From 2001 (found in files)

Immigrant P.O.V.

          I have in the past taught a course in American Politics and Government at Waikato University. I was pencilled in to teach it again second semester this year, but the budgetary strangulation currently going on at the uni’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences makes it overwhelmingly unlikely that I’ll actually do it.

          Although a little money always comes in handy (and in the case of contract lecturers the emphasis is more on ‘little’ than ‘money’), this upsets me little.

          First of all, I was always annoyed by the reasons they hired me for the job: I’m a bloke with a couple of appropriate degrees and an American accent. It’s not as if I ever had an academic or research interest in the subject. I’m more into comparative cultural analysis.

          Secondly, having to keep up with what’s happening over there in the Old Country depresses me. I really have neither a strong enough stomach nor a weak enough nose to follow that stuff without experiencing emotional unpleasantness, to put it mildly.

          I’ve had first-hand experience of what those people are like.

          But, never being quite well-off enough to turn down work when offered it, I taught the bloody course.

          Reckoning that most Kiwis know little about the mechanics of how government is structured over there, and that they want to get their money’s worth, I used up more than half the semester going over the arcanely intricate architectural detail of the U.S. Constitution. The rest was devoted to political culture and practice. And, wherever possible, I’d try to inject a heavy dose of cynicism.

          I reckon, though, that I’d drastically reverse the emphasis if it turns out that someday I may have to teach the damned course again.

          Really, all those 18th-century governmental structures are quaint, but they’re only incidental to what is really going on in U.S. politics. And the 18th-century political theories that the whole mess is based on have been stretched so far by now that they’re hardly even incidental.

          For instance, instead of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, I’d emphsise the philosophy of P.T.  Barnum and Walter Dill Scott, whose thinking reveals more about what actually happens in the U.S., and about what could happen here.

          P.T. Barnum, of course, was also a showman, and American politics and government has become another form of mass entertainment, similar to a line-up of sitcoms and soaps. But Barnum also articulated the three maxims that cut to the heart of the American socio-economico-political culture:

          “There’s a sucker born every minute”, “Never give a sucker an even break”, and “You can’t cheat an honest man”.

          Walter Dill Scott was the author of an essay in 1903 called The Psychology of Advertising. Historian David Potter called him “the Archimedes, if not the Nostradamus, of the advertising world.” It was Scott who articulated and promoted the Great Change in American advertising: the selling of the sizzle instead of the steak.

          Keeping the focus firmly off the steak by acting as if only the sizzle matters — creating images while masking reality — has been at the heart of American political practice for a long time, and politicians have keenly adopted each advance in the advertisers’ repertoire of tricks over the years.

          America has been a society of suckers, and the con-men who feed off them, for more than a century and a half, since the days of the traveling snake-oil salesmen and carnival touts in which Barnum operated. Given a slick enough sales pitch, Americans will buy anything. And with enough money involved, the sales pitch is guaranteed enough to be slick.

          And so now we, as well as the Americans, have suffered through several boring waves of adolescents convinced that they must express their individuality by copying other people, and that the way to rebel against the system is to buy things from it.

          We still don’t have a political system where money, and the  images it can buy, is all that matters. Things seemed to be going that way for a few years there, but the movement in that direction seems to have lost momentum. New Zealanders, it seems, may not be quite the suckers that the Americans are.

          I hope I won’t have to add: “yet.”