On Passion

[jducoeur]

The previous posting aside, I'm slightly annoyed at Kerry for one thing: I dearly wish the man would get a little more passionate on the campaign trail. I mean, some of the stuff the Bush administration has been doing has been utterly heinous, not least the way Kerry himself has been getting abused, and Kerry just blandly takes it. And the worst of it is the realization that he's probably doing exactly the right thing politically.

I think it was siderea who observed a while back that our culture has become deeply suspicious of enthusiasm, and nowhere is that more apparent than in modern politics. Any politician who should dare to commit the sin of being passionate about something is immediately castigated in the press. Howard Dean's campaign was torpedoed largely due to a moment of unbridled enthusiasm. Al Gore, who last week did actually allow himself to get honestly angry about the horrors being committed today, was immediately ridiculed for it in the press. It's almost a knee-jerk reaction -- passion is somehow translated as a complete lack of control, something to be pitied or scorned.

And look at what that has gotten us. We have a President whose public self-control verges on the sociopathic. We have politicians who only feel safe speaking in code, and who hide their passions in under-the-surface agendas. We have a press that is unwilling to point out when the Emperor has no clothes. We have an entire society that is locking itself in the closet, unwilling to admit that it actually *cares* about this stuff, or indeed about anything at all.

I half wonder if it's actually related to the drug war. Consider: this extreme public dispassion comes at a time when the abstinence meme has really taken hold. I genuinely believe that particular meme to be deeply harmful, because it is fundamentally immoderate -- it paints the world in terms of Good (things you must do) and Bad (things you absolutely must not do), with little recognition of the gulf of middle ground in between.

The public attitude towards passion seems much like the politically-correct attitude towards drugs: something to abstain from, rather than something to use moderately. And that's downright unhealthy. When we teach people that the world is black and white, when it so manifestly is not, that failure of reality-checking amounts to nothing less than lying to ourselves...

Comments

[sjo.livejournal.com]

I think Kerry will become more passionate when it counts -- closer to the election. While I hate to sound cynical, I think you'll agree that the American Public™ has a very short attention span. Nobody will remember in November what Kerry did in June. What he does in October will be more crucial. The campaign trail is damned exhausting, and I suspect (hope!) that he's saving himself for the final stretch.

[jducoeur]

I hope you're correct. It's certainly true that Kerry's record support this -- he has a history of laying low until it's time to make his move, and then going all-out until he wins. I'm actually reminded of this right now because I'm catching up on ancient (January) issues of the Economist, all of which rather blithely assume that Howard Dean would be the Democratic nominee.

Still and all, it makes for a nerve-wracking time until he decides to start, and I'm at least slightly nervous about the degree to which he's allowing the Bush camp to define him. He's got a good record of fighting that effect, but it does mean that he's going to be fighting a bit of a rearguard action image-wise, at least to start with...