Lamenting the death of the non-political
I am old enough to remember the phrase “political spin” entering our common lexicon during the Clinton-Blair era, but the concept of retrospectively reinterpreting official happenings for the benefit of one’s political team is surely as old as politics itself.
Yet what clearly does seem to be a new thing, and one with highly alarming consequences, is that we are now living in an age when “the political” has permeated virtually every corner of our lives so that there is virtually no occasion, however remote from what used to be generally acknowledged as the standard political arena, that is not subjected to vigorous narrative-shaping forces determined to align it with our ever-hardening political allegiances.
Take the recent Opening Ceremonies of the Paris 2024 Games. In my July 29 blog post, Self-Sabotage, published a few days afterwards, I shared my take on the proceedings. But what I didn’t mention was that, sitting on the couch watching the spectacle on television, I turned to my wife and asked her, “Does anybody else think this is nonsense?” Which, in turn, sent us both scurrying to our phones—her checking various social media streams and me looking at various “live reporting” from newspaper websites.
And the indisputable impression that we were getting was that, while opinions naturally varied here and there, most people seemed to be of the view that the whole thing was a ponderous, incoherent and often downright boring display (How many boats is too many boats? despondingly queried The Guardian’s half-asleep reporter, before assuring us that whatever the theoretically established threshold might be, by now we had unquestionably crossed the line into the “too many boats” category) punctuated by occasionally interesting and sometimes even moving displays (like Céline Dion’s finale).
But then, slowly but surely, the narrative began to change. Flagrantly superfluous appearances of drag queens arranged by an “artistic director” who had often previously declared his love of using public spectacles to highlight gender identity issues was now interpreted as either a bold pronouncement of societal tolerance or a dangerous threat to our traditional values, instead of the perversely irrelevant inanity that it so obviously was.
By the time attention had shifted to the infamous “Last Supper” scene, whose inevitable backlash somehow took the tweet-deleting (X-deleting?) hypocritically craven organizers by surprise, the battle lines had hardened considerably more, with one side portraying Jolly and his colleagues as courageous defenders of freedom of expression thumbing their noses at “the extreme right” and the other side featuring the likes of Donald Trump fulminating at the “disgrace” of it all.
That a silly, self-indulgent bit of theatrics put on by a sexually-obsessed producer of a public ceremony that formally opened an otherwise magnificent international athletics event could have become yet another political flash-point is, of course, completely ridiculous.
But it is also deeply worrying. Because it is the clearest of signs that there is nowhere left in our lives where “political” spin won’t stridently invade, which not only adds needless emotional tension to all of our lives, it also goes a considerable way towards comprehensively destroying our understanding of “politics” in the first place.
After all, if everything is political, then “politics” inevitably becomes just a form of talking about ourselves—it no longer represents our collective attempt to determine what should or shouldn’t be done for the benefit of the entire community, but simply collapses into flinty assertions of our own identity, our own tribe.
Which is exactly where we are.
Howard Burton, August 19, 2024
Howard is the author of six non-fiction books on various topics and he is the Director of Pandemic Perspectives (2022), Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023), Raphael: A Portrait (2024) and Botticelli’s Primavera (2025) which is the first film in our Renaissance Masterpieces Series.
