The closing month of the 2016 presidential campaign is a tragedy playing out as farce—only unlike Karl Marx’s declaration about history repeating itself “first as tragedy, second as farce”—it’s the first time this degrading drama has occurred.
I’m referring to the Donald Trump sexual predator scandal
for which we have now seen the dropping of the second, third, fourth and fifth
of what may be a series of shoes extensive enough to
accessorize a centipede.
It’s never happened before and it’s a farce. But as in
Marx’s cycle, this farce takes the structure of Greek tragedy. There is the
protagonist with hubris. We see rising action and falling action. The chorus is
enormous, comprising the news media. And perhaps most significantly, we—the
audience—knew what was going to happen as soon as Trump issued his short and
whimpering denial that he never did to women what he said he did on tape.
The other shoes dropping is an event that we expect to occur
as the natural result or progression of another event that just occurred. When a
big company buys your employer, a massive layoff is the “other shoe dropping.”
When the media reveals a celebrity has had an affair, his wife filing for
divorce is the other shoe dropping.
Need another example? How about Trumpty-Dumpty, who is
running to be America’s sexual predator in chief? (He would also like to be its
racist, misogynist and nativist in chief as well!).
First came the videotape in which Trumpty-Dumpy bragged
about actions that all but Trump factotums and core fans consider to be sexual
predation. Second came Trumps’ denial that he actual grabbed women’s genitals
without consent or stalked them into corners.
From the moment of that denial, the entire world—and
especially the news media—have been expecting the other shoe to drop.
And drop it has. Again and again and again and again.
Almost overnight, four women have come forth to describe
various types of sexually predatory actions Trump committed against
them—walking in on women nude, putting his hand up dresses, squeezing behinds,
forcibly kissing.
And we’re just getting started. There may turn out to be a
mall full of shoes in Trump’s sexual predator closet. I don’t know what the
line in Las Vegas is, but I’m betting Trump’s final count will exceed that of
Bill Cosby.
Thanks to Trumpty-Dumpty, we now have a quick test for
racism: If you condemn Bill Cosby on the existing evidence but do not condemn
Donald Trump on the existing evidence, you, sir or madam, are a racist!
Speaking of assault, I’ve had an epiphany about the 25-year
assault the mainstream news media has made on the character of Hillary Clinton,
presenting her as inaccessible, manipulative, lacking empathy, ethically
challenged and unable to connect with people. Her performances in debates, in
front of committees, in interviews, at town hall meetings and working with
others virtually always belie this depiction, but the media persists.
I already knew that many don’t like her because her spouse
is Bill Clinton and that others have always applied a double standard to her
because she’s a woman.
But reading one word in Jill Lepore’s pedestrian essay on
the general topic of presidential debates in a recent New Yorker gave me a sudden jolt of recognition: One of the
decades-old themes in mass culture is to denigrate intellectual achievement and
“book smarts” and no one represents intelligence more than Hillary Clinton in
today’s political arena (although Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama and a few
others come close). Lepore clearly composed her piece before the first debate
occurred.
I’ve written often about the undercutting of intellectual
achievement in the mass media since the end of World War II; for a few examples,
see blog entries of March 12, 2015; February 3, 2015; January 22, 2014; October27, 2013; and January 27, 2013. Saying math is hard or that learning is not
fun, touting celebrities who didn’t finish college, belittling education,
calling devotees of serious theatre snobs, assuming beach reading has to be escapist,
equating genius with madness—the barrage of subtle digs at intellectual achievement
in the news media proceeds on a daily basis.
In presidential campaigns, when “smarts” has been an issue,
the mass media has always influenced the public to prefer the candidate seen as
“less smart.” Examples include the 1952 and 1956 election in which both Adlai Stevenson
and Dwight Eisenhower were both educated and studied men, but the media
primarily depicted Ike as a “nice guy war hero” and Stevenson as an
intellectual (and “smarter”) and subtly marked him down for it. Then there was
smart Jimmy Carter versus dumb Ronald Reagan in 1980 and smart Al Gore versus
dumb George W. Bush in 2000. In both these elections, the media used all the
derogatory ways we have to say “smart” to describe the losing candidates, while
extolling the people skills of the winning candidates.
My epiphany came when reading Lepore’s gratuitous
characterization of Hillary in a description of what she expects in the debate
in which Lepore’s tone reflects a snarky world-wear criticism: “Hillary Clinton
will be there, overprepared.”
Overprepared? That
means she hit the books too hard and studied too much. But is there any such
thing? Let’s see… If she prepared for questions or comments that would never be
asked, e.g., “What do you think of the cancellation of Hill Street Blues?” that
would not be overpreparation, but stupidity. If she prepared so much that she
neglected to eat or sleep and therefore performed poorly, that would be
inadequate preparation, because she focused on just one aspect of what it takes
to get ready. If she practiced her facts and messages to the point that she
delivered them robotically, as if muttering the rosary, that would be a poor
performance, perhaps suggesting, again, that the cause was not overpreparation,
but poor preparation for not focusing enough on the performance aspects of
debating. The more we study the possible meanings of “overpreparation,” the
more we must conclude that there’s no such thing, except as a stand-in for
something else.
In short, all references to “overpreparation” are nothing
more than a derogatory way to refer to a good, smart student. Interestingly
enough, the concept of “overpreparation” is similar to that of “overachieiving”
in that the mass media sees it as a virtue in athletics, but a vice in
intellectual endeavors. If you think I’m wrong, monitor the sports pages and
news sections for a few months. Athletes are always praised for their hard work
(especially if they are white and can be contrasted with “natural athletes”
assumed to be of color).
With the current election, the news media is in a triple
quandary: It usually subtly shapes coverage to help Republicans (see the
Congressional 2010 election coverage for a case history) and it usually subtly
puts down the candidate who is more intellectual, more educated, more
studied—the egghead, as they called Stevenson. But by doing so in 2016, they
risk unleashing a monster on the world.
The third part of the triple quandary. Do I even have to say
it at this point? It’s sexism, which plays out less in candidate preferences
and more in the strict media adherence to condoning a subtle but explicit
double standard that exists throughout American society regarding men and women
in the workforce.
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