The Banality of Wiretapping

Recently, I decided to finally watch Frost/Nixon. While I did enjoy it, throughout the entire film, I had a nagging, somewhat bothersome irking feeling in the back of my brain. It wasn't the artistic license, that was tolerable for a drama. I simply could not figure it out until I sat down at my computer, launched Firefox, and began flipping through news sites.

This.

It almost seems comical, that, of course, Cheney would somehow be involved in this CIA coverup. Comical? Is that the word for it? Unfortunately so. That's when I realized what was bothering me about Frost/Nixon.

In light of everything the Bush Administration did in regards to secrecy and surveillance, the "seriousness" surrounding Nixon in the film seemed almost camp, overly-dramatic. All of it, from the archetypal "angry leftist" played by Sam Rockwell who spends his entire life following and profiling Nixon to expose his "criminality" to the Nixon character himself who breaks down in a long-winded, impassioned confession about his horrible, atrocious involvement in Watergate felt so entirely fake. It leaves the post-2008 audience asking the question: "Is that it? All of that commotion about one coverup?"

Watergate just isn't enough anymore. The tragic figure of Richard Nixon, who laments his betrayal of the public trust, gives way to the post-modern absurdity of Richard Cheney, who simply asserts his prerogative of secrecy with no compunctions or remorse and with little regard to the merits of his argument.

The most absurd schism is the whole idea of "confession." Throughout the film, the characters supporting Frost are desperate in their single-minded focus of giving "Nixon the trial he never had," of making him confess his wrong-doing to the American public. We on the other hand will never get such a cathartic moment out of Dick Cheney because there is nothing to confess. He, on live television, has already admitted having endorsed torture. He is open about his penchant for clandestine security measures. There is nothing for Cheney to hide in his brazen defense of his percieved rightness. Because of this, it is unlikely that we will ever see a weeping Cheney worrying that children will grow up viewing politics as corrupt and criminal.

At the same time, perhaps we have grown overly accustomed to the "Bush/Cheney = shady dealings" equation that we've come to accept it and for expediency's sake cast it off into the past. Given the problems facing the Obama administration and the world, the scrapping of investigations into Bush Administration actions demonstrated a new political culture. Instead of "justice for all, at any cost" we now ignore "petty" crimes in order to desperately try to prevent everything from becoming even worse. The bar for "criminality" becomes greater.

I recall in 2006 the myriad of comparisons between Nixon's wiretapping and the new revelations of Bush's expanded wiretapping program. Seeing how the two resolved themselves, I think the similarities have broken down in the aftermath. Or, perhaps, history is following Marx's observations that everything happens twice, "first as tragedy, then as farce." Except in this case, Herbert Marcuse's corollary is particularly ominous, that the farce is tremendously more terrifying than the tragedy.