‘We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president’, said Michael Moore at the 2003 Academy Awards. Nothing has happened yet. This is limbo time, the time of pregnant, swirling maybes, the time between the axe’s lift and its fall. I write these words in this time and you will read them with me in that time, the time when all the maybes will be done-and-dusted. The television has been full of photo opportunities and party political puffery. Radio ripples with sound bites, each talkback caller more phoney-stoogey than the last. The politicians all want us, unless we’re in a safe seat. (One possible variant of the Chinese curse ‘may you live in interesting times’ is ‘may you live in a safe Labor seat’. Punished by one side and ignored by the other, your roads will crumble, your schools will fall down and your member will sit comfortably till eternity.)
So I have started watching The West Wing on DVD and cable. I missed it when it first came on Nine, and I regret that, because it is great. Terry Pratchett, that novelist-magician, talks of alternate universes, and in another universe, one that is looking increasingly attractive, the President of the United States (or Potus, as the staffers call him acronymically) is Jeb Bartlet, or perhaps more compellingly, Martin Sheen. He is the veteran of Apocalypse Now, the Method actor who did drugs and wigged out generously for us, all on Coppola’s merciless camera. Having taken the uneasy ride with the rest of the babyboomers, Sheen has now become their comfort zone.
The first episode of The West Wing is utterly satisfying. Potus doesn’t appear until close to the end, where he has one of the most effective entries ever accorded a lead role: he charges into a room full of hubristic religious righters bullying his people and corrects their recital of the First Commandment. We learn that when he fell off his bike at the beginning of the program, it was because he was angry with the lobby group that is in ‘real life’ one of the ‘real’ Potus puppeteers. The West Wing is as comforting as a cuppa, a meditation on proper governance and a world that though imperfect, is at least not a warmonger’s playpen. The fictitious President Bartlet is a clever statesman capable of reflection and magnanimity; he even repents and