Ned Raggett Ponders It All

Yesterday I was catching up with a slew of friends at lunch in LA when one of them talked about how glad he’d be when Tuesday rolled around and the competing ads for the gaming props here in California would therefore disappear from the airwaves. Various folks chimed in with similar thoughts, and there was talk about absurd situations where there’d be a block of ads where the first would be pro, the second would be anti and would be a response to the pro ad, and then the third would be a pro ad that was in response to that second ad. On a level of entertaining absurdity that sounds brilliant.

These ads are a bit like the Super Bowl ads yesterday in my mind — people may talk about ’em but I haven’t seen them and I’m in no rush to. This isn’t going to be a rant about how I don’t watch TV, don’t fret, but my situation is an inevitable follow-on — since I don’t regularly watch TV or listen to the radio, the whole spectrum of what advertising there’s been over the past few weeks, as has been the case with similar races in the past few years, is something I’m happily ignorant about. Similarly, since I run adblock software at home, most of the banner ads and the like on sites I visit are thankfully dead space.

I don’t think this makes my dealing with the issues and candidates any purer or any more well-informed per se. It’s long been argued that the whole point of political advertising is to reduce complex issues and positions down to blunt simplicities, but the converse can be true — the blunt simplicity of a position can be explained and supported by a veritable fog of ancillary arguments and extended detail, designed to obfuscate as much as it is to clarify. Combine that with the fact that extended policy discussions or position papers are rarely free from some sort of bias — not that many of their authors would claim that they were, hopefully — and the result is the difference between 30 second claims of “My opponent is a fool and a dip while I have the truth and the way” and 70-page single-spaced discussions of sociological problems and the like which boil down to “My opponent is a fool and a dip while I have the truth and the way.” Most people, presumably, would prefer to take the former route, as it is shorter.

I think for me this is all the result of 9/11 — by which I mean that I resolved not to watch TV news of any sort as a regular thing following that date. I’ve talked about this elsewhere so just to take it as this applies to my point in this post — taking TV news and soundbites from politicians out of the equation meant that everyone’s ‘voice’ in my head was the voice I use whenever reading something, the same voice that we all have, in our own way, as we read along. Perhaps fast, perhaps slow, male, female, whatever. It’s long been argued that rhetoric on the Net means that the nuance one senses and understand in spoken and visual communication is lost, but this seems to me no more or less a problem than how we interpret centuries or millennia-old classics, the original authors not having left us an audiovisual record.

So therefore the whole ad culture of modern politics, something I well knew and remembered from my youth onward, is off to the side for me now, something I’m glad I don’t have to think about. Instead I get to think about random things like this forlorn sign, seen by me in a hedge by Wahoo’s Fish Tacos near where I live:

Of course, the first thing I thought was, “I wonder how many similar signs were mass-produced to look just like that?”

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