Most Americans learn more about the political process from political advertising than they do anywhere else. Being so informed by political media, we better comprehend rhetoric like “cutting and running”, “congressional rubber-stamping” and “staying the course” than we understand the basics of our own government. Ask a person how many congress-people there are and expect a sheepish guestimation. Ask someone to describe a flip-flopper and you’ll hear a thing or two about John Kerry.
Now that the election season has come to a close, the barrage of political advertising will recede into the distance, waiting for the next election cycle. It is through these million-dollar advertising blitzes that we come to understand the function of our Senator or Congressperson. We are civically educated through party-sanctioned name-calling, generalizing, and finger pointing. They go out of their way to fill in the gaps in our political science education. The adverse effects on our political conversation and outlook are startling.
Increasingly, during everyday conversation, I have noticed the frequent referencing of sound-bytes in the analysis of a politician’s performance. My friends and I sometimes sit around and fall into parroting political rhetoricians, explaining to each other that this or that candidate is worth voting for because they will hand over control of Iraq to the Iraqi people. We often fall into tossing around weak generalizations carefully designed for repetition. I have even heard folks reference advertisements in an unironically post-modern fashion, when they characterize attacks of their candidate of preference as a swift-boating. Between swift-boating and handing over control, we aren’t really talking about anything.
This isn’t new. Every cycle there’s an election, and every election media and analysts sculpt the message and shape the image of candidates and issues. We take notice and relearn everything we were learned freshmen civics. Political experts (and novice columnists alike) get up in arms about where people get educated on politics. Every season, however, this exchange is as relevant as the last. With the nation finally in agreement on one thing: We are quickly descending into hell; we must begin styling our understanding and conversation of who we put into power differently.
By repeating everything that is pumped into our heads when we receive political phone calls, hear a political advertisement on the radio, or see one on television, we aren’t actually having conversations; we are saying strings of words that look political, but in the name of coherence, sound like nothing at all. Every year the names and faces of the candidates might be different, but our tendency to buy into attractive rhetoric is still the same. Falling into this habitual behavior, memorizing and spewing all of the buzzwords crammed into a thirty second attack ad, we are bound to repeat even our deadliest mistakes. Because the nation has repeatedly bought into these empty statements election after election-their candidate will be a bi-partisan leader, stand for values, isn’t interested in letting the terrorists win, (fill in your favorite), we have become lazy and have forgotten how to think critically.
It makes sense that these advertisements are defining how we think about politics. With such limited comprehension of civic education required in schools, and with the specter of the 40-hour work week existing only in the history books, there is little competition for becoming our number one informant about how our government works; we have no time for anything else. As members of the populous who are negatively affected when spending has gone wild, or when our country is arbitrarily put in harms way, we must work to think of our political future independently, not in montages of candidates cleverly edited walking down beaches and saying benignly trivial, inoffensive things. There’s too much at stake for that.