indignity

I read an article out of The New Yorker today called Stooping to Conquer. The author talks about recent political history and the use of self-parody, sometimes even self-indignation, to rally up support and "connect" with a certain demographic of Saturday Night Live enthusiasts. At first, in the late 60's and early 70's, when most people who owned a television watched television, targeted and scripted comedic ploys were somewhat useful in making a candidate seem more personal, and this makes sense to a degree. We like to know that we aren't voting for robots and that the people in office share, on some level, the same thought processes and sentiments about daily life that we do. We like to know they're like us, and that's okay. What struck me as discomforting about the article was how the demographics of television viewers has changed dramatically since the first political sketch comedies involving actual politicians in the 70's. Nowadays, everybody owns a television, but very few are watching the same thing at the same time. The audience has gotten much smaller, and politically speaking, much more concentrated in a certain demographic when considering sketch comedy shows like Saturday Night Live.

Now, there is almost an entire election-year industry for comedy writers and strategists to make their employers seem funny on television -- this sometimes fails, as when George W., as a candidate, went on Letterman's show after he had recovered from a bypass surgery and made jokes about it to a booing audience. Or, look at how Howard Dean tried to downplay his over-hyped yell -- to no avail. But the bigger problem to me wasn't so much that it was or wasn't working for politicians or their strategists, but that this was actually a topic that was taking up a significant amount of time and resources: making candidates look funny, or sometimes stupid enough, to appeal to that big demographic of SNL viewers who don't have a political opinion and apparently vote based on how they receive a candidate on television.

Is this seriously how campaigns are going? The political system seems broken to me if the people who don't care are the ones swinging the decisions. I don't know who to blame more, parents, schools, or media for the fact that this is a strategy that can actually work. I can't really blame the politicians, because they're just politicking as usual, but of course I can blame the voters because they're ignoring a fundamental responsibility of their citizenship and relegating it to SNL writers.

Besides that SNL isn't funny now, this is scary. Either candidates should stop trying to pander to those people like they're kindergartners instead of encouraging them to be concerned about issues, or those people should have to choose between sketch comedy shows and voting.

Although, if this keeps up, I'll have a hard time making that choice myself.

on the topic of shoes indefinitely: I

A quick post of an assignment from today with an added graph:

I have always had a very practical and utilitarian relationship with my shoes. If you had recorded the years of my life in a table and then recorded the number of shoes I've had in my life in that same table and used both columns to chart a scatter plot, the result would be uninteresting at best -- a straight line which crosses Y at 1 pair. I use them until my toes pop out of the holes in the front, and then I throw them away and lather, rinse, repeat.

with a polynomial trendline

This can likely be attributed to my lack of appreciation of the glamor of shoes, which I have, until recently, forfeited to the women of the world. Let it be their concern, I would say -- my life has enough stress already to worry about, of all things, current foot fashion. Just as the icebergs, though, my attachment to shoes began to thaw and release itself under the heat from the sun of life. First, I found sandals, and this marked a distinctly new point in my life. In the same way that I imagine once oppressed peoples first gets the ability to vote in free elections, my feet were liberated. Of course, with liberation came more sandals.

As winter months approached, however, my feet began to feel the true responsibilities of this freedom, or rather, my own interpretation of it. I had selfishly justified that sandals were not actually shoes, and so, I was not compromising the greater principles of my life by sometimes delving into that perverse fantasy world. This mode of thought could no longer survive, though, and as November drew nearer, it was time for a new worldview.

he·li·o·cen·tri·cism: because heliocentric was already taken.