Authenticity

Commentator and columnist H. A. Goodman recently wrote on the Huffington Post: "Americans have never voted for someone they don't like and don't trust, which says something about the Clinton and Trump campaigns. When only one candidate is trusted in a presidential election, and another remembers landing in Bosnia under sniper fire (that never happened), there's only one likely outcome."

"As a general rule, I don't trust many politicians, but I trust Bernie Sanders — the man walks the walk and talks the talk," Shaun King writes in the New York Daily News. "I believe in him, I believe in his team and I believe he can win."

For someone who wrote, back when I first started the experiment of blogging, that I wouldn't do politics, I have been writing a lot on politics lately. But I begin here because an election provides a good, obvious testing ground for what appeals and what doesn't, providing clear metric results rapidly. Politicians must find an image, a simple concept ideally expressed in one word (eg: Hope), that will drive people who don't otherwise pay a lot of attention to the details of government to vote for them.

It can be anything, and you can frequently see campaigns run through efforts to find their theme, and a theme may ring true but not be the one that wins. The successful campaign links that season's Zeitgeist with an image that works.

I think the theme of this season is: Authenticity.

In an age of internet memes (Where's my money from Facebook? What, that's a lie?), "reality" TV, and Photoshopped pictures, it's hard for people to believe anything. For something to be simply true, without hidden agendas or outright deception, seems not just refreshing but unique.

A good example of how it works is the Maroon 5 music video of their song, "Sugar."

It shows the band doing ambush concerts at weddings, surprising happy couples with a special treat. Now, there is some question of just how authentic the video is, but perhaps this makes my point. It has almost a billion views (yes, billion with a B) and has a generally positive response.

When I first saw it, I said it was just the sort of thing the candidates should do right now, while their characters are still being established in the public mind. Once a politician has a fixed storyline (Al Gore is boring, George W Bush is dumb), it's very hard to break them out of their public pigeonhole. No amount of aides saying, "If you only saw him off camera! He's nothing like that!" will fix things.

Maroon 5 comes across as genuine, playful, and appealing, bringing a surprising moment of joy to people who obviously like them. What politician wouldn't do anything for that image? Or, for that matter, what business wouldn't love to have customers feel that way?

And the video brings this across in an almost documentary form, re-enforcing the image by showing it in a form that looks captured on the fly, occasionally peeking behind the curtain (watching them drive to the gigs, setting up the stage, sharing drinks after with the couple) as well as embracing handheld camera work, etc.

In the end, I think people want to know you are what you seem to be, whether you're a politician or a business, and you need to show them that.

Sincerity - If you can fake that, you've got it made.

-- George Burns

(At least I think so; I found it on the internet)

Prediction is pointless...

Foreign affairs are my thing.  Some people are into baseball statistics, and some are into college football standings.  Some -- like me -- are into politics like that, but even that breaks down into subgroups of aficionados: campaign mavens, economic wonks, taxation nerds, and -- again like me -- foreign affairs junkies.

Today, The New York Times has a story on the leadership of North Korea.  It reminds me of the stories from Moscow in the the Cold War, when the highest order of foreign correspondent was the Kremlinologist, who owned that combination of wit and curiosity, cultural knowledge and people skills to penetrate the opaque Soviet system that was a mystery often even to the Soviet people themselves.  Some were celebrated in their time, like Walter Duranty, only to be embarrassed later.  Others have held up.  Don Oberdorfer, who in Moscow in the 1980s, I think was one of the, if not the, last of the Kremlinologists.  As I remember it, he covered the serial deaths of the last Soviet leaders leading to the death of the calcified USSR itself, by among other things, noticing the amount of limousine traffic in the night and how many lights remained on in government office buildings.

Oberdorfer is now a professor of journalism (lucky students), and he ironically spent most of his time in Japan covering Asia, especially the Korea story.  Pity he's not there now...

What's going to happen in North Korea?  And what will happen in Cuba?  How to react, edging those countries to positive places without either resorting to the heavy handed lecturing of the old Cold War America, but not standing idly by in a critical moment?  And what do you do if the whole thing goes to Hell in a handbasket?  (Imagine a nuclear-armed North Korea, riven by famine, ruled by out of touch apparatchiks and generals, facing a general breakdown of public order.  Scary.)  

That's what's so cool about foreign policy to me: the genius of figuring out a culture and where it wants to go, figuring out how that culture and its desires will interact with ours, and how to maneuver to make all that happen in a positive way...

But, and here's the deal, the instant you think you've got it all worked out -- you're the master chess player, the world at your mercy -- something pops up.  Swine Flu in Mexico, war in Chad, revolution in some other country you hadn't paid any attention to ... though if you had, you would have seen it coming.  Really, prediction is often pointless, or as the old punchline goes, God laughs...

(Modified 4/28/09)

No teabagging jokes...

I've got to agree with some commentators that, tempting though it is, the current fascination of both open liberals and some "legitimate journalists" (put in quotes, because I'm not sure what exactly those two words are meant to mean in conjunction, sort of like "social justice") to make snotty comments about the Tea Parties last week -- particularly comments related to certain sexual activities and their slang names -- is not really commentary and is just an indication of a willingness to not take a serious thing seriously.  Would they dare make similarly dismissive and "humorous" comments about some of the wackier Islamic extremist terms?

Anyway, there was a Tea Party here in Lexington, Virginia, in the small park that sits in the center of town, attended, by my guess, by 100 to 150 people.

Here we look out into the town from the pergola in the park, past the speaker.  

Here we look back toward the pergola, visible in the background.  As you can see, it was a cool and drizzly day.

After the evening rally (from 6 to 7 pm), people lined up to sign letters to their congressman and senators.

I know I announced at the beginning of this blog that I wouldn't do politics, and I like to think I'm not doing that here, but a hundred people in a town of just 7,000, with a social scene dominated in many ways by two college faculties, turned out on a cold rainy evening to make a statement against an otherwise popular president.  This is something that deserves a reaction besides dismissive sarcasm...

POSTSCRIPT: An interesting comment today in the New York Times by David Carr, simultaneously doling out scorn to cable news for ginning up the Tea Party phenomenon and noting interest in the symbolic connection to history.  Who would have guessed an event in today's shallow culture would still use the resonance of an historical event to inspire it?

And so it starts...

I'm told that one must do things like this to increase one's profile.  And I'm told that one must increase one's profile (sadly, not solely through good food and wine) to increase one's business.  And as I'm rather fond of good food and wine, business must be done.  So, at least my friends will be relieved of some of the burden of listening to me go on about my latest interests...

As a start, I'll explain that "cat typing" is a term I discovered on the Word Spy website (www.wordspy.com), defined as: "The random keystrokes made by a cat as it walks across a computer keyboard."  My thoughts are often about that organized, but hopefully somewhat more interesting.

I was sent to Word Spy by a friend, who had found the term "The Arsenic Hour."  If you're a parent, it's worth looking up.

The tradition in navy wardrooms (or the gunroom, where young junior officers messed in the days of sail) was that conversation was not allowed of politics, women and religion.  Those subjects would often end in arguments, and when at sea for months at a stretch, arguments and hurt feelings are not productive.

My plan is to avoid mainly politics, a sure path to unresolvable disagreement, often marked by ad hominem attacks.  Religion and women are not really an open subject for me: Both have been long resolved by church membership and marriage, and thus would be rather monotone subjects of discussion.

Thus, I may be limiting the level of readership.  But I do hope to be somewhat clever and generally diverting as I write about the things I have discovered, photographed and generally become interested in...