Thursday, November 8, 2007
Al Diamon
The Value of Stupid Questions
Someday, Jeannine Guttman is going to say something in her weekly column in the Maine Sunday Telegram that I’ll agree with.
Not this week, though.
On Nov. 4, Guttman, the paper’s editor, was griping about the lack of solemnity that has intruded on debates among the presidential candidates. What set her off was a question posed to Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich by NBC’s Tim Russert as to whether Kucinich had ever seen a UFO. In Guttman’s opinion, this innocuous query threatens the foundations of her profession by opening the gates to the barbarian horde.
“It’s getting harder and harder for journalists to protest the inroads that bloggers and citizen reporters are making into the territory known as Serious News when we insist on asking such absurd questions,” she lamented.
Guttman then proceeded to list all the world’s woes the next president will have to contend with, from war in the Middle East to oil prices to the cost of education to the collapse of the housing market.
“There’s not much levity there,” she said. “There’s not much to joke about. Doing so would not be appropriate, given what’s at stake.
“It is, therefore, remarkable to me that we see professional journalists injecting silly humor and irrelevant issues into a national vetting process designed to help us choose the next president.”
This is the same “vetting process” that New York Times columnist Russell Baker once compared to professional wresting. The wrestlers, Baker wrote, “howl and bay at each other with a ridiculous lack of conviction reminiscent of Presidential candidates in those ‘debates’ designed to gull the rubes.”
In the same issue of the Telegram as Guttman’s column, an allegedly professional journalist in her employ devoted considerable space to an article, not on the horrifying prospects of global warming, but on whether dolls such as Bratz Babyz warp young girls’ minds. I, for one, cannot wait to find out Barack Obama’s opinion on that.
That same purveyor of “Serious News” also wrote a light-hearted column concerning the odd pronunciations of the names of some Maine towns, such as Woolwich and Vienna. This, while people are dying in Darfur.
And in the Telegram’s sister paper, Waterville’s Morning Sentinel, the editorial cartoon depicted the lovable alien ET wearing a button that read “Kucinich For President.” What’s next? Jokes about John Edwards’ hair?
Clearly, the Republic is crumbling. Or maybe that shaking is just the result of normal people laughing at silly twits like Guttman. Because humor and irreverence have a long and honorable history in American politics. From Maine’s own Thomas Brackett Reed defining a statesman as “a successful politician who is dead” to Bill Clinton answering the “boxers or briefs” question on MTV, the offbeat quip has been helpful in exploding pomposity and providing a glimpse of the real character behind the consultant-manufactured façade.
Guttman seems to believe the average voter is disgusted with these sorts of hijinks. “I guarantee,” she wrote, “you would not hear a single ‘regular person’ asking any of the presidential candidates about UFOs.”
Before somebody attempts to collect on that guarantee, Guttman ought to have a conversation with a “regular person.”. She might be surprised at the popular attitude. And while she’s immersing herself in the culture she’s supposed to be covering, try listening to Rush Limbaugh or turning on the TV to catch a late-night talk show, The Daily Show or The Colbert Report (assuming the writers’ strike ever ends). There’s a whole world of pointed humor out there that seems to support the view that the only way to deal with a planet as twisted as this one is to laugh at it.
Several years ago, when I worked at Casco Bay Weekly in Portland, we regularly posed weird questions to candidates for state and local offices. We didn’t have any particular reason for doing this, other than to see what reaction we’d get. But it almost always proved to be worthwhile. If you define worthwhile as funny.
Sometimes, the result was predictable. When we asked a past-his-prime, old-school-liberal pol where he was when he heard the news that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain had died, he replied, “Who?”
Sometimes, we got a surprise. An arch-conservative Republican, responding to the same question, grew misty-eyed. “I was watching MTV,” he said.
Sometimes, things just got weird. “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever done with duct tape?” I asked a legislative leader. His eyes darted around the room, before he blurted out, “Well, er, uh … nothing sexual.”
Guttman needs to learn a simple lesson of journalism.
It’s not about the question.
It’s all about the answer.
Al Diamon can be asked questions by e-mailing aldiamon@herniahill.net, or by registering to this site and posting comments below.</I>
Posted on Thursday, November 8, 2007 in Permalink
Views expressed in this blog belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect either Down East's editorial stance or the views of Down East Enterprise. We ask that comments be civil; anyone who refuses to self edit runs the risk of being banned from commenting on Down East.com content. Further, please limit material cited from other publications to fewer than 75 words and a link; anything more riles copyright attorneys.