CSotD: Building the bandwagon
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Steve Artley on political tone.
I don't know that we have had a lot of truly polite political campaigns, but we have had candidates who attempted to leave the mudslinging and the waving of bloody shirts to their surrogates.
Good manners need to be mutual, if you don't want to come off like Michael Dukakis, who carried it way too far with a polite, professorial answer to Bernard Shaw's question about how he would view the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered. The problem wasn't that Dukakis was too polite — he was running against Bush Senior, who isn't exactly a volcano himself — but that he came across as not just passionless but wimpy.
After all, while Dukakis was riding around in a tank looking like Charlie Brown, Bush's people were producing and airing the Willie Horton ad.
People say they want good manners, but they respond to mud and blood. The trick is throwing it without getting any on you.
Applause, as Bob Dylan noted, is kind of bullshit. But, then again, what do you want? Genet noted that someone killed himself after seeing a performance of "The Balcony," calling that a case in which his art had elicited a real response, but I think we could maybe seek a middle ground that would please Dylan without satiating Genet.
Audience engagement is a tricky issue. You can't win an election without creating a bandwagon for people to climb up on — that is, after all, where the term comes from.
And participating in the process from down here in the Peanut Gallery poses its own dilemmas.
Posting a comment to an on-line piece that already has 100 or more comments is probably a case of spitting in the ocean, but there is a good argument to be made for confronting trolls and not letting their prejudices, delusions and vitriol go unchallenged, lest their version become the narrative.
And it will, despite the intelligent, well-informed give-and-take that people say they want.
When I first got out of college, I took a job selling "The Great Books of the Western World." It was pretty awful and I ended up testifying in front of the Federal Trade Commission against them, but it was, as the expression goes, "a learning experience."
Part of our canned presentation was a phony "survey" in which, among other things, we asked them about their TV viewing, and, almost invariably, they would answer that they very rarely had it on at all, and, when they did, it was usually PBS or the news.
Meanwhile, their cat would be stretched out on top of the set, basking in the warmth.
If nobody ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public, there have been plenty of political campaigns that have gone on the rocks by overestimating it, or, at least, by putting too much faith in what people say they want.
In the case of the Great Books, the entire idea was to sell them an expensive set of books that would sit on a shelf unopened while they watched TV, and not just PBS and the news. We were playing into their desire to feel like they were the kind of people they thought they probably ought to be.
Same principle as selling them Bibles or Bowflexes.
Same principle as selling them a political candidate.
Incidentally, when the FTC was slapping down the Great Books (actually the parent company, Encyclopedia Brittannica), they were after them for deceptive employment practices, not deceptive marketing. There is nothing illegal about selling people something they don't need, don't really want and are never going to use, as long as it does the thing they claim they want it for. And it doesn't even have to do it well.
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