Meeja circus
Here in the UK the coverage of the US primaries (does that make the November elections secondaries?) has been, if not at saturation point, then at least very damp. I guess the cynical among us think that UK interest in US elections is justified because it’s important to know who’ll be setting foreign policy for the next four years* while the even more cynical think that it’s low season over here for politics and so all the media have migrated to the US in order to grow fat on expenses claims and saturated-fat laced coffee.
The media are doing a valiant job trying to explain the US voting system to Brits, who kind of gave up after that whole ‘hanging chad’ business. They’ve been working even harder to convince us we should care. But if we want to know about what’s going on, we’ll rent ‘Primary Colours’. What’s most impressive is the sheer amount of razzamatazz that is injected into the whole affair. In fact, I’m not aware of any other context that the word razzamatazz can be used in. It’s like one of those tiny sea creatures that live near – but not too near – volcanic vents on the sea bed. They can only live in the very few inches between the extreme heat and extreme cold – the area scientists call ‘toasty’. Like them, ‘razzamatazz’ can only exist in the presence of streamers, whooping, hollering and televised debates that look like they could spill over into cage-fighting at any moment.
The media are concentrating their attention on the Democratic hopefuls, hoping that come November they’ll be able to flog the phrase ‘first woman’ or ‘first hint-of-beige guy’ to death. This means that when a republican is elected, all the people writing books about Bill being the ‘first husband’ will be chewing the carpet in frustration while the biography of ‘rich white guy you never heard of who is now Prez’ will be flying off of the shelves.
Over here we have impending local council elections. Oh yea. Wonder what sort of coverage they are getting in the US? The build up to it may not stretch to automated ‘phone banks (or as I like to call them ‘nuisance calls’) or razzamatazz like they have in the US, but it does involve some fairly heavy leafleting (as described in the ‘new year, new nazi’ post) and, the other night, a rather large and sinister man in a hat and anorak combination that hinted at body parts stored in his freezer expounding the virtues of the Conservative Party on my doorstep.
Brits are funny about getting ‘phone calls from computers. We’ve never trusted computers since seeing ‘2001’, Skynet scares the hell out of us and there’s always that sneaking suspicion that the gas board billing computer has a malice subroutine. The only computer we trust is EARNIE and that’s because he never picks our numbers and so completely conforms to our expectations. Not for nothing are the lottery numbers picked by a low-tech bingo blower. If it was just a box pushing out numbers, we’d all be suspicious.
I think if we received a call from one asking us to vote for a particular person, the combination of technophobia and intrusion of privacy would be overwhelming; leading to tutting in the very stongest possible terms and, who knows, a midnight visit to the mainframe with a cricket bat with some masonry nails hammered through it for some radical reprogramming.
* Well, at least until the EU elect a President, then I think that the EU will declare war with the US as a result of an escalation about the importation of fruit. It’d be cool to see UK troops occupying New England again.
The media are doing a valiant job trying to explain the US voting system to Brits, who kind of gave up after that whole ‘hanging chad’ business. They’ve been working even harder to convince us we should care. But if we want to know about what’s going on, we’ll rent ‘Primary Colours’. What’s most impressive is the sheer amount of razzamatazz that is injected into the whole affair. In fact, I’m not aware of any other context that the word razzamatazz can be used in. It’s like one of those tiny sea creatures that live near – but not too near – volcanic vents on the sea bed. They can only live in the very few inches between the extreme heat and extreme cold – the area scientists call ‘toasty’. Like them, ‘razzamatazz’ can only exist in the presence of streamers, whooping, hollering and televised debates that look like they could spill over into cage-fighting at any moment.
The media are concentrating their attention on the Democratic hopefuls, hoping that come November they’ll be able to flog the phrase ‘first woman’ or ‘first hint-of-beige guy’ to death. This means that when a republican is elected, all the people writing books about Bill being the ‘first husband’ will be chewing the carpet in frustration while the biography of ‘rich white guy you never heard of who is now Prez’ will be flying off of the shelves.
Over here we have impending local council elections. Oh yea. Wonder what sort of coverage they are getting in the US? The build up to it may not stretch to automated ‘phone banks (or as I like to call them ‘nuisance calls’) or razzamatazz like they have in the US, but it does involve some fairly heavy leafleting (as described in the ‘new year, new nazi’ post) and, the other night, a rather large and sinister man in a hat and anorak combination that hinted at body parts stored in his freezer expounding the virtues of the Conservative Party on my doorstep.
Brits are funny about getting ‘phone calls from computers. We’ve never trusted computers since seeing ‘2001’, Skynet scares the hell out of us and there’s always that sneaking suspicion that the gas board billing computer has a malice subroutine. The only computer we trust is EARNIE and that’s because he never picks our numbers and so completely conforms to our expectations. Not for nothing are the lottery numbers picked by a low-tech bingo blower. If it was just a box pushing out numbers, we’d all be suspicious.
I think if we received a call from one asking us to vote for a particular person, the combination of technophobia and intrusion of privacy would be overwhelming; leading to tutting in the very stongest possible terms and, who knows, a midnight visit to the mainframe with a cricket bat with some masonry nails hammered through it for some radical reprogramming.
* Well, at least until the EU elect a President, then I think that the EU will declare war with the US as a result of an escalation about the importation of fruit. It’d be cool to see UK troops occupying New England again.
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