Tell us how, McCain
Candidates love to make grandiose claims without ever explaining exactly how they plan to accomplish anything
Let's say that, troubled by the grim long-term employment prospects for aging columnists in the deteriorating newspaper industry, I were to consider joining the mass exodus into the burgeoning field of public relations.
And suppose, toward that end, I were to find myself being interviewed by the CEO of the Inky Soda Company. Wishing to demonstrate my zeal, I might blurt out something along the lines of, "Hire me, and I will make Inky Soda more popular than Pepsi."
At which point, any CEO worth a carbon dioxide bubble would lean back, raise a gray eyebrow, and ask:
"How?"
"How?" is the shepherd's crook that divides skill from bluster. "How?" is a word apparently not in the vocabulary of our presidential candidates, who think the American people are idiots, and not without cause.
"When I am commander in chief, there will be nowhere the terrorists can run and nowhere the terrorists can hide," John McCain said Tuesday. "I will catch Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice."
"You will?" I wanted to scream at the TV. "HOW??? What technique will you bring to the hunt, and if you are so confident about your plan that you can assure the American people of its success, then why the heck don't you whisper it into the ear of your close personal buddy George W. Bush? Because I'm sure he'd love to catch bin Laden too."
Both candidates do this. They forget: we don't need our hopes fed back to us. We need strategies, ideas, plans that have a halfway decent shot of working. Don't just tell us what. Tell us how.
"Satire is what closes Saturday night," said George S. Kaufman, and since our culture has shifted so radically since he said it, a bit of footnoting, alas, is in order.
"Satire" means a skewing of reality through exaggeration and humor. "Closes Saturday night" refers to the theater, where a play would open midweek -- so the reviews could spur the weekend audience -- and thus closing on Saturday meant a flop.
"George S. Kaufman," I must note, since one Web site identified him as "a printer," was a prolific playwright.
His plays tend toward political satires, and it was a political satire -- a cover cartoon showing Barack Obama in a turban, standing in the Oval Office, fist-bumping his wife Michelle, who wears an afro, and has an AK-47 slung over her shoulder -- that caused a stir across political circles this week.
Needless to say -- well, not needless to say, unfortunately -- the New Yorker is not making a serious statement about how Obama might comport himself if elected president, but is satirizing the midnight fears of a small-yet-significant segment of the population.
Deadly earnest TV stations waved the cover in front of equally earnest passersby, who reacted with the expected puzzlement and offense. Even Obama -- a New Yorker subscriber if ever there was one -- voiced his objection, which makes one wonder how he will survive the sharp-elbowed world of international diplomacy. He'll be condemning a joke in "Dilbert" next.
Satire is a trust drop based on the savvy of your readers, and seldom worth the risk that they won't get it. That's why, though I condemn and critique, argue and analyze, I rarely write satire, rarely pretend that the wild situation I am imagining -- like my conversation with the Inky Soda exec -- is real. Because it flies by people, even smart people.
I ran a satire once, and the memory burns. It was Christmas 2000, and in a holiday moment of levity, I decided to mock those generic Xmas letters by conjuring up the swankest life I could imagine.
The key to satire is to start out plausibly, so I began by thanking my legman and my secretary.
"If you've ever phoned my office, you've heard the lovely Georgia drawl of Miss Annie Sherman," I wrote. "It's a pleasure to start every morning with her always cheery "Hiya, chief!" and one of her homemade pralines.
Then I moved on to the women sorting through my mail, fact checkers and editors. Soon we were saying hello to "the brave souls manning the new Sun-Times Scientific Survey Outpost at Point McMurdo on the Antarctic continent" before sailing off to "our beloved day nanny, Monique D'Anglatere, and our equally beloved night nanny, Felicia Montseuratt."
There was a gardener, a cottage minder, a clutch of well-to-do friends, "the members of the Downtown Club, the Vest Key Club, the Fame Club, the Scrivener's Society, and the Spoon and Bowl Club."
I gave the joke away, I thought, when I ended the column, abruptly, with, "Well, a guy can dream, can't he? Happy holidays."
People swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. They wrote in praising me for taking the time to thank all the people in my life.
My own mother phoned. How is it, she asked, that she never spoke to Miss Sherman, my secretary?
My gut sank. My mom's a bright woman, and perhaps she was tweaking me -- her own satire. But I don't think so. People read something in a newspaper, they assume it's true. That's a trust that shouldn't be toyed with. As far as the New Yorker, well, I've got a bulletin for you: That fop, Eustace Tilley, whose picture they run every February, gazing at a butterfly through his monocle? Doesn't exist. Completely fictional. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you.
A Broadway publicist appealed to George S. Kaufman. An actress he represented was being ignored by the press -- how, he asked, could he get her name into the newspapers?
"Shoot her," Kaufman replied.