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DRILL BABY DRILL

Political Machine Express

To bring a bit of Ed Halter flavor...

I found it amusing that if you go to politicalmachine.com, you'll find a computer game loosely based on simulating the election. Granted, the main page is full of political discussion threads (and updates on the game itself), but I think it's interesting that one of the ways people interface with a real-world political situation is through a form of play. Maybe it appeals to the backseat campaigner. Maybe it gives gamers insight into the election beyond the talking points and punditry. Maybe McCain and Palin look better as bobbleheads.

Wired article:
http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/09/stardock-offers.html

Main website:
http://www.politicalmachine.com/

Link to free version of the game:
http://www.politicalmachine.com/express/

loop de loop

Two quick comments:

1. Didion's description of the newspapers recycled as posters that are then given out to the reporters of those newspapers conjured up thoughts of recycling and the eternal return of players, themes, and visual tropes from convention to convention. Do these ever change? Is there a way to write about (or document in any fashion) these events without this sense of seen-it-already? What do Thompson, Didon, and Mencken DO as writers to freshen up this tedium?

2. It occurred to me while reading these essays that each writer, though unstated, works with the big spectres of previous conventions and presidencies. For Didion, it's the Reagan Years; Thompson has '68 and its ghosts; and Mencken's reporting comes after the four terms of FDR.
How do these events shape their interests and writing styles?

Reponse to Readings

Television primarily allows viewers to indulge in fiction, to accept that a given image or narrative is "false" or "constructed", but nevertheless enjoy it. In order for politicians to even enter this medium, they must invariably fictionalize themselves; you view your candidate of choice on TV the same way you view a melodrama; you accept the narrative it constructs, ridiculous or implausible as it may be, so that you can enjoy the emotional response it drags out of you.

Yet somewhere in Joan Didion's description of a lifeless, plasticized, self-perpetuating and anti-politics political campaign she touches on the existence of people who are sick of what they see on TV; people faintly thirsty for something other than the "consensualist centrist politics" that American democracy proudly produces and American television flamboyantly exacerbates.

The desire-- though often unspoken, inarticulated-- is an inherently radical one, because it is anti-stability, anti-stagnation, and thusly it is inherently political in a more primal sense than we are used to. Conversely, the televised election cycle represents the quest for ultimate immobility through the repitition of distracting noise; it convinces each candidate to appeal to the widest audience possible, and in doing so, render their public policy stances increasingly ambiguous, meaningless, and uncontentious. "Politics" dissapears almost completely from this public performance. As Didion writes, the notion that "the citzen's choice among determinedly centrist candidates makes a 'difference,' is in fact the narrative's most central element, and its most fictive."

Film and video have proved invaluable tools in removing politics from the public sphere; whenever they are used in an attempt to harness the latent desire in people for something besides "politics as usual," it simply transforms this potential energy into more of the same, similar to how Coca-Cola attempts to find the new "cool" and in doing so destroys it. I wonder if there is something inherent in a dominant medium that causes such destruction, or if large media networks can ever be used to promote anything other than mediocrity (in other words, is the "radical" forever confined to the limited venue, or can popular media be transformed?).

Unconventional, or: "John Chancellor, you dirty bastard!"

It's 1948, 1972, 1988; the editor at the Baltimore Sun, Rolling Stone, the New York Review, assigns you to do a story on "The Conventions."   But what exactly does "The Conventions" mean?  According to the editors at ABC, NBC, CBS, or at almost any other mainstream newspaper, magazine, or review, it probably means the message delivered from the lectern, maybe a paragraph or two about the response from the crowd.  That may have been what the editors at the Sun, the Stone, and the Review had in mind as well - but it is not what H.L. Mencken, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion gave them.  When they were assigned to "The Conventions," that is what they heard and that is what they pursued, in it's entirety.  For Didion, it meant a look into the incestual (sic) exclusivity of a "process" which ignored the very citizens it claimed to champion.  For Thompson, it meant exposing the organization that went into producing a spectacle of "spontaneous" political fervor.  For Mencken, highlighting the excessive emphasis on lights and camera that produced no action.  All three of them, recognizing the pitiful obedience of the other political hacks, turned their backs to the stage in order to observe the crowd, the organization, the sham.  They kept their ears to the speakers, to be sure, because there was a sham going on there as well, but their story was offstage: Mencken's "female politicos" looking for the appropriate television makeup, "sopranos, crooners and choirs" giving the mundane a false air of jubilance; Thompson's "Nixon Youth's," defending their individual agency while an organizer screamed orders through a megaphone; Didion's celebrity scribbler's eagerly awaiting the opportunity to be little more than mouthpieces, a privileged few given backstage passes who wouldn't be bothered to take a moments notice of the ropes.  The message: the election is being framed.  To that, Mencken adds his ironic wit; Thompson his comic fear and loathing.  It is only Didion who addresses outright the true gravity of the circumstances: the election no longer belongs to you, it belongs to the media.  And the media belongs to Washington.

- Dylan Byers

purple map

Here's a link to an animated version of the county-by-county "purple map" mentioned in class on Thursday. 

http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/