Saw an interesting news items on NBC Evening News tonight (10/12), which featured Brent Scowcroft suggesting that the Administration's support for Putin could diminish because of his continuing support for the current Ukranian government. The entire report was a collection of implications that seemed aimed to activate and so reinforce a belief in America as the great ethical advocate of democracy around the world.
There was no actual news. Just an implication about the nature of the American government, supported by implications made by an implied reprsentative of the Bush Administration (Scowcroft) -- followed by four stories about shopping.
Ok, apparently unrelated item: went to a Michael Franti & Spearhead concert on Halloween. It was packed, no chairs, everybody dancing. A highly polished show, excellent and obviously well-rehearsed and refined over time. When Franti told the audience to clap or sing, people responded instantly, joyously; but when he stopped giving explicit instructions the order fell apart.
At one point he seemed to want to set up a counterpoint between two different lines, with him singing one and the audience singing another. The problem was that when he switched to the second line the audience went with him - all except for one loud and out of tune woman (a good friend, actually). She kept screaming out the first line in answer to the other line sung by Franti and most everyone else. Her voice was shrill, but she was doing the right thing, and in persevering with it, in overcoming the fear of sounding stupid, she ultimately rallied other people to her line.
Point being that everyone knew how to act when they had someone leading them in connecting with one another. When the leader wasn't directing, the atmosphere fell back into a bunch of disconnected people watching the same show. I pin this partly on the extremely polished structure of the show itself. Even though the songs amounted to a religious revival in the twin churches of self and social-realization, it was so scripted that for the most part the audience heard about rather than actualized those things.
I loved the show, but it reminds me in this respect of the Democratic National Convention, with its enormous 1984-esque image of a saluting John Kerry surmounted by a gargantuan video image of himself saluting.
The most promising development in American politics within memory was not Howard Dean raising gobs of cash on the Internet, but Ralph Nader and the Greens pulling together a true coalition party in 2000. That campaign was not about scripted hero-worship but about linking of true working groups across the country. Thanks to the structure of our system, though, the Green movement was effectively stifled, with Nader demonized and the system of control triumphant.