A Natural Choice?
“This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing… Political language is designed to make our lies sound truthful, and murder respectable”
— George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946.
“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over again for the truth to sink in… to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
— George Bush, May 24th, 2005.
George Washington was a famously distant figure, intent on retaining aristocratic rules of etiquette in the White House. Lincoln demonstrated the virtues of a sober, almost impersonal state of mind. Roosevelt, creator of the Fireside Chats, spoke more as a guiding parent than as a sympathetic friend. Johnson never smiled and favoured a monotonous tone. And Nixon wore dress shoes and black socks on the beach.
But by then Kennedy’s “Superman comes to the supermarket” persona had prepared the super-friendly style that would be continued by following presidents. However, even JFK did not go in for hugging random people (at least not outside the White House bedrooms).
Still, the future was to see this style become obligatory for candidates: we were to elect an actor, for god’s sake, then Bush Sr. got in almost solely on his charm. Clinton brought intimacy into the Whitehouse, kissing babies all the way there. Before, all that mattered was what a candidate could do for the country. Now, “bored by serious talk about issues, we seek out moments of sentimental truth.”
I don’t think it was quite boredom that started our (em)pathetic political revolution. The exhaustion of a generation who threw themselves wholeheartedly into pacifism, then had their heroes assassinated and their ideals ignored, plays a role. Also, the use of a visual medium to connect politicians with the masses had their appearance usurp their comprehension of affairs. Private broadcasters more interested in ratings than analytical value prefer to air highly emotive snippets than detailed justifications, eliminating what serious talk a candidate might articulate. And there is a growing view of what a citizen actually is: as an occasional participant in politics, a person only concerned with voting, not self-governance. Finally, we must not forget the role of the evangelical vote; a vote concerned more with the family values of a politician than the coherence of his worldview. There hasn’t been a single non-Christian president since god knows when.
I would suggest that all of these reasons have led to the state that we find ourselves in today, where elections are fought, and won, on how much we would like to have a beer with a candidate. Bush Jr., however much you would not like to think it, was actually quite a natural choice — he was no fluke.
Post 60s America
Kennedy’s new frontier, Johnson’s Great Society, the sexual and racial revolution, the war on poverty, urban renewal, and the resurgence of an environmental consciousness in the sixties merely resulted in three assassinations, violent demonstrations, student deaths, riots, drugs, and Vietnam. As Woodrow Wilson said, “It is only once in a generation that people can be lifted above material things.” Americans found themselves enduring “national disillusion and exhaustion,” followed by a materialistic backlash with the ME! generation and a culture of narcissism. People stopped looking outside for the greater good, rather turning their focus to what was best for themselves. “Their capacity for further response to crisis was spent.”
However, exhaustion does not fully explain the ensuing political apathy. There was a new vision of global capitalism, preceded by the near-total mobilisation of WWII. The biggest effect of using the first universal weapon was not the end of Japan’s brief moment of madness, but of a new idea of global power, manifested in the nuclear arms race (and represented by the moon landing). Presidents, faced with the bomb, needed to be able to project “an image of power everywhere around the globe,” the key word here being image.
Image is material, and material has a price. Presidential campaigns cost unbelievable amounts, favors that must be returned if the campaign is successful. There is another material interest; lobbyists have made a multi-billion dollar industry of offering congressmen to the wealthy. How else can you explain tax cuts for the rich while the scope of Medicare and social security are reduced? “What in fact occurs through privatisation is not the elimination of power, but the elimination of politics — the public discussion over how power is to be used, to what ends, and who is responsible” ( I can’t remember the origin of that quote). With money in charge, inexcusable positions are hidden behind emotive rhetoric, debates bereft of particularities — in fact, many believe statistics are actually an impediment to the successful politician.
There is another detail that might convince you of the banality brought in by the screen. People who have made their living in advertising have been hired to test the efficacy of any particular speech. These are the same people who coined the term “least objectionable programming” to recommend to producers how to lose the fewest number of potential viewers. They also use an innovative method of finding out what is working with an audience. People are given handsets with a dial on it, which can be switched from “bored” to “fuck yeah!” This test can determine to a single word which phrasing should or should not be used, regardless of their inherent value. In regular TV, this audience is a product that is sold to corporate interest. But in politics, we are sold to ideological ones.
Television
Of course, this method would not work with a enlightened audience. So why are we so indifferent? Well, we are an audience that has been sculpted for decades by our national pastime — watching TV. Image-laden politics owes its life to television. Here’s an interesting fact; the Nixon/Kennedy debate was the first to be televised, but still broadcast to a large audience on the radio. Polls of the two showed that although listeners had pegged Nixon as the victor of the two, viewers gave the win to the calmer, taller and more handsome democrat. Nixon was even quoted as saying he had been “betrayed” by his make-up artists.
Tony Schwartz (creator of the Daisy television ad with the little girl, the daisy and the nuclear bomb) invented the resonance model; the idea that an orator must get a response out of a crowd, as opposed to trying to put one in. The rolling up of sleeves, the appearance of friendliness, camera angle, strength, weight, height, the ability to stop the voice from wavering, the use of positive-sounding words, of recognisable/everyday words… all have become an important factor for the modern politician, at the expense of reason . A Kent State University study showed that the candidate with the most steadfast voice has won every election since 1960. Many political analysts — and every news anchor — would argue that only a candidate’s persona matters.
When I was researching this essay, it was hard to find a newspaper that was interested in the substance of the Gore/Bush debates. They focused on how “wooden” Gore was, or how successful Bush was at making fun of him for using “statistics.” There are two reasons why this is not surprising. The amount of time a candidate has to respond to questions in debates continues to be reduced, giving them less time to instil confidence and credibility into their answers.
But there is another lesser-known theory: that a “cool” medium, one with a low fidelity of definition, breeds a cool message, one that is vague and ill defined. A television politician is one who is “abstract, fuzzy, shaggy around the edges, and not needing to say everything at a gut level. Instead the candidate lets the voter fill in or put together a meaning or image” (on the other end of the spectrum, a hot medium, in real definition — like a newspaper or radio — demands a sharpness to its message). This rings true on a nightly basis — after all, don’t we routinely ignore plot inconsistencies and unbelievable character motivation in films? Forget, then, verifiable logical truths. It’s more valuable to talk of justice, freedom, democracy, terror and hope.
News
These also happen to be words that make good headlines. News conglomerates need daily news in daily papers and on hourly or even 24-7 news shows with little depth and lots of vigor. In such conditions, politicians must compete with rapists, murderers and explosions for airtime. He’s addressing a people through a medium that has otherwise taught its audience that they live in a dangerous world which they can’t control, which gives the candidate with the most caring and protecting façade the edge; often the one who uses an abstract rhetoric full of terms of intolerance and justice on the one hand, and peace and virtue on the other.
Producers know we are interested in politics, but need to find some way of selling it. So they accentuate the war between left and right, of right and wrong and of good and evil. TV Anchors portray a world in which everybody is at one of the extremes — pro-life or pro-choice, for example. “Journalists keep trying to find people who are at 1 and 9 on a scale of 1 to 10, rather than people at 3 to 7 where most people really are…[people who] are just as newsworthy and quotable as those at either end of the spectrum lobbing bombs toward the middle.” This goes for the politicians themselves, too. In polarised debates “people score points off one another and don’t even pretend there’s a possibility that one combatant might change his mind…. Each party has an electoral incentive to push issues towards unrealistic extremes.
In our brave new world, our ethical judgements are made over the scraps of information that have been deemed worthy of our attention by news organisations with vastly different objectives to our own. With these rhetorical scraps we piece together comprehensible stories about political actors and events, with no real knowledge of their significance. Our attention is held by a world portrayed without complexities, ironies or paradoxes, where constitution-backed freedoms are exchangeable with increased protection, a world of explosive and disruptive agendas. “If there was one undisputed victor in Gulf War One, it was CNN” (who’s round-the-clock coverage of the war vastly increased it’s viewers).
This has all helped degrade the power of democracy. Under such conditions a candidate who elucidated expected rates of change, reasoned dialogue and specific calculations for the net worth of specific policies would be almost unrecognisable.
Faith
Brought up in a world of heaven and hell, people recognize family values, nobility, power and the oversimplification of foreign policies. Democrats cannot compete with “God, guns, gays, and grizzlies.” Jeffrey Goldfarb goes one step further, to say that world views in which “complete explanations tie together…[the complexities of] human life into too neat a package,” lead to distinctly modern tyrannies–Marxism and Nazism being just two examples. Fundamentalism is both seductive and subversive in its proneness to polarise the universe into forces of good and evil, but it is exactly what the media barons are looking for.
These fundamentalists have sided with the Conservative movement, a traditional, non-progressive movement. In a country where the minimum wage is one of the lowest in developed nations, how else could a politician excuse tax cuts to the wealthy without a charismatic leader? There is a perfect parallel; starvation in Africa and Jesus.
Christians are willing to believe that foreign policy crusades are “part of a life and death struggle” against evil, but that with faith the country can overcome the trials of adversity, and that these policies might have to be performed outside “the limits of constitutional government.” A conservative views the citizen as that of an “occasional participant through the act of voting,” a loyal subject there to provide a stable basis of support in an increasingly dangerous and complex world.
Conclusion
George W. Bush is:
1. Good looking
2. Calm
3. Imprecise, possibly bereft of any details altogether
4. Emotive
5. Easily understandable by the widest audience possible
6. Hard-hitting, possibly an extremist
7. A capitalist
8. Associated with war
9. Full of notions of good and evil
10. An evangelist, possibly a fundamentalist
11. A Republican
Renana Brooks, in her book “It’s the Language, Stupid! — The Frightening Secret to Bush’s Success,” has found three tactics through which Bush tries to affect us; empty language (broad, abstract statements which are impossible to oppose), personalisation (projection of self, and one’s character, to a level of importance in the debate, making dissent a personal attack) and a negative framework (a pessimistic image of the world leading to what she calls a “learned helplessness;” a feeling that nothing can be done to make the situation any better, thus increasing apathy, and the feeling of fear). These are not stupid distractions. They are exactly what he needed to do to get into power. Of course we voted for him.
