When reality breaks through

Thursday, November 9, 2006

There was only one wise thing about the reporter’s briefing. George W Bush’s senior aide – whichever one it was – at least offered his extraordinary quotation under the journalistic cloak of anonymity.

Everything else about his insistence that the Administration was different from “what we call the reality-based community'', and that “when we act, we create our own reality”, was  naïve ... idiotic ... recklessly hubristic – or maybe all three.

 

That briefing was given (to writer Ron Suskind) only two years ago, and now with the midterm elections and the long-delayed, and of course long-denied, departure of Donald Rumsfeld, a hefty dose of truth-telling has been delivered by that occasionally reality-based community, the American electorate, and is maybe getting through even to the West Wing at last.

 

The breakdown of denial is, of course never easy or consistent. Though we know the President was lining up Robert Gates to take over Defense well before the "thumpin'" of voting day, his so-called “Brain”, Karl Rove (pictured above left, with boss), stuck doggedly to the old delusional line, waltzing down Air Force One’s aisle giving reporters chocolate-covered caramels and cooing “Sweets for my sweets”. He also maintained to those same journalists – but then in the famously scandalous Mandy Rice-Davies’ common-sense words, he would, wouldn’t he? – that he expected nothing but “Victory, victory, victory”.

 

In media-handling, other White House power-centers hoped (still more denial) not to be affected even if victory were to elude them. On a day when Bush was already speaking with Bob Gates about imminent changes, Dick Cheney was using ABC TV to signal his contempt toward voters calling for change. Just about every news outlet quoted him proclaiming that the Administration’s Iraq policy would remain at “full speed ahead” – but he also said: “It may not be popular with the public. It doesn't matter, in the sense that …we're not running for office”. The twenty-plus GOP Representatives and the handful of Senators who lost their seats will differ from the Veep about whether or not it mattered.

 

Cheney was not part of the White House huddle of press briefers (but of course Rove was, and so was presidential counselor Dan Bartlett) who started, even as E-day loomed, to remind reporters and commentators about George Bush’s lauded capacity for bipartisanship when Governor of Texas, dealing with a Democratic legislature.

 

Dropping Rumsfeld was perhaps the loudest, simplest Democratic demand (as megaphoned by the media) and the easiest to implement promptly.

 

 

DENIAL IS ALSO ON DISPLAY at Broadway’s Booth Theatre – in the refusal of the eponymous antihero of Butley, played as energetically as ever by Nathan Lane, to appreciate that his universe is falling apart because of his own emotional destructiveness. 

 

Writer Simon Gray’s acerbic creation of Ben Butley, a seedy London University lecturer with an even seedier office - all too convincingly built by designer Alexander Dodge - believes he’s honest, maybe brutally so, and funny about others - and he is, devastatingly so. But it’s actually his own increasingly tenuous hold on a life of any meaning that he’s bombarding so effectively.

 

In some ways you’d expect it to be an ideal fit for Lane’s considerable ability to fuse tragic pathos with manic humor – but sadly there is in practice a mismatch. He simply doesn’t, in this performance, exhibit the heft that Alan Bates brought to Butley in the original performance three decades ago. It is only at the very end of the play when we see, in Lane’s collapsed, winded stance downstage, just how destroyed he is – and by then it’s too late.

 

I can’t help but also think, when it comes to important messages getting through, it's too late for the Bush Administration as well.