One longtime Democratic researcher has a technique she leans on when nudging voters to share their deepest, darkest feelings about politics. She asks them to compare America’s two major parties to animals. After around 250 focus groups of swing voters, a few patterns have emerged, said the researcher, Anat Shenker-Osorio. Republicans are seen as “apex predators,” like lions, tigers and sharks — beasts that take what they want when they want it. Democrats are typically tagged as tortoises, slugs or sloths: slow, plodding, passive. So Ms. Shenker-Osorio perked up earlier this year when a Democratic man in Georgia suggested that a very different kind of animal symbolized her party. “A deer,” he said, “in headlights.”...
Somehow Republicans do way too much, so aggressively, but Democrats don't get anything done? And these were swing voters? Sorry. Not believed. Sounds too much like the opinion of someone with left-wing policy preferences. You want more from the Democrats and you want it faster. And those terrible Republicans!
Anyway, asking people what animal Democrats and Republicans reminded them of reminded me of the old Barbara Walters question "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?" Yeah, be skeptical about that too because she didn't ask that question... other than that one time, after Katharine Hepburn started it by likening herself to a tree. Barbara Walters followed up with "What kind of tree are you, if you think you’re a tree?" Of course, Hepburn gave the answer nearly everyone would give if they were asked what kind of tree they are: Oak. And poor Barbara was forever after treated as if she asked everyone what kind of tree they were.
This is one of the greatest death triads I have ever seen. Perhaps the greatest.
Goodbye to 3 greats, in 3 different fields — religion, journalism, and sports. All 3 died after a long, productive life — Pelé, a little young, at 82, Walters at 93, and the Pope at 95.
You've probably seen this 1977 interview before. This is a communications professor dissecting it:
Do you think he should have given Walters some credit for bringing out the best in Dolly? You could say that Walters behaved without vanity, lowering herself, to elicit what was a brilliant performance from Dolly. But that's not how the professor grades it.
WWD retreats into quoting Anna Wintour (who is not only the editor of Vogue editor but also the artistic Director of Condé Nast of which Vanity Fair is a part). Wintour only made a gentle gibe, "I’m not sure if I should include a new pair of tights in her welcome basket."
I'm more interested in interpreting the metaphors. What can you say about a navy blue dress strewn with zippers? It says women have the power now. The zipper's strongest association is with the fly on a man's pants. We might say a man with uncontrolled sexual compulsions has a "zipper problem," as in "Jackie Collins Knew Bill Clinton Had A ‘Zipper Problem’" (HuffPo, 2011)("I remember, before Clinton was president, I was sitting at a dinner in Beverly Hills and one of his aides was there and told me that he was definitely going to be president, except for one problem: the zipper problem.... They knew way before he was elected!").
And then a navy blue dress... I think of Monica Lewinsky.
Therefore I interpret Radhika Jones's dress as wry political commentary: the end of the political subjugation of women, the end of silencing — zip your lip, not mine — and a new era of female domination.
Now, let's consider the item of clothing that was even more attention-getting and metaphor-pushing than a blue dress strewn with zippers: tights covered in foxes.
So there were many zippers on the dress and many foxes on the tights, which is a message of multiplicity already. But each of the many foxes is also a symbol of knowing many things.
There is, of course, the idea of women as "foxes," which was already laughably sexist when Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin played Festrunk Brothers in 1978 (and Garrett Morris had to explain that you can't talk about American women like that):
I'd say the foxes on Radhika Jones's tights represent a reclaiming of an old diminishment, amplified and multiplied, and complicated by zippers. Foxes run around, finding out about everything, uncovering what is hidden, and zippers enclose while suggesting a sudden, perhaps shocking disclosure. That's all very apt as a message about journalism, and it's an exciting way to say that a woman is now in charge.
And I created a "zippers" tag and went back and applied it to old posts. I was amused by how many times over the years I've talked about the Brian Regan comedy bit about Zipper, the bad dolphin (in contrast to Flipper) — "Zipper's surly. He is uncaring."
Meade, reading this post, said his first association with zipper was the "zipless fuck" (in Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying"). I had to do some additional retroactive tagging, because I'd only searched for "zipper." Searching for "zipless," I found places where I'd talked about Erica Jong's idea, including one in the context Trump's "Access Hollywood" remarks, from October 8, 2016 (the day after the sudden, shocking disclosure of the tape):
[I]f you watch the whole video, you see him winning with another woman, Arianne Zucker, the one who, in Trump's words, is "hot as shit, in the purple." Zucker is the one who inspired him to say "I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
And in fact, you see the female version of that power trip: The woman plays on the man's sexual interest. Grab them by the crotch. Zucker looks entirely pleased with herself, demands to walk in the center and grabs the arms of both men. If that is what is expected and that is the norm in your workplace, how can you be the cold one who keeps her sexuality to herself?
I invite you to contemplate why this got me thinking about Erica Jong's concept of the "zipless fuck":
The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.
"As a result, when we refuse to take the media's bait, we suffer. I felt it this week when I was asked to weigh in on what other people said and did and what others' beliefs are. If you are looking for answers to those questions, ask those people. I will always choose to focus on what matters to the American people, not what matters to the media."
ELSEWHERE: In Politico, Jack Shafer purports to give advice on how to answer the "gotcha" question. He holds up LBJ as a model: "Here you are, alone with the president of the United States and the leader of the free world, and you ask a chicken-shit question like that." Oh, yeah, wouldn't you just love for the Midwestern son of a preacher man to suddenly emit an LBJ-style outburst full of Texas swagger and farm excrement?
Years ago, an Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton walked into the state Capitol media room at the end of a hectic legislative session and asked the journalists if we needed anything else from him. We had asked Clinton questions all day. We were tired. We wanted him to shut up and go home.
So I said, "Yes, governor. I know you don't know much about baseball, but when there's a pop-up behind the third baseman, whose ball is it?" The other reporters snickered. Finally, they figured: a gotcha question Clinton wouldn't answer.
Bill came up with an answer that seemed amiable and made him look good. But I don't think that's a gotcha question. It's just a casual, irrelevant question that might bring out some personality. It's the sort of question Barbara Walters used to be associated with.... What kind of tree are you?
... and he responded, "I'm not that popular right now. Are you sure?' Jasmine said she was game...
As for how Jasmine feels about Sterling, she says, "It's 2014. I feel that everyone is a little bit racist and comedians joke about it all the time. But yeah, I do think he's racist."
"... a little above the posterior or sagittal angle of the parietal bones."
In phrenology, self-esteem is: "One of the mental faculties with which an ‘organ’ or ‘bump’ in the cranium is associated; the ‘bump’ itself." That's from the (unlinkable) OED, where I was looking up "self-esteem," after blogging about Monica Lewinsky's 40th birthday and cherry-picking the old Barbara Walters prompt "Where was your self-esteem?"
Monica, had she known phrenology, might have said: Where? It's at the top of my head, of course, a little above the posterior or sagittal angle of the parietal bones.
Too bad I don't have comments or you could supply me with the jokes about Clinton's "organ" and the location of his self-esteem. I won't go there, other than to say that I see that one could. I've got lofty plans for the direction of this blog post.
That's the question Barbara Walters asked Monica Lewinsky in 1999, I'm reading this morning as I belatedly catch up on the news that Lewinsky — once famously young — has passed through the portal into middle age and is 40.
I don't remember what her answer was, but here's something she could have said: My self-esteem was sky high. I was having sex — yes, sex, sex, sex, it sure as hell was sex — with the President of the fucking United States. How about you, Babs?
["Audition: A Memoir"] includes all the affairs she had – when she was married, when she was single with married men, and when she was single with men you might consider fug who happened to be powerful. Walters promoted the book by confessing to Oprah of an affair 30 years ago with married US senator Edward Brooke. Brooke’s wife passed away 13 years ago, and... an insider claims “she hated Barbara Walters till the day she died” and blamed her for their divorce.
So Senator for Walters. Lewinsky had the President. But then Walters also had Alan Greenspan. She spanned Greenspan:
Self-esteem. It's a highly nuanced topic, but I will nevertheless reduce it to this simple poll.
I only skimmed the article (cuz I detest Christie), but it sounded like he did it directly after he went on Letterman and did donut shots and said his weight was fine.
Which suggests he might be less than honest. Of course, his conduct in the last year or so also suggests that.
He also did an interview with Barbara Walters in December which engaged with the issue whether a very fat person can be President. I think those 2 performances were done to test public opinion and the surgery is evidence of the results of that test. There was the idea that perhaps people would think that being fat was endearing, humanizing, and part of his overall delightful personality. He went on 2 prominent shows, reaching different demographics, and — in so many words — made the argument for fat acceptance.
I assume internal polling was done, and he was forced to see that the "fat man" image wasn't going to work. He took action. Note that in March, the month after the surgery, he rolled out the saying "Fix it!"At the time, I made fun of him for using that slogan when he's the walking embodiment of the inability to fix something. In fact, when he was emoting for the Barbara Walters demographic, she asked him why he's fat, and he said: "If I could figure it out, I'd fix it."
He doesn't know why, and if he could figure out why, he'd fix it. Then he says it doesn't mean he's not capable of serving as President. But, come on, when you're President, all the world's problems are yours, and you'd better be good at figuring out what's wrong. These problems are much more complicated than why he's fat! He not just a bit chubby. He's very fat. Whatever the subtleties of why people get fat, a good percentage of what he's carting around has got to be from just plain gorging himself. How can he sit there with a straight, sincere face and say "If I could figure out why, I'd fix it"? At least we have video showing us how he looks when he's lying.
In a weird way, I hope she delivers an honest, introspective account of how she managed to clear away the emotional rubble, if indeed she has, and if indeed our celebrity-train-wreck culture will let her 14 years after her world imploded.
Yeah, Lewinsky has a book to sell, even though she "gave hours of interviews to Andrew Morton, Princess Di’s British biographer, for his 1999 book, 'Monica’s Story,' the same year she spilled her guts along with some tears in a long, unpaid ABC News sit-down with Barbara Walters." She has a book to sell because she's lived through a long expanse of years since the 1999 glossy media blitz that she might have imagined would get her life going on a rewarding new track.
What's it been like being Monica Lewinsky all these years? That's the new story. Monica, The Middle Years. Of course, she wants money, but she wanted money in 1999 when she gave away those interviews. She must have thought it would work out well. Now, she can tell us how she thought that and how it didn't go so well.
And of course, she can retell the old story, with new more honest/more lurid details, and with revelations about all the times she fudged the truth with Morton and Walters, to serve what she believed were her interests at the time.
She's also earned a master’s degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics. That along with the maturity of her advanced age (39) might bring some actual insight to the story of Monica and Bill — which is never going to go away.
IN THE COMMENTS: Rabel notes that the word "unpaid" — seen in the quote I extracted above — no longer appears at the linked article and provides, via Wikipedia, the information that "Lewinsky made about $500,000 from her participation in the book and another $1 million from international rights to the Walters interview."
Of course, Obama is smart enough to whip out the official, mentally healthy answer: "Flying." Only creepy people say "invisibility." Why am I saying that? Listen to the great old "This American Life" segment "Invisible Man vs. Hawkman."
ADDED: "If you could be any superhero, who would it be?" is one of the tricky job interview questions the Wall Street Journal has in its article today: "How to Ace a Google Interview/Brain teasers like the ones used for hiring by the Internet giant are spreading to other picky employers." What's the right answer to these questions? Who knows? What superhero? Uh... JobGettingMan.
Weird interview questions have become a meme, like a joke or a viral video. It's catchiness, rather than proof of their effectiveness, that keeps them in circulation at many companies....
The deep, dark secret of human resources is that traditional job interviews don't work very well.
By the way, I have an answer that would ace the Google question, which is: You're suddenly shrunk to the size of a nickel and thrown into a blender. "The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?"
I'd say: What is the basis of my knowledge of what's going to happen 60 seconds into the future? Every blender I've ever seen reacts instantly and only when somebody pushes a button. There must be person who threw me in the blender who is also informing me of what he intends to do in 60 seconds. But why would someone this evil tell me the truth? But whether he's lying or not, he's interested in what I will do in the next 60 seconds, rather like you, the interviewer, are interested in what I'll do in the next 60 seconds. Presumably, desperate flailing is not what will get me this job, keep evil blender truthteller from killing me, or influence the mysterious lying blender guy to let me out, so I think I should do a fascinating dance. I would tell a long, fascinating story, like Scheherazade — who delayed her execution — but I'm assuming there's a fairly soundproof lid on the blender, so I'm resorting to dance. Wanna see?
Maher waltzes onto "The View" and delivers a prepared line that is obviously structured to reach out to the female daytime-TV audience. Joy Behar prompts him to talk about Sandusky, and Maher begins:
You'd like this...
(Because you're a woman.)
... Any institution where there's no women around — like The Church, like football, like the Middle East, like fraternities — it just goes to hell. You do need women as a moderating influence.
You? There's a feminist faux pas right in the middle of his effort at feminism. The audience is female, and he's saying "you" to them, but they are not the "you." Worse than that, seemingly without realizing it, he's dishing out old-fashioned male chauvinism: Women exist to moderate men. Men are the primary force in the world, but too much of that roiling, spewing masculine energy, and there's trouble. Come in, ladies, ground us, soothe us, care for us, tone us down, so our intensity doesn't boil over into destruction.
But Maher assumed — "You'd like this" — that female TV audience would feel flattered and not notice the message of subordination. And he assumed they'd enjoy hearing an insult to men. Quite aside from whether women appreciate negative stereotypes about men, underneath the insult was great pride in male achievements. Some men go too far, but maleness is central, even as femaleness is needed for moderation.
Nevertheless, Maher intended to appeal to women, to embed himself in the context of feminist values. He failed, even before Hasselbeck lit into him, but he did not realize that. He was perched in the center of the curved turquoise sofa, pleased at having presented himself as an admirer of women.
Hasselbeck begins: "That sounded very supportive of women." That is, she could see what he was doing, trying to seem feminist, though she doesn't say that it really was supportive: it sounded supportive.
"And I just want to go back to a time that bothered me... not for my own personal reasons... Forgive this idiotic Republican for bringing this to your brilliant mind..."
Talk about a moderating influence! She's stirring things up.
"In February of last year, Lara Logan was in Egypt and she was brutally attack by a mob there. She came back and said: 'There were hands raping me over and over again, tearing my body in every direction, trying to tear off chunks of my skull. I was in no doubt in the process of dying.'
"Now, prior to her coming back, Bill, you on your show said: 'Now that Hosni Mubarak has released Lara Logan, he must put her intrepid hotness on a plane immediately. In exchange, we will send Elisabeth Hasselbeck.'"
Hasselbeck sums up: "That wasn't that funny."
I'm virtually positive that Maher wasn't ambushed here. I think it was planned that Hasselbeck would read that indignant bit — it's all on paper, with 2 verbatim quotes — and sum up with an attack on the comedian's funniness. She did not cut more deeply. She could have said: You made a joke out of rape and you specifically thought it was funny to say that I should be raped. Is rape funny when it happens to a woman whose ideas you object to? You stood there on TV and named me as a person you'd want to hand over to a mob to be raped to death? That's your show, Bill?!
But she had it on paper, and it had her ending with a simple that's not funny. There's a female stereotype for you! It's the punchline to the old how many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? joke. The "ambush" was gentle, and Maher was prepared:
"We do a comedy show for an audience that's perhaps different than your audience. You are a public figure. It was not aimed at you personally, but when you are a public figure, you are out there and you're fodder for comedians to make comments on."
Asked "Do you draw the line ever?" he responds, elegantly, "I do draw the line, but I also live on the line." He's a male, bursting with creativity and cutting recklessly, unmoderated by females, late at night, on HBO. "You have to be out on the edge to know where that edge is."
Hasselbeck scoffs, "Thanks for being the hero." That is: You're bragging about yourself. She's playing that moderating role assigned to women, dragging him down to earth. She demands an apology. The others on the sofa frame her complaint as a personal affront, because she was named, not a more general attack on Maher for making a joke out throwing a woman to a brutal mob to be raped to death.
If you had it to do over again, would you used that joke, Hasselbeck asks, "if you're so supportive of women"?, and Maher deflects her glibly, but still without acknowledging the gravity of wishing rape on his political opponent. He says: "If I had a crystal ball and knew I was coming here and had to spend my whole segment talking about it, no, I wouldn't. It really wouldn't be worth it."
That is, he still likes his joke, but it's such a pain having to fritter away his book-pimping spot dealing with her that it's not worth it. He brushes her off: "Worse things have happened to people." Worse than hands raping me over and over again, tearing my body in every direction, trying to tear off chunks of my skull? Yeah, it is true. Worse things have happened to people. Thanks for the info, Bill. And here you are, talking to the women daytime TV has been explaining feminist issues to for decades!
Barbara Walters butts in to talk about herself. "I went through years of Baba Wawa. I survived." What a survivor! The message from Walters — who promotes feminism on most occasions, I think — is that Hasselbeck shouldn't take herself so seriously. She needs to learn to take a joke. Gilda Radner's delightfully charming imitation of Walters's speech defect is pretty much the same as Maher snarking about throwing Hasselbeck into a gang rape. Yeah. It's all comedy!
Hasselbeck claims some dignity in the end. She clarifies that it's not about her personal feelings, that she's "speaking on behalf of women," and that accountability is important. It's what she teaches her kids. Yeah, she's a mom. She's nice. She's folded back into the group, properly in place as one of the women on the turquoise sofa, arrayed sweetly around the man... moderating him.
I wonder if his views have been influenced by his relationship w/ his daughter. I'd assume so. Presumably Althouse would be opposed to such decision making because it is influenced by personal experience. Or, maybe that anti-anecdote position is only for other people, re other issues? Where Althouse doesn't have her own anecdote.
I don't like argument/reasoning from anecdotes, and one's own personal experience is a subcategory of this. I don't think the argument for gay rights should hinge on whether you're gay or you know someone who is gay. If something is actually bad or morally wrong, you don't try to promote it by talking about the person in your family who does it. You may notice that I've been writing in support of same-sex marriage on this blog for more than 7 years, and I don't think I've ever bolstered the argument with anecdotes of personal experience. In fact, I think it cheapens the argument to blend that in.
"What is up with this? Chunky Bobo is always talking about C. S. Lewis too. Is he the new Edmund Burke? I read a bunch of C. S. Lewis books when I was a kid and I don’t see what makes them so conservative, aside from all the Jeebus stuff."
Here's there underlying story about Palin. (She's on Barbara Walters' "10 Most Fascinating People of 2010." Ah, but how influential is she in Madison ?)
Here's a really nice — giftable — book collecting the works of C.S. Lewis. And here's a "daily readings" collection. And here's "The Portable Edmund Burke."
Hot Air has the video -- and highlights the line "I love Sarah Palin" (adding "How does Huck expect to compete with her among the base when Rush, Hannity, Ingraham, et al. are head over heels for her?"):
Here's what Rush himself said about the interview on his Friday radio show. First, there's this observation about the difference between TV and radio:
[O]ne of the reasons, ladies and gentlemen, I am not enthusiastic about television is that it drives me nuts getting feedback every time I'm on television. When I had my own show, I would go home, I'd check the e-mail, whatever, and nobody was ever satisfied. Everybody always had a complaint. I never get complaints about this radio show. I never have people say, "What you shoulda said was… and why did you let 'em ask that? You shoulda thrown it right back in their face." I said, "What's the point? What's the point?" Nobody is ever satisfied with television because all that matters is how you look and nothing else matters. Nobody remembers what anybody ever says on television. I give you Obama. It's how you look; it's how you come off.
Well, Rush's style has evolved on the radio, and it's not so good on TV. I watch the radio show on the webcam sometimes, and I can see what the problem is. He puts his body into producing that voice. He doesn't worry about how it looks. It's all about producing the sound. And it doesn't look relaxed and natural. You can see the effort. It's tiring to watch it, but for listening, it fits the material perfectly. I think he's wrong in saying that TV is only about how you look, but his demeanor is so radio that when he's on TV, we're distracted by the unsuitable visuals. People on TV have honed their style. Walters is brilliant at what she does, and Rush ought to admit that great TV technique really is something, just as his radio voice is.
Next, he complains at length about the way they edited his answer about how much money he makes in a recession. They chose to air the funny line -- "I just choose not to participate" -- and to skip the economics lecture -- which is that all he gets is a percentage of what the show brings in. He claims they took it out because it didn't fit their script. They want to portray him as someone who's cold to the suffering of others. (Barbara stresses that he grew up rich.) He's right but only part right. They were also making him more interesting.
Rush goes on to emphasize that he -- and none of the other "10 Most Fascinating People" -- got Barbara laughing: "We were yucking it up and having a good time." I noticed that he had a strategy of laughing. He responded to almost every question by laughing. He also uses laughing a lot on his radio show. There's a difference between saying funny things that make us laugh and using your own laughing as a form of communication. Be aware: Rush loves to laugh in the face of liberals, to give the impression that whatever they say is plainly foolish. If Barbara laughed along with that, I suspect that she was following her own strategy, letting him feel like the 2 of them were just having a good time, so he'd spill something she could use. Rush said "There was nothing really confrontational about it." Ah, yes. How do you think Barbara does what she does? She helps you get comfortable. He saw that too, because he goes on to say: "The whole thing was a challenge."
Hmmm. Contradiction. It wasn't confrontational, but it was a challenge? That, my friends, is a typical Rush change of direction. He doesn't admit he's wrong when he sees he's wrong. He just starts saying something else. As a law professor, I'm very familiar with that technique. I know you can do it. You realize you're saying something that is wrong or off for some reason. You can either: 1. Shift to getting it right and pretend there was never a problem, or 2. Stop and deliberately point out the problem -- look, that's wrong and here's why -- and then go on to get it right -- to openly show your work as you get to the right way of putting it. I understand why commentators and politicians protect themselves by using #1, but I think #2 is the ethical approach.
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