Essays: September 2008 Archives

The news media has hailed this presidential election as unprecedented. One for the history books. A huge step forward for America no matter how you slice it, Democratic ticket or Republican ticket.

 

But in this fete of supposed progressive thinking, one archaic practice is still being tossed around by both the news media and by the politicians themselves: isms.

 

Racism. Sexism. Ageism. Fanaticism. Liberalism. Conservatism.

 

Isms are a quick fix for our brains -- a simple, tidy way of roping a group of people with related opinions together, setting them to one side and saying there. That's that. I get what you're about.

 

Yes, isms make us think we understand others when in fact they actually hinder our ability to truly do so. To use an ism is to generalize, and to in effect deny the diverse rationales that can lead people to hold the same opinion. We stoop to using isms either because we're too lazy or too narrow-minded to take time to think out these diverse rationales.

 

It's so much easier to argue that anyone who doesn't like Barack Obama is racist than it is to dig deeper, start a dialogue, find out what could really be behind this opinion.

 

A reporter can fit together an easy, crisp little story around the fact that Barack Obama is black, that Sarah Palin is a woman, and that these qualities attract and alienate certain voters. It would be difficult, however, to go beyond the "ism" buzzwords -- beyond this gross homogenizing of the American people -- to discuss why voters hold the opinions they do, why they value certain things in candidates, why other things don't appeal to them.

 

The sooner we step up to the task of discussing what's behind our differing opinions rather than ism-ing them away, the sooner we can really take that huge step forward that we've all been hearing about.

 "-Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, 'I don't believe in The Beatles, I just believe in me."'

- Matthew Broderick as Ferris Buehler

Elections are full of the much maligned -ism.  Every possibility if -ism is explored for each candidate.  If a candidate is white, then his or her potential racism is made an issue.  If the candidate is black then the racism of the public is central (Washington Post).  If the candidate is female then the country is too sexist to elect her.  If the candidate is male he may be too much a sexist to effectively govern a half female country.  There is so much ado about the -ism that one might agree with Ferris and want to be rid of them all, as if that were possible.

The truth of the -ism is that they are simple ideological constructions people erect in order that other people can understand a complicated idea.  Could Joseph McCarthy have rallied the country to almost tear itself apart over the state run program to forcibly reallocate property and remove rights of owners for said property for the United States? Not likely.  But he could rally people against communism.  At the most basic level and -ism is simple shorthand.  

The issue with the -ism comes when they are used to define people as opposed to ideas.  Once you label a person a communist, that is what they become.  That communist is no longer a person and become just a classification.  This can come in handy when we deal with scores of new people every day, but it is also an inherent weakness in our thought processes that conspires to damage our good judgement.  As an example of such a failure it is not widely appreciated how many Russians died defending their homeland in World War II (about 10.7 million).  They were communists and not even American communists.  By virtue of that fact they were far less meaningful to learn about in history class.

-Isms make ideas easier to digest.  But we must remember that some indigestion is good. It tells us what ideas are actually are worth eating.

When the epic Tom Waits epically interviewed himself, he was asked (by himself) what was wrong with the world. To himself he replied, "We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance..."

'Ole Tom said a mouthful. This sage observation can be applied broadly to many things, but specifically it brings to mind 24 hour news coverage. Even more specifically, it can be said of election coverage in 2008, a year still fully embedded in the "Information Age." In many ways, the internet has made it more treacherous to be a politician than ever before. Anything you say can and will be used against you (on youtube) and will be commented upon by legions of disgruntled web surfing trolls (again, on youtube).

Recall George Allen's "macaca moment" which single handedly derailed his campaign. This world in which every second counts has forced politicians to become slicker than ever in their public appearances which could be good or bad depending on how you look at it. But, in effect, we all lose out when politicians are hijacked by their own sound bytes.

The average citizen pursuing election coverage online is typically met with a barrage of sound byte headlines or pulled quotes and in many cases, flat-out irrelevant controversies such as the recent "Palin Pregnancy Conspiracy"

Despite the tired old argument of the bias found in CNN or Fox or wherever, the web has made it even easier to narrow one's scope to their own particular view. If someone were to solely view Huffingtonpost.com day after day, they would have a very different version of events that is tailored to very specific tastes. The internet, like many things in this world, is a very powerful tool when used judiciously. Subscribing to sound bytes with no depth and following sites that only affirm our currently held beliefs are just as bad or even worse than not being informed at all. We have a responsibility to follow 3 "D's": Diversify our browsing for variety of coverage, Demand better, more in-depth coverage from our sources and ultimately Decide for ourselves what content we should retain to make informed decisions.

The future of democracy in an information age will ultimately be decided by just how responsible we, as citizens of the state, can be with the abundance so that we may (as Mr. Waits encourages) sift out the knowledge.