Reviewing "Reality"-NYT columnist Frank Rich views political life through a theatrical lens

[babylonsister]

http://www.harvardmagazine.com/2007/03/reviewing-reality.html

Reviewing "Reality"
New York Times columnist Frank Rich views political life through a theatrical lens.

by Craig Lambert

The scene, at least the one framed by the family-room proscenium of the television screen, remains indelible. President George W. Bush emerged from a navy jet that had just landed on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. Swathed in flight gear, he cradled a helmet under his arm and told the press that he had flown the plane, and “I miss flying, I can tell you that.” Hours later, he reappeared on deck wearing a business suit and spoke beneath a huge banner reading Mission Accomplished. Bush announced that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” and exulted in the defeat of “an ally of Al Qaeda,” declaring that “no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because that regime is no more.”

Scheduled for East Coast prime time on a Thursday, the night with the highest television viewership, Bush’s speech drew a large audience and played well with both the public and the drama critics of the political stage. “That was great theater,” gushed Morton Kondracke of Fox News; on Meet the Press, the Washington Post’s David Broder rhapsodized about the president’s “physical posture” that communicated “authority and command.”

Now compare these raves with the response of a professional theater critic who long ago quit reviewing Broadway plays and refocused his gaze on the dramas called “news.” Each Sunday, Frank Rich ’71, a New York Times theater critic for 14 years and a Times columnist since 1994, scrutinizes pseudo-events like the aircraft-carrier scenario in a quest to distinguish the smoke of real fires from the ubiquitous fumes of smoke-making machines.

In his recent book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina, Rich describes Bush’s “May Day double feature” of carrier landing and speech, analyzing its elements using a theatrical vocabulary, like his mention of the “three-hour intermission” between the two components of what he called a Top Gun reenactment. There was costume: Bush emerged from the cockpit “draped in more combat gear than a Tom Cruise stunt double,” and the crew members in the official audience wore color-coordinated garb. There were set design and choice of props: a White House advance team supervised renaming the plane Bush flew—normally used for refueling—as Navy One, and painting George W. Bush, Commander in Chief on its fuselage. The Mission Accomplished banner “was positioned high up so that it appeared as a halo hovering above the president,” Rich writes.

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[MannyGoldstein]

1. Frank Rich is a God

Back in 2004 or so, it seemed like nothing could, or wanted to, stop The Bush Machine. The only things that kept my chin up were Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd.