Commentary : Go Ahead, Make Your Allusion

Excuse me, but was this week’s Republican convention a preview for the coming presidential campaign, as Dan and Tom and Peter and others kept telling us? Or was it just a random assortment of clips from old movies, a few “American Revivals” to make us forget the language shortage caused by the writers strike?

That was the real Ronald Reagan up there, wasn’t it, long past his prime as an open field runner, making a lame duck plea for the team to go out there and “win one for the Gipper”?

That was George Bush, wasn’t it, the tongue-tied presidential nominee who delved into Dirty Harry’s quip bag and came up with the failed wisecrack, “Go ahead, make my 24-hour time period”?

And the new guy, Dan Quayle, who assured Reagan that he and Bush would indeed win one for the Gipper, he really is a senator, isn’t he? So many people compared him to Robert Redford--the layered hair, the porcelain teeth, the megawatt smile--that his speech began to look like a scene from “The Candidate.”

Quayle was in a cinematic mood. While he said he was proud of his wife and kids, of his eight years in the U.S. Senate, and of his two terms in Congress, what he seemed most proud of was being a “humble Hoosier,” a resident of the great state of Indiana, that microcosm of America that he said was so clearly and accurately depicted in the film “Hoosiers.”

“Hoosiers”? If reporters are smart, they’ll give up trying to figure out how Quayle got into the National Guard and see if he owns any video stores.

The Republican convention played more like a story conference at MGM. Forget Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite, what did Siskel and Ebert think? Why wait for David Broder and George Will to weigh in with heavy analyses when we can get Gary Franklin to dangle the whole show from his Sleepmeter and rank it on a scale of 1 to 10?

Politicians and their speech writers have always been notorious pack rats, collecting clever similes, metaphors and analogies to dot the political landscape like so many aluminum cans waiting to be recycled. No adage, homily or aphorism launched in public speech has ever been safe from adoption.

But lines and plot synopses from movies?

Perhaps the Reagan Revolution has taken us farther than even the President thinks. We’ve had academics and industrialists in the White House, a parade of lawyer-politicians, and one peanut farmer. But he’s our first actor, a man of easy humor and measured elocution. If the “Great Communicator” can stand before the nation and quote a line he uttered in a football movie in 1940, why shouldn’t Dan Quayle, who wasn’t even born until 1947, claim to have found the meaning of life in a 1986 movie about high school basketball?

Nothing said in a political speech is to be taken too literally, of course. If that were the case, we could expect the nominees to spend most of their time this fall debating which ones are most in love with their wives. And if the movies mentioned in this week’s speeches were more than glib reference points, what were they really telling us?

When the dying George Gipp said “win one for the Gipper,” he was asking coach Knute Rockne to stir the Notre Dame football team to victory over Army.

In Bush’s speech, the “Go ahead, make my 24-hour time period” line seemed to have had a couple of purposes. By bolixing Dirty Harry’s most famous thug-baiter, Bush was attempting to disarm those opponents who ridicule him for his frequent malaprops. Like the septuagenarian Reagan referring to his old friends in the Senate, the Roman senate, Bush was saying “Go ahead and criticize me, it doesn’t hurt.” At the same time, he was identifying with Clint Eastwood, a man of Bush’s approximate size, and one who has never been called a wimp.

But take the original “Make my day” line in context. Dirty Harry Callahan is really an anti-hero, a licensed vigilante who, in the scene where he squeezes those words out through snarled lips, is hopeful of having an excuse to detonate the brains of an apparent hoodlum from point-blank range with a .357 magnum.

Now, most of us are with you on the no pussy-footing with criminals theme, George, but let’s not redecorate the walls with them.

As for Quayle’s reference to “Hoosiers,” the part he remembered best was its depiction of small-town America. He compared the town in the movie to his own Huntington, just a quiet little burg where a wealthy offspring of publishing barons can grow up working hard and sampling honest values. What the movie was about, however, was an outmanned basketball team that won the Indiana State Championship back in the early 1950s.

The star of the team was a kid who had been coaxed out of retirement (he had disdained basketball to prepare for the college career he hoped would get him out of the small town) and the two main characters in the movie were troubled middle-aged men. One was a coach who had been banned from college basketball for beating up players. The other was the town drunk who was trying to sober up long enough to see his son play for the state championship in Indianapolis.

The real theme of “Hoosiers” was redemption, a subject most politicians have to deal with eventually.

Using Hollywood as fuel for political speech making has not been confined this summer to the Republicans. Michael Dukakis had his cousin, actress Olympia Dukakis, narrate a folksy Dukakis video family portrait for the Democratic convention, and in the opening of his acceptance speech, Michael gamely compared Olympia’s Academy Award, won last April, to the presidential trophy he expects to pick up in November.

So, if they’re all guilty, what’s the crime? We’re in the Instant Communications Era where movie titles, lines of dialogue and ad phrases enter the vocabulary and become easy access tools of speech. When he wasn’t working with Dirty Harry lines Thursday, Bush was borrowing from another tough cop, Sgt. Friday--”just the facts.”

At last year’s Academy Awards, Steven Spielberg said that “movies are today’s literature.” If so, their dialogue is today’s poetry.

It’s not surprising that modern speech writers who grew up on the classics--Abbott and Costello, John Wayne, “Charlie’s Angels”--would cull their literary allusions from the examples they know. Poor Abe Lincoln and other pre-electronic campaigners were stuck with the works of Shakespeare and those crazy poems of the ancient Greeks.

Given the nature of campaigns today, where opponents compete for style points only, the language doesn’t matter anyway. When candidates at a national political convention have something really important to say . . . well, to lift a line that Buddy Holly already lifted from John Ford’s “The Searchers,” “That’ll be the day.”