Charles Dickens Takes on Incompetent Bureaucracy: Welcome to the Circumlocution Office

Posted on January 31, 2010 by s

For many years, I rarely read much about politics and government that really captured the craziness, the reversals, the betrayals, the hypocrisies, and the double-dealing of that loony world.

Then, in 1991 , I saw Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Of course, the primary topic was HIV/AIDS, but that issue was so skillfully embedded in the politics of 1980s America that I left the theatre stunned at how perfectly the play “got” the workings of power and influence. At one point Roy Cohn – played that night by the magnificent Ron Liebman — delivers a brilliant and cynical monologue about who matters and who doesn’t at the highest levels of political combat.

I wanted to share another take on government in fiction that I find comparably compelling and gut-splittingly hilarious. Check out Chapter 10 from the Charles Dickens novel Little Dorrit. Dickens delivers an angry and biting satire on the incompetence of government called “Containing the whole Science of Government.” He does this through the creation of a fictional government entity called the Circumlocution Office.

Too true. And too funny.

My Gossip Confession in the Chicago Tribune: Human Nature and Our Need for Happy Endings

Posted on January 30, 2010 by s

Ok, so I like gossip. What I don’t like is watching lives unravel. A contradiction? Maybe.

I do know that I have to stop expecting real human beings to produce fairy-tale endings.

I let loose in the Chicago Tribune today.

Rhetorical Combat Fought at the Highest Level: The President and the House Republicans

Posted on January 29, 2010 by s

My personal political beliefs are not a big secret. They are firmly and passionately held.

As a Professor, though, I have always done my best to create a classroom in which students are comfortable expressing diverse views. I am not sure I have always succeeded. Talking about fairness is one thing, but body language and tone of voice can tell quite a different story. I try.

Media and Mayhem, though, is not primarily a political blog. That does not mean it does not deal frequently with politics. It is that imparting my political views is not its main purpose. It has always been primarily for my students and other students of media and culture. But I am fully aware that nothing can really be extricated from the political.

All of this is to say, in a much too windy way, that when I watch an event like today’s face-off between President Obama and House Republicans, it would be a little dishonest for me to claim neutrality. I am a Democrat, probably left of President Obama, who admires the president enormously. Having worked in politics, though, and having thought a lot about political and communications strategy, I can generally watch a politician appear before an audience and give a pretty fair evaluation of who won a particular skirmish. I am more than willing to concede that a politician I admire may have performed horrendously. And I have often had the uneasy experience of watching debates in which people with whom I disagree perform infinitely better than those representing my point of view.

Having said that, and with full awareness that that the president faces close to impossible challenges, I would like to suggest that this week’s State of the Union address by President Obama, followed by today’s face-off with the group of hostile House Republicans, was as good as political communications gets.

Yes, I know that success is usually measured by how many minds you are able to change. Sadly, this does not seem to be an era in which any minds are changed very easily, regardless of argument or evidence. But simply as a strategic attempt to increase his advantage in the battle for public opinion, and as an attempt to speak to a larger audience of citizens whose support he will continue to need, these were two memorable days in the history of the presidency. They also illustrate many principles of persuasion and argument that we should all keep in mind as we make our cases for how we wish the world would work.

The president was neither apologetic nor defensive about his views. At the same time, though, he used words and tone and body language to make clear that he was clearly aware of, and had been chastened by, his failure to enact some of his key initiatives. He conveyed a sense of urgency, but did it without the kind of intensity that suggested fear or panic. He seemed to say: “I’m here. You’re going to have to deal with me. I have deeply held principles that guide my actions. But we are all in this together and I’m not going to be a jerk about it.”

He also used what appeared to be spontaneous humor to disarm opponents who looked more than a little strange when, at first straining to keep poker faces, they sat on their hands and almost refused to acknowledge that the president was in the room. I respect their right to disagree and to employ whatever political strategy they think is best, but I’m not sure they realized how strange it looked to be stubbornly refusing to acknowledge anything positive about the president.

The president saw those poker faces, but looked them straight in the eye, suggesting that he had just made a proposal that they certainly should be able to applaud.

Come on, he seemed to ask, you can give me a little bit of applause, can’t you?

One of the House leaders did applaud, and then laughed. This is rhetorical combat fought at its highest level, and at that moment the president at least temporarily snatched their weapons away, as if in an old Errol Flynn sword fight.

Then, even more shrewdly, he proceeded to list a series of proposals that the House Republicans simply could not have afforded to ignore. They had to applaud. Even when he proposed something for which there is a reasonable counter argument, he stated it in a way that virtually forced the audience to register at least some enthusiasm.

These events, even at their best, are more combat than careful discussion. Each side’s views are inevitably caricatured by the other side, and impressions matter more than intellect.

But even judged this way, I think it’s fair to say that the State of the Union was a tour de force, and that the president resuscitated and revitalized his presidency as well as any political leader I have ever seen. Of course, in our current frenzied news cycle, this will probably be quickly forgotten. This, though, was a night when many were watching to see whether his recent defeats would make him a little more defensive and a little less bold. He wasn’t.

It is one thing to be tough and unwavering. It is quite another to be warm and humorous. I have known politicians who were superb doing one or the other. But to do both at the same time, and to do it when the stakes are high and when millions of people are watching, is an extraordinary accomplishment.

J.D. Salinger (1919 – 2010)

Posted on January 28, 2010 by s

J.D. Salinger died today.

When I was 14, my Mom left a copy of Catcher in the Rye on a table in the living room. Mom had returned to finish college and the book was required reading in one of her classes. I picked it up, went to lie on my bed, and knew that anything left around “accidentally” was probably at least a little steamy. Fourteen year-olds place a high premium on steam.

I was right, although I stopped expecting steam in Mom’s textbooks just several weeks later when, ready for something along the lines of Harold Robbins’s The Carpetbaggers, I found myself searching for the “good parts” in something called The Critique of Pure Reason. No good parts. But I still remember the night I picked up Catcher in the Rye.

I know that the “I never felt understood until Holden Caulfield” trope long ago morphed from iconic to trite. Over the years, as I would hear others recount the same experience, I would feel less and less like anything special or unique had happened to me that night. I even remember years when my insecurity led me to believe that it was “literary” to dump on Salinger, to consign him to the bin of the obvious and the superficial.

That I was the one who was obvious and superficial would never have crossed my mind. Thank goodness Salinger held up longer than my pretensions.

The first killer-moment I remember in “Catcher” was a hilarious school assembly. I choked with laughter as Holden described a pretentious speech by a bloviating school benefactor being interrupted by a thunderous explosion of flatulence. (Hey, give me a break. I was in 8^th grade!)

But even more, I remember experiencing the rest of the book as story after story of a kid whose cynical bravado only slightly, and usually ineffectively, masked his guilt and sadness. It was a revelation discovering that I wasn’t the only smart-ass struggling to keep loneliness at bay. In fact, simply learning that night that I wasn’t so peculiar was enough to lift some of that loneliness.

One episode in particular has stuck with me: After having been kicked out of school, Holden is on a train going home when he meets the mother of one of his classmates. His cynical side comes first and we learn that the classmate was more than a bit of a jerk. But almost immediately, Holden – afraid to hurt the mother’s feelings – goes into an insincere riff about how great the kid is. And the mother beams. Holden may be filled with disgust at the kid himself, but – when it comes to talking with the kid’s mom – he can only launch into one of his bouts of phoniness. Again and again, Holden’s disgust and rebellion fight it out with his “feeing sorry.”

That’s why I have always felt that the power of the novel lies, not in Holden’s cynicism, but in his losing battle to present himself as a cynic. His effort to play the part of a sophisticated smartass is constantly sabotaged by his inner turbulence and insecurity.

He fails as a jerk.

I know that some view the “feeling sorry” part as naive, as taking the edge off Holden’s justified disgust with hypocrisy. Why not pass guilt and go directly to alienation? Fair point. That would not, though, have made as much sense to me, not during an adolescence when the rapid-cycling between anger and insecurity, between certainty and complete confusion, was dizzying.

In the intervening years, I have sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed as a cynic. I have hurt others and been hurt myself. I have sometimes wrapped sadness in a veneer of jokes and put-downs. I have also occasionally been smart enough to share rather than hide my scars.

But never, in the years since I first read Catcher in the Rye, have I forgotten just how much I am capable of fooling myself and just how much, regardless of how I might occasionally act like a jerk, I will always be rooting for that jerk to fail.

I hope that, to at least some extent, he has.