Life Goes On, from T.V. Event To T.V. Event

You probably already know that Ellen Degeneres is going to host the 79th Academy Awards and that Prince will be the half-time performer at the SuperBowl. But, did you know that Coca Cola is returning to the Superbowl this year?

The hype is definitely stimulating. I can hardly wait. Last year, I watched the SuperBowl for the first time. Of course, it was because I was at a loose end that day, and Seattle's team (what's their name again? Shows you how much I care about football) was playing. But, could I, a professor of mass media, resist the lure of "the best commercials in the world," which we have come to know as a breathtaking, "miss-it-if-you're-uncool" feature of this sporting event? I accompanied an equally clueless friend to a sports bar, where, despite this being "polite Seattle," one man kept aggressively shouting, "THAT"S WHAT I"M TALKING ABOUT!" everytime his team scored. I kept thinking a fight would break out -- but that only happens in other parts of the world. This country has way too many other things to fight over than football. Besides, the super-commericials and the Rolling Stones kept everyone mellow and mesmerized.

Makes me wonder -- maybe television and its hyper events keep us from taking a knife to each others' throats. Of course, television also distracts us from the fact that elsewhere, we are, actually, taking more than just knives to other people's throats.

This weekend will come and go, and then we can start the buzz over the Oscars. It's never about who won, is it? It's about the endearing nonsense that we construct as meaningful mass-mediations in our lives. I don't know about you, but I really can't not be there. If nothing else, it will keep me mellow.

But, Did Obama Learn to Use a Crayon?

What if the “dirt” on Barrack Obama had been true? What if, heaven(s) forbid, Obama had, in fact, received two years of education at an Islamic religious school in Indonesia when he was six years old? What if this education hadn’t been secular, like Mr. Obama has clarified?

Let’s stop and think for a minute about how funny this is. Picture a six-year-old Obama being moved profoundly by a madrassa education, and the impact being so great that, no matter his later education at Harvard Law School, if he becomes President of the United States of America, the country turns into Amerikistan.

I think of my own son and his learning between the ages of six and eight, i.e., first and second grade – he went to a private, Episcopal school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Gulp. My wretched decision to let my Hindu boy learn to use crayons, attend church and play softball with his buddies Zach and Taylor has damned his chances of one day running for Prime Minister of India.

Well, maybe not. Because, didn't Indians in the last general elections elect an Italian, Catholic woman as prime minister of this chiefly Hindu, patriarchal third world country? Didn't they crowd the streets in protest when she declined? And, the protests had nothing to do with the fact that the man she handed the post to was Sikh.

Granted, a madrassa’s teachings are probably more religious than that at an Episcopal school, or, for that matter, the kindergarten in Singapore where my son learned to speak a little Mandarin (goodness,what was I thinking?). But, seriously, wouldn’t you applaud and wish all power to any kindergarten/grade school and any education that can make our kids think and be inspired for life at age six? Sign me up!

So, even if the story had been true, what is it that right wing muckrakers and political analysts know about American voting publics that makes such news so deliciously worth putting out there? Here’s a brief list –

• That the last presidential election was a vote against gay marriage and abortion.
• That the news media will be in a feeding frenzy over any smear campaign at all, so, why not kick off the 2008 presidential campaign season with this shocking one?
• That Web sites and blogs are here to stay, grow and drive us insane. For one, they don’t need to identify their reporters, leave alone their sources! I don’t easily use exclamation points, not even in email, but I use it here in the way in which its use is intended – to exclaim. A man called Jeffrey T. Kuhner's has a Web site, Insight, which “reported” that Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign was planning an accusation against Obama for covering up his elementary school education. I have sometimes supported maintaining the anonymity of sources, but, if any of my journalism students tried to pull this kind of stunt on me, I’d laugh them out of the classroom. Who are these people? And why are we reading their “news” and not moving emails from them to our "trash"?
• That we’re reading their “news” because Fox News told us to. No comments; don’t quote me on that; I can’t tell you who I am because I don’t think I know that myself.
• That, once it’s out there, we, the readers/audiences of America, cannot tell for ourselves what is fake and what isn’t. So, CNN is compelled to legitimize this and follow this as a
news story
. It actually sends a reporter to Obama’s little school in Indonesia, brings back an interview with the school principal and video footage for us to see for ourselves.
• That, finally, we’re readying for another horse race presidential campaign – bring on the Web sites, the blogs, the denials, the drama.

By the time we go out to vote, we will be so saturated and dulled by our torrents of media consumption, so familiar with the compelling ugliness of our candidates, that we just might go and vote on the basis of what someone whispered to us that morning, or, worse, on the suggestion in that last email.

Lamenting Over Hrant Dink in a Journalism Class

When I checked with them today, few of my journalism students had heard of the murder of Turkish journalist Hrant Dink. I had put his name on their current affairs pop quiz. Now they know. But, this isn’t to chastise my students. We talked, in fact, about why they didn’t know – the students were oh-so-ready to blame themselves, for not waking early in the morning, for only reading trashy news, for being so, so bad. That’s what we’ve done to our youth today – made them feel bad,powerless,incapable... for something we have done to them ourselves. We dumbed down their media. And sent them to seek cover in their own space – My Space and Facebook. Hrant Dink and Orhan Pamuk aren’t on our front pages.

My journalism students should know about a slain journalist. They should know about what happens to journalists in other parts of the world when they raise questions that challenge nationalism. And, they should know that while some men and women are dying for the right to free speech, others aren’t quite exercising it.

Closet Sexists?

Upon reading this article in the New York Times today, I am once again struck by how our media enjoy defrocking women leaders by discussing their frocks.

So, this article is on how style is being ushered into the halls of Capitol Hill, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s entry serving as the news “peg” onto which this soggy raincoat of a story is hung. Ms. Pelosi (whom the article refers to as “Mrs. Pelosi,” in a marked regression toward 60s-style reporting), we are told, did some very important things in her first week as speaker, but, importantly, she did it while staying "playful" with jewelry. In fact, the article tells us, ever since she assumed office, orders of Tahitian pearls (her signature) have skyrocketed.

The author of the article, Lizette Alvarez, aware that she may raise unplucked feminist eyebrows for doing a piece such as this, addresses the dilemma within her story (“Just raising the issue of a powerful woman’s wardrobe choices strikes some people as sexist, an undermining of her talents and qualifications…”). Well done, Ms. Alvarez. But,
admiring Ms. Pelosi’s sartorial savvy is not the problem. I don’t believe that an article on her dress style, or her appearance with her grandchildren at her swearing in, detracts from her power image. But, one must take objection to the style and content of the article. First, where are the men? Bring on the suits! Certainly, one of the gentlemen in Washington could have been a peg for such an article, too? Second, and this is more subtle, read the article for its use of certain phrases. The women politicians “happily chatted away,” are “skittish” about their wardrobe choices and one of them wears “slimming” pantsuits. Am I alone in imagining that these are gendered terms?

The concluding line of the article takes the cake: “You don’t have to grow up to look like a librarian,” said Lauren Solomon, founder and director of LS Image Associates, which has clients in the corporate and political fields. “But you don’t have to look like a hooker, either.”
Senator Clinton’s “found her fashion center,” the article tells us. And her hair now compliments her age and standing.
What does this kind of statement imply? That America has only seen two types of professional women – the librarian and the hooker? That women politicians need “image consultants” to grow them up into appropriate attire? The article actually points out inadvertently but quite clearly – these women are still struggling with what not to wear. And, given our enthusiastic scrutiny of their every pantsuit alongside their policy agendas, most of us should probably admit to being closet sexists.

"Role Play, Or Tap Dancing Through Partisanship in the Classroom"

The following is an essay invited for a Roundtable discussion on Political Partisanship in the Classroom, published in "Political Communication Report," a publication of Political Communication Sections of the International Communication Association and the American Political Science Association).The other essays published as part of the roundtable can be found here.

All my years of living in the world’s most complex democracy—India—could not have prepared me for the simplicity of ideological identification in the world’s oldest democracy, America. You are likely to be profiled as either liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. Or maybe you are an Independent? Just before they let me off the hook for being, well, a “foreigner,” I guide students away from ideology and toward the one article of faith that places me in a room, standing before them, poised with a dry erase marker: I am a professor. And that should send all the energetic guesswork about my ideology and my partisan leanings out the window.

But it doesn’t and it never will, as explicated in the article “My Professor is a Partisan Hack: How Perceptions of a Professor’s Political Views Affect Student Course Evaluations.” Students are curious about their professors; they will look for clues to your personality, your personal life—and, indeed, your ideology. They will find these clues in your research, your teaching, even your dress.

The authors of the article advise in their “Conclusions And Recommendations” that professors should refrain from identifying their political affiliations. This, I would argue, is easier said than done, especially for a faculty member seen as being, for better or for worse, “a woman of color.” To twist Shakespeare’s line for my own political purpose here, I would say: “Some are born with ideology, some achieve ideology, and some have ideology thrust upon them.”

So, on an ostensibly liberal, Jesuit Catholic campus with a stated mission of social justice, in progressive Seattle, in the “blue,” state of Washington, I enter the classroom ready to teach courses in public affairs reporting, “Media, Society and the Individual” and “International Affairs Writing.” Naturally, some or all of these courses must deal with politics, political communication, war and foreign policy. When I raise topics of communication justice and the representation of race, gender and sexuality in the media, even before I say a word, my students know that in all probability, they are dealing with a feminist. In fact, feminism is arguably the one ideology that today does not go down well with even the more liberal male or female students.
I would wager that it is hard to find a professor who truly believes that ideological leanings do not creep into the choice of what to include and what to leave out of a lesson plan on any given day. Sometimes, ideology is right there in the choice of textbook. In my case, my decade-long career in journalism is strewn with stories that challenge the social and political order, yes, with objectivity and little bias, but certainly with favor toward one topic of story over another.

So, while it might be easier for a white, male instructor with a stiff upper lip and soft tweed to appear neutral, my students want cues not merely to my attitude toward one or the other political party in America, but toward America itself. In such a classroom, brimming with presumption and aching for clear, partisan confession, I navigate toward my role as instructor with a little role-play of these different kinds:

1. The Nomadic Journalist: An easy role, one that helps me assume the higher ground of neutrality, objectivity and, more than anything else, a reverence for a well-asked question. The message I give to students is that governments, across the world, are deserving of scrutiny. Without being defensive, I discuss how a media professional working in partisan and ideology-driven times might play the role of watchdog and question the politics of, say, a fundamentalist Hindu government in India, state-controlled media in Singapore, or, then, self-censorship among journalists in America during the Iraq war. My endeavor is that students recognize that I have played the role of the adversarial journalist in every place in which I have lived and worked, especially my homeland. I extend the same loving critical inquiry to where I currently, and proudly, reside – the United States of America.

2. The Storyteller: Continuing in the spirit of questioning and disclosure, I encourage students to ask me questions about my background and experiences. I use this technique sparingly and under controlled conditions. For instance, in the International Affairs Writing course, I may set up a mock press conference in which students get to question me, an international journalist and a Ph.D. in American Media and Politics . I use students’ questions (which come fast and hard!) to clarify any misconceptions they might have about me, or about most immigrant communities. For instance, I tell them, the “woman of color” is a new and uneasy role for me to play. In my own country, and for most of my life, I belonged to the dominant community, the majority, the Brahmins, equivalent in many ways to upper class white Americans. I did not, by Indian standards, suffer from a lack of resources. As a journalist, though, I worked on stories that challenged the very caste, class and economic structures I hailed from. So, I have shifted identities of birth, ideology and nation. Through this kind of controlled disclosure, I encourage students to think about their own identities and ideologies – acquired or challenged—and encourage them to recognize the possibility of morphing from one to another.

3. The Devil’s Advocate: My course description states that students can expect to hone their critical thinking skills in my classes. Indeed, some of my courses rely strongly on class discussion. If I find one view overpowering others, I throw in the opposite viewpoint. On this liberal campus, the one I am forced to bring in is often the conservative viewpoint, exposing me to the charge of being, maybe, a “moderate.” As the results of the study suggest, being a “moderate” does not inspire much confidence in students. So, when I choose to assume a moderate viewpoint, it’s a no-man’s land. Certainly, it’s a no-woman’s land. Liberal students are resentful, conservative students are suspicious. Students of color may automatically expect solidarity from me, and, in fact, expect me to censure and penalize those students lacking in racial sensitivity or awareness. Giving them mixed signals is risky, but it gets the job done—discussions open up, rich and rewarding. A moment of triumph was when one male student looked at me without batting an eyelid and stated, with no sign of malice or contempt, “I want all immigrants to leave this country because….” He was not inhibited by my nationality, my own immigrant status, my gender or my possible position of authority over him. He was doing what I wanted him to do—enriching the debate.

4. The “Patriotic” Foreigner:
Whether I like it or not, sometimes it does become necessary in an American classroom to defend my commitment to the ground beneath my feet. Fortunately, it’s not hard to do. I do like America. I talk to students about what I like about America, as a journalist, a woman, an academic and a resident. I do this in the context of the class. I like America particularly for its First Amendment freedoms and the power to question. The spotlight, then, is back on the students and on their training in asking strong questions.
Often, I make casual though calculated references like “We (in India) grew up reading about your leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.” The students may or may not see the statement as political. The class may be on globalization and the media, but the message is that of admiration for America’s triumphs on racial and gender equality.

5. The Humorist:
Although I resist reducing complex topics to one-liners, sometimes well-placed wit can defuse tensions and redirect energies to the topic under scrutiny. Once, today’s pasha of political punditry, Jon Stewart, rescued my class from disaster. A video clip of Stewart’s quip on the political brawl of the day made for enthusiastic learning across partisan lines without revelation of my own views on the subject.

Hyperlinked Humans

“I think it’s interesting, because there seems to be a lot of concern about the last two minutes of Saddam Hussein’s life, and less about the first 69 years, in which he murdered hundreds of thousands of people. That’s why he was executed.” – White House spokesman Tony Snow, on the controversy over the way Saddam Hussein was taunted before being executed.

Set aside for a moment the reasons Mr. Snow does not want us to dwell on the "execution" of Hussein. Once again, let's move the spotlight from the pseudo-event of the execution to what we, as hyperlink-happy audiences, make of it. In the midst of a holiday season in the United States, in the midst of a solemn and beautiful state funeral given to former U.S. president Gerald Ford, come the ugly pictures of the hanging of a brutal man. Something about the timing of it all tells of the dulling drama of our lives. So, was the timing contrived, a friend asked me at a swimming class last night. I don’t know, but it does give us something to go online and do a search on.

I have tried to avoid mulling over the maniacal execution, not to bury my head in the sand, but, in fact, to retrieve it. Here’s another instance of the imagery catching up with us even if we wanted to let a death be just that – a damned, wretched, state-sponsored death. At a Tully’s coffee shop in Seattle the morning after Hussein’s hanging, right next to the deliciously enticing posters of steaming holiday brews and oozing chocolate-chip cookies, the newspaper racks lay heavy with imposing front-page pictures of the tyrant who was hanged. Joy to the world. The juxtaposition of fear and consumption, once again, promised to help us navigate through the holidays and the hype.

The man and his deeds make me shudder, but so does the fact that we have no other way of dealing with killing than killing itself. And, having dealt with it, we try and make sense of it all through the pictures of the prey. Just like the terrorists of 9/11, the guard who took cellphone pictures of Hussein’s execution knew we’d be waiting for the photos to arrive.

The act, its imagery and the voyeuristic clicking on video streams that show us the macabre delight over the death of a madman makes me feel like a helpless, hyperlinked human. I don’t want to click, I just want to close that window, shut that page for now.For your sake and mine, I will not provide any hyperlinks with this post.

Borat, Kramer and Other Things Unfunny

In these past weeks, two men, in their own distinct ways, have turned humor on its head. In so doing, they have exposed not only our gluttonous love of humor but also the humor of hate.

In the first case, humor was, ostensibly, used for serious commentary. In the second, humor turned into an inadvertent, serious commentary of a different sort. Both cases, however, are a comment on the seriousness of our times, and our bizarre propensity to laugh through it all, leaving discussions of racial tensions up to humor or to be forced up to the surface by hurricanes.
"Borat,” the fictitious character of the film that is inexplicably being hailed as iconic, did everything racist, sexist and downright crude, but succeeded in somehow convincing us that the joke was on us. So, we laughed, sportingly.

“Kramer” (as comedian Michael Richards is better known, for the character he played on sitcom "Seinfeld")raged in a Los Angeles comedy club , shifting between almost incoherent frenzy and very eloquent nostalgia for hate crimes against African Americans. But, the cellphone camera recording by an audience member reveals more than the comedian’s humorless breakdown.

The soundtrack of laughter that laced Richards’s comments reveals our own over-developed, almost steroidal, collective sense of humor. The live audience in the comedy club, unsure about whether or not this was part of the comedian’s routine, laughed. And laughed some more, nervously. One female audience member could even be overheard pleading, “Don’t go, Kramer,” when the performer finally walked off stage. Similarly, when the comedian apologized in an interview on The Letterman Show, television viewers and live audience members who were unaware of the context of the interview, did what we know to do with our entertainment-driven media – they laughed.

But, didn’t the film critics hail Borat as “intelligent” humor? Critics were intelligently aware of the very Cambridge-educated, very British Sasha Baron Cohen’s appropriation of racial, gendered and ethnic stereotypes and his deliberate use of offensive chicanery for the purpose of taping people’s baser tendencies. Critics and the hype transferred through them -- smugly told us that either we’d either “get it” or we wouldn’t. So, we, the viewers, were alerted to what would be the most “educated” response: we should both fall off our seats with laughter and sit up straight for a slap on the wrist.

Where we do deserve a slap, though, is on the funnybone. Because, the result of it all, of course, is that we’re laughing too easily about things that are just not funny. Both Borat and Richards made jokes about black people (yes, Borat’s use of the character of the poor, overweight black “prostitute”/actress riding a mechanical bull might have made you go “Awww,” but how wasn’t that exploitative of her, again?). Just like people unknowingly played along with Borat’s humiliating gags, other people unwittingly stayed amused through Kramer’s abuse. However, what today’s effortlessly amused audiences must come to recognize is that while laughing easily is charming, laughing on cue is, increasingly, dangerous. The humor imperative of our mass-mediated society is almost as dire as the thing is seeks to oppose – political correctness. As a result, we laugh more easily than we talk, especially about issues like racism. And, we leave the job of airing these issues to Borat and Kramer and other things unfunny.

More importantly, we are relegating these conversations – on race, gender and sexuality – to the sphere of humor and humor alone. Certainly, there is something potent about the fact that one of the most charged explosions of racist public speech in recent times occurred in a comedy club, where, given that people went right on laughing, it could just as easily have been a joke, after all? We have, here, a fine example of the humor of hate, fuelled by laugh-a-minute audiences with a predilection for mirth over something as awfully un-hip as conversation.

The humor ethic in today’s entertainment-driven media demands that we pull out all the stops and then some more, until we are smack-dab in the middle of a naked, obese man’s legs, wrestling with Borat to get out of the grip, while what we really ought to do is walk out.

Political correctness, despite the bad rap it’s been given, isn’t the culprit. Standing at the extremes of either political correctness or dim-witted humor is. The politically correct are asked to “lighten up,” maybe watch SNL or go to a comedy club or something, where desperate, competitive comics grab at the low-hanging fruit – jokes about race, gender, sexuality, disability. Often, the jokes are by comedians who belong to the group that the joke is on. The message is – if a “fat” joke is delivered by a fat person, it’s OK – go ahead, laugh your heart out. It’s time, however, to pull the rug from under humor’s feet. And not laugh when we see it fall.