After the last big
speech and debate game
more citizens started saying “Yea, no…”
“Yea, no we ate at McDonald’s.”
“Yea, no he hit a deer on the way to work.”
“Yea, no double binds suck but
whatcha gonna do?”
Watch opposing parties choose
Coke or Pepsi, then
collect all executive bottle caps.
The syrup is different!
Plus broadcasters sell ads
for the economy,
win or lose.
Who will we be?
Affirmation goes smoother
with ambivalence in this
Lincoln-Douglas taste test.
Cast the jive uncle tongue.
Sports fans who aren’t even pundits
can just know, you know,
how to chill with
relative truth.
So, uh,
vote cool.
In a letter entitled Obscene funding to the editor of the Daily Astorian last Friday, Don McDaniel, a libertarian of note in these parts, tells Daily A readers, “The underlying problem is the inattention of voters to what is going on in our country and world around us. They prefer watching sitcoms to viewing, reading and analyzing the news.”
Don asks us all to pay more attention and make our voting decisions based on our own research, and not on the ads from the candidates and their cronies. Under this scheme, the money in elections would mean little, he says.
I completely agree. I have a lot of trouble figuring out why all the money matters. I haven’t based many voting decisions on campaign ads, and I don’t know many that have.
The presidential election this time around is as obvious as usual as far as the differences between the major party candidates. No amount of campaign ads could make me vote for Romney, and I’ll only vote for Obama if I’m not sure he’ll easily carry Oregon (which I don’t think will be the case). My worry for the country is that there seem to be people that can’t see the differences, or that can be persuaded to see things that aren’t there.
There’s a lot at stake in this election (as usual). Not only on the presidential level, but at all levels of government. Look for a post from this Rabbi on the Edge about his ideas on getting representation for the people. Can you say lottery? Interactive democracy? Oy! Voting is so 20th century! Mishugina!
“I have a lot of trouble figuring out why all the money matters.”
Maybe it mostly matters because it matters most to mainstream broadcasters and publishers who tell us what matters.
Good stuff Watt.
Yea, “relative truth”. I think about this concept all the time.
Communication is a funny thing and ultimately people are going to believe what they want to believe, especially when it’s so difficult to be adequately informed. Look at ‘broadcasting’ to get an idea of what we’re going to be harvesting ‘later in the season’.
From the Don McDaniel letter above, “They prefer watching sitcoms to viewing, reading and analyzing the news.”
How about watching a sitcom about news that does what we wish the news was doing, adequately informing us. opening scene to HBO’s “The Newsroom” (be warned, there are some ‘bad words’ in this)
Or this one… This is one of my all time favorites… Jon Stewart on CNN confronting “Crossfire”. The show “Crossfire” was cancelled not long after this.
The older I get the more I believe that it’s all about storytelling. We all identify with a story. If we know and care about the characters what happens to them matters. Otherwise, it’s just some brown people in a far away place that died, or something.
What’s on tv tonight?
Good stuff Watt and Rabbi, I enjoy reading you two.
Storytelling, yes! Alas prime-time tellers equate citizens with captive consumers. This narrows our options while carbonating the illusion of choice. By choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate, for example, Mitt Romney sharpened the contrast between major brand candidacies that are both controlled by private corporations. “Coke or Pepsi” now feels more like “RC or 7-Up.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbkoeJ7BVsI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXmc7DG4uu8
Short run commercials mainline our choices. But as citizens cheer for a favorite brand, we’d be wise to fill our canteens with springwater. Prepare for the longer story.
Thank you Matthew for helping us do that here.
A Democrat friend took issue with my “RC or 7-Up” metaphor (and grimmaced at “Coke or Pepsi”) whilst we were discussing the poetry of politics in my bookshop. Instead, he said the choice between Obama and Romney was more like “fruit juice or Monster drink”.
So now I’m thinking of Obama as Hawaiian Punch. Tastes sweet and contains some real fruit juice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UihIjK9xm4
Beneath the metaphors, though, we need to understand the story. And I think David Dayen pegs an important part of the story in his post today at FireDogLake. He says the great debate we’re supposedly having “is really a relatively narrow debate, between radically transforming a set of social programs, and just cutting them. An entire other set of alternatives gets marginalized.”
http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/08/27/obama-im-prepared-to-make-a-whole-range-of-compromises/
Meanwhile, the great debate over environmental protection seems like a choice between whether we’re going to take a short-cut to hell or take a slightly longer route so we can make out for a while.
Dang those metaphors.