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Conclusion. Theaters of Compassion
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
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202 People in pain have been stock figures in American political theater . As the scholar Javier Moscoso has noted, “The uses of pain have nothing to do with truth, but rather with drama.”1 Illustrating the point, the 1966 American film The Fortune Cookie placed actor Jack Lemmon at the center of his era’s pain pageant. Lemmon played a sports cameraman who had been knocked down accidentally by a player during a professional football game. Though only dazed, he was convinced to fake severe injuries by his unscrupulous lawyer and brother-in-law, played by Walter Matthau. He sued the team to win a settlement for his injury, pain, and suffering. The comedy revolves around the plaintiff’s fraud, the lawyer’s greed, the gullibility of doctors, the football player’s sense of responsibility , and the attempts by insurance company investigators to uncover the scam. In the theatrics of The Fortune Cookie, the answers are satisfyingly clear to the omniscient viewers, and so are the stakes. When Lemmon lies in bed in a full neck brace watching a television program, he hears the words Abraham Lincoln says to him (and us), “If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.” All the more satisfying is Lemmon’s decision, at the end of the film, to embrace virtue and reveal himself as a fraud. With humor and determination, he redeemed himself fully. Would that distinguishing true pain from fraud were always this simple. When Reagan came to power in the early 1980s, this overdrawn theatrical image of the person in pain became newly embedded in public policy. As anthropologist Talal Asad has noted,“The modern nation as an imagined community is always mediated through constructed images.”2 In Reagan’s time, the person claiming fraudulently to be in pain was one CONCLUSION Theaters of Compassion THEATERS OF COMPASSION 203 such constructed persona. The disabled person in chronic pain became a symbol of much that was wrong with liberalism—its gullibility, its support for government dependence, and its embrace of welfare at the cost of hard work. The preceding pages have told the story of how these problems of pain and social welfare came to define American political theater and (perhaps more important) how the courts came to play a central role in judging pain. The book shows how and why these questions of compassion and government made good theater and good politics and how they endured as fundamental conflicts that still define the American political landscape. The problem of pain touched intimately on the problem of how the people of the country were bound together. The questions of which kinds of pain are real, which warrant sympathy , and whose plight is deemed illegitimate have provoked constant political spectacle in the many decades before Reagan and since. Today, these remain powerful moral and political questions at the heart of American government. What to do about pain that doesn’t go away but lingers, especially in a prosperous nation where hard work, frequent injury, and aging are all common? Does pain caused by chronic disease warrant special consideration , long-term attention, and ongoing relief? Whose pains should we, as a society, be willing to carry for a lifetime and at whose expense? When is pain and relief merely a fraud? Beyond pitting liberals against conservatives, the question of pain (as I have argued here) also refined the very meaning of “conservative” and “liberal” as keywords in the American political vocabulary. “Political words take their meaning from the tasks to which their users bend them,” Daniel Rodgers has observed.3 What it means to be liberal or conservative became ideologically solidified around the problem of pain. From the years immediately following World War II until today, the political Right railed consistently against certain kinds of pain, seeing public relief in particular as a symptom of a weak, coddled, and dependent society. As liberal government expanded to address the needs of people professing to be in pain, so too did conservative ire grow. For the political Left, just as consistently, compassion toward the pain of others—the disabled soldier, society’s elders, those injured at work, or people suffering from debilitating disease—underpinned an expansive view of government and a comprehensive ideology of what society owes to its citizens. Positions on pain did not always align with party ideology, but for Republicans and [34.237.245.80] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:18 GMT...