People talked a lot about cheating as a threat to the game’s sanctity. It wasn’t really. Whether we like it or not, cheating is still a way of playing the game. Cheating is second-order pretending within the first-order pretending of the game itself. Cheating is pretending to play the pretending which is the game itself. Cheating is entirely compatible within the game, maybe even called out by the gamesmanship of the game. That’s why those congressional harangues of hypo-happy baseball players sometimes seemed so bizarre: they were just acting the way the game encouraged them to act. Which is good, or anyway convenient, since cheating seemed pretty common in this largest game, the game of the system. Sure, people disagreed about what counted as cheating — but that was actually a big part of the game! You couldn’t assassinate your opponent, no, but was it cheating for two political parties to burn through $2.4 billion in order to enact the two-year drama of decision, the endless narrative of mandate, that got you here? You didn’t think so, or at least you weren’t prepared to say so.
And was it cheating for the nation’s treasury to toss more than $1 trillion after the failing health of financial ventures, those losing bets they called “institutions” or “pillars” of the economy? Or billions for the myopic makers of automobiles, the crystallized worst selves of your nation, the supercharged producers of consumption, the great demons of desire? Was that cheating? It had better not be, because in a few minutes it would be you standing there, holding the ticket, guarantor of the loan, chaser of your predecessor’s cheques, pre-compromised, shameful, the biggest mark in the whole game. A projected deficit of $1.2 trillion. A debt of $10.6 trillion. How easily the word trillion, the concept of a trillion dollars, rolled around the mind and off the tongue.
But even if any of that was cheating — which it wasn’t, you thought, standing there, not really, maybe incompetence and poor judgment but not cheating — the main thing to remember was that it was still inside the game. What nobody could do, least of all you, now, standing there, was spoil the game by acknowledging the fictions at its heart. To refuse the collective illusion of the game is not to cheat; it is much worse — it’s to be a spoilsport.
“It is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoil-sport,” you recalled reading, or having quoted to you. “This is because the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself,” while the cheat “pretends to be playing the game and, on the face of it, still acknowledges the magic circle.” The word “illusion,” you realized then, or perhaps later, actually means “in play.” They said irony was dead. It is not, you thought, as long as we keep playing at this endless round, this generalized confidence game, we call democracy.
And so you held firm to your belief as you stood there, risen to the top, the bearer of the message, commander of the difference, tall, handsome harbinger of change and hope and yes we can.
Not to gratify your ego. Not to aggrandize yourself. But to serve. To serve a great nation and a great people, one perhaps lately fallen on hard times and bad decisions, and to remind them of their greatness, the sweet promise of their republic. You thought fleetingly of Whitman, though you never quoted him in speeches — too difficult, too weird, too gay. “Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently moving in vast masses. Here is the hospitality which forever indicates heroes.”
You wanted to be that hero, the hero of openness. To embody the endless hospitality of a nation that has always, always — well, always until now, until these late dark days — made a place at the hearth for the stranger, the unaccommodated, the barren and rootless. “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it,” the poet concluded. And you wanted to be that poet, thought perhaps you could be that poet. You wanted to be absorbed in just that way. You had the command, everyone said so, everyone agreed.
But then the wonder, the doubt. Were you perhaps a poet the way an advertising copywriter is a poet? A genius of desire? Not merely a shill, not a crude hawker. Not some tired drummer rapping on doors or peddling knife sets and shammies at state fairs and travelling midways. Rather a purveyor of aspiration, a dream merchant, a wizard of longing and its satisfaction. They projected their desires onto you, the good ones and the bad ones, and you mirrored them back. Yes! And yet you knew, somewhere in the back of your fine, subtle, highly trained mind, that the only way to satisfy one longing is to replace it with another, to shuffle the dreams and desires along with the skill of your ideas. They weren’t just any ideas, empty ideas. They were good ideas, ideas of substance! Big and moving ideas, about hope and change, about justice and truth.
There was another writer, also dead. He had covered your opponent’s campaign in an earlier election, how strange, and he killed himself exactly seven years and one day after the terrorist attacks that brought such power to the executive you were ousting. The same executive your current opponent had failed to best for his party’s nomination eight years ago. The writer was a young man still when he took his own life — only a little younger than you, with a mind as fine, as subtle, as highly trained as your own.
He had said this about political writing: “The rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. Ninety-five percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: the writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil.”
