Michael Phillips: As Election Day approaches, our home screens are sending wildly mixed messages about democracy in action

CHICAGO — Here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “politics”: “The activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.”

We’re in it, all right, neck-deep and gasping. Less than two weeks before our quadrennial democratic experiment in terror, division, heartbreak and the art of the possible, our home screens are sending wildly mixed messages about democracy in action — how it was, how it is, how it should be and how we might save America from itself.

For every left-leaning TV reunion show designed to get out the vote or combat voter suppression, issues that shouldn’t belong to any one party, there’s a Fox News celebrity yelling at people to just calm down and stay the course.

Meantime a flood of passionate streaming and cable programs jockey for our attention, dealing with democracy and politicking head-on, no apologies — and with no illusions about real life versus, say, “The West Wing.”

Now on HBO Max, director Thomas Schlamme’s elegantly mounted, lavishly nostalgic “West Wing” reunion show restages creator Aaron Sorkin’s 2002 episode “Hartsfield’s Landing” on the stage of the Orpheum Theatre in downtown L.A. The result is the highest grade of meat loaf; it’s political comfort food, hitting the spot for millions of “West Wing” devotees, however they happen to vote. Well. Let’s be honest: It’s especially tasty for those who miss the rounded, heightened gentle-left political discourse favored by fictional POTUS Jed Bartlet, played once again by Martin Sheen. The actor, now 80, ranks as the only POTUS in the popular culture with the standing and longevity to call either Biden or Trump a punk kid.

The HBO Max show officially titled “A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote” never mentions the current West Wing occupant by name. No need. The hourlong program’s between-acts public service messages call him out, over and over, by deed and reputation. As Los Angeles Times TV critic Robert Lloyd wrote: “It’s clear the point here is not just voting but voting out Trump.”

If you care about “free speech, a free press, a woman’s right to choose” or “a Black man’s right to breathe,” “West Wing” alum Elisabeth Moss says at one point, then you care about politics. Later, from Samuel L. Jackson: “If you see science mocked and politicized in a health crisis, and know we’re smarter than that, then you have to vote in this election.”

“Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda reassures viewers that the results of this pandemic U.S. presidential election remain supremely unlikely to be settled by Nov. 4, or Nov. 5. But don’t worry: The mail-in votes simply need some extra tallying time.

Also, Miranda says, “In American elections, candidates don’t declare themselves the winner.” The wording there reminds us that forever and always, “The West Wing” dwells in devoutly wishful thinking.

In contrast to Sorkin’s political wonderland, the mess and sprawl of modern-day Chicago politics belongs to a separate universe. Premiering on National Geographic Oct. 29, available on Hulu Oct. 30, director Steve James’ five-part documentary “City So Real” began as a multistrand account of the 2019 Chicago mayoral election. By following all the candidates, James figured he’d capture the city in all its neighborhoods, factions and tribal skirmishes.

He got that and more. The trial of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, after 16 shots killed Laquan McDonald; the ongoing Ed Burke scandal, pretty rich even by Chicago aldermanic standards; and the win for Lightfoot, which gave the original, four-part cut of “City So Real” (premiering at Sundance in January, just before COVID-19 changed everything) a culminating note of progressive affirmation. At least for Democrats.

Then the rest of 2020 happened. Egregious federal pandemic bungling; more Black men dying under the boot of law enforcement; protests here, looting and property damage there; economic, physical and psychic devastation everywhere. James and his crew hit the streets to film an additional episode. And now “City So Real” ends on a note of harsh but necessary honesty about where we are.

“We can’t continue to tear each other apart,” Lightfoot says in the new footage, even under the strain of “back to back to back crises.”

In that same “City So Real” episode, the co-owner of embattled Bucktown bar and music venue The Hideout, Tim Tuten points to the bane of his existence, the controversial Lincoln Yards redevelopment project threatening to obliterate the neighborhood. Tuten notes that the pop-up drive-in this summer, located on the Lincoln Yards site by the river, featured “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” This was what might be termed “white privilege counter-programming” a tra-la-la to everything going on in Chicago and America at the moment.

“This is their idea of what Chicago is,” Tuten says, regarding his corporate nemesis. “A bratty, entitled rich kid, a suburban tourist who comes in, trashes the city — and then leaves.”

Filmmaker James revisits aspiring politicians and everyday Chicagoans introduced earlier in the series, including mayoral candidate Neal Sales-Griffin. He lost to Lightfoot, but he got on the ballot, at least, which was encouragement enough. Whatever Chicago’s political future, he says, “new systems of power are going to be required.”

What’s past is prologue. Streaming on the Facets Virtual Cinema platform through Nov. 5 via distributor Kino Lorber, the William Greaves documentary “Nationtime — Gary” resurrects a remarkable 1972 time capsule of American politicking at the root.

It’s a snapshot of ground-level organizing (however disorganized, in some eyes) lifted up by sky-high oratory. Greaves’ camera enters the fray at the National Black Political Convention, held over a contentious weekend in March 1972 in Gary, Ind. So much Black royalty showed up that weekend, from Coretta Scott King to “Shaft”‘s Richard Roundtree to Harry Belafonte, along with 10,000 activists, organizers, politicians and citizens eager to establish a clear, effective Black political agenda for America.

Narrated by Sidney Poitier, featuring the poetry of dramatist and poet and conventional co-organizer Amiri Baraka (then known as Imamu Amiri Baraka) and of Langston Hughes, “Nationtime” circulated briefly in an edited, less “militant” version. The 4k digital restoration, now streaming, devotes a full quarter of its 80-minute running time to a speech delivered by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, directed at Black parity to be carved out of the white-establishment political machine.

The memory of the bloody 1968 riots in Chicago hangs over the proceedings, along with the war in Vietnam, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Comedian Dick Gregory points out that the National Black Political Convention managed to stir hearts and minds that weekend in 1972, and without violence.

“We can bring more radical Black folks together in Gary,” Gregory joked, “than they can bring radical white folks together (in Chicago).”

Richard Hatcher, then mayor of Gary, sets the tone of defiance and purpose, and his welcoming speech contains what sound like portents of injustice yet to come. “We demand that any party which asks our support acknowledges the inhumanity every Black man, woman and child faces in a hundred different ways, each and every day,” he says.

Later, Hatcher wonders: Will this convention come to nothing? When it concludes, with or without a clear political agenda, “will we walk in unity — or disperse in a thousand different directions?”

America the fractured: The beauty of the nation has never hidden the societal cracks for long. Now streaming on Amazon Prime, Heidi Schreck’s fabulous, despairing stage play “What the Constitution Means to Me” finds the author/star revisiting her 15-year-old self, as she toured American Legion halls around her part of the country (Wenatchee, Wash.) and beyond. She competed, successfully, for college scholarship money by delivering oratory about the meaning, and durability, of the U.S. Constitution.

The art and thrill of political debate informs every part of Schreck’s work, shrewdly captured for the camera. She links larger judicial and political shifts in the country, as the founding document comes under constant, often flagrantly partisan reinterpretation, to her long, painful family legacy of battering husbands and terrified wives and children, unprotected by the law.

Like so much in the culture today, “What the Constitution Means to Me” is angry as hell, and it’s both small- and capital-D democratic in its worldview. Schrek sees the Ninth Amendment “equal protection” language, in particular, as an endangered species of American idealism. The Constitution, she concludes, remains an inspiring and malleable framework. But strict constructionists such as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (the show was taped long before the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett), she argues, will only keep us mired in outdated notions of “a culture, and a country, that is making it clear every single day it has no interest in protecting you.” The “you” refers to women and people who are not white.

Is non-partisanship even possible in these times? From “The West Wing” to “Happy Days,” old TV shows are getting their acts together largely to support Democratic causes and candidates. This, truly, is the season destined to alienate conservatives who hate Hollywood for wading into politics.

How can any of us begin to “reset this conversation,” as Mayor Lightfoot says in “City So Real,” when we’re at each other’s throats ideologically? The last four years in American politics has done something to us. But it’s not new. These rifts divide every speech and conflict in “Nationtime.” The nation’s divisions became more pronounced when George W. Bush got reelected, sending roughly half the country into a snit, or worse. When Barack Obama got reelected, the other half felt the same way. Or worse.

Maybe this is why the nostalgia/agitprop combo platter offered by the “West Wing” get-out-the-vote reunion special goes down so easily for so many, on all sides of the political spectrum. With American political discourse where it is today, who doesn’t take some solace in Sorkin’s earnest yet quippy dreams of reason and empathy in national politics? It’s a lovely break from the ongoing American argument. That argument, as we see in “Nationtime,” “City So Real,” “What the Constitution Means to Me” and “The West Wing,” holds no promise (let’s hope) of a season finale, nor of a fixed definition of politics, or liberty, or justice for all. The argument is America, the fractured, beautiful and ever-changing.

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