Shadows

A discussion topic I ran across recently expressed surprise (and pleasure) at the results of a recent Gallup Poll which showed that ex-Vice-President Cheney's popularity among voters is higher than Speaker Pelosi's, by a margin of 37 percent favorability to 34.

Actually, the difference in the approval ratings of these two politicians is negligible, as it falls within the margin of error.

And anyway, while we're on the subject, poll participants weren't giving their opinions of Cheney and Pelosi, but their opinions of the people they think Cheney and Pelosi are.

You may have noticed that both are heavily made up when they appear on TV, so we don't really have too good an idea what they really look like. By the same token, neither reveals his or her true personality to the public. We only see the person that each of them wants us to think they really are, which is to say, we see an image of a person, but not the person. It's just like the counterfeit physical image they show us.

As Andy Warhol once said, "It's not who you are that's important, but who people think you are."

Public opinion polls reflect the cumulative opinions of a shadow of a "typical" cross-section of the voting public, which indicates as a group whether it prefers the shadow of one politician to the shadow of another.

Dick Cheney and Nancy Pelosi really are real people, but we don't know them. I suspect that if I did know them, I wouldn't like either one of them. I know I wouldn't like Cheney because I suspect he's a power-mad sadist with dangerous mental disorders, like Josef Stalin. Pelosi is a little harder to formulate in the mind, but what I see through the cracks in the facade doesn't exactly thrill me.