Several years ago we had occasion to use theatre as a metaphor for the events of the time. In that column, we spoke about a genre known as “Theatre of the Absurd,” where playwrights generally deal with man’s reaction to a world apparently without meaning. Recent goings on in our nation’s capital are more in keeping with a tragicomedy -— though most tragicomedies are fiction. This is all too real.
Though the definition of tragicomedy has evolved over the centuries, I favor the 16th century definition as most applicable to today. In those days, it was a (small “r”) romantic play that violated time, place and action. It mixed highbrow and lowbrow characters and leaned a bit toward the fantasy. In the 17th century, tragicomedy began to mix emotions, where, according to playwright Gotthold Lessing, “serious simulates laughter and pain pleasure.” More modern exemplars (whose names you may recognize) are Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter.
OK, I think we’ve got it now. If all of those qualities don’t define the health care efforts of this Congress, I don’t know what will. The Wall Street Journal editorial (Nov. 22, 2009) about the vote to move the Senate bill to the floor for debate was spot-on. “As tragedies go,” they wrote, “the Senate’s Saturday night vote ... wasn’t exactly Shakespearean. The outcome was expected but the writing wasn’t as good and the acting was more Jon Lovitz than Laurence Olivier.”
It is increasingly difficult to watch Congress act without thinking about Lovitz’s “Saturday Night Live” character: Pathological liar Tommy Flanagan. After constructing a series of ever more fantastic lies, the character would reach the last one and deadpan into the camera, “Yeah — that’s the ticket.” Like Russian nesting dolls, once the initial mistruth was uttered — that Congress was interested in “reforming” health care — each subsequent attempt at misdirecting the American public needed to neatly fit over the previous one. Now we have two complete sets of those nesting dolls.
Tragicomedy in action
The theatre that has surrounded this process has been unprecedented. It began several years ago as the 2008 Presidential campaigns began to ramp up. “Act I” was all about establishing the characters: Who was “good” and who was “evil.” It exposed the time frame for the action to come. In that first act we learned the overarching theme. We found the protagonist, the antagonist and the supporting cast of characters. In November, a majority of the audience bought into the characters and concepts.
Act II has been the longest — and most difficult. It is where the thematic struggles have been played out — and “played” is the operative word. There has been scandalous behavior as some of the antagonists have been swayed by gifts and promises and ultimately enabled the protagonists’ agenda to move forward. There has been the dynamic tension created by “the trigger,” a doomsday mechanism that would drive the antagonists mad and all the while assure the protagonists’ desired outcomes.
Good playwrights assure that characters and plots take sudden and unexpected turns. Just when the audience thought they had all of the characters “figured out,” they learned that they had been deceived.
The protagonists urged immediate action even as the antagonists created dynamic tension by trying to slow the process to a slightly deliberative pace. As the plot unfolded, the audience found that the sense of urgency was less a matter of public policy than sleight of hand intended by the protagonist to distract from the thinly veiled plot. The opposing forces are locked in mortal combat.
Just when the audience thinks Act II is over, a strange phenomenon takes place. The play itself begins to morph from Olivier’s “Richard III” and his Machiavellian scheming to “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Clean-cut couple Brad and Janet get a flat tire on a rainy night and ask for help at the nearby castle of Dr. Frank N. Furter. Much like our protagonist-in-chief, Dr. Furter claims to have “discovered the secret to life itself.”
And just like “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” the metaphorical “fourth wall” that separates the audience from the actors begins to crumble and the audience becomes a part of the show. In our melodrama, this interaction began with the Tea parties and escalated with the town hall meetings. In venue after venue, the audience expressed dissatisfaction with the actors, the script and what they viewed as the inevitable conclusion of Act III.
The audience participation has brought a new dimension to our play. For the first time since the curtain went up, a majority of the audience is no longer rooting for the protagonists. The Gallup organization ran a poll in late November and it indicated that 50% of those asked do not believe it is government’s responsibility to make sure that all Americans have health care. Only 47% believe that this is indeed the appropriate role of our government. This seemingly small difference is made much more remarkable because for the last 10 years the majorities have been reversed on this question.
How will Act III end?
The audience “gets it” now. The play isn’t really about reforming health care at all. That was a device to distract from the real plot — a large-scale government takeover of yet another sector of the U.S. economy.
The Web site pollster.com looks at all of the polls and the language used by the pollsters. In an attempt to eliminate bias, it crafts a scatter graph from the polls taken on a particular subject and then draws trend lines. Again, in late November it found that only 39.2% favor the health plan being discussed in Congress and 49.8% are in opposition.
Significantly these lines began to cross in July and August 2009 — just about the time the audience began to get involved in the play. The question is whether or not the audience will affect the ultimate outcome of Act III. In the health care discussion and in the other transformative discussions that are sure to follow, we’ve now learned that “we the people” can allow the play to go on unchallenged and create a tragicomedy of the absurd, or we can participate to try to derive the outcome we prefer. Now that’s the ticket.
David Saltzman, RHU, DIA, is a past president of NAHU and has been a health,
disability, life and employee benefits broker for more than 25 years. He is director of the large group segment for Carolina Care Plan. Readers may write to him at Carolina Care Plan Inc., 201 Executive Center Drive, Columbia, SC 29210.