THE facts answer

When our leaders become afraid to seem human

by John waters

Certain lines of questioning have the aim of making politicians uncomfortable, but this unease concerns us as well.
In a TV interview recently, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was asked,  “Are you someone who uses pills to help get you through?” The questioner was the highly respected presenter of a serious political program. The rumor that the Prime Minister was on anti-depressants had gained ground on the Internet and now had surfaced at the center of the public square. Mr. Brown replied, “No, I think this is the sort of questioning which is all too often entering the lexicon of British politics.”  
Most of us can recall similar recent situations when politicians were challenged by interviewers in ways that not long ago would have been forbidden by the conventions of political discourse. Often, one gets the feeling that these questions are being asked not for the sake of eliciting information, but to dramatize the discomfiture of the interviewee. Usually, there is also an element of journalistic bravado, a sense of satisfying some public demand for what seems like journalistic rigor.
But we would be foolish to see this as merely a problem for politicians. When the public perception of a world leader is indelibly defined by a rumor spread by bloggers with more opinions than responsibilities, and more free moments than ideas, we must surely ask questions about the meaning of freedom in the contemporary democratic realm.
Some days after the Gordon Brown interview, I heard one of his predecessors, Neil Kinnock, talking about Brown’s “image problem.” He suggested that the public perception of the Prime Minister as dour and charisma-deficient had to do with a refusal to display his true personality in public. Kinnock said that he had told Brown that he needed to be “more himself” in public. The implication was that the Prime Minister was, in a particular political sense, frightened to be “himself.”  
The scrutiny of journalism, then, seems simultaneously to be doing two contradictory things: driving the humanity of politicians inwards and yet seeking some deep flaw by which to explain the caricature that emerges as a consequence.
But we, the people, observe such dramas without seeing into them. We witness the politician being asked the personal question and either passively allow ourselves to be seduced by the moment of theater or become outraged at the invasion of privacy. What we do not contemplate, generally speaking, is that we are observing a culture in which we ourselves are implicated, on which we must depend for words, thoughts, understandings, perceptions of reality.  
We collude by our participation in the construction of a mentality that actively denies our leaders the right to be fully human. And then, rather than observing what has happened, we peer into the humanity of the politician in search of an explanation,  as though seeking some evidence of tenderness or vulnerability which cannot be seen because all such human frailties have been driven like frightened animals into the refuge of the heart. And the same thing happens simultaneously in ourselves.