Occasionally my mind travels in bizarre directions. Yesterday, the Fourth of July, it wandered to the movie “Independence Day.” What I remember most about that movie has nothing to do with aliens, spaceships, Will Smith or Jeff Goldblum. What I remember the most is that rousing speech that Bill Pullman, as President of the United States, gives just before he leads a troop of jet fighters to battle the invading aliens.
When I first saw that movie I remember thinking, wow, now isn’t that the kind of president any country would be proud to have as its leader. This president is noble, articulate, intelligent, discerning, a loving father, and since his wife is killed by alien fire, he is a grieving widower. To top it all off, he is an ace fighter pilot! Though every disaster and tragedy imaginable surrounds him, he gives a speech that manages to rouse the entire planet. What a “President,” with a Gigantic Capital P.
If you have a couple of extra minutes, watch it here: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechindependenceday.html
Yeah, I know. How corny can one get?
But think of the fictitious presidential images that have been presented to us: besides Bill Pullman in “Independence Day,” we also have Morgan Freeman in “Deep Impact,” Harrison Ford in “Air Force One,” Henry Fonda in “Fail Safe,” and many others. It’s kind of pathetic that, more often than not, fictional presidents have the ability to rouse us more than the real ones. Inevitably, we are disappointed because real life, what we say we want and hope for, does not imitate the movies. How did we reach this point where we expect, consciously or subconsciously, our presidents to be the equals to the Superpresidents of fiction?
Surely the creation of a presidential image has been around for a long time. Simple sloganeering began ages ago in 1840 with William Henry Harrison’s “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” and has gone on to, among others:
· Vote yourself a farm – Abraham Lincoln
· He kept us out of war – Woodrow Wilson
· Return to normalcy – Warren G. Harding
· A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage – Herbert Hoover
· He’s making us proud again – Gerald R. Ford
· A leader for a change – Jimmy Carter
· It’s morning again in America – Ronald Reagan
· Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow – Bill Clinton
· Yes, American can! – George W. Bush
· Yes we can! – Barack Obama
In the 21st Century we seem to have carried the formation of a presidential image to new heights, or depths, depending upon how you look at it. Sloganeering has blossomed into a media package of photo ops, sound bytes, personal stylists, videography and a bevy of professional speech writers. If a candidate looks good and sounds good, why, surely he must be good, right? We don’t listen to speeches, we listen to rhetoric, rationalization and any bastardization of the truth that seems to strike the right chord with us, otherwise we don’t listen at all. We won’t listen. We confuse cleverness and the ability to come up with a smart retort in a millisecond with intelligence, wisdom, deep foresight and discernment.
What do we choose to take away from these professionally manufactured sound bytes?
“Yes, America can!” America can what? Yes, America can overcome its enemies; but what happens to those enemies after we overcome them? America can be the best, but do we continue to be the best in the light of today’s new world economy and international arena? If we decide that we are not, then what must we do to return to our original greatness?
“Yes we can!” We can what? Rebuild our economy? Overcome the daunting parameters of a new world society? Bring jobs back to our own shores? If we can indeed, how, at what price, and are we ready to pay that price?
Our candidates must also ensure that they dress with the right balance of Kohl’s and Nordstrom. I call it “The Macy’s Mode.” Can you imagine the stylists, personal consultants and shoppers that must be kept on staff to insure that a photo op doesn’t turn against them – and how quickly we would turn against them if they did not adhere to images we have foolishly permitted to be imprinted in our minds.
Now there is nothing intrinsically wrong with sloganeering, photo ops and sound bytes. There, however, is a lot intrinsically wrong with making our decisions based on them. A sound byte or photo op should only be the springboard to the information process. A sound byte or photo op is the title to a book. If you only knew the title of a book, would you immediately agree with its author and content?
Harrison Ford, Bill Pullman and Morgan Freeman might be great on screen, but Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama were and are real people. You may cheer a rousing speech in a movie because of the instant emotional gratification, but before you cheer a speech and gush slogans in real time make sure you understand exactly what is being said.
Why have we reached this point? Why have we become so shallow? Why have we so willingly, it seems, given our power over to media imaging? When did we make the deal with the devil to trade depth for image? Are we lazy? To paraphrase Pogo “Have we met the enemy and is he us?”
Therefore, I declare today, July 5, 2012, a New Independence Day. I declare independence from the sound byte. I declare independence from the manufactured media image.
Until the next time, LLAP!
PS . . . Interesting how similar the Bush and Obama campaign slogans are. One could travel all sorts of highways of deliberation with regard to the difference in using the word “We” versus using the word “America.”
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Hear Hear!! I second that independence from the media dictating our unique individual thoughts and beliefs! Thank you, Andrea.
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