Word: shows
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...mixture of politics and show business is not merely expedient; it is also natural. Each world, by its nature, plays to the crowd. The politician and the performer equally require public attention and feed on popular adulation. As either politics or statesmanship, government has always relied on a heaping measure of theatricality. Royal pageantry evolved not entirely to oil the vanity of the overlords but also to satisfy the human craving for symbolic ceremonials. The politician's own requirements in a democracy carried things a step further. To win a constituency, the politician must first gather a crowd...
Politics, moreover, has fashioned what has begun to seem like a permanent alliance with show business itself. In season, the same names that decorate the gossip columns and Variety begin popping up in political chronicles. Last week a squiblet on Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin turned out to be a note about a Boston fund raiser for Ronald Reagan. Singer Glen Campbell, it seems, is slated to give a benefit concert for John Connally. From the White House, via a guest list for a recent campaign dinner, comes word that supporters of the Carter-Mondale team include Johnny Cash, Willie...
Such news has become commonplace and so is usually received without reflection. But it must be time to wonder how the promiscuous mingling of politics and show business affects the public's capacity to distinguish between imagery and substance. The question is not idle when asked about a society in which Actor John Wayne and Comedian Bob Hope could wind up widely admired not only as entertainers but as political philosophers...
...Granted, show business folk have every right to politick. And politicians are entitled to use every self-serving gimmick that the law allows. Still, given the American tendency to worship stars, one may wonder whether eventually show business might be too casually accepted as an appropriate training ground for political leadership. The question is pertinent even if California's election of Actor George Murphy as a U.S. Senator is shrugged off as a typical West Coast aberration...
Money, to be sure, lies alongside, and sometimes above, other factors at the roots of the politics-show biz alliance. Impressive sums, $75,000 here, $100,000 there, were added to campaign treasuries in 1976 out of the proceeds of concerts by celebrated musical performers. Singer Linda Ronstadt was producing bucks for Governor Jerry Brown long before the two of them had become a hot gossip-column item. The Allman Brothers and Johnny Cash similarly helped out Jimmy Carter. This fund-raising mode was facilitated by a financing law that allowed concert receipts to be considered as donations...