Metaphor Country

Empathy and Other Evils

Good work, Republican Party - it takes effort and talent to turn empathy into an evil, especially in times like these.

Good commentary last night on Slate by Dahlia Lithwick, who writes...

When did the simple act of recognizing that you are not the only one in the room become confused with lawlessness, activism, and social engineering? For a group so vociferously devoted to textualism and plain meaning, conservative critics have an awfully elastic definition of the word empathy. It expands to cover any sort of judicial malfeasance they can imagine. Empathy—the quality of caring what others may feel—signals intellectual weakness, judicial immodesty, favoritism, bias, and grandiosity...

Professor Douglas Kmiec of Pepperdine Law School has a thoughtful piece in America: The National Catholic Weekly in which he suggests, reflecting on the prophet Micah, that "one can be empathetic toward all sides of a dispute." Empathy means being impartial toward all litigants without being blind to the consequences of your decisions. You can send up such concerns as gooey judicial sentimentalism, unmoored from any fixed legal principle. Or you can admit that judging requires acts of judgment beyond the mechanical application of law to facts and that it's best for judges to know when the mechanical act of deciding cases gives way to ideology and personal preference. Empathy isn't sloppy sentiment. It's not ideology. It's just a check against the smug certainty that everyone else is sloppy and sentimental while you yourself are a flawless constitutional microcomputer.

...and by The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen, who had this to say...

Almost immediately, "empathy" became a terribly scary word to conservatives, who said it was "code" for "judicial activism." (The irony is, phrases like "judicial activism" and "strict constructionist" are themselves code words for the right.)

My take is simpler.  Just on a basic level of how to connect - or fail to do so - you're not going to come out against empathy and win.

But it'll be fun to watch them try.

 

 

Reptilian Blues

Obviously I'm not doing justice to anything concerning the election.  Still way too busy over here.

But a quick thought, following up on this... in the past few weeks, we've gotten a good look at exactly what's wrong with the whole reptilian thing.  As in - the McCain campaign tries to appeal to fear by painting Obama as an exotic.  Then something really scary comes along - say, for example, the collapse (or near collapse) of the financial system.  Under those circumstances, Obama looks safe (Presidential) and McCain takes the honors as scary, out of control guy.  So what does he do?  Try to gin up the fear again by leaning on the whole Ayers/terrorist dynamic...

Which proves what, exactly?  Well, to me, the lessons are...

• Fear is genuine, not something you can manufacture.  Calculated attempts to gin up fear (exotic, Ayers) look tinny next to the real thing (meltdown).

• Fear is dynamic, not something you can control.  Things change and your well-planned fear campaign winds up behind the curve.  The audience gets a vote - it's not just what you tell them, it's what they tell you.

• Deliberate attempts to appeal to fear bring out everybody's worst - the campaigner and the audience, too.

• THERE ARE NO MAGIC BEANS!

I can't make that last point often enough.  There's no single thing that you can do in a communications campaign that automatically spells victory.  "The reptilian always wins."  No.  The reptilian always plays a part.  "What we really need is a new message."  "What we really need is a brand solution."  No.  No.  Those are nice things to have but the reason people - especially businesspeople - like them is they're shortcuts.  "If we had the reptilian/the message/the brand then we wouldn't have to do the work."  But you've got to do the work.  You've got to go out and meet people and get to know them and work with them in a complex dynamic environment and build relationships and build trust. 

In other words, reality always wins.

Nice try, reptile guy.

If McCain Has an Advantage, Here's Why

Putting aside all the details of policy and political management (yes, I know I'm reversing myself here, but bear with me)... and taking a broad view of communications... it occurs to me that if the McCain campaign has an advantage, it's this: McCain, however much he talks about change, stands for stability.  And simplicity.  As in, "You don't really need to change anything.  You don't need to make painful choices.  You don't need to accept that things are seriously wrong.  America can go on being America - same as it ever was."  Or put another way, "I'll change Washington but not your life."

I don't favor simple, but simple usually beats complicated.  The risk to Obama is that he comes across as complex and his worldview looks like it means pain for the end user.  As in, "Things are difficult in intricate ways and we need to look at them carefully, and think hard about them, and give up things we like and change who we are in the world."

Want to bet on complexity/pain against the can-do spirit?  I'm not sure I do.  Bad news from my partisan perspective.  We need the surgery but we're going to pick the hair tonic instead.

Then there's Palin.  The other day I was trying to take down Clotaire Rapeille and his archetypes.  Today I'll reverse that, too.  McCain and Palin together look like the wise old man and the young woman.  It's classic Jung food.  Think that isn't going to resonate?

The wise old man goes walking with Sophia and they get together and tell you it's all going to be all right.

The alternative is Scary Exotic Guy.

I'd hate to think The Reptilian Always Wins.

But maybe it does.

The Democrats Get/Fumble Religion

All I can say is, yes.

And also that I find it a little strange to agree with a Heritage Foundation fellow.  But I do.

All I'd add is that this isn't just typical Democratic Party ham-fistedness (though it's that, too).  It's also part of the broader corporate impulse toward branding as a substitute for -- rather than the result of -- policies, actions and relationships.  It's seductively easy -- and completely ineffectual -- to use words like "faith" and "worship" in opposing a particular piece of legislation.  It's a little harder -- but not much better -- to draw broad analogies and forge loose connections between social policies and scriptural passages.  It's very hard -- and absolutely necessary -- to go out and meet, get to know, engage in dialogue with people of faith.  Or, better, let's call them "people who use the vocabulary of religion to think about difficult life issues" (because, you know, there might just be some intellect involved).  If you do that, you'll have to spend a fair amount of time listening, rethinking, maybe formulating new polices. But the policies won't necessarily be bad policies. And because the relationships are authentic, you stand a chance of breaking the Republican stranglehold on faith-based communities and values-based messages.

Worth a shot?

Or, as the ads used to say, you can turn the page.

Changing Times, Et Cetera

One of the nice things about having been away from the blog for a while is that you find you're less caught up in the day-to-day or hour-to-hour shifts of opinion, which might mean that you're better able to see the big, long trendlines developing.

Case in point -- the long slide of the Bush administration.  From a remove it looks like this: post-9/11, a bunch of us are willing to support them because a) we're staggered and b) whatever else we think about them, they seem competent.  That sense of their competence erodes slowly in Iraq -- then gets wiped out altogether during Katrina week.  The result?  A new story -- we shift from "competent" to "flailing."  And events that we would have considered separately before -- like Cunningham -- now become part of the picture because they fit the picture.  And on the other hand, all the backdrops and all the uniformed audiences in the world can't help set things right because the fundamental story has changed.  A year or a year and half ago, those staged events would have looked like more evidence of mastery and control.  Now they look like part of the desperation.

Times are, to coin a phrase, changing.  The whole cluster of sensibilities -- executive leadership, command and control, the market system -- that used to be a support and a comfort, now seems disconnected from a negative, uncertain lived life.  Yesterday in Slate, Edward Jay Epstein wrote about Hollywood's tendency to vilify business.  Why do they do that?  For want of more challenging targets?  Maybe -- let's not underestimate Hollywood's gift for superficial emotionalism and simplification.  But there's also this -- an increasing sense that all those business values that we staked so much on haven't actually done us a lot of good.  If there's a rise in communitarianism, post-Katrina -- and there will be -- then entrepreneurial individualism is going to suffer.  It's a long time since I've agreed with Krugman, but in this case I do.  A worrisome sign.

On Sunday afternoon I went to see Syriana.  There's plenty wrong with it.  I'm not a fan of strong conspiracy theories, the kind that require lots of collusion in smoke-filled rooms.  No one can believe in active conspiracies who's tried to arrange a conference call that stretches across more than one time zone -- people just aren't that competent ("what do you mean, 2 o'clock Central?")  I lean toward weak conspiracies -- conspiracies of neglect, conspiracies of compromise, conspiracies that happen on their own when people can't stand up to the corrosive effects of money on the table.  Those reservations aside -- I was struck by the size of the crowd and the amount of energy in the theater.  This is not exactly mainstream entertainment, but it packed the house.  Granted that 10023 isn't the heartland -- and it'll be interesting to see how the film does when it opens there on Friday -- but there really seemed to be something in the air that hadn't been present before, even here on the lower Upper West Side.  Anti-Bush, of course, but also anti-business, anti-corporate, and strongly in favor of getting to the bottom of what's wrong -- and something seems decidedly wrong -- with our quality of life.

A year ago my friend Joe Apocalypse kept telling me that "the center is going to move left."  I didn't believe him at the time -- but now, he's got me wondering.  Joe, bless his dark heart, has been right before.

So step lively, and watch the changing times.

Lakoff and Lakoff and Lakoff Again

The nice thing about political debate is that it unfolds simultaneously in fruit-fly time, and in geologic time.  What with all my personal upheavals, I've missed a couple of chances to comment on George Lakoff coverage.  No problem -- here he is again.  Worth a look.  Advantages: more depth.  Disadvantages: it's still the same old story, a fight for...  sorry, a focus challenge there.  Basically, there's nothing in play in the new coverage that changes my viewpoint, which is, as you know, that the policies need to lead the framing, not the other way around.  And I'll add an emerging thought: by the time these theories are really in play (read six months from now, as the midyear campaigns hit full stride), conditions will have changed so much that we won't be debating frames, we'll be debating pictures.  In other words -- the framing debate assumes stability.  Throw in a severe event -- an attack or an economic downturn or both -- and we won't be debating communications strategies.  We'll be grappling with consequences, at the policy level.  Communications strategies will follow naturally, which is what they ought to do. 

Maybe I'm premature in calling the major impact for '06.  But by the time the next Presidential campaign gets rolling, the odds are that we're in a different world, and that all the talk about framing will seem quaint.

Of course, I've just been reading this (for subscribers only, but still available on the newsstand), which may account for my mood.  But I don't think so.  I can manage to feel like this all on my own.  More soon about my state of mind, and my life as a focus group of one.

The Democrats and Branding

Reader Al Geduldig asks below what I meant in an earlier post when I referred to "the Democrats' fatal attraction to branding."  I probably should have been clearer at the time -- what I meant was, "the Democrats' fatal attraction to branding as a substitute for actually doing hard, hands-on policy work."  The Democratic Party -- in flirting with George Lakoff and other framing and branding gurus -- seems to have decided, along with a fair number of businesspeople who ought to know better -- that branding is a sort of magic fix that, once you apply it, takes care of all your communications problems.  "What we really need is a brand!"  What's generally meant by that is, "What we really need is a campaign or a commercial or a logo that makes people understand who we are and what we mean, and makes them like us, without our having to address any of the fundamentals of what we do."

I once had a client -- he was the head of marketing for a consumer Internet startup that meant to compete with Amazon -- who came to my office and said, "I need to be Coca-Cola.  What does it take to be Coca-Cola?"  I was a bit tired that day, and not feeling very diplomatic, so I looked at him across the table and said, "Two world wars."  It's a tribute, I guess, to him and maybe also to me, that he didn't jump across the table after me.  His business is gone, but we're still good friends.

What I was really trying to tell him was this -- Coca-Cola wasn't built overnight, and it wasn't built on a wish.  It was built over decades, through a whole series of business decisions and actions that added up to the Coca-Cola brand.  Yes, there were some decisions along the way about what Coca-Cola ought to represent -- but they were consistent with the business strategy, and they were arrived at over time. 

A brand isn't a goal.  It's a result.  It isn't a magic substitute for strategy.  It's the expression of strategy.  It isn't easy.  It's hard.

I'm not confident that the Democrats who talk about the need for branding understand that.  If they articulated the desire, it might come out this way -- "if only we had a brand, we wouldn't have to worry about the fact that we're aligned with old vested interests, and we're fixated on solutions for an industrial economy, and we don't have a coherent way of talking about values, and we don't have anything resembling a national security strategy."  A brand would be easier than that -- wouldn't it?

No.

I'd be happy to see a Democratic brand emerge.  But I'd like that Democratic brand to be the expression of what the Democrats actually are.  And right now, I'm not at all sure what that is.

Policy now.  Branding later.

Left-Faith, Geo-Green, and Other Strange Bedfellowisms

It's been a while since we visited the question of whether the left can build ties with evangelicals and other faith-based communities.

Might be time to take another look.  A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times discovered the growing alliance between evangelicals and environmentalists.

And on a somewhat related note, Tom Friedman took a look at the potential for a Geo-Green movement.

The Bull Moose explores further.

New energy in the strange bedfellows movement?  Just perhaps.

The New Republic: Narrative Festival

The New Republic opens windows into narrative -- first, there's Robert Reich, arguing that America is built on four (count 'em) stories, and that the key to success for the Democratic Party is to reclaim at least some of them from the Republicans.

This actually isn't as bad as it sounds in the short retelling.  Four narratives are better than two, which if I remember correctly is where George Lakoff left off.  More detail -- more approaches -- means better strategy, at least up to a point.  Reich is also far more willing to engage on the policy level -- he doesn't just deal in phrasing (or framing).  But I'm not sure his "Mob at the Gates" strategy (create GATO, the Global Anti-Terrorist Organization) exactly makes it.  His "Rot at the Top" approach is more promising -- assuming economic collapse, or some other form of assistance. 

Of course, there may be more than four American narratives.  For example, he seems to leave out the one about the White Whale...

Nevertheless, worth a look.

Better is Lee Siegel's takedown of the Ashley Smith-Brian Nicholls story, as converted into a morality play by CNN:

Prostitution is legalized in two places in America: in Nevada and on the airwaves. One of the biggest whorehouses is CNN (you don't expect integrity from Fox), which swung into action. The print media kept its cool and reported what seemed like Smith's remarkable grace under pressure with equal composure and reported her hints that she was an angel sent by God--Nichols himself told her, she assured reporters, who repeated it again and again, like a character reference--with skeptical detachment. In the newspapers, her narrative of sin and redemption was the story told by a hostage about how she saved herself. On television, it was the reason why she was saved. CNN proceeded to thrust before the cameras evangelical pastors, ministers, and even a rabbi claiming that Smith's use of Christian sentiments to save her life was proof of God's grace and divine intervention.

Never mind that Nichols himself had gone to a Catholic school and had been a religious man, very active in his local church, where he played the organ. Paula Zahn, the Xaviera Hollander of this particular story, blathered on about The Purpose Driven Life as if it had caused her own conversion...

On her show, Zahn endorsed the idea of a benevolent orchestration of four murders leading to many blessed hours and days of crowd-pleasing coverage like this: "For those who believe God works in mysterious ways, Ashley Smith and Brian Nichols will long remain a case in point, but the legions of those who have been touched by Rick Warren's teachings will not be surprised." This wasn't really a cynical attempt to appeal to the Christian right, who we are told now have the country's destiny in their hands and must be courted. It was an attempt to win the viewership of some of those "legions" who read Warren's book--a delicious demographic of 20 million...

One effect of the media's endorsement of this evangelical fantasy was to make the murder of four people inconsequential, or at least incidental to the happy unfolding of this story, which now included four possible book deals, a movie project, and a job offer from a hostage-negotiation firm for Ashley Smith...

But the main result of supporting the ideas of this religious-seeming crew was to legitimize the notion that a judge, a court employee, and two law-enforcement people were sacrificed for the sake of a divine arrangement...

Being by this point quite warmed up, he does go on...

Check it out.  Step lively.  And watch the closing story forms...

The New New Journalism... And Beyond

Took time out Friday night to attend a seminar at NYU moderated by Robert S. Boynton, a fine writer and old friend who now heads the university's magazine journalism program.  The event was linked to the publication of his new book, The New New Journalism, a set of interviews with 19 leading writers, ranging from Ted Conover though Lawrence Wright, with stops along the way for Richard Ben Cramer, William Langewiesche, Michael Lewis, Ron Rosenbaum, Gay Talese and Lawrence Wechsler, among others.  The focus is on craft -- how do you research?  How do you interview?  Do you tape?  How do you get from your notes to manuscript?  The answers go well beyond -- to outlook, motivation, worldview.  Quite revealing.  Should be (but probably won't be) required reading for my colleagues in the communications strategy world -- who, unfortunately, start their professional lives in the business environment, never leave it, and tend to look at writers as a sort of alien species that exists to disrupt marketing plans.

As for the symposium -- Conover, William Finnegan, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and filmmaker Edet Belzberg talked at length about, among other things, aesthetics.  I always find that odd about magazine journalism -- the amount of consideration given to narrative structures and such.  I've always preferred something more blunt, and less developed -- which is probably why I'm out here and not in there.  Then, there was the matter of political engagement.  Boynton defines the "New New Journalism" as a blend of the 60's-era New Journalism and the activist muckraking of the 1890's and early 1900's.  So clanking through the discussion were long leftist trains of thought.  LeBlanc talked about how difficult it was for her to engage a law enforcement perspective, given her biases; Conover talked about his research into the lives of prison guards -- to his credit, he worked as one in order to do his research; on the other hand he referred to them as the "bad guys" in his cosmos, which seemed to be meant both with and without irony.  "Just the fact that you're writing about kids in the South Bronx is itself a political statement," he said.

Boynton suggests that while the New Journalism focused on status, the New New Journalism focuses on race and class, and that this is cutting-edge.  I'm not sure.  Seems like this particular journalistic aesthetic is a bit pre-cooked.  All the while, I found myself thinking about the aesthetics of the blogosphere -- driven by fragmentary, always hyperlinked, sometimes hyperactive 20-somethings who aren't locked into the formalities of academic Marxism and identity politics.  My business communications colleagues may be naive about the lives of magazine journalists, but the journalists sound like they're having a hard time thinking about the business world as something other than the domain of evil landlords.  I'm inclined, once again, to blow up categories and see what happens.  Question of the moment -- what's the New New New Journalism?  Is it blog-based?  Is it bored with race and class?  Does it blend perspectives into a fresher kind of thought?  Or does it produce its own set of formalist, politico-aesthetic blinders?

You got me.  But like most everything at the old media/new media intersection, it's going to be fun to watch.