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By Nathan Bierma


Content & Context

The Books & Culture Weblog

February 2003

This Week:

PRESIDENTS' DAY: PRESIDENCY AND PROJECTION

Presidents' Day is one of the most underrated holidays on the calendar. We go all out to celebrate days with far less significant antecedents, such as Halloween and Mardi Gras, and most people at least bat an eye at the arrival of Groundhog Day, April Fool's Day, and Columbus Day. So you'd think we could summon a little more enthusiasm for a day set aside to venerate our loftiest national heroes. To judge from television advertising, the day seems to exist mostly to give furniture stores another excuse to have a "blowout sale." Perhaps we feel saturated with presidential holidays, less than a week after Lincoln's Birthday and a week before that of Washington (the man for whom Presidents' Day was more or less instituted).

But apart from its designated holiday, you could argue that celebration of the presidency in America is overstated—that the cultural weight of the presidency far exceeds its political weight. If I were a political science major, I'd produce a more ponderous piece on the relationship between the executive branch and the other branches of government, but as a journalist, my question is this: is there a bias in the news and historical media (and thus in our cultural awareness) toward over-covering and over-celebrating (or over-excoriating) the president compared with other branches of government, simply because the president is easier to cover, and because we have an insatiable appetite for singular, godlike icons?

You could make a case that Congress and the Supreme Court have far more influence in shaping the public contours of our daily lives—they actually make and interpret the laws, respectively, while the president is lamely mandated in the Constitution to "enforce" the laws—and that very little of what the president does affects us on a day-to-day basis, apart from sending troops to war and keeping foreign leaders from getting mad at us (not to downplay these tasks, especially at a time of multiple international crises).

And yet the president's every step and spoken word is covered breathlessly by CNN and pondered endlessly on PBS and the History Channel. After all, it's easier to cover one person, and focus on one face, than to try to cover the multi-faceted legislature or judiciary in tightly packed segments on the evening news. You can't grab viewers and readers with personal drama if you're talking about 535 people, in Congress' case, the way you can with one. As for the Supreme Court, whose members have indefinite tenure and set standards of justice that can stand for decades, it hardly gets any media coverage (partly because the Court keeps the media at bay—in a 24-hour news world, it is one of the most influential brokers of power to keep itself and its personalities shrouded in mystery).

Still, the symbolic function of the president, in addition to the occasional wise and unifying leadership the office provides, does much to justify the focus of the news and historical media. Our country has the desire and sometimes the need to esteem one person the way we do the president, especially when national crisis arrives, whether it be September 11 or the Columbia disaster (at such times, the president plays a benedictory role—note the spiritual nature of Reagan's Challenger speech and Bush's Columbia speech).

Although we remain fundamentally different from most Western European governments, whose prime ministers have most of the power to set the agenda and whose presidents exist to smile and shake hands at various photo-ops, the rise of the mass media in the 20th Century has made for a fascinating discussion about how the U.S. president's political and communicative functions are converging. In this column on Ronald Reagan and the media, I quoted columnist Meg Greenfield, who wrote that under Reagan, "seamless visual projections had come to be seen as synonymous with the act of governing itself." The following essays—most of them from The Atlantic, which does some of the most in-depth writing on the cultural impact of the presidency—ponder this growing connection between presidency and projection.

  • The First Postmodern Presidency (from 1992): "The once all-powerful national megaphone of the presidency competes with many amplified voices in a diverse, atomized culture."
    Related:
    Bill Clinton and his consequences (from 2001)
    Soon to be posted here from The Atlantic: "Post-president for life"
  • Our remote-control presidency: New York's Michael Wolff intriguing essay on The West Wing, the presidency, and postmodernism.
    Related:
    The Atlantic on West Wing: The Feel-Good Presidency
    Ranking the Movie Presidents: The Atlantic assembles a panel of historians to evaluate presidential characters on popular movies.
  • The New Shape of American Politics (from 1987): "After six years in office Ronald Reagan has changed everything about American politics except ideology. … 'Reagan's abilities … have restored a belief that an extraordinary, but mortal, person can give leadership and a sense of direction to the American national government.'"
  • No Apparent Motive: With his consistent wryness, P.J. O'Rourke asks, can politicians really be motivated by fame and power? "The average politician has less power than a high school senior-class president and cannot so much as unilaterally decree that the annual House-Senate sock-hop theme will be 'Hula Luau.' … In general Americans regard the politician as a type of celebrity falling somewhere between NPR commentator and soap-opera supporting actress."
  • Edmund Ross: My essay on the nineteenth century Senator who, some say, quietly saved the presidency, from NBierma.com.

Other Presidents' Day Links:

Skip to Dialogue / Skip to Digest

PLACES & CULTURE

From The San Francisco Chronicle:

Soon after James Marshall discovered gold along California's American River in 1848, thousands of miners and entrepreneurs rushed to the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, hell-bent on striking it rich. … They also made wine—lots of it. Some 100 wineries thrived in the Sierra foothills in the late 1800s. … When the gold ran out, the miners moved on and winemakers closed shop, their departure made more certain by the root louse phylloxera, which destroyed many vineyards in the 1880s. … Today there is once again gold in them thar hills—liquid gold in the form of Zinfandel, Barbera, Syrah, Sangiovese and Cabernet Sauvignon, made by nearly 100 wineries that have sprung up in the Sierra Foothills since the 1960s. Winemakers have found the Foothills to be a hospitable place to make bold, deeply flavored wines that are, for the most part, very good values.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi …
Related:The NY Times on a wine war fermenting in France
Phon Kham, Laos—They still killed a water buffalo, cooked it in chunks Thursday and had a big party with plenty of local dignitaries and Beer Lao to go around. And the villagers still crowded around the little computer they believe will change their lives, punched buttons and laughed as they pumped the bicycle pedals that charge its battery. … The idea was to fire up the world's first bicycle-powered wireless computer in this bamboo-and-wood village deep in the Laotian jungle. Just two days before this signal event, the team of cyber whizzes led by the Bay Area's Lee Thorn and Lee Felsenstein were pulling an all-nighter to work out final programming details. And then two hard drives crashed, bringing the whole venture to a screeching halt. In a sense, it wasn't unexpected—this sort of thing happens in Third World high-tech projects—but it was still a crushing blow.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi …
You're entering the city from the Bay Bridge along Interstate 80, and, suddenly, it hits you. White, white—everywhere you look, more white. But it's not San Francisco's chilly fog that assails you, but rather signs of a cooling economic climate. Literal signs, I mean. Once serving as a battleground of boomtime San Francisco's overheated outdoor-advertising wars, the 80/101 corridor offered a billboard phalanx of color, flash and ever-morphing promises, all begging for your eyeballs' split-second attention. Now, those days are gone. The billboards don't change so often. … But what's stranger and more intriguing is that increasingly frequent absence of imagery, the blank billboard. Perfect for contemplating Buddhist koans and existential brooding, it also projects the question, What does it all mean?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi …
• Last week's Places & Culture
• About Places & Culture

DIALOGUE: BONNIE HUNT

Bonnie Hunt is one of the most creative comedians working in television. Her new show, Life With Bonnie, which airs Tuesday nights on ABC, reflects both her fondness for improvisational comedy and her versatility; she writes, directs, and stars in the show (as the host of the show-within-a-show "Morning Chicago"). In a season of formulaic crime dramas and gimmicky "reality" programs, "Life With Bonnie" is one of the most original and refreshing programs in prime time. I interviewed her by phone while she was in New York City last month, in between her appearances on ABC's "The View" and "The Late Show With David Letterman."

Books & Culture: Your show thrives on ad-libbed dialogue. What does the script look like?

Bonnie Hunt: For "Morning Chicago" segments, a lot of the stuff is scripted. But I always tell people, if there's something you want to say, something that comes into your head, go with it. The script is a regular full script, except for [blank spaces for dialogue with] guests on the "Morning Chicago'"show. We have the freedom to improvise only because the script is at the core of it, it's our safety net.

That's how we write the script—we improvise the entire script as we're writing it. Don Lake and I have two keyboards hooked up to one monitor. The script is based on improv, based on what people would say. It is a different rhythm, some people find it refreshing. … It's hard to break the mold on TV, because people are so trained in format—setup, punch line, setup, punch line—we wanted to do something more alive.

From Salon magazine:
Hunt, a veteran of the famed improv comedy group Second City, is one of those people whose talent far outweighs her luck.
From the Wisconsin State Journal:

Smart and funny is a tough combination in Hollywood, especially if you're prettier than the average character actress, but don't fit the starlet mold.

B&C: You've said before that you've tried to learn from the failure of your four previous sitcoms, but is the business is some ways so illogical that you can't learn anything coherent from it?

BH: The biggest thing I learned is not to wear my heart on my sleeve, and realize when it's a political situation. With each experience, I'll be in a meeting [with a network], I'll take [their] notes, and turn in something I could still be proud of, instead of rejecting them. … I'm proud of the work we're doing, and there is an audience for it. With "Seinfeld," "Cheers," and "Raymond," the network had to be behind those shows; they took time to become hits. I was on Friday nights in the summer [with earlier shows], that was really tough. … ABC was in a situation [last year] where they needed us and we needed them. ABC said we will give the show time, we'll stick with it. We're getting to the point now where we're just getting into the groove. …

It's not about succeeding by staying on the air, it's about succeeding with something that you're proud of. I've never really chased commercial success, I've been a worker bee for some time.

B&C: You've had the chance to play character roles in some major movies—Rain Man, Jerry Maguire, Green Mile. What was your favorite movie to appear in?

BH: It's not really the movie you remember as much as the experience of the people you work with. I love crews, they remind me of my family, remind me of Chicago. There's so much teamwork that goes on. I'm moved by it, it's like an orchestra coming together. Jerry Maguire was like that, Green Mile. Return to Me [which Hunt wrote, directed, and appeared in] was fulfillment on the largest level—to be able to show the city through a camera, from the skyline to a small restaurant, with four guys who are retired and solve the world's problems—that's what I remember [being around] as a child.

From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: David Letterman loves her, and she's one of his most entertaining guests. And she has said that she believes that her longtime friend is showing a sweeter side since his heart surgery in 2000.

B&C: It's been written that you "never went completely Hollywood." That's also been said of fellow Midwesterner David Letterman [who was born in Indiana]. Do you and he feel a sense of solidarity in the glitzy world of show business—that making it to the top didn't change who you were?

BH: A lot of times in this business people around you change more than you do because you're in the [middle] of the tornado. … David works very hard, we're both Midwestern kids, it's just who we are: we keep working hard, not taking it for granted. When you get to the higher level of any business sometimes you lose perspective. When you're in this business, people lay your clothes out for you in the morning. I have six brothers and sisters who live in Chicago, when I get home I'm still that sixth-grade girl.

From Salon:The idea for "Life With Bonnie" came about while she was in talks to take over Rosie O'Donnell's talk show. "But I didn't want to stop writing and directing," she says. "I love being a storyteller and I didn't want to give that up. So, Don Lake and I were just sitting there and we said why don't we just do a sitcom where I can write the family material that I love to write about and then have an actual talk show where I can have guests on and really interview them and improvise? And that's what we did."

B&C: Not only are you a frequent talk show guest, you're now playing a talk show host on "Life With Bonnie." Will you ever put all this practice to work and have your own talk show?

BH: Maybe I might want to do something later on. A talk show is kind of a giant circus. If I didn't like a movie, it would be hard to pretend I did. If I could do something like Tom Snyder did, I wouldn't mind doing it. He really had a conversation with people.

B&C: For all the big-name movies you've been in, one of your most memorable lines came from a small part as a White House tour guide in Dave: "We're walking, we're walking, and we're stopping." How do you feel about that being one of your most enduring quotes?

BH: I love it. I went in and improvised that role. I [had] auditioned for the role as the president's wife. I was in the waiting room and they said they're not going to hire me. They said they needed someone with a name. I said, I have a name. They said, "No, a name name." [The part went to Sigourney Weaver.]

But later on I got a call from the director, and he said I need a laugh at this point in the movie, can you think of anything to do. I said, I'll be a tour guide on a power trip. I went in and did the scene, but he wasn't sure if it would work. I said the "we're walking, we're walking" thing is funny, people will respond to it; I convinced him to keep it in. Now I hear it all over the place. I'll be in a restaurant and the hostess will do it. People have done it to me not knowing who I am. 

B&C: There seems to be a renewed interest lately in actors being directors—including George Clooney, Denzel Washington, and Nicholas Cage. You've always been involved in the broader creative process in your work. Can you explain that drive to go behind the camera?

BH: To me it's that I love being a storyteller, I always want to be on the set. I like interacting with everybody and saying, is this funny? Or would that be better? I want to have the control in order to give the power away. Someone like George Clooney has always been a storyteller, that's always been who he is. … I've always viewed being an actor as being part of the storytelling process.

B&C: You've always seemed to just follow your heart and do what feels funny and original. But at the same time, you've consistently played strong independent women and offered fresh alternatives to the simplistically passive or bossy housewives. Is that a deliberate attempt on your part?

BH: I think for me, it's about always playing a character at the top of their intelligence, no matter what their occupation is. It's just better for everyone involved—for the actors, for the audience, for the story. With this show ["Life with Bonnie"], we're careful that the parents are smarter than the children. Have you noticed that with other shows, the children sound like writers? …

Look at all the characters on "Andy Griffith." They're all smart, independent characters. Even Otis played his character at the top of his intelligence. It's that kind of storytelling we're trying to do. I always feel like I don't want to let people down in a movie. I don't want to tell the audience how to feel, I want to show them how to feel. Don Lake and I, in our writing, we say let's show that and not say it. It's harder in commercial television. With all the commercial breaks … you need to do something to bring people back.

Related:

DIGEST

For links with an *, you can enter "bcread" for both member name and password

• The country hasn't had a new Catholic university in forty years. The man who wants to change that is the founder of Domino's Pizza and former owner of the Detroit Tigers. Tom Monaghan hopes the new campus in Southern Florida will open in 2006 with 600 students, alongside a new town near the Everglades. From The New York Times.

The founder of Ave Maria, Tom Monaghan … has grand plans for the university: majors as varied as theology and hotel management; a Division I football team; three golf courses, including one for donors only; and a new town, Ave Maria, with a commercial center joining the campus. But his mission is as much religious as educational. "For 25 years, I've felt the need for a school with more spirituality," said Mr. Monaghan, who has committed $200 million to the university. … "At some Catholic universities, students graduate with their religious faith more shaky than when they arrive."

http://nytimes.com/2003/02/10/education/10COLL.html*

Related from B&C:
Christopher Shannon: Rethinking the Catholic university, Jan./Feb 2003
Related stories on higher education in the NY Times:
Hispanics trail white and African-Americans in college degrees*
The road to the Rhodes at Arkansas*
other stories from the NYT's Education Life section*

• Christ toppled tables in the temple to protest the merger of the sacred and the market. So it's disillusioning to see some of the stuff being sold in his name, says Charles Colson at Breakpoint.org.

Nearly everyone agrees that a lot of the stuff is cringe-inducing and only confirms people's worst stereotypes of Christians. What they do not agree on is what we should do about it. Any answer to that question must start with remembering the place that beauty and aesthetics occupy in a truly Christian worldview. … Beauty gives us a glimpse of God's integrity, perfection, and majesty. Beauty points to the order and intelligence that sustains the universe. And it points to the source of that intelligence and order.

http://www.breakpoint.org/Breakpoint/ChannelRoot/ …

Related:
"The Jesus Market" from the Weekly Standard
"Jesus Sells" by B&C contributing editor Jeremy Lott in Reason

• "The Shuttle is a marvel of nineteen-seventies engineering," says Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker. But it never got much beyond that, and without a new injection of dreams at the administrative level, he says, it's not likely to anytime soon. This is one of the better-written among the myriad ground-the-Shuttle-forever essays (including Easterbrook's) in the wake of the Columbia disaster.

[The Shuttle's] career has been marked by bad economics, bad science, bad engineering, and bad symbolism. … Robert Park, the public-information director of the American Physical Society, the country's principal professional association of physicists, has said, "There is no experiment that has been done on the space shuttle that has made a significant difference to any field of science." . . .

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030217ta_talk_hertzberg
Related:
"Stairways to Heaven" from the March '92 Atlantic

• Why are we doomed to tonight's NBC two-hour investigation into Michael Jackson's plastic surgery, and other such low points of Western civilization that are clustered together each TV sweeps period? The answer lies in the 2.5 million viewing logs Nielsen distributes to sample viewers four times a year to measure ratings. The archaic system that has billion-dollar implications is not only ridiculously imprecise, as everyone agrees—it is biased toward splurges of sensationalism. It could easily be reformed, but network affiliates are in no hurry to get a system that would be more truthful about people's viewing habits.

There are three important things to know about sweeps. The first is that they are deeply flawed, and of little use, in the end, to the networks, the advertisers, and the viewers. The second is that everyone in television knows this. The third is that no one has done anything about it. … What's wrong with them? To begin with, they force the networks to rely on "stunt" programming—to pack their schedules with outrageous specials, celebrity appearances, and expensive movies. … Advertisers, for their part, wind up paying for ratings that often reflect only this stunt programming.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030217ta_talk_surowiecki

Related:
Boston Globe Magazine: TV crime dramas inflating public expectations of crime fighting

• 'The Simpsons,' which celebrated its 300th episode last night, is one of the truly funniest and most transcendently ironic shows in the history of television. Or it was, five to ten years ago. Since then, 'The Simpsons' has disappointed its cult of fans with mediocre writing and forgettable episodes. Slate's Chris Suellentrop investigates.

The Simpsons themselves, and the rest of the Springfield populace, have become empty vessels for one-liners and sight gags, just like the characters who inhabit other sitcoms. … 'The Simpsons' no longer marks the elevation of the sitcom formula to its highest form. … The show's still funny, but it hasn't been touching in years. Writer Mike Reiss admitted as much to the New York Times Magazine, conceding that "much of the humanity has leached out of the show over the years. … It hurts to watch it, even if I helped do it."

http://slate.msn.com/id/2078501

Related from Slate:
'Simpsons' cancellation would be merciful (2001)
Film critic A.O. Scott on 'Simpsons' creator Matt Groening (1999)
Related Elsewhere:
'The Simpsons' according to The Gospel According to The Simpsons author
From B&C:
My review of David Dark's Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons

• A global McCulture? Sounds intimidating, except that the globe has proven resistant to American pop culture, says Charles Paul Freund in Reason. Which is a good point, but bad ratings for U.S.-brand reality TV—and Freund's survival-of-the-fittest model for cultural clash—do not do enough to disprove America's diluting effect on the popular arts around the globe.

The leading prophet of cultural doom these days is Benjamin R. Barber, an academic growing hoarse as he warns against the dull global "monoculture" he thinks is being imposed by American capitalism. (See "Tempest in a Coffeepot," January.) But mounting evidence suggests that all this fulmination has been entirely pointless, and that cultural pessimists have been as clueless about the processes shaping the world as were their social, economic, and political forebears. In January, for example, The New York Times ran a front-page story reporting that exported American TV programs had largely lost their appeal for overseas audiences. According to the Times, these shows "increasingly occupy fringe time slots on foreign networks," leaving the prime-time hours to locally made shows.

http://www.reason.com/0303/cr.cf.we.shtml
Related:
Barber's "Jihad vs. McWorld" from the March '92 Atlantic

• Speaking of cultural dilution: "Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance." So begins Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, which "is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right." The completion of a six-volume collection of Huxley's essays (published by the Chicago-based Ivan R. Dee) prompts John Derbyshire to reflect on Huxley and metaphysics in The New Criterion.

Most of us, if challenged to disclose our metaphysical beliefs, would probably offer a part-baked dualism. Yes, certainly there is an outer reality, "the universe," made up of material objects whose behavior, thanks to four hundred years of diligent scientific inquiry, we can understand, or at any rate predict, in fine detail. And yes, there is an inner reality, "the self," comprised of mental objects about which science has much less to say, and some irreducible core of which, we are inclined to think, exists independently of the material world. Those of us who are up to date with developments in neuroscience, or who have read Tom Wolfe's famous article on the subject ("Sorry, but your soul just died," in the December 1996 issue of Forbes ASAP) are uncomfortably aware of the relentlessness with which researchers have been shrinking the size of that core, but we live in faith that they will never succeed in eliminating it altogether.

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/feb03/huxley.htm

• Nelson Mandela has long been a global icon for racial justice. Only recently has the world glimpsed his artistic abilities, in drawings that convey the harshness of his long imprisonment. From the Times:

He spent about three months working with a tutor last year on drawings that reflect his memories of his 18-year imprisonment on this bleak prison island during the apartheid years. He sketched in charcoal and lively pastels and the works were unveiled and auctioned here to raise money for charity before an elegant crowd of businessmen, artists and cabinet ministers. … [One] depicts the view through a cell window. There is a drawing of a prison watchtower, a lonely church and the cold waters of the harbor. Mr. Mandela has used riotous colors to soften the bleak images and to hint at his triumph over age and adversity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/12/international/africa/12MAND.html*

• Browsing: The Economist on the rift between the U.S. and Europe, The Weekly Standard on the Laura Bush poetry gathering that wasn't, and more from Slate's "In Other Magazines."
http://slate.msn.com/id/2078342

Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant of Books & Culture.

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