Obama’s Cool Fire Side Chats - Hubris, Anyone?
by Skip Press
In classical Athens, hubris was a crime and considered the greatest sin in Greek society. In American society it is simply defined as an arrogant self-confidence, an overweening excessive pride. As most Americans know by now, you’re most likely to see it displayed on Wall Street, in Hollywood, or in the nation’s capitol where Wall Street and Hollywood collided with a vengeance during the most recent election. As we’ve now seen with “the stimuli,” including the current bill in Washington, there are a great many people in D.C. who want all our money and that of future generations to use as they please right now, because they don’t think we’re terribly smart and only they can save us.
President Obama - technically the first President created by Hollywood beginning with Oprah Winfrey declaring him “the one” - made plans to have three one-hour TV sessions on all the major networks over the course of the next three weeks in order to pitch Americans on the “glories” of the economic stimulus bill whose popularity fell with the public with each passing hour. As TV columnist Lisa de Moraes pointed out in the Washington Post, this presidential posturing could cost the networks millions and millions of dollars. One must wonder what he has to say that is so lengthy it can’t be said in one broadcast? And with a deal on the current stimulus bill, will he still hold forth on TV?
He is, rather obviously, emulating President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s radio “Fireside Chats,” which began with the “On the Bank Crisis“ broadcast on March 12, 1933. Perhaps he believes he is the new FDR and truly is “the one?” After all, Time magazine said he was in one of its many cover stories.
Is our current crisis truly as dire as it was in 1933? Well, let’s examine what FDR said in that first speech shortly after he took office: “…by the afternoon of March 3, scarcely a bank in the country was open to do business. Proclamations temporarily closing them in whole or in part had been issued by the Governors in almost all the states.” I haven’t noticed that it’s that bad now, have you? FDR said later in that first Fireside Chat: “I hope you can see from this elemental recital of what your government is doing that there is nothing complex, or radical in the process.”
Nothing complex or radical. That was reassuring, Certainly more so than Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s recent statement about 500 million Americans losing their jobs each month the stimulus bill isn’t passed. Who knows, maybe she just added a few zeroes or read too fast when perusing President Obama’s February 5th editorial in the Washington Post where he stated: “And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”
That doesn’t sound to me like someone eager to emulate The Great Roosevelt, who’s most famous for this part of an inaugural speech: “This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first let me assert my firm belief that all we have to fear is fear itself. Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror. Which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Maybe you were familiar with the “fear itself” part but not the last two sentences. To me, “unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance” sounds an awful lot like “crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”
Funny thing, I have trouble listening to a president talk about numbers after he said on the campaign trail he’d been to 57 states in 15 months with ”one left to go.”
And if Pelosi and the President weren’t bad enough, how about the parade of Obama nominees, including a Treasury Secretary who just can’t figure out his taxes? But why should we hold them to such a high standard, when the feIlow who writes tax laws, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, messed up on his own returns?
If $780 billion in stimulus was divided up and sent to each American, legal residents of the U.S. would get a check for around $2600 each. Do you think you could do better with that money than those in Washington? I sure as hell could. Hello, Macbook Pro!
In 1968, educator, philosopher, and author Marshall McLuhan published War and Peace in the Global Village in which he riffed on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a much ballyhooed novel that most people haven’t read (it’s kind of like Obama voters who had no idea what he stood for other than “change”). Using the metaphor of ”thunder” in Wake as an era in the warmaking history of mankind, McLuhan equated Thunder 10 to television and said it would place us back in a tribal type society - murky and muddy with people more interested in feelings than intellect. Hmm…
In a previous book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), McLuhan divided media into “hot” and “cool” categories. Movies were “hot” and enhance a single sense (in the case of motion pictures, vision), while television was “cool” because it provided a lot of stimulus but little involvement.
Bob Shanks, a TV producer and writer who produced “The Tonight Show” with Jack Paar, “The Merv Griffin Show,” and “Candid Camera,” as well as creating and developing “Good Morning America” and “20/20,” no doubt had TV’s “cool” media aspect in mind in 1976 when he published “The Cool Fire: How To Make It In Television.”
You couldn’t see the fire when FDR delivered his speeches. Despite the misconception of Vice-President Joe Biden, they were delivered on radio, not television. No, a great many homes were heated by fireplaces in those days, and the family gathered in the warmest room of the house and listened to the radio together. Today, with kids mostly communicating with each other via cell phone text messages, it’s likely that very few families will gather together to hear what the President says on television. Therefore, his comments will be to a great many like an aside in a stage play, which is used to tell the audience what a character is thinking.
We don’t really need any “aside” chats from President Obama via the cool fire. He’s already told us what he’s thinking in his “The Action Americans Need” editorial. Since probably very few Americans actually read it, he wants things like computerized healthcare records (do you want the government knowing all of that?), two million homes and 75 percent of federal buildings more energy-efficient (how come such a low percentage of homes compared to government buildings?), the upgrade of 10,000 schools with state-of-the-art classrooms, and a college education within reach for millions of Americans (so the mostly liberal education establishment can do more indoctrination with “teachers” like William Ayers?), and the rebuilding of aging roads, bridges and levees (sounds like manual labor being paid by the government, a new Civilian Conservation Corps, anyone?).
In discussing the future, Marshall McLuhan said: “The effect of the electric revolution is to create once more an involvement that is total.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m not crazy about total involvement with the federal government. And that sentiment is apparently being shared by more and more Americans. The stimulus bill, thanks to Republicans and some Democrats showing a spine, got changed substantially and became much more transparent, largely thanks to the “hot” medium of the Internet (you have to concentrate on your computer to use it). As far as President Obama’s future commandeering of TV’s “cool” fire to chat about his grandiose generalized posturing? I won’t be listening. The way his administration has evolved in two short weeks reminds me of a song by Todd Rundgren called “The Cool Fire”:
I remember, but I don’t remember
I was captured, I was hypnotized
Look away from the cool fire
Look away, you could burn your eyes
In 2004, two UCLA economists determined that the economic policies of FDR prolonged the Great Depression by seven years. Lee Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA Department of Economics, said:
Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump. We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.
If we don’t buy into fear, if we pay attention to common sense and not pronouncements made on television by “the one who won,” we Americans will not gum up a recovery. In the United States, we’re good at bouncing back and taking the whole world with us, but not if we put ourselves in economic chains. Mr. President, you simply stating “I won” is not a compelling enough reason to listen in or go along. After all, it’s our government and our money.
Bill Clinton thought he could bluster away and get whatever he wanted after his election too, and we know how that turned out. Why don’t you ask him what happened in 1994? |
