The man who invented the future

TV and politics have always made inevitable bedfellows, but the results have been disastrous. Look at the situation we have now. Let's say that tomorrow someone who is a political genius were to emerge -- and I'm not expecting this to happen, but say that it did. Say that a politician emerged who seemed, for once, basically competent, who seemed to be able to do their job as well as the average cab driver, comic writer or journalist. If they were the most intelligent, visionary, humane political thinker in the history of mankind, but were also fat, had some sort of blemish or something that made them less than telegenic, we would not be able to elect them. All we're able to elect are these telegenic, photogenic crypto-Nazis. As long as they look good. I suppose it's too early to go into my rant on Ronald Reagan? That would be tasteless.

Actually, I was going to mention him. Especially his recent sanctification by America's television news media.

[Laughs.] Well then, OK. You've got Ronald Reagan -- the much eulogized, recently deceased former president -- who everyone seems to have forgotten was regarded as one of the most low and treacherous individuals by those in Hollywood that he sold out to the McCarthy hearings. This is someone whose response to the AIDS epidemic was probably responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. This is someone who created Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, or at least set in motion the policies that would create these creatures. This was the architect of much of the world's present misery. Why did we elect him? Because he had been in a lot of films that some quite liked. We thought him an honorable man because in his films he played a lot of honorable men. I believe there are some who believed he had an outstanding war record. Even Ronald Reagan himself talked with misty eyes about the time he liberated concentration camps, which he may have done in a movie. But Ronald Reagan was out of World War II, fortunately for him, because of ill health. So all of his memories of military service came from movies. I've got to say that there are probably better people to elect than film stars.

And now there's Arnold.

What is it with California? They keep doing it! Who's next? Is Robert Downey Jr. going to be the governor of California after Schwarzenegger? This is ridiculous. Television and movies have short-circuited reality. I don't think a lot of people are entirely clear on what is real and what is on the screen. They will take what they perceive as qualities of fictional characters and attribute them to the actor called upon to play them, and then disastrously elect those actors to higher office. I think television and movies have a lot to answer for. It's when they start to have an impact on our politics that we should become anxious about it. I used to joke a lot after Ronald Reagan was elected that the future probably promised a President Springsteen. Or a President T; you know, "I pity the fool!" Who knows? Unless we get our democratic system overhauled fairly urgently, there is really no telling what manner of monsters or buffoons we'll have steering us into this still-young century.

It's amazing how much power media can have if we let it, especially if we're using it to supplant our political dialogue.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see. At the start of this current conflict back in 2001 and 2002 when we were starting into Afghanistan, I said to my girlfriend -- Melinda Gebbie, who's Californian -- that I believed there was a possibility George Bush could walk away from this with his political career intact. Because, and this may be a sweeping generalization, the American electorate has a somewhat shorter attention span than the English electorate. There's a good chance that many people in the American electorate have already forgotten that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, that he was supposed to have weapons of mass destruction ready to deploy in 45 minutes. I think they're going to forget that they were lied to; there's a good chance that many of them will forget entirely who they were at war with. That may be doing a terrible injustice to the American electorate, and I hope that I am.

How about Tony Blair?

No, I don't think so. I mean, I think that the recent savaging Labor was handed at the European Parliament election is purely attributable to Tony Blair having taken us into this war against our wishes. We despise him. He is an object of almost universal hatred. People who voted Labor feel that they've been misrepresented, that they've been made party to things that they would never in a million years have voted for if they had known that Tony Blair was going to suck up so shamelessly to the American presidency over this. No, I don't think that we'll be forgiving him anytime soon. I'd be very surprised if Labor wins the next election with Tony Blair at their head; the fallout from this is going to take several years, even decades; it's going to take us a very long time to sort out the mess these clowns have made.

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