As a kid, brimming with pride at American achievements and institutions, I marveled at Soviet leaders and the sheer absurdity of it all. Here were inarticulate and mostly decrepit party hacks only pretending to be in charge.
Despite the pretense of democracy, in which people were given only one viable candidate, it was a dictatorship of a gang of elites. The people had no power. The guy waving from the balcony was a puppet and nothing more. It was so obvious.
The only two premiers in the postwar period who did anything were both dispatched, the first by the party and the second because the entire scam already collapsed.
The first was Nikita Khrushchev, an oddly curious person who took his job seriously. When he proclaimed at the United Nations that the Soviets would bury the West, he meant in economic terms. He truly believed that his centralized industrial plans for Russia would outproduce the United States. Otherwise, he seemed to be ready for a fair fight.
He eventually ran afoul of the party leadership due to his reformist plans. He complained that getting any done was like trying to shape a tub full of dough. That’s a good description of every bureaucratically managed system. His sponsors in the party ended his career and he retired to sit on park benches feeding the pigeons while older and more reliable fossils stood in for the role of head of state.
The second was of course Mikhail Gorbachev, another reformer who opened up just as the whole system was crumbling under the weight of nationalist pressures and mass demoralization of the public. The Soviet system as it was known turned out to last only as long as the full lifetime of the people who came of age during the original revolution. It lost steam and then melted into nothingness as the last of its serious partisans kicked the bucket.
Yes, I was raised to have disdain for such a system. Where is the freedom? Where is the real democracy? The system was an obvious farce, or so it seemed to me.
And so here we are with our own version of Chernenko, Brezhnev, and Andropov, all of whom were placeholders and figureheads of a vast elite structure that hid in the background to avoid the fate of those who came before. They were all volitional figures, smart enough to rise through the ranks but too dumb to avoid the spotlight.
Perhaps that is the way to think of Biden today. That he is even toying with a second term smacks of absurdity. Everyone knows it.
All of which reminds me of one of the most remarkable films of the postwar period: “Being There” (1979) produced by and starring the great Peter Sellers. It’s the story of a very dim (not his fault) gardener to a wealthy but aging old man living in Washington, D.C. He kept his estate intact long after the neighborhood had descended to crime and dilapidation. Chance kept the gardens. When the old man died, Chance found himself wandering the streets but in very fine clothes and with a transatlantic accent and manners he had learned from watching TV.
Loose in the city, he is accidentally hit in the leg by a car carrying the young wife of one of D.C.’s most mighty power brokers and taken to their estate. Introduced to their large circle of friends, he immediately impresses by being a man of few words, which allows everyone around him to speculate about who he really is.
Not having a vocabulary of more than a few dozen words, he turns out to be a good listener with a charming smile, and a wider and wider circle of elites are drawn to him.
Even when put on national television, and muttering inanities about the seasons of the year, he amazes his audience with seeming and attributed profundity that causes him to rise further up the ranks. All the more impressive was that no one could discover anything about his background, allowing elites to assume that he used his wealth and power to scrub all history, thus further adding to his mystique and allure.
The fawning becomes over-the-top as ambassadors from all counties stand in awe, and the president himself marvels at his uncommon wisdom. There is no there there at all and yet powerful elites who celebrate his wonders never seem to catch on.
In the course of this, the viewer knows the truth very well: this is a very sweet but exceedingly simple man whose main wisdom consists in not saying anything at all.
What was Chance’s advantage in rising up so far, so fast in only a few short weeks? He had no skeletons in his closet. He had no partisan loyalties. He was truly above it all. He had no serious thoughts beyond a handful of cliches dropped at strange moments. Only one person in the entire film has the reality figured out but he never reveals it because doing so would be too heartbreaking for those who had already come to believe that this man was a savior.
The beauty of the film is the way in which it reveals the unfathomable gullibility of elite culture in centers of power. Possessing every privilege and every access to money and power, they are ultimately highly insecure people who live in terror of losing place and position in the pecking order. They live off symbolism only, particularly the symbolism of power and access, which is the only currency that really matters in D.C.
Chance was a simpleton but he dressed the part—double-breasted suits tailor-made from the late 1920s and carrying an exotic leather suitcase—and talked the part too; he said only a few words but with a high-brow brogue while exuding a kind of aloof calmness. Mostly, his silence was golden because it permitted everyone around him to fill in the gaps with their own fantasies about who he was.
The gag continues to the end with its inevitable conclusion. The pallbearers of the nation’s leading power broker decide that he should probably be the next president, given that he seems popular and has absolutely no detectable downsides based on personal history or loyalties. He becomes the perfect figurehead for the presidency.
Keep in mind that this movie was made in 1979. Peter Sellers saw a point that I did not see at the time, namely that the brokers in any system of hegemonic control need people to front for their machinations. The more anonymous and less criticizable they are, the better off they were. Their main goals were to hide and do so behind a marionette who is acceptable to lower-level elites and the public at large.
The irony in this case is that the answer was a complete imbecile (pardon my use of the term). He turns out to be the best puppet leader of all.
Surely this is not our fate, right? One never knows.
The DNC just stopped a real primary, and the main competitor has been forced into an independent bid. The head of the ticket is nearly non-volitional. This is not a secret.
The other party is rallying around a leading candidate whose main platform is resentment against how he was treated last time but whose supporters infuse with their own political outlook, regardless of what he says or does.
I’m not making a partisan statement here but only drawing attention to the way in which the top of the ticket has become symbolic: and perhaps this has been true for a very long time.
Maybe it is time to look more carefully at the power behind the throne, and why the people who are tagged to sit on the throne are there in the first place.
I dearly love the idea of democracy and like to imagine a vast populist movement for dramatic change. But something tells me that seeking control of the highest office might not be the most effective path toward long-term social and political change. Sometimes the person who is paraded before us has the spotlight only because he happened to be there when he was needed.
In any case, I do think we should have learned by now that no country is entirely impervious to the political sclerosis that afflicted the Soviet Union of my youth. What I had otherized as a young man has become too familiar for comfort to our own dearly loved country.
