CSotD: The Ratings Game
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I pity editorial cartoonists today because there is really so little to be said at the moment that will shed any new light on our situation. Every idea is obvious and how many variations on sexually assaulting the Statue of Liberty do we need?
Thus it is that the most telling cartoon of the day is Betty, in which a less direct commentary makes a more important point: When you ask "How the hell did we get here?" the answer is not Donald Trump but a world in which Donald Trump is seen as a perfectly acceptable person.
And I feel like every point I could make is one I've made before, but that only puts me in the same position as the aforementioned editorial cartoonists. I can't think of new ways to say those same things.
Might as well start with the TV shows Betty decries: A generation ago, none of that degrading, depressing stuff would get on the air, and, if it did, there would be massive complaints and sponsors would flee.
A century ago, Jacob Riis documented the poverty and degradation of the inner cities in "How The Other Half Lives," and the shocked response of society led to reforms, because in many cases people in a position to make change had genuinely not known how bad things were, and the people Riis profiled existed apart from society.
Today, Honey Boo-Boo does not spark a cry for reform but, rather, is celebrated as a star.
Moreover, we had a scandal two generations ago when it surfaced that favored contestants on quiz shows were being fed answers, but, today, we have so-called "reality" shows that are rigged and faked and there's no outcry from either government or the public.
What is more disturbing is that, when the fakery is revealed, their audiences don't seem to go down. It may be that they don't care, it may also be that they are impervious to facts. It hardly matters.
You don't have to go to the fake reality shows to see "Idiocracy" playing out in real life: Both "Seinfeld" and "Friends" were based on self-centered, vapid characters who became as popular as the bigot, Archie Bunker, had been a generation earlier, and, in all three cases, people were laughing with them, not at them.
It's good that the Trump tape woke up part of the country, that we finally hit a tipping point where people were willing to take a stance and declare something unacceptable, but there are plenty of people willing to shrug it off.
Which goes back to the popular notion that, if someone had yanked down Hitler's pants at an early speech in his career, he would have become a laughingstock and World War II would never have happened, or the related science-fiction idea of going back in time to kill baby Hitler.
This assumes Hitler walked into a perfectly healthy society and somehow imposed his will upon people who, otherwise, had no such instincts. It is nonsense: Hitler succeeded because people wanted him to succeed, and, if he had failed, someone else would have succeeded.
So here we are, with last night's town hall over and done, and it seems that Hillary Clinton emerged as the winner, but I doubt that Trump's evening of strutting, interrupting and telling bare-faced lies cost him a great deal of support. To his fanbase, the evening was more of his "telling it like it is" and refusing to knuckle under to the system and the mainstream media.
And you can sneer at Honey Boo-Boo or the various fake science and fake history shows on TV, but they wouldn't be on the air if people weren't eager to watch them, nor would Donald Trump be the Republican nominee for president if people were not willing to vote for him.
Ann Telnaes live-sketched the debate, and this quick portrait of Hillary Clinton captured the part of the process that fascinated me: How do you respond when your opponent is completely off the rails?
Bearing in mind how the media leapt upon Al Gore for audibly sighing when George W. Bush was spouting economic nonsense, Clinton had to be aware that her non-verbal responses would be as critical as anything she said, and I watched her to see how she would react. As Telnaes captures it here, it was with a self-confident expression that, if anything, brought back Ronald Reagan's "Well, there you go again."
It was as if she were watching a spoiled child throw a tantrum, but she was under pressure not to respond with a tantrum of her own, and I thought she handled an impossible situation well.
Telnaes suggests the "looming" aspect, the bullying posturing of Trump, but I doubt his adherents noticed it. I was more struck by his pacing than by his looming; at one point I thought maybe he had actually left the stage, while at others you could see him stalking around in the background. It was more bizarre than threatening.
In a debate during her first Senate campaign, Clinton picked up support when her opponent, Rick Lasio, walked over to her podium and tried to hand her some papers, an intrusion into her personal space that was immediately noted and widely criticized.
Trump never approached that, but it may have prepared her for the casual response to his brooding petulance that Telnaes captures here.
So what's the takeaway?
The response to the Trump tape is probably more important than the response to last night's town hall. As said, it's good that it stirred some people into speaking up, but you'd be naive to think there was going to be some moment in which the entire country woke up and reversed itself.
There is an appetite for what Trump is selling, and, if you don't think so, turn on your TV.
And if you can't stand to watch that depressing nonsense for half an hour, imagine what it will be like to watch for four years, or eight.
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