VOICE FROM AMERICA

Stay tuned, folks! See Al run!

See little Al get run over!

ThNew York e craven instinct of politicians to remake themselves into whatever they think the people want gave birth at last week's Democratic convention to a whole new category: The Suffering Servants of Democracy. It began with lower-ranking Democrats with merely physical disorders, such as multiple sclerosis and Aids, serving as warm-up acts for the convention crowd. Then came the higher officials with higher, mental problems. Congressman Richard Gephardt described how he weathered his son's battle with cancer. Jesse Jackson chipped in with a traumatic tale of meeting a young dwarf. Then the nominees them- selves rose to speak, and for a tricky moment the people, grown used to suffer- ing, wondered what Al Gore could say. Could there have been even a hint of tragedy in his upper-class progression from prep-school to Harvard to the Senate?

'I don't know what it's like to lose a father,' the vice-presidential nominee began, almost apologetically, since others before him had. 'But I know what it's like to lose a sister and almost lose a son.' Waves of relief washed over the conven- tioneers as Gore told of his feelings when, two years before, an automobile had rolled over his six-year-old son. The tragedy had led him and his wife Tipper to seek thera- py. 'That experience changed me forever,' he said, implying that he was a better man than the Al Gore who lost his hid for the presidency in 1988. The crowd cheered as Little Al, fully recovered, rose from his seat in the balcony and nodded in the direction of the nearest camera. One could not help but notice the jealousy in the eyes of his sis- ters, who had lacked the political sense to run into the street without looking.

Following Gore, on stumbled Clinton. A number of speakers had alluded to the presidential nominee's troubled childhood — the father he never knew, the alcoholic stepfather who beat his mother. But their accounts paled beside the candidate's own rendition. In less than an hour the Gover- nor of Arkansas described experiences so wrenching that, in an earlier age, they might have called into question his psycho- logical competence for higher office; now they merely heightened his appeal. He told of his dysfunctional childhood; he told of his troubled marriage; he described watch- ing, together with his wife and child, a tele- vision programme in which he all but con- fessed to adultery. At the moment of high- est tension the cameras wheeled on his daughter, Chelsea. The I2-year-old child waved nervously and smiled unhappily. The crowd cheered. Another survivor!

Of course the pretext for the Democrats' shameless use of their families was the charge, made by the witless Republican vice-president, that they lacked family val- ues. But their real motives may have lain elsewhere. The most telling statistic to emerge from the Democratic convention more telling than Bill Clinton's 23-point lead in the polls over the President — was the one showing that more Americans than ever before — 85 per cent — amused them- selves by watching someone other than the Democrats. Each evening, as the faces of politicians appeared on network television, Americans reeled with boredom. The rat- ings do not say how many turned to the nations's favourite programme, Studs, on which two men and three women fraternise in every possible heterosexual combination, then reconvene to discuss which pairing produced the greatest pleasure. But the rat- ings do suggest that last Tuesday at 8 p.m. nearly one million ordinary citizens reached around their stomachs and switched to a badly played baseball game.

The three main television networks have already responded to this trend in their market away from politics by reducing their coverage. The television journalists unlucky enough to be left behind at the convention were driven to telling new absurdities in their quest for market share. We know this because bored reporters from the New York Times stopped writing about politics and began to cover the media. For example, the newspaper described a television producer applying pink highlighting to an advance copy of Mario Cuomo's speech, while shouting to her director what faces should be found to illustrate each passage. The director scanned his monitors and snapped his fingers, ordering his cameramen around to give his show 'a moving, fast-paced look.' Their conversation ran as follows:

She: We need some black faces.

She: You want to get some middle-class workers.

She: I need kids coming up soon.

He: Get me a bunch of kids, we need a bunch!

He: Gimme a working-class family. Anybody got a working-class family?

He: We have a guy on seven. Forget it, he's eating a hot dog.

She: A section on Aids coming up.

He: Get me lesbians and gays right away!

She: I need a school child and an immigrant. He: Oh, there's a hag woman.

Perhaps it was only to be expected that the television journalists should compete with the freak shows on rival channels. It was more surprising that the whole of the Democratic Party should follow suit. The delegates in the hall were mere props for the cameras; before long lesbians and gays, workers and children were keeping them- selves together in one place where the cam- eras could easily find them. Brown dele- gates dressed up as Agent Orange and taped their mouths shut; a Louisiana dele- gate draped a yellow sack festooned with buttons over his head; a Mississippi dele- gate came dressed as a Sikh; native Ameri- can delegates rose and delivered their votes in their tribal tongues. The thousands of hand-held signs grew taller and taller, like trees in a rainforest, straining for the atten- tion of the cameras. The convention, in short, came to resemble nothing so much as a tawdry television talk- show, led by the loose upper lips of the politicians.

Probably we will never know the shock to a child's mental health when he first realis- es that his private grief is merely grist for his father's ambition. Will little Al Gore one day stumble across a pollster's memo and think: how lucky for Dad that the car came along just then? Is it only a matter of time before Chelsea Clinton becomes bulimic and hurls herself down the stairs of the large empty houses she inhabits? Will the children of future politicians go seeking tragedy to please their fathers? I do not wish to suggest that any candidate for presi- dent who truly cared about family values would omit from his campaign the most intimate details of his family life. My point is only that, since the politicians' latest bid for attention has failed, they might as well preserve their dignity.

The Wasp