Mainstream media sources and the blogosphere as well have been going overboard trying to interpret the results of the 2006 midterm elections in the U.S. Many different angles are being explored but I am simply going to take a meta view instead of adding my two cents in any one area.
This was a broad reaction to a lot of little nagging questions. Some outlets are convinced that the results of the election reflect the general feelings about the war in Iraq. Others talk about the cultures of corruption and incompetence that characterize the Bush Administration and Republican leadership in Congress. Others claim it was a repudiation of all things neo-con.
It's quite possible that all of them are correct.
But I don't think so.
I believe it comes down to the simple fact that our entire society in this country is built on rules of marketing, and that nobody has a clue anymore about what is real and what is proper. This was a battle of Bandwagons. This was a battle of Card Stacking and Name Calling. And most important, this was a battle of Glittering Generalities and Loaded Words. In other words, the American people were once again sold a bill of goods thanks to the manipulations of marketing experts.
To their credit, the Democrats' marketing approach didn't harm them, but they didn't win because of shrewd message manipulation. They won because the other guys tried too hard once again to manipulate their own message, and the Dems merely had to sit back and applaud their failures.
Notice that nobody offered any solutions to our current problems. Nobody debated the wisdom of "staying the course" vs. "cut and run" sloganeering. Apparently, nobody had to. The message of failed leadership was all the Dems needed to hold onto, which they did, and the American voters, or (ahem) the 40% or so that actually bothered to make their votes count, swept them into power in Washington.
Will it matter in the short run? Not much. The troops in Iraq cannot depart there overnight, and if there's to be a pullback to some place in Iraq out of harm's way, there's still a lot of wrangling left to be done as to where they'll go, how long they'll be there, and how operations will be conducted thereafter. As for Congressional change, we still have to wait for the current Congress to clear out before the next one can take over, so the remains of the lame duck session could see lots of maneuvering on both sides aimed at securing leverage positions in the coming session.
It's all vanity, of course, but the improvement now is that there will be less opportunity for Congress, and the President, to enact legislation that rams any ideology-based laws down our throats. Bush can still veto and neither chamber has ratios that will make override votes easy to obtain. Conversely, the leadership in both chambers is not terribly sympathetic with the President's agenda, so Bush will just ride out the remaining months of his tenure while the order of business is more likely cleanup operations instead of moving forcefully ahead.
At least that is my hope.
But when will the American people stop falling for all the hype?
Probably never. Madison Avenue marketing agencies own the airwaves in more ways than one, and our society is now built on the fruits of marketing and advertising. Media descriptions of political campaigns use the jargon associated with charting standard marketing campaigns for household products. Ever since McGinnis reported on the Selling of the President (1968), and the Nixonians learned huge lessons from the marketing consultants they brought in to help them change the public image of Richard Nixon, the first truly "packaged" Presidential candidate, we've been on a downward spiral in this country.
The rules of our society are now set by advertising and marketing pushes, and all must comply.
Do we need to blame anyone for this? I mean besides the advertising agencies? Of course we do, but to what end? Will it change? The answer to that is either a cynical no, or a wary yes but only if people take up arms against this invasion of our psyches. 'Cuz that's what it is: Our thoughts have been invaded by people whose job it is to probe our intentions and inclinations, and then use them against us.
Those of us who are most blind to this manipulation of our psyches are usually ones with the strongest passions, positive or negative, about topics. It's easy for the marketing experts to target advertisements that stir up religous zealots, bigots, super patriots, fashion trend freaks, and the like, but they have to work harder to get to the intelligentsia. Or at least that's the theory.
The fact is that anybody can be sold an idea through propaganda techniques. What matters most is having the tools necessary to identify the techniques and ignore the non-verbal messages being sent out. One tool is to educate oneself. Another is to become an informed and discerning consumer of advertising and propaganda hype.
It's one thing to be moved by an advertisement for a pickup truck that invokes images of America's Heartland, or for an airline that invokes poignant images of families traveling to be close once more, or for a cell phone that makes you feel like you're part of a huge network, and so on. It's another to be told that somebody running for office should be shunned because he appears to be gay, or she secretly harbored enemy combatants in her basement, or they secretly support the overthrow of the country by undocumented aliens from Mexico. Haters of others that don't match their guidelines for acceptable humans will happily support such evocative messages. In these cases what is being evoked is fear and bigotry, products of ignorance. As Dickens made his Christmas Present ghost tell us in A Christmas Carol: beware especially ignorance because it will lead to our doom.
Advertising and propaganda cater to ignorance in a big way. Succesful campaigns get people to happily ignore the possibility that what they're being told is not as true as they think. Discerning consumers can spot the inconsistencies, the efforts to misdirect thinking, and even the effort to mislead. This is vital knowledge these days, and can lead to us redirecting our ship of state's course.
Too bad so many of the media commentators out there have, as a group, no ability to discern where we should be heading. They only seem to want to tell us where we've been, and how bad it was while we were there, but without trying to help us figure out a rational approach to the problems that lay in front of us.
One wonders how some of them may have fared on the Titanic. O'Reilly would probably complain that the ship's band wasn't playing enough good Christian hymns or Easter carols. Hannity would probably complain that the captain and command crew made some bad choices, but then insist that others who have learned from the same teachers should continue to be in command to maintain their majority. Olberman would probably decry the fact that others were missing the big point that the ship was sinking. Stephanie Miller would probably try to at least keep everybody in good spirits while the ship sank.
Nevertheless, none of these good people would help right the ship, and this is the problem with all the mdeia discussions over the results of the midterm elections. Regardless of what the implications are for the parties involved (who really cares?), the discussions are yet again distracting all of us from the real issues at hand. Instead of concentrating as we have for too many years on the relative strengths weaknesses shown by the two major parties and their members, we still need to be talking about where we're headed and what pitfalls lay in our path thanks to the decisions of our representatives in ofiice.
The American people, however, on the surface seem totally uninterested in such weighty issues, appearing more concerned with American Idol and Dancing With the Stars and the kind of voting those programs promote. But without vigilance directed toward our piloting crew, we all could just be arguing over the positions of deck chairs on our sinking ship.
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