{"id":130756,"date":"2018-11-08T09:00:13","date_gmt":"2018-11-08T14:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130756"},"modified":"2018-12-19T12:08:48","modified_gmt":"2018-12-19T17:08:48","slug":"political-fictions-unraveling-america-at-a-west-wing-fan-convention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/11\/08\/political-fictions-unraveling-america-at-a-west-wing-fan-convention\/","title":{"rendered":"Political Fictions: Unraveling America at a West Wing Fan Convention"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In times of chaos, we turn to narrative. Throughout the tumult of the George W. Bush years, the preferred palliative for the demoralized left was Aaron Sorkin\u2019s The West Wing\u2014<\/em>a political drama about the lives of White House staffers in the administration of Josiah Bartlet, a fictional Democratic president played by Martin Sheen. The show, which originally aired in the late nineties and early aughts, depicted a world in which government could serve as an engine of good, an instrument of change. Across\u00a0<\/em>the series, the staff brokered peace in the Middle East, dreamt up free college education, and unraveled the gordian knot of entitlements like Medicare and Social Security. In the wake of 9\/11, as the U.S. was contending with the specter of domestic terror and gearing up for an unpopular war in Iraq, the show\u2019s viewership tilted toward seventeen million.<\/p>\n

The storyline I found most compelling as a young, aspiring author was about the presidential speechwriters. Throughout the show, Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) and Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) sequestered themselves in the darkened catacombs of the White House, armed with nothing more than legal pads and Bic pens, testing out snatches of oratory on each other as they sought to draft a comprehensive narrative about America. \u201cTonight, what began in the commons of Concord, Massachusetts,\u201d President Bartlet intones in a campaign speech, \u201cas an alliance of farmers and workers, of cobblers and tinsmiths, of statesmen and students, of mothers and wives, of men and boys, lives two centuries later.\u201d It was this heady idealism\u2014the notion that America itself was merely a story, a fragile narrative continually authored by each administration\u2014that led me to see politics as a noble calling, a redoubtable vocation. The depth of my fandom revealed itself in ways that were oblique but no less shameful. Throughout college, I festooned the walls of my bedroom with the same framed \u201cDon\u2019t Tread on Me\u201d flag that Seaborn keeps in his office and, on weekends, I recreationally performed critical exegeses on the rhetoric of presidential inaugurals. After watching the 2004 Democratic National Convention, during which Barack Obama delivered a speech that had an elegance rivaling anything Aaron Sorkin had written, I wrote an effusive fan letter and shipped it off to his senate office in Chicago. A few weeks later, a staffer called and suggested that I apply for an internship, which led, somehow, to me spending the next several years in Illinois, toiling first in Obama\u2019s senate office and later in the headquarters of his presidential campaign. As an intern in the correspondence department, I was fairly low on the totem pole and had exactly zero sway in shaping the candidate\u2019s agenda. Instead, my job involved wading through thousands of letters from ordinary voters, an epistolary tangle out of which I gleaned a national longing for a different kind of leader, one who could connect the bloody doldrums of the nation\u2019s past to the hopeful arc of its future. After long train rides home to my garden apartment on the north side of Chicago, I binged-watched episodes of The West Wing<\/em>, often falling asleep to the DVD menu\u2019s soaring orchestral theme.<\/p>\n

Now, in 2018, that time of my life seems lacquered with the same gauzy-edged cinematography as Sorkin\u2019s televisual fantasia. Eventually, I abandoned my aspirations to be a presidential speechwriter and enrolled in an M.F.A. program for creative writing. In retrospect, it seems a slender mercy to have escaped the political arena before the presidency devolved into the blustering Twitter volleys of our current mogul-in-chief. But over the past several years, The West Wing<\/em> has made a swift and surprising comeback. Owing in part to the convenience of Netflix, the show had been enjoying a resurgence among younger viewers, who weren\u2019t yet born when the series first aired. \u201cThe West Wing<\/em> Weekly,\u201d a podcast devoted to rehashing episodes and extolling the virtues of the Bartlet administration, garnered two and a half million downloads by the end of 2016.\u00a0So seismic was this revival that earlier this year rumors began circulating about NBC possibly rebooting\u00a0The West Wing<\/em>, with Aaron Sorkin wrangling his old crew to serve as a foil to the Trump White House.<\/p>\n

Last summer, I learned that these new West Wing<\/em> fans, or self-described \u201cWingnuts,\u201d along with the original Aaron Sorkin faithfuls, were planning to commemorate the show with its first-ever fan convention in Bethesda, Maryland.\u00a0There would be panel discussions about public policy, a West Wing<\/em>\u00a0Trivial Pursuit night, plus a mock state dinner. When I showed my wife the event\u2019s Kickstarter page, which was soundtracked by the show\u2019s triumphant theme, she said, with no small amount of grief in her voice, \u201cPlease tell me you\u2019re not thinking about going.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Wood-paneled and fern-studded, the Marriott Hotel & Conference Center in Bethesda is thronged with excited Wingnuts. Retrieving welcome packets and plastic lanyards from the lobby desk, the fans trade introductions with the restive energy of long-lost friends and peruse the daily schedule with palpable elation. Eventually, a bovine line forms outside the White Flynn Amphitheater, where the welcome session will soon start. It is difficult to describe why a cadre of policy wonks would strike anyone as an alluring premise for a fan convention. \u201cHey, guys, let\u2019s cosplay a senior staff meeting,\u201d is something no one says on Reddit. My older brother, who prefers action-based entertainment, likes to disdainfully point out that The West Wing<\/em> is nothing more than, \u201cjust a bunch of old guys walking around in suits.\u201d But in the Kickstarter promotion for the West Wing Weekend, Elisa Birdseye, its programming director, underscored the event\u2019s fundamental appeal, \u201cDon\u2019t we all want to go somewhere where Jed Bartlet is our president?\u201d<\/p>\n

The lure of escapism is echoed by Clay Dockery, the head organizer for the West Wing Weekend, who hustles to the front of the amphitheater wearing a suit and a red tie, one that has been snipped with scissors just below the solar plexus. The maimed Windsor is an homage to episode 6 from season 4 (entitled \u201cGame On\u201d) in which the first lady amputates the president\u2019s necktie as a prank just before he goes on stage for a reelection debate. I can\u2019t say what\u2019s more embarrassing\u2014that someone would actually do this or that I, a supposed journalist and thus an innocent bystander, can spot the reference.<\/p>\n

Slouching at a chestnut lectern, Dockery looks like like a sullen, middle-aged version of Harry Potter\u2014squat, portly, nervously adjusting his owl-eyed glasses\u2014and explains that the West Wing Weekend should be an occasion to revel in Sorkin\u2019s genius and make friends with like-minded people. Then, almost as afterthought, he says the conference will also \u201csend people home with tools for organizing,\u201d which is why, in addition to the fan programming, there will be panels hosted by NGOs like EMILY<\/small>\u2019s List, Emerge America, and Wolf PAC. Ultimately, this will prove perfunctory. Such events will be woefully under-attended, with the Wingnuts proving far more keen about press secretary cosplay or \u201cWest Wing<\/em> Speed Dating\u201d than lectures on civic engagement. Once the introductions are over, Dockery looks momentarily flummoxed, unsure how to close out the session. \u201cShould we sing the theme?\u201d one audience member yells. There\u2019s a wave of sheepish laughter until one bold attendee starts humming, quite tunefully, the opening bars of the anthem. One by one, the Wingnuts join in until eventually the entire auditorium resounds in song.<\/p>\n

It is difficult to summarize my first day at the convention. Should I tell you about the episode-watching session where a coterie of Wingnuts discussed season 1, episode 19 (\u201cLet Bartlet Be Bartlet\u201d) with the exegetical rigor of a grad seminar? Would you like to hear about the table read I attended, where your fellow citizens sat on folding chairs and paged through West Wing<\/em> scripts, delivering Sorkin\u2019s breakneck dialogue with enviable thespian \u00e9lan? \u00a0Should I tell you about the West Wing<\/em>\u2013themed punk band called Steph Anderson and the Two Bartlets, whose pink-haired lead singer abused a maroon Stratocaster and screamed into the microphone lyrics like \u201cI serve at the pleasure of the president\u201d? Because, sadly, I could, friends. I was there, your humble correspondent.<\/p>\n

Again and again throughout the first day of the convention, the Wingnuts keep blathering about the analgesic properties of the show, a needed tonic for our current political turmoil. I meet a white-haired man named Lou, who owns a Sparkle Car Wash in suburban Pennsylvania and who has been a die-hard fan of The West Wing<\/em> ever since it first aired. These days he likes to stream episodes on repeat, and has seen the entire series \u201cprobably fifty or sixty times.\u201d \u201cMy daughter recently got married,\u201d he tells me, \u201cand she used The West Wing<\/em> theme song for the father-daughter dance.\u201d In a hotel corridor, a bearded and ponytailed landscaper named Greg, who traveled here from Cleveland, tells me that he watches two episodes of the show every night, the televisual equivalent of an Ambien. \u201cI can\u2019t go to bed without a little bit of it. And I just keep going through the seasons. For me, The West Wing<\/em> isn\u2019t just an entertainment anymore. It\u2019s the way we wish it were, and the way we hope it will be the next morning.\u201d<\/p>\n

To my mind, this desperation for an alternative political narrative reveals something crucial about the governing styles of the last three presidents. If The West Wing<\/em> snagged Emmys and garnered large audiences during the Bush years, and if the show witnessed a resurgence during the scandal-laden first term of the Trump administration, it seems to suggest something peculiar about Obama, apart from his status as a liberal Democrat. Perhaps it owes something to the fact that Obama was himself a gifted narrator\u2014who, before running for office, penned a New York Times<\/em> best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father<\/em>, and who arguably won the election for his ability to tell Americans a particular kind of story. Not only did his narrative flatter the yearnings of the Left, but it also had the power to loosen Republican strongholds throughout middle America. In the last days of the Obama administration, when asked whether he and the president had tried to manufacture a new American narrative about politics and public service, Jon Favreau, the president\u2019s head speechwriter, said, \u201cWe saw that as our entire job.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cGovernments require make-believe,\u201d the historian Edmund S. Morgan writes in Inventing the People<\/em>, a trenchant monograph on the origins of democracy. \u201cMake believe that the people have a voice or make believe that the representatives of the people are <\/em>the people \u2026 Make believe that all men are equal or make believe that they are not.\u201d In other words, nations are nothing more than fickle acts of imagination\u2014America itself, a story written across three centuries. We rarely acknowledge the fictitious underpinnings of our nation\u2019s founding, but the self-evident truths that Jefferson inscribed in the Declaration were not actually axiomatic but dependent upon a willful suspension of disbelief. (After all, the putative equality was extended only to the rights of white male landowners).<\/p>\n

It is not at all coincidental that the most venerated presidents throughout history were fluent in certain literary tropes and thus operated as cunning dramatic narrators: Reagan, with his tinsel-town charm and his grandfatherly locutions; Kennedy, with his rousing calls to national service; Roosevelt, with his palliative fireside chats, the oratorical approximation of a bedtime story. What these stewards of the American ideal understood better than their blundering counterparts was that in order to govern effectively, one needed to remain cognizant of the motifs and themes that animate the American fable\u2014optimism, inclusivity, hard work, and progress\u2014a narrative expansive enough to hold together the disparate factions of the nation.<\/p>\n

For vast swaths of the electorate, part of the comfort we took in the Obama presidency was knowing that we were in the hands of an adept storyteller\u2014one who admired the poetry of Derek Walcott, one who understood the rhetorical valence of singing \u201cAmazing Grace.\u201d No matter the national turmoil or geopolitical crisis, we felt confident that, with Obama at the helm, the plot would invariably swerve toward a denouement of decency and justice. Such soliloquies, it must be acknowledged, also went some way toward obscuring Obama\u2019s more unsightly policies\u2014the ramping usage of drone warfare, the cozying up to Wall Street. Still, it was a dramatic, televisual narrative about America\u2014a Hegelian unfolding of hope and change. <\/em>By contrast, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Kellyanne Conway have proved dexterous postmodernists, deconstructing not just the narrative about America that Obama and his speechwriters had spent the previous eight years fashioning, but also the rudiments of narrative itself\u2014plot, coherence, truth, and meaning. Whereas Obama followed the rules of Aristotelian drama and thus resembled a president from Aaron Sorkin\u2019s imagination, Trump obeys the antinarratives of reality television, where what matters most is not coherence or logical progression, but chaos and titillation.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

On the night of the mock state dinner and presidential ball, the Wingnuts stroll into the conference center, looking stuffy and uncomfortable in tuxedos and ball gowns. Before dinner, we\u2019re treated to a concert by a Croatian cellist named Dorotea Racz, who opens her set with Bach\u2019s \u201cSuite in G Major.\u201d The song is an allusion to a West Wing<\/em> episode called \u201cNoel,\u201d in which deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) attends a state dinner featuring Yo-Yo Ma and has a PTSD-grade flashback of getting shot during an assassination attempt on the president. As the song enters its second movement, it becomes difficult for me not to sense a slippage in the meridians, an imbrication between the real and the imaginary. After all, sitting beside me in this Bethesda ballroom are a half dozen of former West Wing<\/em> cast members, whose job required them to portray White House staffers and who doubtlessly recall filming this episode on a mock set in Los Angeles. But also in the audience are former White House staffers\u2014real ones, like Stephen Goodin, who was Bill Clinton\u2019s presidential aide, and Bob Lehrman, who was chief speechwriter for Al Gore\u2014who doubtlessly attended real state dinners. That I\u2019m also rubbing shoulders with hundreds of ordinary Americans who are gussied up like White House officials sends me into a vertigo of epistemological uncertainty, where the differences between reality and its simulacrum are so dizzying and complex that even Baudrillard would\u2019ve blanched. It occurs to me that as much as the West Wing Weekend has promised an escape from the grisly realities of our political moment, the ontological blur actually feels like a faithful reenactment of the last election, where the reigns of the nation were given over to someone whom we knew mostly from television.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

At the state dinner, I sit next to David Kusnet, President Clinton\u2019s chief speechwriter from 1992 to 1995. It seems important to stress that this is the real David Kusnet\u2014not someone cosplaying him. He\u2019d been invited to be on a panel called \u201cReal Life in The West Wing<\/em>\u201d and decided to stay for the gratis dinner.\u00a0As we gobble down our salads, one of the tuxedoed Wingnuts at the table says, \u201cOkay, here\u2019s a subject for a panel: How would Game of Thrones be different if Aaron Sorkin had written it?\u201d<\/p>\n

With his tortoiseshell glasses and gray wisps of Einstein hair, Kusnet has the rumpled appearance of a long-suffering professor. We trade potted biographies and discuss the midterm elections, then I ask him what he makes of the West Wing Weekend. This causes him to smile, a bit ruefully. \u201cWell,\u201d he says, \u201clike so much else in America, it\u2019s nostalgia for a time that never really existed.\u201d Kusnet then launches into an impromptu colloquium on the political semantics of the last three decades, something he\u2019s uniquely equipped to do, since this is the guy who literally wrote the book on twentieth-century political discourse. His manifesto, Speaking American: How Democrats Can Win In The Nineties<\/em> was, at one time, the vade mecum for leftists and was so rife with crackling rhetorical advice that Clinton hired him after its publication. Kusnet tells me that the American narrative reached poetic heights with Obama, who mixed the argot of progressivism with the homiletics of the civil rights movement and, as a result, became an incarnation of American progress. Merely by casting a vote for Obama, he says, Americans felt themselves pushing the national story from injustice toward tolerance. Over and again, Obama reminded us that electing \u201ca skinny guy with big ears and a funny name\u201d was proof enough of our national betterment.<\/p>\n

However effective this rhetoric proved to be at the ballot box, it obscured the economic and social issues that Clinton had faced in the early nineties, when small towns across America were ravaged by deindustrialization. For a Democrat running in such a climate, the linguistic task became one of convincing the rural quadrants of America\u2014places like Little Rock, Arkansas\u2014that reeducation and job training were exigent and necessary. \u201cSo Clinton couldn\u2019t talk like a character from The West Wing<\/em>,\u201d Kusnet says. Instead, Clinton\u2019s orations were steeped in the idioms of Southern moderates, like the midcentury North Carolina senator Frank Porter Graham, a down-home vernacular with which Kusnet had to familiarize himself. \u201cClinton used to give speeches to high school classes in Arkansas,\u201d Kusnet says, \u201cwhere he\u2019d say, Do you know that kids in Korea do two hours of math homework a night? Now, why the hell do you think you\u2019re going to make more money than they are when an employer can hire them or hire you? So, that\u2019s how he\u2019d talk to people, but he\u2019d do it like he was on their side \u2026 So that\u2019s a complicated narrative \u2026 I mean, he really believed that you couldn\u2019t get New Deal liberalism in a globalized economy and a fractured society. That\u2019s sounds like a point you\u2019d make in a seminar at the Kennedy School or something. But to explain that as someone whose rhetoric came out of the folksiest politics of Arkansas and not scare people off, that was impressive. But he could do it. I mean, he could really do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Doubtless this could be taken as one staffer\u2019s rosy-tinged hagiography, as we haven\u2019t yet talked about his boss\u2019s centrist compromises (NAFTA) or his queasy philandering (not to mention his equivocations about what the definition of\u00a0is<\/em> is, etc.). Still, it could be argued that Clinton was the last politician to place the grim realities of globalization at the forefront of his campaign, as evidenced by James Carville\u2019s twangy, exasperated dictum, immortalized in the classic 1993 political documentary The War Room<\/em>: \u201cIt\u2019s the economy, stupid.\u201d Kusnet tells me that whatever happens after Trump, the narrative will inexorably return to the difficulties Clinton faced in the nineties. \u201cWe might not get Clinton\u2019s solutions, but we will face his problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I loosen the knot of my Windsor and toss an arm over the back of a nearby chair, I realize that the tenor of our discussion is not at all dissimilar from the big-think strategy sessions that Toby Zeigler and Sam Seaborn used to have on episodes of The West Wing<\/em>. It must be admitted that, for all my cynicism about the conference, if anyone could be accused of succumbing to the escapist appeal of cosplay, it was me.<\/p>\n

It grows late, and most of the Wingnuts have repaired to the dance floor, boogying with the half-hearted enthusiasm of middle schoolers at a sock hop. As \u201cBlame It On The Bossa Nova\u201d pours through the speakers, I ask Kusnet what he\u2019s been up to these days, and he tells me that while he\u2019s spent the last few years writing for a PR firm, he\u2019s recently returned to his own writing, a transition that has been bumpy to say the least. \u201cIt\u2019s strange to say for a man in his sixties, but I suppose I\u2019m trying to find my voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s only when we stand to leave that I recognize the metaphorical weight of his confession. Here is a man who once served as America\u2019s voice and who is now struggling to find his narrative persona at an hour of national disarray. It is a literary predicament that seems to embody our own existential crisis: Is America\u2019s story one of tolerance and progress? Or is it a scrambled, fragmentary tale, the meaning of which is uncertain? I suppose I\u2019d been hoping that Kusnet would offer me a soothing interpretation, a new way of stitching together the plot twists of the last few years, but sadly he seems just as boggled and lost as I am.<\/p>\n

We shake hands and part ways, with me wandering toward the dance floor and him heading directly for the exits. A phalanx of Wingnuts are socializing in the hallway, talking passionately about squandered storylines, and suddenly, I feel like a fraud in my blue suit and press pass. It\u2019s easy to sneer at the escapism at the West Wing Weekend, but I can\u2019t help thinking these citizens understand something crucial about the American experiment. At a time when the country seems incurably divided, when news chyrons have become a grim pageant of scandals and Twitter rants, the fervor for Sorkin\u2019s feel-good chimera reveals the degree to which American optimism relies, in part, on the sustainment of certain narratives, ones that have the power to flip rural Midwestern districts and elect unlikely candidates. Whether anyone has the skill or gumption to write this story is still unclear, but it feels like we\u2019re heading toward the final chapter, and the hero\u2019s destiny is uncertain.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Barrett Swanson was the\u00a0Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the\u00a0Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing and was the winner of a 2015 Pushcart Prize.\u00a0His work has appeared or is forthcoming in <\/em>The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, The New Republic, American Short Fiction, The New Republic, The Point, and <\/em>Best American Travel Writing 2018, among other places.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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