Social Engineering

Last week we went to a taping of the Daily Show. Rob commented while we waited in line outside that it was peculiar that such a large agglomeration of liberals didn't attract panhandlers or proselytizers of any sort: after all, we were essentially captive in that location for an hour or two, and there was no one to stop people from working the line. But maybe the audience weren't such flaming liberals after all.

Once we had been seated by a cast of cheerful minions (Disney Park-happy, if Disney Parks permitted slacker haircuts and jeans and T-shirts), it was time for the self-described "warm-up monkey," who said his name was Paul. He began by making us cheer and shout as loudly as we could, over and over, and then the same for laughter, repeating that it was important that we were loud once the taping began. We practiced cheering and then laughing until we were just short of hoarse.

Then commenced the comedic warm-up, in the form of patter with the audience. There were jokes about a frat guy in the front row, Jon Stewart's height--nothing original. Then Paul said, "Hey, a black guy!" and proceeded to indulge in a series of stereotypes about black men. When someone pointed out that there was another black man in the audience (yeah, so-called liberal gatherings do tend to be mighty white, but Paul didn't do anything with that potentially rich satirical point, one that I expect Jon Stewart would have done a great deal with), he went on in the same vein: black guys prefer white chicks, black guys like to have lots of them, blah blah blah. "Uncoooomfortable!" Rob whispered.

Thing was, though, no one appeared to be uncomfortable. Pretty much everyone laughed.

The jokes weren't funny, but we'd been pretrained to laugh, and laugh a lot. We'd spent the previous few minutes learning that loud laughter earns praise.

The humor was offensive, but we'd been told to laugh. And if you don't laugh, you're left out of the fun.

The black guys who were the focus of these remarks laughed, so that made it okay for us white liberals to laugh.

And come on, this is the milieu of Alpha Liberal Jon Stewart: nothing anti-liberal could be happening here, right?

(There was a black woman in the audience too, but Paul the Warm-up Monkey never took note of her. She too laughed.)

Maybe those gentlemen genuinely enjoyed the racial humor at their expense; I have no way of knowing. But were Rob and I the only people in the place who did find it a bit skeevy? Either Jon Stewart's program isn't the liberal bastian it has been portrayed as (seems implausible, given the content of the show), or it's pretty easy to get us all to check our values at the door.

Which would be a fascinating social experiment, and one ripe for Stewart's pointed wit. But alas, I don't think it was that knowing. More likely that at the Daily Show they're just thoughtless idiots like the rest of the world.

The Plot-Driven Society

The new season of 24 is under way. 24 is an odd phenomenon: although it is simplistic, nonsensical, and frequently riddled with notions that anybody outside of the Bush White House and Fox News would reject (torture: fine and good as long as the good guys do it; nuclear blasts: not really a threat if they don't happen in town), it is addictive.

It's the ticking clock. It pops up at commercial breaks and assorted other intervals. And the quick cuts between various story lines. Everything moves plenty fast so there's no time or incentive to stop and think about it.

Same is true of John Grisham's novels (or at least the two I managed to read): cardboard characters and plot holes big enough to fly a 747 through whizz past in a frenzy of page-turning.

This is what writer types call plot-driven fiction: events so fast and furious that mere niceties like character development, theme, or even reason and sense may be left by the wayside. The best authors of plot-driven fiction don't neglect those other aspects, but it seems that those things must slow them down just enough, because the 24s and The Firms of this world tend to be more popular. It's popcorn for the mind, and it races right through you without wasting any time being digested.

Fine if that's what entertains you. The problem is when it infects more critical aspects of our lives.

Someone (I've forgotten who, or where) said that the candidacies of John Kerry and Al Gore were both doomed by their use of subordinate clauses. (Both campaigns had other problems than their sentence structure, IMO, but that's beside the point for this discussion.) Why follow a complex sentence--a complex thought--when it is so much easier to grasp a simple declarative sentence, especially one that expresses a simple, unnuanced, black-and-white concept?

Keep throwing new images at people, new sound bytes or new threats, and they will tend to follow along with them like a 24 plotline. No time to stop and go back and reexamine the foundation of the notion, the background of the story, the meaning of it all, whether an argument holds together under close examination.

Some people can handle large quantities of stimuli and critically assess them all (I think first of my friend and Clarion classmate Cory Doctorow), but most people are sufficiently wrapped up in the minutiae of daily living--that ticking clock is the limited number of hours in the day to accomplish work, family, household, and personal responsibilities--that it just flows through them without stopping for analysis. And so we have become the plot-driven society.

Notice too that in 24 you get a lot of ineffectual and/or corrupt leaders? Probably not a coincidence. For 24 the plots depend on it; while here in the plot-driven society it's just a side effect. When candidates' cases are made in snippets and 30-second ads, and analysis of their positions and arguments is left to talking heads whose ratings depend on being just as catchy and concise, the niceties of substance can easily slip past unexamined. A plot-driven culture will select for the candidate who can survive best in that environment--who keeps his arguments concise and easy to grab onto, and doesn't slow us down or overcomplicate our already overfull lives.

If that's the society we want to be, then so be it.

But I am one of those dinosaurs who, while enjoying a page-turner now and again as a sweet treat, prefers substance. I enjoy a book or film or TV show I can sink my teeth into, with some substance and subtext, the kind of thing you get something new from on repeated reading or watching. (Rob is currently reading Finnegans Wake in one of his classes, which is just about the pinnacle of substantial reading, and may well exceed my ability to stick with it. More power to those who do.) And I would like to be able to vote for candidates whose entire worldviews are not summarizable in a sentence, who understand that issues are complex and demonstrate their willingness to grapple with those complexities. But in a plot-driven society, even the candidates who may fit that bill are compelled to hide their substance behind repetition of easily digestible metaphors and catch phrases in order to compete.

And we as a nation are the poorer for it.

This Is Our Country

Okay, using Rosa Parks in a Chevrolet commercial is a bit tacky and a lot silly (she's sitting on a BUS, people, not a car, a BUS--if she'd had herself one of your cars, you probably would never have heard of her). Using Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech to sell cars: what exactly does this have to do with cars? Pandering, is what.

And I'm sure the people who lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina are enthralled to see their suffering and loss used to sell products. (Note that the people who had cars were able to leave New Orleans. The people who ended up living in squalor at the Superdome or the convention center: those were in large part the people without the means for their own transport.) But, oh, it's okay, because they show someone raising a new house right after that. See, a bunch of fresh-faced people rebuilt New Orleans all shiny and new, so it's all good, right? Now go buy a car.

And then, the pièce de résistance: the towers of light at the World Trade Center. Ooh, evoke patriotism, sell cars. I've said for years that it wouldn't be long before there were ads for 9/11 sales ("free flag with every purchase!")--apparently the manipulation of the deaths of thousands of people in the service of commerce is already upon us.

So where is hue and cry over this sleazy, repulsive advertising campaign by Chevrolet?

Nowhere.

Why? Because this is our country.