Pop and Circumstance

Trading in the “Decider” for a new immediate and inclusive patriotism,

provided you know your pop culture references

PHI 4931

Philosophy in the News

Dr. Shelley Park
Jan Whitehouse
12/8/2008
Immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales, and he received his sight forthwith; and he arose
and was baptized. (Acts 9:18, KJV)

In light of our texts for study, my supplemental reading, and everything else I

steeped myself in during this protracted quest for the White House, I will seek to address

how the 2008 presidential campaigns were perceived, mediated as they were by the

catechism of pop culture: music, news coverage, television, and the Internet. I will

then respond to de Zengotita’s own stated thesis statement/question: “On balance, is

pervasive mediation a good thing, or a bad thing?” (de Zengotita, p.28)

Pop Music

It was no accident Obama’s campaign theme was Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed,

Delivered – I’m Yours.”1 If Obama was the first major party candidate whites could “be

comfortable with,” the President-elect can include in his thanks Mr. Wonder and Motown.

Though little Stevie knew Jim Crow, he ungrudgingly left a great bequest to Motown’s

canon of suburban-friendly soul. (Never mind had the Illinois senator been a

contemporary of the young Stevie, Barack would be carrying memories of scouting for

designated water fountains and even scarcer political opportunities.)

Back in the day, “Signed, Sealed”’s polite yet irresistible confection was an

example of the Spoonful of soul-tinged Sugar that made the medicine of civil rights

easier to swallow. Nearly forty years after topping the charts, this postal paean performed

a similar service, making it toe-tappingly safe for whites in the new millennium to

1
This video shows a little boy at an Obama rally dancing to the hit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Jswyw-Uao&NR=1

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transfer their acceptance of Motown’s mediated African-American culture to their

adopted candidate.

Of course Motown’s soundtrack is just one contributing factor. How one group of

people get “comfortable” with another often comes with a history of bone and sinew

struggle, especially if said groups lived through a painful history on opposite sides.

Enter Oprah. Oprah has gravitational pull to make the planets line up like the

clacking balls executives used to display on their desks. On a Sunday in early February,

Oprah had Stevie come and sing a standard scale2 as she applied her celebrity poultice to

draw Hillaryites and skittish others to her candidate. She arranged the UCLA stage with

trusted brand names: herself, Stevie, Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver. Their

household name-iness was reassuring, not showy. The successive speeches rose

incrementally to a predictable crescendo and pitch preparing the way to make a Star of a

relative unknown. Michelle Obama delivered the fireworks that day; she spoke

passionately and insightfully for 45 minutes.3

The demographic that needed to be brought into the fold were the comparatively

colorblind YouTube/Facebook cybersocials. If wooed and truly won, their allegiance

would spell continued victory for the successful suitor-party for decades.

Again in February, Will.I.Am posted his unsolicited tribute4 to a concession speech

2
Stevie Wonder at UCLA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWL1G8iu32g
3
Michelle Obama at UCLA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD8cW-Ot6F8
4
“Yes We Can” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY

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Barack gave following his defeat in New Hampshire5, setting the last minutes of his

address as the text for a new generation’s “We Are the World.” The video handily went

Viral, and the early-adapting goslings were made phenomenologists-in-reverse. That is,

this groundswell of newly-minted Obamites interpreted the campaign doings with nary a

hint of objectivity, the Obama logos became a subjective story arc, grafting onto the

public’s collective psyche much like de Zengotita’s description in the public’s outpouring

of feeling for Princess Diana:

“Di was the ultimate celebrity because, in her performance as fabulous victim, she

managed to represent everyone who felt marginalized, unappreciated, misunderstood.”

(de Zengotita, p. 150)

In Barack Obama’s case, throw into the above mix an absent father, a mother who

died too early, some boundless resolve and a wealth of talent and he arguably attracted

the same disenfranchised throng. This time, instead of Fabulous Victim, our Glamorous

Surrogate came with an infectious narrative of overcoming, of victory. It was (your/my)

vindication on the grandest of scales, regardless of the outcome of the literal vote. With

Will.I.Am’s, “Yes We Can” anthem, it was also crucial you knew as you clicked “replay”

and watched the cavalcade of performer-endorsers, that he was never contacted or

commissioned by the campaign; Will. was just “inspired.”6 His altruism was neither

manufactured nor bought. It was intimate (on a worldwide scale). It was your own urge

of blobby patriotism. It was mine.

5
The “Yes We Can” speech as originally delivered: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_lQYC7vqBg
6
Interview of Will.I.Am on NPR’s Tell Me More with Michel Martin:
http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&

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 The Obama Stevie theme declared like the Hebrew prophet, “Here I am;” in

contrast, John McCain was represented by a combative, combustible “Raisin’ McCain”

refrain from CMT’s John Rich.7 Like Yosemite Sam with a record deal, no fewer than six

times us varmints were warned, ”You can get on the train or get out of the way.”8

Also for McCain, Hank Williams, Jr. recast his song, “Family Tradition.” Originally

written to commemorate his DNA ties to liquor and weed,9 Bocephus put the song once

through the rinse cycle and took it on the campaign trail, bleating,

John N Sarah tell ya

Just what they think
And they're not gonna blink
They don't have terrorist friends
To whom their careers are linked
Yes, John is his own man
And Sarah fixed Alaska's broken condition
They're gonna be just fine
We're headed for better times
It's a McCain - Palin tradition
I am very proud of our country's name
But no society is perfect
And we have had our stains
If I'm down at the coffee shop and
Somebody starts to give our flag friction
We say please “MoveOn”
Cause we're standing strong, That's a McCain - Palin tradition

This Outlaw/Sheriff dynamic was perhaps the only arguably consistent mood of the

McCain campaign and it was in keeping with the “for-me-or-ag’in-me” binarism of the
7
“Raisin’” here, not intended as a dig about Senator McCain’s advanced age, but was ”Raising” – just
another “g” sacrificed in the McCain/Palin ‘08 killing fields of the English language.
8
Video of “Raisin’ McCain” at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmKgITJejfg
9
Here is the whole “McCain/Palin Tradition” song, missed cues and all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2MKG2hFWao

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Bush administration. Worried about the continuance or even escalation of this

confrontational default setting, Paul Krugman wrote, “The modern economy, it turns out,

is a dangerous place — and it’s not the kind of danger you can deal with by talking tough

and denouncing evildoers.”10 What the McCain organization may have lacked in

systematic approaches to problems, it made up for in cantankerousness and trigger-

happyosity.

News Coverage
The African-American electorate had some complaining that Barack Obama was

not authentically “black enough” insofar as he had not been the descendant of slaves; he

had not been through the real experience of Jim Crow segregation [de Zengotita might

consider Obama to be our first fully mediated representative]. Enter Rev. Wright’s

YouTube Sunday salvo aimed at our derelict government. It hit the stands in March,

played on a loop on every station but the Food Network, scared the bejabbers out of

white people accustomed to “please and thank you” sermonizing,11 and was broken only

by a devastatingly honest speech Obama gave on race.12 With that searing essay, Obama

revealed himself and us, and gave everyone permission to claim him as their own.

Pundits crowed Obama couldn’t possibly peel away Hillary Clinton’s blue-collar

10
Krugman, Paul. "The 3 A.M. Phone Call” The New York Times (September 29, 2008),
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/opinion/29krugman.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=mccain+temperament&st
=nyt. (accessed December 8, 2008).
11
In refutation of the Wright wrongers, former Religious Right leader, Frank Schaeffer, points out his
famous father, who helped found the movement, effectively expressed the same inflammatory America-
incurring-God’s-wrath sentiments, but instead of being marked as treasonous, Schaeffer was lauded as a
hero by the Republicans. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/obamas-minister-
committe_b_91774.html
12
Obama’s speech on race: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU

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voters and prevail, either for the party’s nomination or in the general election. In the post

mortem parsing of just how people voted13, results showed Obama improved performance

with whites over John Kerry’s 2004 run, gaining two percentage points in comparison to

Kerry (Kerry 41%, Obama 43%). Frank Rich offered a rebuke in his November 9th Op-

Ed:

For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and
stupid — easily divided and easily frightened... We heard this slander of America so
often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included. If I had a
dollar for every Democrat who told me there was no way that Americans would
ever turn against the war in Iraq or definitively reject Bush governance or elect a
black man named Barack Hussein Obama president, I could almost start to recoup
my 401(k). So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was
taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by
Tuesday night.14

News outlets also made much of the, shall I say, ethnic homogeneity, of McCain

rally attendees and subsequent voters. The New York Times devised a national map that

showed shifts in voting trends, identifying, county by county, just where and who was

responding to the Republican party’s culture war campaign with its terr’rist-’n’-taxes

fear-mongering. The map15 traces an Appalachian clot: the only sign of growth for the

GOP. Of this, Adam Nossiter wrote,

What may have ended on Election Day, though, is the centrality of the South to
national politics. By voting so emphatically for Senator John McCain over Mr.
Obama — supporting him in some areas in even greater numbers than they did
President Bush — voters from Texas to South Carolina and Kentucky may have

13
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1023/exit-poll-analysis-2008
14
Rich, Frank. "It Still Felt Good the Morning After” The New York Times (November 9, 2008),
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/opinion/09rich.html

15
New York Times interactive map: http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html

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 marginalized their region for some time to come, political experts say.16

Shenkman, Palin and Tina Fey

During the campaign these marginalized values voters were promoted as the “Real

Americans,” a patriotic variant of “The People.” Rick Shenkman’s Just How Stupid Are

We? dismisses the concept of “The People” out of hand, portraying such cloying appeals

as being uniformly directed at an imaginary uniform populace, and that such rhetoric is a

deliberate and cynical manipulation. Shenkman denies “The People” as a concept, as the

people people, given the vast diversity of the electorate, are a polyglot, not a monolith.

He tells us what we know: “America is not a mass, no single group can claim to be

representative...the existence of a single public interest...cannot exist in a country as large

as ours in which there are numerous competing interests.” (Shenkman. p. 64) And then it

happened.

Mr. Shenkman, I’d like to introduce you to The Economy. Suddenly not only was

there a genuinely unifying national interest, there was a global one.

Shenkman’s charge of a national stupid virus found a kind of vaccine in the

juggernaut-cum-fizzled sparkler that was Sarah Palin. She ascended like Venus on the

half-glacier and in the course of the nine weeks she and the country were shopping (she

for clothes, we for leaders), by most accounts, save her own, she handily torpedoed her

and her running mate’s credibility, putting McCain on the run like wolves trying to

outpace helicopter hunters. After the horrific Couric interview, she was on a leash for the

16
Nossiter, Adam. “For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics” The New York Times (November 10,
2008)

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press and unleashed for rabid fans at Klan Republican rallies.

The Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric interviews might have slipped away from

national consciousness but for Saturday Night Live’s masterstroke of enticing alum Tina

Fey into brilliantly recreating the Alaskan governor. Though not an impressionist – Fey is

primarily a writer and comedic actress and had not done impersonations during her tenure

at SNL – recreating Sarah Palin was a role she seemed born to play. The premier skit17

showed a joint press conference given by “Sarah” and “Hillary.” The routine effectively

snipped GOP hopes of luring disaffected Clinton supporters by literally placing the two

very different women side by side. The skit even referenced the Charlie Gibson interview

gaffe where Palin reported she could see Russia from her house (thereby submitting a

foreign policy “credential”). Television and Internet technologies converged, word

spread, and anticipation for the next Fey/Palin skit escalated apace.

SNL’s Seth Meyers was the lead writer for the Couric/Palin skit.18 Meyers got a gift

the week Palin sat for CBS Nightly News; the Couric skit wrote itself – it was little more

than a matter of transferring the transcript of the actual interview to the teleprompter.19

Amy Poehler’s deadpan Couric played foil to Fey’s coquettish, imploding Palin,

cementing suspicions that Palin was not only under-qualified, but was revealing herself to

be out of her depth in a puddle. By the time the vice-presidential debates came, the public

17
SNL Palin/Clinton open: http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/palin-hillary-
open/656281/
18
CBS Nightly News and SNL Palin/Couric interview comparison:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/27/tina-fey-as-sarah-palin-k_n_129956.html
19
Meyers is interviewed about all the Fey/Palin sketches on NPR’s Fresh Air:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96258775

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had come to equivocate Fey’s portrayal with the real thing. That’s mediation as medicine.

If I can pretend to think like de Zengotita, Sarah Palin was, for many, the face of

our own unpreparedness. It may have been the lead story that for his voting record having

paralleled the President’s, John McCain was nicknamed “McSame,” but it was the

Alaskan governor who was Bush’s true DNA match. She met Bush’s “freedom is the

almighty God's gift to each man and woman in this world” and sought to up the ante in

Texas Hold ’em Holy Ghost Decidering. Her roiling rhetoric of American

Exceptionalism, American victory in Eye-raq, American small town values, and concrete

policies of, oh, forget it -- who knows? She was the new Decider-in-Town who couldn’t

be deciphered. She would have been content to dwell in glittering generalities, except

“glittering” sounded too darned effete.

Most of us were intellectually scandalized by her example and were forced to

confront our own worst “didn’t-study-and-late-for-SAT-and-naked-to-boot!” nightmares.

If Shenkman provided ABC After-School Specials on Stupid = Not Good, Sarah Palin was

HBO’s Oz. She scared us straight. She performed a kind of service, like unto the

expiation de Zengotita talks about with Bill Clinton. She, on her own merit, and through

the lenses of SNL and The Daily Show, inoculated us against ignorance.

So there stood all of us, taking in this fascinating train wreck. Thanks to the

requirements of our assignments, I had a legitimate excuse to settle in and hook an IV up

to reportage, commentary and satire on every front. In The Assault On Reason, Al Gore

cites Marshall McLuhan’s concept of how we ingest media:

...McLuhan’s description of television as a “cool” medium – as opposed to the

“hot” medium of print – was hard for me to understand when I read it forty years ago,

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because of the source of ‘heat’ in his metaphor is the mental work required in the
alchemy of reading. When a new technology emerges as the primary medium for the
sharing of information -- like the printing press in the fifteenth century or television in the
twentieth century – those who adapt to the new technology literally change the way they
process information. As a result, their brains may actually undergo subtle change. (Gore,
p. 20-21)
Perhaps that subtle change includes the ability to time travel. Back in TV

Blobbyland, the final season of the The West Wing was being written in the summer of

2004. Writer Eli Attie deliberately modeled the storyline’s narrative about (fictional)

rising Democratic Party star, ”Matt Santos,” a Latino candidate (played by Jimmy Smits),

after Obama, and in reviewing those episodes, the prophetic parallels are/were uncanny.

In an interview with Jonathan Freedland at The Guardian UK,20 Attie describes how he

became intrigued with the nascent Illinois senator after he heard his breakout “no red

states, no blue states” turn at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. A brilliantly

edited video for the online magazine, Slate.com vividly depicts the twin story arcs.21 If

you really want to risk getting the bends, there is the Politico.com interview with Smits,

appearing at a Florida rally for Barack, parlaying his West Wing character’s vapor trails to

introduce his non-fiction doppelganger. This was life-imitating-art-imitating-life…

circling itself.22

Finally, in response to whether or not pervasive mediation has been a good thing, I

would have to say that for this election cycle, and until the next bend in the road, the Blob

has used its powers for good.

20
Freedland, Jonathan. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/21/barackobama.uselections2008
21
Bosch, Torie. http://blog.indecision2008.com/2008/02/27/the-west-wing-obama-and-plagiarism/
22
Ressner, Jeffrey. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15156_Page2.html

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Works Cited:

Bosch, Torie. Slate V (Slate.com video podcast) http://video.aol.com/video-detail/update-

life-imitates-the-west-wing/2005865616/?icid=VIDLRVNWS06
de Zengotita, Thomas. Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You
Live in It. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005.
Freedland, Jonathan.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/21/barackobama.uselections2008
Gore, Al. The Assault on Reason. New York: Penguin Books, 2007.
Nossiter, Adam.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/us/politics/11south.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&ref=
todayspaper&oref=slogin
Shenkman, Rick. Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the truth about the American voter.
New York: Basic Books, 2008.

Note: Additional pop culture campaign moments discussed at:

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_10889387

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