A Reason

 

I like to watch old episodes of The West Wing and cry. Not because of the politics—they’re almost quaint in 2020, real old-timey stuff, my past neoliberalism being the stuff of shame, like a bad prom photo but also problematic. But the point of this isn’t the politics, I don’t care about your politics. This is about something in which I used to believe and in which I no longer do. And something in which I wish I could.

I began in the last hopeful days of summer, in the easily taken breaths of a café table outside and a declined body count, when our eyes were elsewhere—another crisis, another story. Things seemed calmer in the world since March, since May, since June. Evidence mounted of an eroding democracy, but Washington D.C. is an abstract concept, a Neverland; government, like all theater, like everything, exists only so long as people believe that it does. And, like theater, I believe we are waiting for a deus ex machina to emerge. Our country was dying but at least there were no more morgues in Central Park, no more field hospitals set up in convention centers, no more refrigerated trucks outside of emergency rooms.

I began the show again at the beginning, with POTUS crashing into a tree. Coming, in the way only someone in a Sorkin drama can, to a sudden arboreal stop.

I tell myself watching this is better than doing the readings for class. There’s no one better to teach you dialogue, sentence rhythm, or plotting than early-season Sorkin. He teaches that repetition is not necessarily cleverness but you can get away with it for a while, that it’s good to keep things moving, and no one can come out of this unscathed. Those first sixty episodes or so, the belief in that team is palpable. The team believes in one another, and exists in a world where they can earnestly, bright-eyed, say they serve at the pleasure of the President. Those are the moments. Don’t you understand—what they have is purpose. And what do I have. I have crises, I have screens, I have a President, recovering from the virus, who refuses to wear a mask. Sociopathy qua American individualism, qua qua qua.

Morris Tolliver is introduced. He shows President Bartlet a picture of his newborn daughter, named Corey, after her grandmother, who got the name from her great-aunt, who got it from the first free woman she ever met. Leo soothes his anxieties over being too low-ranked to be the President’s doctor: “He likes you, Morris, I think some days you lighten the load a little.” And then Morris Tolliver dies when his plane is shot down en route to a teaching hospital in Jordan. Morris Tolliver dies because he must die; he’s a new character, liked, helpful, with a new daughter, but not included in the title sequence; his death comes at the shot fired in the third act from the gun placed on stage in the first.

The episode is called “Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc” — “after this therefore because of this.” We affirm causality based on consequent proximity—one after the other. Put in order this way, from one looking back to identify their cause, a sense of order can be insisted upon. By making the antecedent clear, the next step logical, contingent—it makes the present moment predictable, something one could have seen coming, something one could have forecast. But it’s a logical fallacy. And what I want is not prediction.

The President’s first line, spoken from off-stage: “I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt worship no other God before me.” (Not that one could ever believe that the evangelical the President’s correcting would confuse the first and third commandments). And he enters, quoting Scripture, I am the Lord your God, walking with a cane. This is before he faints and breaks the Steuben glass pitcher. This is before we hear the words “multiple sclerosis” in “‘He Shall, from Time to Time.’” Ten episodes later.

President Bartlet tells the nation he has MS. Delores Landingham buys a new car and a neat forty minutes later gets hit by a drunk driver. Cruciatus in crucem. Eas in crucem.

Delores Landingham dies because she must die. The structure demands that you see this.

It is now that I turn back, later in the fall and deeper into the nth crisis of the year, and there are theories as to why. Experiential control. Conjuring power. I like the idea of conjuration, but doubt it as the truth. Experts tell me I am soothed by the ability to make predictions of the repeated experience of the stories I half-remember, but what I want is not a prediction. What I want is the architecture of why. The relief comes strangely from the fact that Sorkin rarely planned too far ahead, and there are long arcs and there are short arcs. The show is essentially a monster-of-the-week serial, but the monsters are human, and sometimes Republicans. Long arcs, short arcs, but there are so very few loose ends.

But there are some. In “Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc,” Morris Tolliver gives the President a flu shot. In “‘He Shall, from Time to Time,’” the President collapses and breaks the Steuben glass pitcher because he has the flu. But it was my sixth, seventh watch before I caught the mistake. Once I watched, and I still watched, to catch structure—the firing of the gun in the third act that, the first time watching, I could not have possibly braced myself for, the second, third, fourth times, I was tensed to expect. Lately, unexpectedly, I find myself watching for where that structure falls apart. But it doesn’t change what I want.

http://https://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/1061b7d002a6d6eabec4fc98fd917d56e53ae35d/c=0-420-2027-1569/local/-/media/USATODAY/None/2014/09/24/1411578197000-B08-INT-WING-21-EMMYS.jpg?width=1320&height=750&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webpWhat I want is the architecture of why. In why there is an ending, and in why there is a reason. I turned back then but the crisis was past, though we knew the crisis was coming again.

When Bartlet interrogates the altar of God, what does he do—he’s been plotted to interrogate his own plotting. Who is God but the author. I was taken and torn by this when I first watched it, what, four, five years ago. I didn’t see the connection. I never saw the end coming. But now I can see how it works from the inside. The author shows his hand and I look to find it. I want to find an author in events for whom I believe no author exists, so desperately do I want it.

It is late fall now, turning winter, and the wave rises. The water sucks away around our ankles, building. Chicago reports the highest positivity rate in months. The internal structure of these events is unclear, poorly plotted. The internal structure is clear but still nonsensical. I know what it is demanding that I see but I do not want to see it, because I do not know what is coming, and I do not know what must come.