Many people in the US are apparently outraged by their president’s dovish views on the Middle East and his determination that the United States should not attack Iraq, even if the overthrow of the repugnant regime of Saddam Hussein is highly desirable.
You will be forgiven if you have just read that sentence again, in confusion. But in a sense, it is true. The president in question is not of course George W. Bush, in whose opinion doves are clearly only useful as targets for hunting parties. It is rather President Jed Bartlet, or more accurately the actor Martin Sheen, who plays the fictional US leader in NBC’s hugely successful TV series “The West Wing”.
In an act of considerable professional as well as personal courage, Sheen has joined the growing lobby of prominent figures in the US, who are saying publicly and repeatedly that they are fundamentally opposed to an attack on Iraq.
As a result, not only are Sheen and other Hollywood actors receiving bag loads of virulent hate mail, but there are indications that pressure is being exerted on studio bosses, to punish Sheen and his fellow star protesters for their effrontery to have an opinion that does not coincide with that held in the real White House.
It is important to say “real” in this context because, ever since cowboy film star Ronald Reagan rode into the White House, the boundaries between reality and fiction have become increasingly blurred in the US. Reagan was as successful a president as ever he was an actor. For him it was just another role. He delivered the lines written for him by Republican Party bigwigs, with the timing and aplomb of a true professional. The Reagan White House show enjoyed its constitutional eight-year run, and when the end titles finally rolled, many there were, who wished that somehow they could slip the first reel back in the projector, and run the whole film again.
And it is not just the US presidency that have been taken over by Hollywood. Look at any US police force or rural sheriff’s department, and you will discover law enforcement officers, consciously or unconsciously modeling themselves on Hollywood cops. This is hardly surprising, since Americans have grown up with these powerful but fictional images, created in the endlessly fertile minds Hollywood script writers.
A recent survey suggested that Americans knew more about Martin Sheen’s President Jed Bartlet and his White House than they did about George W. Bush and his. Inevitably there were even a few folk who thought that Jed Bartlet was the real president. The compilers of the survey do not then appear to have asked these people, if they thought that George W. Bush was a work of fiction. Pity.
Americans these days get most of their information from a computer or a television screen. The young US soldiers out in the desert right now, awaiting their attack orders, are no exception. They will be going to war peering intently at screens, guiding in bombs and missiles and tank and battery fire, just like they were playing some arcade shoot ‘em up game.
If only those self-same monitors in front of these soldiers, could pick up President Jed Bartlet and Martin Sheen’s message that the US mission of Iraqi destruction is just plain wrong, maybe he could order them all home.
