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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
Again from the Atlantic Monthly (and again from the mouths of babes): "America's greatest need these days is to clear out the underbrush of name-calling and ideology so that simple things can work again."
"But what are we to do?" I hear you moan as your head hits the screen. "The First Amendment sez we must let them do this to us."
Two hundred-plus years ago some great men gathered together, kicked the British out and created a new nation. We are eternally grateful for both these things, although I sometimes feel we ought to go to London, tell them we've maxed out the credit cards and give the whole thing back. These men wrote a document to tell us how to govern ourselves. Why? Because they were sick of having some aging syphilitic decide the rules on the basis of whether or not his mascara ran. This document survives and guides us today.
But hopefully we have learned that documents need to grow just like people. Progress changes how we act and how we think. Inventions beget behaviors. Discoveries provide opportunities. And most important right now, technology changes the rules. No law should ever be passed abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, or to petition the government for redress of grievances.
But like speed limits and bans on assault weapons and discouraging people from yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, we just have to find a better way to allow our candidates to have their say and speak it too. There wasn't any VH1 when those words were written. There weren't any Web sites, transit ads or caller I.D. As a society that is leading the charge into the next century, we simply have to come to grips with better ways to provide information while protecting what we got. We're dealing with it for commerce. We're dealing with it for pornography. Sometimes effectively, sometimes not, but we're trying. Why can't we turn some of this effort toward maintaining the dignity and effectiveness of government, which those guys who wrote the Constitution were literally ready to die for?
And there are ways. We've already got televised debates. What about cable access forums in which candidates can respond to viewer inquiries and their opponents can react? What about Internet sites at which issues can be articulated and examined? We've got hundreds of channels now. How about devoting one to something other than fishing? There have to be a dozen or more better ways to do this than to pour millions into paid political video manipulations that do nothing more than cause people to say the hell with it.
Helayne Spivak -- who did the creative thing at places like Hal Riney, Young & Rubicam and Ammirati Puris Lintas and last held the nosebleed title of World Wide Creative Director, Chief Creative Director, North America, for J. Walter Thompson -- was on former president George Bush's ad team during his campaign against Gov. Michael Dukakis. Archive magazine asked her the difference between political campaigns and propaganda. Here is part of what she said:
I don't think anymore that there is any difference. [In the Bush campaign, the] candidate was a product. Well, I guess we get what we deserve, because if you can affect a presidential campaign on a 30-second commercial, if people will not listen to debates, if they're not interested in hearing what the candidates have to say, yet one negative political ad is able to move people, I guess it's our own fault. It's all propaganda.
Don't blame Spivak. She's telling you what is.
I just think we have to give some thought to what is going to be. Stopping paid political advertisements won't make for a new dawn in America, certainly not by itself. But as a guy who makes ads, I'd like to see ads go back to what they were made for: selling soap.
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