BLINKING SATIRE
by Jason Loewith on 9/19/2008 12:21:00 PM 

While I've never really been a fan of Saturday Night Live, this year's opening skit, featuring Tina Fey as Sarah Palin and Amy Poehler as Hilary Clinton speaking about sexism in the Presidential campaign, is the funniest piece of small-screen satire I've seen in many years.

While the progressive in me enjoyed a little fantasy wish-fulfillment (wouldn't it be great to only ever see politicians speak when the other side's right there to rebut or comment?), the cultural critic in me was interested in the way it laid bare the "elite vs. regular" schism that's become so pervasive in American politics since the second half of the 20th century. Sometime around the Lyndon Johnson Presidency - around the time universities became battlegrounds in the emergent culture war - intellectualism took a hit, and it's never recovered.

So there's Sarah Palin, the regular Joe-anne, out on the Alaskan frontier, attending five colleges in six years before she graduated; the woman who was so confident she could be Vice President she didn't blink when McCain asked her to be his running mate.

On the other side of the podium was Hilary Clinton, of the elite and suddenly-upstate Clintons, who couldn't have wanted it more, who talks policy until it bleeds out her ears, who wears a V for Vendetta and a Y for Yale.

As progressive strategist George Lakoff might have it, this skit successfully satirizes conventional "frames" that have been embedded into our thought processes from years of absorbing American cultural output. A person who doesn't blink in the face of a challenge is framed as courageous, patriotic, willing to fight; she shares the virtues of the pioneers.

There is, of course, another frame through which to read Palin's open-eyed clarity. One who professes they didn't blink when asked to take on so grave a responsibility as the Vice Presidential nomination might also have an aversion to thoughtful consideration, strategy or (if I may) the capacity for rational thinking. Unfortunately for progressives, this frame is counter-cultural; it packs no heat; it's not a "sticky frame."

Clinton, on the other hand, is caught in a very sticky frame that derides her because she blinks - or thinks - too much. Poehler's Clinton wanted the Presidency desperately: so she manipulated and connived and was a ball-buster (which is quite different, culturally, from a woman who can gut a moose). She thought so much it made her sneaky, dishonest, insincere, and - remember? - unlikeable.

Of course, the counter-cultural frame here is that she knows a lot of policy, she strategized, she deliberated, she was methodical, she chose her words carefully... but in our current cultural narrative, Clinton's intellectualism is a giant negative.

As the King of Siam (via Rodgers and Hammerstein) might say, in his charming yet uneducated way, "Is a puzzlement!"

Another great satirical analysis of these cultural frames can be found in this week's New Yorker Magazine, by George Saunders:

Now, let us discuss the Elites. There are two kinds of folks: Elites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. That is also why they love me. She did not go to some Elite Ivy League college, which I also did not. Her and me, actually, did not go to the very same Ivy League school. Although she is younger than me, so therefore she didn't go there slightly earlier than I didn't go there. But, had I been younger, we possibly could have not graduated in the exact same class. That would have been fun. Sarah Palin is hot. Hot for a politician. Or someone you just see in a store. But, happily, I did not go to college at all, having not finished high school, due to I killed a man. But had I gone to college, trust me, it would not have been some Ivy League Elite-breeding factory but, rather, a community college in danger of losing its accreditation, built right on a fault zone, riddled with asbestos, and also, the crack-addicted professors are all dyslexic.

I've lately been interested in another recent small-screen satire that has been far less well-received. I'm speaking here of Microsoft's horrible Bill Gates-Jerry Seinfield ads for Windows. In them, Bill & Jerry hang with a "regular" family. The regular mom buys fancy mustard with white wine in it for her visitors; Bill tries to read a tech-manual as a bedtime story to the regular little boy; Jerry refuses to share financial advice with the regular dad who's bought a few gold coins; they end up getting kicked out of the regular folks' house for pinching a leather giraffe from Cabo San Lucas. (You don't believe me? Watch the clip).

The spots were pulled not long after their debut this month (Microsoft claims this was all part of phased roll-out of the new Windows), but if you ask me, Gates and his ad agency misread the regular-elite frames in the most egregious way. Imagine putting Barack Obama and Joe Biden into this ad, watching the two of them try to make sense of the quirky classlessness of middle-class America. Gates and Seinfeld inserted themselves into the most popular anti-intellectual, anti-elite frame: they condescended to the regular folks, they poked more fun at them ("Have you ever had scalloped potatoes, Bill?" "Yes, I have.") than the reverse.

So, back to the SNL clip: how did it so successfully cut through these embedded frames? By placing one beside the other, the skit exposed them both for what they are: manufactured cultural representations. That's the power of good satire.

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