“Let there be light.” God says those words, according to the book of Genesis, and the rest is human history.
For God, merely talking brings things into existence. His speech is ontology.
Watching hard-lined partisans this election season, the kinds of supporters doggedly unwilling to let the tiniest shreds of reasoned (or reasonable) analysis spoil their talking-pointed punditry, seems like a secularized version of that Biblically foundational moment.
Many pundits and partisans appear to imagine themselves with similar God-like powers, with the ability to speak things into being. It is as though simply saying something, and saying it definitely, makes it politically true — at least true enough, the hope is, to win over some of those voters still purportedly on the electoral fence. As I’ve argued in one of my previous posts, I suspect that the bulk of this oft-invoked fence (on which self-described “undecideds” supposedly stand) is little more than an evasive smokescreen, a strategy for postponing contentious public debates. But whether there is even still such a fence out there (especially this late in the electoral game), many of the loudest talking points are hurled squarely in the direction of would-be voters allegedly balancing atop it.
Some of the recent political claims have been wild, even ridiculous. Was it really legitimate to describe Alaska as “the biggest state in the country” over and over and over again as a way to prop up a surprise VP-pick’s gubernatorial credentials? In what sense does a state’s land mass represent what serious political analysts ever mean when they discuss a location’s size? Yet that was all we heard for a time.
The more patently absurd the claim, the more adamant and definitive the rhetorical stance taken. Calling Obama a Socialist or Marxist or Communist (and with a straight face) only two-seconds after a bipartisan $700-million bailout plan that effectively nationalized the banking system epitomizes an ironic version of this rhetoric’s hubris.
And Democrats do it, too. (I’m not sure what “erratic” actually means in a political landscape where politicians seem to change their policies and platforms with each new morning sun.) But the Dems haven’t been doing it nearly as much this election season — mostly because they haven’t needed to. It is one benefit of being the frontrunner, of making campaign decisions without chronic gusts of desperation temporarily expanding your sails.
But there is something profoundly important about these kinds of maneuvers — these political versions of Jedi mind tricks and mesmerizing vampiric glam.
It is the reason why anytime I switch to Fox they are talking about Obama’s “dangerous” connection to Ayers (and now Khalidi), or they are asking ominous questions about who this “mystery man” from Chicago might really be? “Do we even know?” It is why every expert they offered up last night seemed to be arguing that the polls have already “tightened” and that the electorate is moving decidedly in McCain’s favor. It is why I hear their anchors constantly bemoaning “liberal media bias” and declaring that all major news outlets are effectively conspiring to elect Obama.
At the same time, MSNBC is always discussing something totally different from what Fox emphasizes. They highlight McCain’s financial links to Khalidi (in response to Fox’s stories about that Los Angeles Times video). They keep asking about Palin’s husband’s ties to Alaskan secessionists (and wondering aloud if that is “anti-American” by her definition), and they have all the latest gossip about in-fighting between McCain’s team and Palin’s. MSNBC’s version of a typical night’s “top stories” is barely mentioned (if at all) on FOX. And FOX’s reading of the political tea leaves gets almost a point-by-point refutation from MSNBC’s evening anchors.
Of course, we all know about the media’s capacity for agenda setting. Even if they don’t necessarily tell viewers what to think (and many of the most famous names on cable news these days are actually trying to do just that), they help to predetermine the sets of issues viewers are most likely to think about. They determine how issues get prioritized. And that seems to be the name of the game.
When Fox execs declare that they are “Fair and Balanced,” they want to imagine that they are (i) providing a right wing counterbalance to an otherwise leftist media industry and (ii) simply giving audiences information and allowing them to make their own decisions.
But that isn’t nearly the only thing going right now. Pundits and partisan media outlets also believe that if they say something often enough, consistently enough, no matter how self-evidently half-baked, those claims will produce observable “reality effects.”
If you build it (discursively speaking), they will come.
Similar to the way God saying “let there be light” allows for the creation of that very reality, pundits sometimes think that labeling an ostensibly vast, dark universe already well lit can pull off the very same miracle.
