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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
What passed with little commentary by the American media was the widely rebroadcast video footage of what happened later that day, when Israeli helicopter gunships raked the deserted village of Ramallah with pinpoint rocket strikes. The damage was to property, not persons. Nevertheless, it was profoundly disturbing and illustrated better than anything I have ever seen the degree to which the Israelis' superior firepower, provided by the U.S., has intimidated and brutalized unarmed Palestinians and diverted Arab hatred and rage toward Americans abroad. Those monstrous, high-tech machines, hovering impersonally over Ramallah's ancient hills packed with simple, square, white houses, reminded me of the terrifying, apocalyptic scenes in the 1953 film "The War of the Worlds," when Martian airships sweep slowly and unstoppably over Earth's cities.
Given the intractable sentiments of hard-liners on both sides, from armed Islamic militants who want to obliterate Israel to fundamentalist religious Jews who believe God deeded them the land, I've never been optimistic about the "peace process" launched with great fanfare seven years ago by the Oslo accords. If Jews remembered Jerusalem over 1,900 years of diaspora (caused by my own ancestors, the imperial Romans), how could Palestinians be expected to forget, in just 50 years, the land and property they were robbed of by European powers making guilty reparation for European crimes committed against the Jews? To blame Arab nations for failing to make things easier for the West by absorbing the Palestinians into their populations is both futile and ethically problematic.
But Israel is now a fait accompli and remains our most reliable democratic ally in the Middle East, upon which too much of our policy converges because of our overdependence on foreign oil (and fossil fuels in general). It's difficult to see how the U.S. could ever substantively modify its commitment to a nation with so many intricate connections with high-placed American citizens. On the other hand, Israel's confidence in American support and economic aid has made its changing governments arrogant and perhaps prolonged the conflict by giving them little reason to compromise. At any rate, much more open debate is necessary about the history of America's alliance with Israel. Too often, criticism of Israeli policy is punitively policed and treated as if it were rank anti-Semitism.
Now back to domestic politics. A number of Salon readers complained that I ought to have posted prompt assessments of the presidential debates; however, because of my duties as a teacher, this column is now on a triweekly schedule. I did contribute to a Salon roundtable on the first debate, where I felt that the sneering, sighing, compulsively paper-tearing Gore came off as juvenile and weird. About the dull second debate, where a subdued Gore was still too supercilious, I have little to add except that the very vague George W. Bush, with his pursed lips and oddly upright, stock-still posture (to increase his height?), reminded me alternately of Ross Perot and Whistler's mother.
About the third debate, however, I have a lot to say. The run-with-the-pack commentary by professional journalists about that event was woefully off the mark. The St. Louis debate should go down in history as one of the most stunningly successful uses of TV by a candidate (in this case Bush) since Sen. John F. Kennedy's charisma overshadowed another experienced, knowledgeable vice president, Richard M. Nixon, in 1960.
Those who thought that Gore won the third debate evidently know little about TV and its relation to the mass audience. After over two decades in politics, Gore showed that neither he nor his advisors fully understand live TV either. Vainglorious about the "1000 town meetings" he claims to have conducted, Gore plunged into the debate thinking he had to impress and convert the immediate audience of allegedly undecided (but suspiciously liberal-sounding) voters sitting in front of him. But after his poor showing in the prior debates, it was the great, invisible array of TV viewers nationwide that he needed to reach.
Gore and his team (including, presumably, his simpering daughter Karenna) made a massive misjudgment about presentation. Gore's pirouettes, finger-pointing and constant crossing and recrossing of the pit between the bleachers may have struck in-house observers as dynamic and dominant, but his choreography was not keyed to the camera, of which he showed little awareness except when he was prissily sitting or stiffly standing. Gore's "blocking" of physical space in the circumscribed arena was inept and incoherent. Hence his movements seemed to the TV audience awkward, erratic, febrile, disconnected and chaotic, leaving the viewer with a lingering impression not of presidential authority but of psychological instability.
Add to this Gore's dreadful failure to modulate his voice for the microphone to communicate effectively with TV viewers, most of whom at that hour were sitting at home or (on the East Coast) preparing to retire for the night. So implacably determined was Gore to score big with the small group in St. Louis that he boomed away at top volume with a forced, monotonous, near-breathless pacing more appropriate to a rah-rah partisan rally. While Bush often seemed like he might not make it to the end of his sentence, Gore seemed to be reciting by rote and muffed some key moments, such as when he couldn't switch into a convincingly conversational tone to describe being called back to the White House the prior week to be briefed on the Mideast crisis.
