A (death) star is born

By Max J. Castro

There is no getting around the fact that Paul Ryan delivered a sparkling performance at the Republican National Convention last week and that his presence on the ticket adds yet another challenge to President Obama’s uphill battle to win a second term.

I use the word “performance” advisedly. Because, while its is incontrovertibly true, as numerous analysts have pointed out, that the totality of Ryan’s speech consisted of a series of misrepresentations, fallacies, manipulative turns, canards, and outright falsehoods, as a purely dramaturgical exercise, it was brilliant.

When the chips were down, Ryan showed that he has mastered the rare art of the Big Lie; that he can argue repeatedly that black is white and do it confidently, eloquently, persuasively, and with apparent conviction. That gift makes him a very dangerous politician.

From the caustic comedian Bill Maher to the brainy economist Paul Krugman, critics have dissected and exposed the brazen mendacity that lies behind the words Ryan uttered in his first starring role on the national stage.

In the speech, Ryan, whose budget would drive a stake through the heart of Social Security and Medicare and confer a gift of trillions of dollars in tax savings to the very, very rich masquerades as the savior of these vital programs against the non-existent depredations of the Democrats.

The rich kid who once worked at a fast food restaurant for pocket money before stepping onto the fast track that was there waiting all along for someone of his social class implies that unlike him those truly stuck in dead-end jobs just don’t have the right stuff.

The most radical champion of policies that would savage the livelihoods of the bottom 99 percent of Americans in favor of the one percent and drive the already scandalous level of inequality to unimaginable heights lectures the audience, with a straight face and not a trace of irony, that a society should be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. How to qualify this statement from a man who cut his ideological teeth absorbing the dog-eat-dog, ultra-individualist, neo-social Darwinist thought of Ayn Rand? As the recently deceased writer Kurt Vonnegut would have said, ”and so it goes.”

There is a word in the English language that sums up the nature of Ryan’s Convention act: specious. My old but unsurpassed edition of Webster’s – my late father’s first purchase upon landing in the United States – defines specious as ”seeming to be good, sound, correct, logical, etc. without really being so; plausible but not genuine.”

And yet…by the time he ended his speech, Ryan had whipped the crowd into the kind of frenzy Mitt Romney can only dream about. The gathering suddenly became a revival meeting for of the reactionary.

The ecstatic mood did not quite extend to the mostly left-liberal commentators on MSNBC, but even some of them were awestruck. Ed Schultz, one of MNSBC’s bluntest opponents of the GOP and conservatives in general, said that that night the conservative movement had found the leader for its next generation.

The problem the Ryan phenomenon presents for the Democrats would have been well understood by Erving Goffman, the great American sociologist who stressed the dramaturgical quality of communication and social interaction. Everyone tries to present him or herself in the best possible light, but the audience is keen to detect any signs of deception or insincerity. Mitt Romney, for example, consistently has suffered politically from an inability to get by this inherent audience bullshit detector.

Ryan, on the other hand, seems to possess a quality that great actors, successful con artists, and some sociopaths, among others, share. It is the capacity to induce an audience to suspend disbelief even when that is exactly what is called for. This makes the young Ryan the perfect complement to Romney, an old dog who will never learn the tricks his potential vice president is so able to perform.

The reaction produced by Ryan’s speech even among the smart and skeptical crowd at MSNBC is alarming. In politics, as in many areas of life, emotion often trumps reason and style triumphs over substance.

Moreover, when life is hard, as it is for many people in the United States today, and whenever citizens believe their country is going in the wrong direction, as the polls here indicate, voters are more inclined to be swayed by passion and to seek change without looking at the fine print.

It doesn’t help that many of the key issues at stake – deficits, the federal budget, tax rates, and the sources of growth and job creation versus stagnation and unemployment – are difficult to grasp. That makes it easier for a good political con man to mystify, obfuscate, and confuse the voter.

The Big Lie can more easily achieve plausibility because the corporate media is just that, corporate, and most reporters are unwilling or unable to cut through the fog and just tell the truth for fear of being called to account for having a “liberal bias.” So they are reduced to reporting that “Democrats say this and Republicans say that” without adding, “oh, by the way, the Republicans are lying through their teeth.”

Thus, Paul Ryan, the would-be exterminator of critical programs that aid the vast majority is able to claim it’s the opponents that would do that. The message becomes even more credible when it is delivered by a good-looking, smooth operator who could fool a lie detector.

Add to this the fact that Big Money, which is mostly conservative, is taking full advantage of the opportunity the Supreme Court gave it to invest unlimited cash to elect those who will do their bidding best, and November looks very tough for Obama.

In this dismal panorama, the fact that Obama finally has taken his gloves off is a source of hope. It is not time to throw in the towel yet, but it’s certainly not too soon to roll up the sleeves or, better yet, take the shirt off completely. This election will prove whether the Big Lie will prevail once again as it did in the case of George W. Bush or whether the Lie this time is so humongous that, just in the nick of time, it will collapse of its own monstrous weight.