Talking

The short-term question for today seems to be this. Is your life any different than it was two years ago, when Obama was elected and Democrats became the majority in Congress? In one way mine is radically different. In early November 2008, I still clung to my belief, stridently, some would say, that you cannot blame the media – the media simply serves its audience. The media is not to blame for the message. I was wrong, and for the past 24 months I’ve been eating crow. The media – all of it, the radio, the television, the incessant Internet commentary and chatter and rambling – began priming the pump for the midterm elections not on the day that Obama was sworn in but on the day he was elected. It’s a show, and since they’re hosting it they want to make sure as many people as possible attend. Therefore, Obama takes a dump on a Thursday afternoon, out of synch for various reasons with his regular rhythm, and it is tied directly, somehow, in a way that defies your wildest dreams, to the midterms. A road is paved on a hot summer afternoon; by the next morning the analysts are reporting on it “in the context of” the midterms. While surveying the destruction in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama, who is the president of the United States, refuses to behave like he’s a guest on Oprah and that, ladies and gentlemen, will have an impact on the midterms.

In PR this behavior is called “seeding the story.” It’s toxic enough when it concerns the launching of a new computer program that shouldn’t be newsworthy in the first place; when the “seeding” intentionally distorts and perverts politics for the sake of ratings, I think we’ve taken the concept of sinister to an entirely new level.

So today I’d like to seed a story of my own, one whose primary character is a little boy called Ian. I cringe when people attempt to explain the world with toddler quotes – so simple yet so true, and so gosh darn cute! – but today that’s exactly what I’m going to do. On the morning of the inauguration, Ian and his father, who happens to be my brother, came to my house to watch the festivities. It was a beautiful sunny morning in Portland, cold and wintry, January. Inside we had coffee and bagels and brownies. “The steam coming up out of the mugs, it’s so pretty,” my brother said. Though wasteful, I’d boiled water to heat up our mugs before pouring the coffee. That had been one of our father’s signature moves: warming cups and teapots and such with boiling water. Since our father had died shortly after casting his vote for Obama from a hospital bed via absentee ballot, I’d wanted, in some way, to recall him. It was touching, for a very brief moment, that my brother bothered to notice. Ian, who was about to turn two, trashed his face with cream cheese but managed to get most of the bagel in his mouth. Using both hands, he drank fruit juice from a steamed coffee mug of his own.

There was all sorts of commotion on the television. My brother thought the wheels on the helicopter waiting to carry W. off the national stage looked like they belonged on a toy. I thought Mrs. Obama’s dress was wonderful. We sat on the couch, the three of us, watching. Ian looked up first at his father, and then at me, with a curious but resigned expression on his face, then pointed at the television and said, “Talking.” We laughed, we agreed, we all pointed at the television, and Ian said once again, with more conviction, “Talking.” And for the past 24, hype-fueled months of stories that are at best distorted and at worst completely made up, it’s been mostly just that: talking.