How to Speak Heartland

Fred Thompson's narcoleptic performance in this year's primaries proved that he's not the greatest candidate around. And when it comes to his day job, he's not exactly the guy you'll see leading the next big revival of King Lear. But as his starring turn at Tuesday night's Republican convention showed, he will always find work, because he has one rare skill in abundance: He is fluent in Heartland.

Heartland isn't a foreign language; it's not even a dialect. It's a combination of certain words and certain visuals that add up to describe a worldview. It works via careful balance. So that you hear, for instance, the lofty language of ancient and patriotic glory, of martial and heroic valor, but juxtaposed with a tone of Pepperidge Farm. Heartland thumps its chest and knows its strength, but labors under the existential dread of gathering foreign threat. Heartland also loves—loves—metaphor. Thus, a question of fiscal policy, in the hands of as skilled a practitioner as Thompson, becomes: "They say they are not going to take any water out of your side of the bucket, just the 'other' side of the bucket! That's their idea of tax reform."

Democrats are no good at Heartland. Sure, they've got Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who lit up last week's convention by sounding like an actual human being. But the main thrust of their speeches follows the Clinton route: trying to make wonkishness sexy. The best moments of Thompson's speech showed what they're missing. With hand stuck casually in pocket, he laid out the case for John McCain with the easy charm of a country lawyer bringing a jury around. He also found his laughs, as when he noted that McCain viewed the historic number of demerits his father amassed at the Naval Academy "as a record to be beaten." And naturally he made the kind of bold patriotic claims that are very near the core of Heartland. "We live in the freest, strongest, most generous and prosperous nation in the history of the world, and we are thankful," he drawled. (The reference to McCain having dated an exotic dancer named Marie, the Flame of Florida, was not Heartland. It was just weird.)

But last night saw a curious twist on those affirmations of patriotism. Throughout the evening--too frequently for it to be coincidence—love of country was held up as something demonstrated through physical suffering and death. Each occurrence was honorable and just; it's the pile-up that begins to seem off-putting: a quick shot of Reagan waving from hospital window, a voice-over saying "no one can take away what our flag symbolizes" as a widow is presented with one in a cemetery, a biographical film about Mike Monsoor, the Navy SEAL who threw himself on a grenade. Even Abraham Lincoln was described, over an illustration of John Wilkes Booth's fatal shot, as one who served "the country he had put first, before self."

Thompson's biographical remarks about McCain's ordeal in Hanoi were the payoff of this trend, sounding, as they did, like excerpts from the shooting script of The Passion of the Christ. "When John ejected, part of the plane hit him--breaking his right knee, his left arm, his right arm in three places," he said. Then, later: "After days of neglect, covered in grime, lying in his own waste in a filthy room, a doctor attempted to set John's right arm without success ... and without anesthesia." And this goes on.

God knows the Republicans are right to honor a man who went through that hell; we all should do so. You can also see, though, the narrow, functional need this served last night.  All these evocations of noble suffering, of redemptive pain, have a way of turning up the rhetorical temperature. There's a model for this, and I wonder if Thompson, old-timey actor that he is, is aware of it: the speech that Antony delivers over Caesar's body. As he invites the crowd to inspect each tatter of Caesar's cloak ("Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through: / See what a rent the envious Casca made,") Antony's listeners turn all the more passionately against the conspirators. As last night's pageant wore on, every attack on the Democrats seemed to hit harder. When, toward the end of his speech, Thompson insulted "a teleprompter speech designed to appeal to American critics abroad," he made Obama sound not merely ignoble but treacherous.