|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
ISRANET
DAILY BRIEFING MEDIA, STEREOTYPES, AND HYPE THE TYRANNY OF STEREOTYPE So Michelle Obama spends a lifetime forming herself as an original woman, with the special characteristics and quirks that normally distinguish a complete adult. Then she goes to the Democratic convention and demonstrates that she’s ordinary. This is the tyranny of the stereotype in action. Stereotypes strip away uniqueness, among the most precious of human qualities. It’s not that voters want to see themselves mirrored in public figures. Any given voter may well be as remarkable as Ms. Obama. But they still want to see a purely imaginary creature, a person who’s universally acceptable, a fantasy of what an average woman might be if she existed. Ms. Obama’s chore, when she gave her speech the other night, was not to reveal herself but to reassure voters about their own values. She was there to reassert what the public needs to believe, or thinks it should believe. TV commentators who analyze speeches such as hers judge public figures according to a formula that has already been tested and found acceptable. And they judge themselves in a similar way. Not one of them dares to show more than a flicker of originality. They want to sound shrewd, they want to avoid repeating what someone else has just said, they may hope to insert a slightly fresh thought into the debate. But they never stray far from what everyone else thinks. They are there to say the right thing, which usually means a version of the national consensus. They will not be welcome on television if they are overly original, if they sound odd or weird. Stereotypes make public figures predictable and therefore comfortable. And there’s no question that stereotypes are necessary. (The term comes from the word for printing from a solid plate, something unchangeable once it’s formed.) Subtract stereotypes from ordinary life and the world would be far too confusing. It would be necessary to re-think, several dozen times an hour, our attitudes to everything and everyone around us. As for fiction, if we eliminated stereotyped characters we would have to do without movies and bring an aura of wisdom with them. We believe in them automatically and barely realize they can be questioned. Walter Lippmann, who was the most admired of American journalists during much of the 20th century, wrote in 1922 in his book Public Opinion that “A stereotype may be so consistently and authoritatively transmitted in each generation from parent to child that it seems almost like a biological fact.” Even in private life our most intimate emotions may be governed by conventions that we have absorbed in the same unconscious way. A recent documentary on NPR’s This American Life, called Break-Up, dealt with the aftermath of romance. Ira Glass, the narrator, began by telling his listeners that when a love affair ends you realize that your feelings are a cluster of cliches, which are abbreviated versions of stereotypes. The next voice on the program was a young woman saying that she didn’t want the man who had dropped her to call, but she also wanted him to call. She didn’t want to take him back, but realized she would if she could. She sounded genuine, laughing at herself while on the point of tears, knowing that all the time she knew she was living an ironbound stereotype but couldn’t help herself. The most powerful stereotypes derive their strength from fear. The late Robert Jacobs, an architect who built hospitals all over this country and the U.S., understood what it was to live with bureaucratic stereotypes. He said that without exception all of his clients wanted their buildings to be original, but nobody wanted to do anything for the first time. What they most passionately desired was to banish their fears of failure. In Denver, Ms. Obama had to eliminate the fear that she might be strange and therefore threatening. She did it, but at what cost to her spirit? PISTOL-PACKIN’
PALIN MIGHT BE JUST THE RIGHT CHOICE A “bombshell?” A pregnant teen from a small town. Where have these people been? A true media “bombshell” would be the discovery of a small town in North America where teens are keeping their hands off each other. Good grief. Yet Bristol Palin’s swelling belly seems to have captivated Washington—and St. Paul, Minn., where the Republican Party has gathered to weather two storms, first Gustav and now Bristol, the 17-year-old daughter of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin—like nothing since Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky and the blue dress she neglected to send to the cleaner. The experts turned out to be wrong about Clinton, of course: He didn’t have to resign, didn’t become a lame-duck president—and his popularity held at numbers that today’s candidates for president may never reach. Those experts are now saying the John McCain-Sarah Palin “family values” pitch is sadly out of tune, but is it? The media presumption has always been that “family values” are all about going to church and putting up picket fences and being there for the birthday parties, but they are also about being there for the flip side of family life. And in this instance Sarah and Todd Palin seem to be giving pretty good value. They can’t be particularly pleased by events, but you can’t always control events any more than you can control weather systems building in the Gulf of Mexico—so you deal with it best you can.… [I]f certain members of the Washington press corps were reassigned after the 2008 Presidential Election to, say, Alaska, their view of guns might change overnight with the first snort coming from the backyard. It is simply patronizing to suggest that a young woman from Alaska is somehow not up to the challenge because her only real experience is being mayor of a pitiable small town of less than 7,000. Well, let’s examine that for a moment. We have, on the Democratic side, Barack Obama for president, who went from Harvard Law School to community work to the Illinois State Senate in his mid-30s. We have Joe Biden for vice-president, who barely made the minimum-age cut, 30, when he reached the U.S. Senate. As for the “most experienced” candidate in the race, 72-year-old John McCain, Ms. Palin’s running mate, graduated from the Naval Academy, joined the navy, was captured in Vietnam, returned and jumped straight into politics as a U.S. senator. It’s a fair question to ask: Exactly who has the most experience with real people facing real issues—a two-term mayor of a small northern community or a bunch of guys who’ve been surrounded by staff for so long they don’t even know where their coats are hung?… THE
AUDACITY OF HYPE By choosing the venue of a vast outdoor stadium as John Kennedy did for his “new frontier” acceptance, and by speaking on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” address, Barack Obama—whose claim to fame is an ability to move audiences with his words—deliberately invited comparison with two of the most memorable speeches of our recent history. What a mistake. A speaker must first ask: what is the best setting to make close contact with the person I want to reach? In this day and age, it is not a huge throng wildly cheering on cue. On the contrary, the target is the individual American voter watching a TV or computer screen at home, accustomed to looking over the shoulders of elected representatives, in colorful convention assembled, selecting the party’s nominee. Instead, Obama’s handlers offered the political version of “American Idol”—the audacity of hype.… Belatedly, Obama did what he could to lower expectations for this speech, saying it would be “workmanlike” with no high rhetoric.… By becoming the first African-American to win a major party’s presidential nomination, he made history, but he failed to come up with a historic acceptance address.… A poignant reminder of the Original Obama came in the speech’s moving peroration. His evocation of Martin Luther King’s dream of togetherness at the Lincoln Memorial was beautiful and timely. A stern editor could have improved the 4,500-word acceptance by cutting a thousand words of populist boilerplate and partisan-pleasing shots that offend centrists. But the die was cast before the writing began. The pretension of the fake Grecian temple setting clashed with the high-decibel, rock-star format and overwhelmed the history implicit in the event. Ancient Greeks had a word for it: hubris. (William Safire, a former Times Op-Ed columnist, is the chairman of the Dana Foundation.) WANT
REAL CHANGE? QUIT NOMINATING LAWYERS! The 2008 presidential campaign is supposed to be a referendum on “change”—who brings it and who doesn’t. Real change, however, hasn’t yet proven to mean new politics.…This year the media seem to think change means race and sex….But does that mean de facto that the country will be run any differently? There is, however, one area where we might have seen real change. The Democrats could have not nominated another lawyer. This may partly explain why former military officer John McCain and working-mom Sarah Palin are polling near even with Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, in a year that otherwise favors the Democrats. A snowmobiling, fishing and hunting mom of five who was trained as a journalist seems like a breath of fresh air—and accentuates the nontraditional background of former naval officer John McCain. If the Republicans win, it may well be that, like George Bush and Dick Cheney, or Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, they weren’t members of the legal culture. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama got out of Harvard Law School, worked for a firm, offered his legal expertise as a community organizer and went into politics. Joe Biden graduated from law school and almost immediately ran for office. In the Democratic primary, winner Obama, runner-up Hillary Clinton and third-place finisher John Edwards were all lawyers. In 2004, both Democratic nominees, John Kerry and Edwards, were lawyers.… In fact, every Democratic presidential nominee for president and vice president in the last seven elections—except Gore who dropped out of law school to run for Congress—has been a lawyer.… Of course, there have been Republican nominees and presidents who were lawyers—Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Bob Dole—but recently far less so than the Democrats, as the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes attest. So, what’s wrong with the Democratic nominee once again being a lawyer? After all, legal minds are trained to think precisely and evaluate both sides of an issue. The problem is that lawyers usually do not run companies, defend the country, lead people, build things, grow food or create capital.… In the past, law school has not necessarily been considered ideal presidential training. Harry Truman was audacious perhaps because he had tried and failed as a haberdasher. Dwight Eisenhower learned about leadership from his years as a general. George H.W. Bush was a businessman and Ronald Reagan an actor. Even unpopular presidents like Jimmy Carter (farmer) and George W. Bush (businessman) brought different perspectives to the job. Change for Democrats this year was not a new strain of liberal politics or a different race or gender. Instead, they needed to have run candidates who talked, thought and acted differently from their usual run-of-the-mill sorts. And that meant someone other than the same old, same old legal eagles who appear glib—but so often manage to lose in November. For a glaring example of the left-wing media’s treatment of Gov. Sarah Palin, see Janet Bagnall’s “Backward Step For Women” published in The [Montreal] Gazette. CIJR's daily "ISRANET BRIEFING"
is available by fax and e-mail. The daily ISRANET BRIEFING
is a service of CIJR. We hope that you find it useful and that
you will support it and our pro-Israel educational work by forwarding
a minimum $36.00 tax-deductible contribution [please send a cheque or
VISA/Mastercard information to CIJR (see cover page for address)]. All
donations include a membership-subscription to our respected quarterly
ISRAFAX print magazine, which will be mailed to your home. CIJR's Briefing series attempts to convey a wide variety of opinions on Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world for its readers' educational and research purposes. Reprinted articles and documents express the opinion of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the Institute.
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
