Since no actual debate
takes place in these things --
just parallel non-intercommunicating prewired performances, as though by
autists -- nothing develops dialectically: these are essentially press-releases read aloud.
 |
| "Nice fabric. Hong-Kong bespoke-tailor?" -- "You betcha, chump!" |
Very early on, the moderator, Jim Lehrer -- an old hand --
actually did try to get candidates to respond directly to what the other guy
just said, rather than simply continuing to send press-release paper-airplanes
soaring towards the other guy’s lectern, land where it may, by unexpectedly
saying (it startled me in my chair):
LEHRER: Mr. President, please
respond directly to what the governor just said about trickle-down -- his
trick-down approach, as he said yours is.
Obama’s answer was entirely non-responsive:
OBAMA: Well, let me talk
specifically about what I think we need to do. First, we’ve got to improve our
education system and we’ve made enormous progress drawing on ideas both from
Democrats and Republicans that are already starting to show gains in some of
the toughest to deal with schools. We’ve got a program called Race to the Top
that has prompted reforms in 46 states around the country, raising standards,
improving how we train teachers.
So now I want to hire another
100,000 new math and science teachers, and create 2 million more slots in our
community colleges so that people can get trained for the jobs that are out
there right now. And I want to make sure that we keep tuition low for our young
people. (etc etc)
Worthy sentiments, but -- huh? If someone were
persistently thus unable to engage with what is said, to address the topic at
hand, we would deem him mentally defective: and our President is not that.
Determining what went wrong yields easily to a bit of
analysis. For, though he
doubtless meant well, Lehrer here basically blew it. Like the candidates, he came pre-prepped to let out certain
zingers, and his turned out to be a damp squib. For:
(1) Romney had not said anything substantive about
“trickle-down”; he had merely used the word -- and that (see point (2)) in a new and confusing way. His preceding
remarks in their entirety are as
follows:
ROMNEY: Now, I’m concerned that the
path that we’re on has just been unsuccessful. The president has a view very
similar to the view he had when he ran four years, that a bigger government,
spending more, taxing more, regulating more -- if you will, trickle-down
government -- would work.
That’s not the right answer for
America. I’ll restore the vitality that gets America working again. Thank you.
(2) The standard concept is trickle-down
economics: in a nutshell, “Y’all make us rich guys
even richer and maybe we’ll leave you a tip.” This phrase “trickle-down government” doesn’t even make
sense -- it reads like a sort of pun, or perhaps a misspeaking for the standard
phrase. But that wouldn’t
make sense either, since here Romney was attacking it, whatever it might mean,
whereas his wing of the GOP are definitely pro-trickle-down in the usual
economic sense.
(3) Lehrer threw in a curveball of his own -- a distracting
reference to something most of us probably had not heard before, obviously a
throwaway line (again, no better than wordplay) from some campaign flack: “trick-down”.
(4) Lehrer’s stab at Let’s-you-and-him fight came way too early. They had all just barely finished
saying hellos, neither had yet
said anything of much substance:
Obama just wasn’t expecting it;
it came out of nowhere.
What, then, to do?
The problem for the debater-on-the-spot is now obvious. It took me a couple of minutes of
careful cogitation, relaxing undisturbed in my armchair, to riddle this thing
out: but on live TV, you don’t
have two minutes to silently reflect, nor even two seconds. At all costs, he had to a avoid
Rick Perry moment -- a stage-wait in which he paused for thought. Nor could he ask the moderator to
define his terms (that would be niggling), nor could he launch off on a deconstruction
of trickle-down economics (not among the debate points he had endlessly
rehearsed for). There indeed was
little that a man in that position could do, other than what Obama did do: Ignore the question and plow on -- the
brief semantic disconnect will quickly be forgotten -- if even noticed -- by
the stupefied viewers.
The main focus in a performance like this is not to screw up in a way that, excerpted out of context in a ten-second segment, could make you look like an idiot on YouTube. (The concern, to borrow the terminology of The Shape of Space, is with local geometry rather than global topology.) Indeed, the reflexes of the American audience preclude
real debate: since if a candidate
were really to bore in and make a
case, logically and factually, he would be considered considered intelletually arrogant.
Romney said: “I want to continue to burn clean-coal” (this being nothing but a nod to
Pennsylvania and Ohio, quite detached from the merits of the case). The linguist immediately notices
that the intonational structure of this sentence contains a presupposition (enthymeme alert!): < Coal
burns clean > (or even “is” clean, in some enantiosemantic subconscious
sense). But of course, if
that were the case, there wouldn’t be the controversy, or the search for clean
energy.
Sarcastic response:
“Yes: clean coal, to power SUVs made of
weightless iron, propelled straight up frictionless cliffs.” But such a response will cost you with
the public. And a lengthy restatement of the engineering facts will at best put people to sleep,
more likely irritate them, make them feel “lectured-at”.
The presuppositional structure of Romney’s sentence renders
it worse than inane, almost cosmically counterfactural. It is the strategy of the clever
liar, where butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth: If you’re gonna lie, lie big. (Historians of political discourse know this as the “Große Lüge”; it was used
to great effect by a certain little man with a toothbrush moustache.) Compare the early ads for cigarattes
(and even for radioactivity), which specifically touted their supposed health
benefits.
Tomorrow morning, if not indeed tonight, will brim with predictable
political commentary, rehashing, ember-raking, from choirs of pundits: no point adding my own two groats.
What might be more interesting would be a psychosemantic analysis,
catching on the wing the
“tells” that leak out between the preset talking-points.
In the initial interviews, an analyst might listen only
lightly to the surface assertorial structure of what is said by the analysand. Beyond this, you open the ears of your
own (by now professionally instructed) unconscious, to receive the messages
being beamed beween the phonemes -- beneath the auditory threshold -- on audio
frequencies that date back to the dinosaurs.
Such, on an amateur level, is indeed what most citizens do when they listen to a candidate. They often don’t really hear or comprehend (let alone critically analyze) what he says, but register how he says it, and vote accordingly.
Thus we had:
Al
Gore: Schoolmarm.
Dubya: Regular guy.
Or (my own yardstick):
Al Gore: Harvard.
Dubya: Yale.
A psychosemantic analysis might well pass over in
silence the papier-maché differences
between the candidates, who invent
them rhethorically where none of substance exist, and blur them where
inconventient, as in Romney’s post-Etch-a-Sketch sudden embrace of government
regulations. Rather, the
analysis might zero in on the apparent common assumptions, shared and
unquestioned by both candidates, unquestioned by moderator and commentators as
well: as, their fetishizing homage
to Small Business. No-one had (or
ever has) a good word for “Big Business”. But, logically:
a big business (if the economy is
working right) is a former small one which had a good idea and played its cards
right, in the process creating thousands of jobs. A small business is one that might go bankrupt next month,
while burning up loans in the meantime, and paying its workers with promises.
-- My own instincts were sharpened in this regard when, back in Berkeley, I worked with
some pretty hardcore labor activists for a while, who scoffed at the sentimentality
about “family business” that filled the talk of liberal goodthink subjectivists who plumed themselves as pro-labor while keeping a safe
distance: such businesses are
typically the most exploitative of
their workers.
[Update 6 October 2012] Here, from this morning’s headlines, is a heart-warming tale
of Small Business -- a Mom ‘n’ Pop pharmaceuticals outfit -- as you might say,
the Phamily Pharm. Owing to
sentimentality about the Small, Small World, this kind picturesque local small
business is rapturously free of regulative interference by Big Government in
the form of the FDA -- its long reach so oppressive to Big Pharma, does not “trickle down”
so far. The news from deregulator Romney's home state of Massachusetts:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/health/news-analysis-a-question-of-oversight-on-compounding-pharmacies.html?src=me&ref=general&pagewanted=print
The outbreak, with 5
people dead and 30 ill in six states, is thought to have been caused by a
steroid drug contaminated by a fungus. The steroid solution was not made by a
major drug company, but was concocted by a pharmacy in Framingham, Mass.,
called the New England Compounding Center. Compounding
pharmacies make their own drug products, which are not approved by the Food
and Drug Administration.
Federal
inspectors at the New England center found a sealed vial of the steroid afloat
with so much foreign matter that it could be seen with the naked eye, Food and
Drug Administration officials said Thursday. Under the microscope, the
particles were a fungus.
Why
would pain clinics around the country rely on a pharmacy that mixes its own
brand of unapproved drugs, especially for a delicate procedure like an epidural
injection that has the potential — realized in these awful cases — to infect a
patient’s nervous system?
The current outbreak
is not the first time a steroid made by this type of pharmacy has caused fungal
meningitis in people receiving spinal steroid injections. There were five
similar cases, including a death, in 2002, all traced to one pharmacy in South
Carolina that had been shipping its product to five states. Inspectors found
contaminated vials and a complete lack of quality controls or sterility testing
at the pharmacy.
The New England
center had also received warnings in the past from the F.D.A., though not about
its steroid drugs. The earlier warnings had cautioned it against opening
sterile vials of a cancer drug, Avastin, and repackaging the drug in smaller
doses to be used to treat an eye disease. The agency had also warned the center
against selling a pain cream that contained a powerful mixture of local
anesthetics and that could be toxic and even cause heart problems if too much
was rubbed into the skin.
There has recent been a court ruling denying the FDA the right to regulate such fly-by-night operators, handed down in -- wait for it -- Florida , that septic-tank in the shape of a state.
Expect a lot more of this sort of thing, if Romney and the Deregulators (sounds like a garage band) gets in.
Expect a lot more of this sort of thing, if Romney and the Deregulators (sounds like a garage band) gets in.
[Update 7 Oct 2012] This morning's Sunday Times front-pages the story -- but the website buries it. Here it is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/scant-drug-maker-oversight-in-meningitis-outbreak.html?hpw
“The Food and Drug Administration
has more regulatory authority over a drug factory in China than over a compounding
pharmacy in Massachusetts.”
~
So: Why the repeated, and never questioned, invocation of Small Business -- or its ultimate hustings apotheosis, the economically peripheral and by now practically nonexistent Family Farm? Analysis might reveal that, so far from a homage to small business as the assumed effective principal engine of job creation, the unconscious mental mind-set is virtually the opposite: a truckling to mediocrity, a flattering of failure, a retreat from the great ages of America’s frontiers, into a world of gated communities and curled-up cocooning. The analyst might note, that such discourse typically goes in hand (as it did tonight) with an exaltation of the anecdotal individual (the smallest of small societies) -- and indeed, typically the disabled, the elderly, homeless, single moms or what have you (including that sentimental flavor of the month, “pre-existing conditions”): while studiously avoiding mention of the only force that could truly turn things around: militant organized labor, union men standing shoulder to shoulder, putting the instruments of production to productive rather than speculative use.
At this point, the Marxist might feel we have finally reached bedrock: Workers to power! But alas -- there is a layer beneath that one, dimly glimpsed by Jung and Freud, and emphasized by such Marx-savvy figures of both thought and action as Arthur Koestler. The saurian underbrain yet lingers; and our collective unconscious is as much subject to neurosis as the individual. For: Why the exaltation of inherently ineffectual side-categories of the body politic? This is by no means merely a ploy to distract attention from the potentially effectual agency of labor unions or a workers party. The bosses themselves don’t quite know what they are up to -- they are in the grip of the Zeitgeist just like everyone else. This brand of propaganda is in line (I suspect) with parallel but quite labor-unrelated trends as the devaluation of manliness and martial ardor: The poster-soldier for the Iraq war was not the warrior like -- well, like a lot of the guys I work with, in fact, quiet heroes of brains and steel -- but the utterly passive, blonde and photogenic Jessica Lynch, cover-girl of Newsweek, whose jeep went astray and rolled over, and she sat out the entire firefight unconscious, while the guys whose guns blazed go nameless.
Nay more -- although we started from the illusionistic disinformation
of the anti-union Right wing, we pass insensibly -- literally insensibly,
beneath the threshold of consciousness -- to what is more typically of the
(non-Marxist, sentimental) Left: to
that swamp of paraphilias now clamoring for co-equal status with those who
actually raise the families, fight the wars, and do the work.
Coming soon to a media outlet near U: Amputee-Wannabes Found Their Own Small
Business.
Such an analysis
your humble blogger will not attempt, since
(a) nobody’s paying me the $200 per
50-minute-hour to do so -- and folks, I have a day-job, with hungry (hamster-)mouths to feed;
(b) the debates themselves are an
impoverished source of data, entertainment, or insight, being little more than
a parallel pair of tape-decks, each blaring repetitiously the same pre-recorded message.
For a similar politico-semantic deconstruction, click here:
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