CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
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| KILL THE BATMAN - The writer explains where his is coming from in this RADIO INTERVIEW of the column - turn on the volume if you're angry or just want to listen to some good entertainment! |
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
By Daren Foster
The silly season is now officially over. The conventions have played out. The candidates chosen. The media has designated and defined the issues that this year’s Presidential election will feature. Welcome to campaign 08, American style.
Wait, wait, wait, the car brakes screeching to a halt. What’s this talk of the media designating and defining the issues? That’s not what they do. They report on the issues as they arise during the campaign, laying out the facts and figures as the candidates present them. Even-handedly. Objectively. Dispassionately and professionally. The media reports. You decide. Isn’t that one of the tag lines viewers are bludgeoned with before and after every commercial break?
That’s so Walter Cronkite. To do some actual reporting, the press would have to do some actual reporting. You know, diligently following leads, talking to sources, brushing up on the details of official party policies and platforms. Like they do on TV shows and in movies. Reporters do not establish their own narrative arc and judge candidates according to how they adhere to the press’s manufactured storyline, relying almost exclusively on campaign press releases and PR flacks who traffic solely in misinformation, gossip and innuendo. That’s so Walter Winchell.
Yet, starting in Denver, the media laid out the Things Democrats Need to Do to Have a Successful Convention like commandments carved into stone tablets and brought down from Mount Sinai. No less a God than the ubiquitous Public Opinion Polls -- polls commissioned, paid for, and interpreted by the media outlets themselves -- had told them what the Things Democrats Need to Do to Have a Successful Convention. Heaven help the Democrats if they ignored God’s--no sorry, the media’s--no that’s not right either--the polls’--we mean, the public’s will and strayed from the script.
First and foremost, the Democratic candidate for president, Barak Obama, had to prove to the rest of America that he and his family were regular folks just like them. Ignoring the racist subtext at work (the Obama’s are black; regular American folks are white), the media had decided--no, not decided--discerned from reading their polls that Senator Obama was a little too elitist, cosmopolitan, skinny and couldn’t bowl well enough to be able to make a connection with the electorate. His wife, Michelle, gave off a whiff of militant anger that upset regular Americans’ sensibilities. I mean, can’t we all just get along?
Well-to-do celebrity journalists decree that a well-to-do celebrity politician needs to prove that he is really just a regular guy, no different from the well-to-do celebrity journalists themselves who are just regular guys like the regular guys throughout America.
Got it?
To their (dis)credit, the Democrats adhered to the script flawlessly, perhaps a little too flawlessly. The media began to wonder out loud if maybe Obama had become too popular, taking his acceptance speech outside the convention hall to a football stadium where 80 000+ people would be in attendance. That’s verging on cult-like, Nuremberg Rally-style. The American people like popular public figures but they don’t like Nazis. If the Democrats really want to win in November, they better be careful about getting too popular. That’s how it all started with Hitler.
The following week, the media horde got out of Denver, baby, and set up shop in St. Paul, Minnesota where the incumbent Republicans were nominating John McCain their candidate for president. Establishing their Things Republicans Need to Do to Have a Successful Convention list was a little more difficult as Hurricane Gustav bore down on New Orleans, diverting everyone’s attention from the convention and delaying the proceedings for a day and a half. Also, the list was only going to be one item 
long. The Republicans needed to convince everyone that they hadn’t been in control of the White House over the course of the last 8, messy years and therefore would be the best party to change the direction that they have, in fact, taken the country.
The Democrats needed to pretend they were something the media said Americans wanted. The Republicans needed to pretend they weren’t something the media said Americans had wanted but now didn’t. There’s a distinction in there somewhere, folks, very likely an important one. Let’s just hope the fate of the free world doesn’t depend on voters figuring it out.
Regular readers of this column (shout out over the hurricane tossed waves to Page) will know how I ultimately judged the two conventions. The Democratic side engaged me far more than the
Or more to the point, when I’m looking for the surreal, I’d prefer to find it in my entertainment rather than my politics. And 90210 was plenty surreal. Aside from the usual other-worldliness of obvious 20somethings playing teenagers, there was the too-cool-to-be-a-teacher journalism teacher, Ryan Matthews, played by Ryan Eggold who has more than a passing resemblance in look and style to Half Nelson’s too-cool-to-be-a-teacher-he’s-actually-a-junkie Dan Dunne, played by Ryan Gosling in a movie directed and co-written by Ryan Fleck. (I’ve never even met a Ryan in real life). Brenda Walsh shows up to hang out with her bestest friend ever, Kelly Taylor who is now West Beverly High’s guidance counsellor. Why is it that on TV, former students inevitably show up at their old school as guidance counsellors and not, say, science or journalism teachers? Because they’re not named Ryan? And if I have my Beverly Hills 90210 lore down pat, weren’t Brenda and Kelly mortal enemies back in the day? Did I miss their big reconciliation somewhere along the line?
The height of surrealism, though, had to be Jessica Walters as Lucille Bluth, er, Tabitha Wilson. Swilling cocktails in the a.m. and nursing hangovers in the p.m., it was a performance torn right out of the pages of an Arrested Development script, complete with a car accident. (For those non-Arrested Development buffs, Lucille Bluth made frequent appearances on the America’s Worst Drivers television show.) It was as if the 90210 creators just told Walters to be exactly like Lucille Bluth, only a little nicer.Such blatant artistic thievery, storyline and character amnesia, and retro-grasping nostalgia are fine for TV shows like 90210. It’s what draws me to them in the first place. When political parties partake in these antics and the media encourages their behaviour, well, that is frankly horrifying and more than a little dispiriting. I believe that’s called infotainment which may well serve the bottom line and ratings but undermine the notion of a full and functioning democracy.
READ MORE COLUMNS BY DAREN FOSTER
September 8 2008 - KILL THE BATMAN - Seriously. Put him out of his misery.
September 1 2008 - MY SUMMER VACATION
August 25 2008 - PHONING IT IN
August 18 2008 - GUNGA GULUNGA
August 11 2008 - EMMY DAZE - Where is The Wire
August 4 2008 - ME TALK GOOD
July 28 2008 - TAKE THE CANNOLI
July 21 2008 - TECHNO BEAT 2
July 14 2008 - TECHNO BEAT 1
July 7 2008 - THE INDIGESTIBLE HULK
June 30 2008 - KING GEORGE
June 23 2008 - PLAYING ONE ON TV
June 16 2008 - NEW MONDAY MORNING COLUMN - LIFE IS TOO SHORT - Finally, I saw the last episode of The Wire.
June 4 2008 - FLIP THIS CHANNEL - Buying first house leads to having many things on the mind.
May 29 2008 - BE AFRAID VERY AFRAID - The Canadian military is no longer some namby-pamby, truce-brokering, do-gooding, adventure-seeking, peacekeeping bunch of pacifiers
May 22 2008 - STONE COLD BORING ANGEL - All about The Stone Angel
May 15 2008 - HARD TO SWALLOW CANDY - Madonna is back!
May 8 2008 - THE DUMBEST GUYS IN THE ROOM
May 1 2008 - AN ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT
April 24 2008 - Just TWEEN you and me
April 17 2008 - A Day at the Movies
April 10 2008 - Stop the (March) Madness!
April 3 2008 - Heaven's Gate Revisited
March 27 2008 - ACTING OUT - A great actor working with sub-par material
March 20 2008 - TECHNO ROBBER BARONS - When daylight savings time ruins my taping of The Wire
March 13 2008 - DAMN AGES - Growing up is hard to do
March 6 2008 - CULT OF SADNESS PART 2 - How tearjerkers still baffle me!
February 28 2008 - CULT OF SADNESS - How tearjerkers baffle me!
