Politics as a spectator sport

This behavior has always been as exotic to me as belly dancing, or snake handling. True, I rooted for the home team until I was hoarse, back when I was in high school. But that was it. I was pleased when the San Francisco Forty-Niners won the Super Bowl, however long ago (20 years, maybe?), and I loved watching Joe Montana because he was so graceful, but why were people getting drunk, hanging from street lamps, and turning a bus over?

Give me a good election season, though, and I can be as lunatic as a European soccer fan. When my favorite candidate secured his party’s nomination for president this summer, I leapt around the house like a kangaroo until I finally leapt into a piece of furniture and broke a toe. When his running mate was about to be announced last weekend, I waited up with the journalists until the arrival of Secret Service agents settled the question and we could all go to bed (at 3 a.m.). The advent now of the back-to-back conventions, Republican and Democratic, is way more exciting to me than Christmas.

This morning I gave New York’s former mayor, Rudy Giuliani, a piece of my mind via the TV screen. You would’ve thought that I didn’t like him, had you heard me, but actually I’m grateful that anyone wants to do the hard, hard work of politics. It’s astonishing, really, that they’re willing to put themselves out there to be hounded by the media, derided by the public, clobbered in the polls, yelled at by people on buses, and then ignored and even unrecognized once their particular sun has set. These brave and foolhardy dreamers are a lot like the football players except that the latter get literally beaten up.

And among both politicians and football players, I think we occasionally glimpse a kind of immortality — something ineffable but unforgettable. John Kennedy’s seagoing smile, as if even on land he was turning his face into the sun and the wind; Joe Montana soaring effortlessly over the backs of opponents sent to block him. It’s as though heaven sends down a quick ray of light, like a flashbulb: “Here. Remember this.” We don’t see them often, these special ones, but we recognize them when we do.

And I guess I’d rather see them in politics, where so much is at stake. I give them a lot of credit for being willing to risk everything, knowing that it may be all for naught.

But if they don’t share my priorities, they’d better watch out, because I’ll be shouting at them from the couch, making trenchant remarks and pointing out their frailties for none but me to hear.

Susan Harper is director of the Commerce Public Library. She lives in Commerce.

For all of this week's editorials and opinion columns, see the Aug. 27 issue of The Commerce News.