The Search for Pizzazz at the Impeachment Reality Show |

Last Wednesday, at the end of the first day of the House impeachment hearings, NBC tweeted that the testimony of two civil servants—George Kent, a natty, professor-from-“Gilligan’s Island” type, and Bill Taylor, a diplomat with Muellerian gravitas—lacked “pizzazz.” The word became a running joke, first on Twitter, then on late-night TV, emerging, at last, on “Saturday Night Live,” where the hearings were done as a soap opera, with Jon Hamm playing a hunky Taylor macking on the eyelash-batting telenovela heroine Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“Pizzazz” was satisfying media shorthand: it was fun to say, spangled in “Z”s, faintly vaudevillian—an anxious catchphrase that framed a serious subject. But the word also captured a genuine tension about just what sort of show was being produced here, and for whom. It sounds bad to demand that a legal proceeding entertain a mass audience—that it should do more than attempt to establish the truth. It’s depressing to suggest, as Donald Trump so often has (and as Devin Nunes did, clumsily, halfway through Tuesday’s testimony), that ratings are all that matter when it comes to politics. It’s disturbing to judge real events as though they were fiction, if only because that’s how our insult-comic, reality-star Barnum of a President perceives the world. Trump is obsessed with stadium-size crowds and with hiring based on “central casting”; he stages televised Cabinet meetings to look like boardroom scenes from “The Apprentice.” When Trump announces the death of a terrorist, he perseverates about lurid, almost certainly made-up details—“whimpering,” “crying”—adding, in an awed tone, that what he’d seen was just like “watching a movie.” The world’s worst hyperbolist, he views everything as a mass spectacle, most often a wrestling bout, with crude nicknames for every participant.

The Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have similarly sold the hearings as a theatrical event, a “kangaroo court,” “a circus.” As the hearings opened, the Republican congressman Devin Nunes declared that the witnesses we would meet were, quite literally, crisis actors, reading scripts in “a televised theatrical performance staged by the Democrats.” “Ambassador Taylor and Mr. Kent,” he sneered. “I’d like to welcome you here. I’d like to congratulate you for passing the Democrats’ star chamber auditions, held for the last weeks in the basement of the Capitol. It seems you agreed, wittingly or unwittingly, to participate in a drama. But the main performance, the Russia hoax, has ended, and you’ve been cast in the low-rent, Ukrainian sequel.”

It was an astounding moment: a congressman telling the American public that the career government officials testifying before the House, under oath, many under subpoena, weren’t merely to be regarded through skeptical eyes, as evidence was examined, but presumed to be faking it entirely. And, in fact, that was the frightening conundrum surrounding the proceedings. Somehow, the Democrats had to attract attention and crack the shield of unreality, to be both riveting and solemn, to find a genre that would match the story and get it across to the audience. They had to break through the crackling environment of distraction and disinformation to make the truth not merely memorable but addictive, thrilling, must-see TV.

The solution has been an alternate sort of showmanship, in the form of highlighting decent characters, sometimes in both senses of the word: civil servants whose human presence—their authenticity and specificity, their strange quirks of behavior—makes Nunes’s “deep state” theories hard to maintain. There was a sense of palpable relief when Marie Yovanovitch began to testify on Friday, telling her story, about a principled diplomat being fired by the President based on a smear campaign. The magic of Yovanovitch’s testimony was not just how she came off on television—professional but likable, that miracle alchemy for the public woman—but the simple clarity of her tale. She is a child of immigrants. She’d worked hard for the United States in war zones such as Somalia. Her task in Ukraine was fighting corruption, and, along the way, she’d made enemies—powerful villains who did things like throw acid in the face of an anti-corruption activist. On the very night that Yovanovitch was honoring that activist, she was flown home and fired, her reputation ruined by her own President, who turned out to be in the same corner as the shady characters she was fighting.

Then, ever the counterpuncher, the President jolted the proceedings with fresh pizzazz by tweeting an attack on Yovanovitch during her live testimony. Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, seized upon that tweet and read it out loud, stating that it amounted to witness intimidation. The moment made for electric television, the kind that even Fox News—which, to its credit, has been running the hearings live, and largely uninterrupted, after inserting laughably partisan pop-up factoids throughout the first day’s hearings—acknowledged. Instead of shifting the narrative, Trump’s tweet, ironically, had made it clear that he was the bully—the villain of this story.

It’s no wonder that the Republicans spent the next day of hearings, the following Tuesday, trying to damp down any potential drama, begging Trump, via his invisible friends on “Fox & Friends,” to keep his Twitter thumbs still, which he largely did. But new characters emerged, anyway, especially Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, another child of immigrants who, like Yovanovitch, articulated, through simple storytelling, a set of patriotic principles that felt straight out of “The West Wing.” At once baby-faced and stalwart, Vindman came across as a vulnerable figure: as he read his opening statement, in which he reassured his father that he’d be safe in speaking out, Vindman’s hands, holding the printed speech, shook. Later, he toughened up, as the Republicans attempted to target him. At one point, prompted by a Democratic congressman, Sean Maloney, he explained why his father didn’t have to worry, as he would have in Russia: “This is the country I have served and defended, that all of my brothers have served. And here right matters.” The crowd burst into applause.

In the afternoon, things got more complicated with the testimony of a slippery pair of witnesses, Kurt Volker and Tim Morrison, both of whom the Republicans requested to appear. Their stories were much harder to simplify, and their testimonies encouraged online observers to mob-solve the contradictions, as if we were watching a confusingly structured true-crime narrative. But my fingers were crossed for the testimony of Gordon Sondland, on Wednesday, who promised to provide something more startling and peculiar than the decency of Yovanovitch and Vindman: a shady, grandstanding egotist who might turn in either direction, an independently wealthy participant whom Volker had described, smirking, as something like a larger-than-life character. And that’s exactly what happened Wednesday morning as he began to read his opening statement, clarifying that there had been a quid pro quo, that everyone knew about it, that “everyone was in the loop”— including, and especially, the President himself. Twitter lit up with gasps of “BOMBSHELL!” Sondland himself had a peculiar affect: smiling, laughing at his own jokes, at once merry and chilled-out. It was impossible to tell exactly where this was coming from—nerves or bravado, the liberating effects of confession or something else. But, at times, he seemed to have a not inaccurate sense that he was performing in a dark comedy, one that he’d paid a million dollars in donations to the President’s inauguration committee to enter.

During a break after Sondland’s initial round of testimony, there was a shot of Nunes, looking deflated, side-eyeing the R.N.C. counsel. As has become a national tradition, someone suggested cueing the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” theme. And then the second half of the hearings began and a fog of aggression descended again, as Republicans stumbled toward a new focus, emphasizing that there wasn’t some singular moment of proof that Trump had demanded dirt on the Bidens. I began to fear that what has happened so many times was happening again: that nothing would stick, that memory would be erased, that the line of what constitutes proof of Presidential wrongdoing would shift. It’s shifted so much during the past three years of criminality that it’s easy to lose hope.

For a long time after the election, I worried that pop culture had laid the groundwork for Trump’s rise. Cable dramas encouraged voters to root for a chaotic, rule-breaking antihero; melodramas like “Scandal” and “House of Cards” normalized a nihilistic view of all politics as intrinsically corrupt, existentially conspiratorial. “Game of Thrones” and “Survivor” made everything look like a game; late-night talk shows and cable news made everything feel like a joke. Those series didn’t create Trump, but maybe, I thought, they added to the air of sedation, of unreality and chaos, a sense that no one narrative is real.

The truth is, for decades now, the G.O.P. has been a far better crafter of narrative compared with the Democrats. Maybe this is because their actual policies and ideologies have, from Reagan onward, drifted further and further from any basis in factual reality. Trickle-down economics never worked; climate denialism hasn’t stopped the oceans from rising. Because Republicans have increasingly been unable to document the merits of their ideas with evidence, they have been forced to become the party of Scheherazade, telling a series of mesmerizing stories in order to stay alive. Obama is a crypto-Marxist, say. Or that he was born in Kenya, the story that launched Trump’s campaign.

The Democrats, in contrast, are leashed to the mast of reality. They keep on reciting facts, pushing their glasses back up on their noses and thinking these facts alone will win the day. Is it wrong to crave pizzazz? To fantasize that the way out is narrative—that someone might create an animated version of the story, one that makes the time line clear. That some game-changing clip will go viral, hell, something on TikTok—that a singular figure might emerge, like Ocasio-Cortez, who can break through as the storyteller, using pure charisma. In the next few days, I’ll at least pray for a closing argument that can’t be forgotten. The past three years have often been compared to bad television, with endless twists and cliffhangers and an air of implausibility. Fingers crossed that we’re getting close to the finale.

Sourse: newyorker.com

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