The West Wing,” which I had only seen fragments of before, but standing there, looking at the box, I remembered all the praise I had heard for the series over the years, from classmates, family and even from strangers on the bus.
When I left the store, lugging the multi-pound load of DVDs under my arms, I thought I had made a mistake; I rarely impulse shop and rarely like the results of such impulses, but this time I did. All the praise and hype was right. I not only liked “The West Wing,” I fell in love with it, with its quirky cast of characters, its delicate touch for sensitive issues and most of all its sense of hope.
Hope is a strange, even awkward, thing to find in anything relating to politics, and most often appears when politicians are out trolling feel-good messages for vote. However this is a false hope, since we, as voters, are supposed to be hopeful only when our vote is needed for reelection, but after that, money talks, and it talks a lot louder than hope.
A few politicians are generally hopeful. They treat hope like a garden; they cultivate their crop slowly; they fight the weeds; and they are patient even when the sprouts don’t show up on time. They are also as conspicuously rare as patient gardeners are in real life. (In any talk of hope and politics, Obama’s name inevitably appears, so while my subject lies elsewhere let me give him two cents’ worth: I dearly pray that he falls into this second category of hopeful politicians, if only because a rhetoric shift at the presidential level is desperately needed.)
But the hope that “The West Wing” inspired lies in a different category altogether: It is the hope of everyday heroism, the hope that ordinary people can step forward and do something extraordinary. My favorite such hero from the series appeared early on – Mr. Willis of Ohio, a middle school social studies teacher who took over his wife’s senate seat after she died. He only got to vote once, but despite the political pressure, and despite saying he was not as smart as his wife was, he did his best to study the issue and voted where his conscience lay, where he hoped he had done a good thing.
But Joe, you might say – assuming you have that sort of colloquial relationship with me, dear reader – these are fictional characters and whatever heroes might do on TV, it bears no resemblance to reality.
But yes, yes, it does. “The West Wing” of Josiah Bartlet does not actually differ from the west wing we see on CNN, it just appears different from the west wing we see on CNN: All of politics comes down to appearance versus reality, and I think we need a bigger dose of political reality.
Politics today holds our attention, like the proverbial train wreck, by its sheer horribleness. We don’t get humanity; we get sound bites. We don’t get honesty; we get rehearsed lines. By now, the process is so ingrained in us all that we just accept it.
But “The West Wing” focuses on its characters, not issues. Issues are the background, the hub around which problems and conflicts develop, but the issues did not bring me back to watch episode after episode. For that, I needed people, real people, who I could cheer and curse and kick for being stupid and hug for being brilliant all at the same time; people who act like humans instead of automatons of policy.
What makes “The West Wing” different from the west wing is that fly on the wall, that invisible camera roving the halls of the white house that gives us insight into people as people, not as jobs or roles. We need the understanding that politics does not boil down to them versus us, but that everyone, literally everyone, has a different opinion, a different story that shapes their view of politics.
I can’t help but think – fiction writer that I am – what if? What if in our elections we could have those flies on the wall? Politicians couldn’t have meetings on policy and how to say things the right way; they would just say them, the same way the rest of us do.
[email protected]