Depressing Art // Likable Politicians

There are elections now, and people here are deeply cynical about the slate of candidates. Political despair is the dominant tone, and has been for some time. This is also true in the wider world, where few politicians inspire trust or excitement. There was talk this week of Elizabeth Warren launching a Presidential campaign, which "I Don’t Hate Women Candidates — I Just Hated Hillary and Coincidentally I’m Starting to Hate Elizabeth Warren" references. I don’t really have an opinion on Warren, but it made me think of a politician I do find powerfully likable: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Trying to put my finger on what it was, I came up with 1) cheerfulness and 2) optimism. O-C is a politician, and invariably does need to say divisive things and spar with rivals; but she seems excited, spontaneous, and again, optimistic. That optimism is very valuable in such a toxic political climate. Perhaps Obama as a Senator projected a similar fresh optimism. It probably is made easier when a young candidate puts together a string of victories. Beto O’Rouke’s defeat to Ted Cruz - no matter how predictable - may have detracted slightly from his likability. (And for a bit of nonpartisanship, I’d mention Ben Shapiro as a conservative whose precociousness and Reaganesque moral optimism has won him a lot of attention, though he’s not exactly a political figure - more in the “discourse” game.)

I should stress that I do not think this likability necessarily translates to leadership ability or worthwhile ideas. This approbation is from a rhetoric/political communication point of view. “Cheer” and “optimism” are hard to fake successfully: the public is used to seeing politicians try all the time. When they exist sincerely, they are valuable assets, but not a substitute for good policy and governance.

A lot of the music I like is not exactly fun. A fair amount of it might be described as something one might bump themselves off to. And yet I don’t really relate to it from a depressed space. In a way, I find it cathartic to listen to other people’s depression (and perhaps feel better by comparison!)

There’s an old debate about if some artists need to suffer from depression, or other mental illness, to be successful at their craft. Many find this idea repugnant, with its implication that these people must live in a state of untreated illness in order to ply their trade. I certainly don’t think anyone’s mental health should take second place to their artistic output. We as a society should do everything possible to make professional medical help available to everyone, and encourage people to make use of it. But it is at least possible that there are artistic truths that are accessible only to those deep in the well of melancholy. Better, certainly, that we lived without these truths, and still had Elliot Smith. But that doesn’t alter the fact.

The idea of depressive realism dovetails with this nicely: if we imagine that the world is fundamentally a tragic place, and that neurotypical people deal with it via defensive mental obfuscating, it might make sense that we would be drawn to the work of the depressed, seeing in the expression of these unlucky prophets a vision of a truth almost, but not quite perceived.