Well, with all the recent prickly religious threads these days going along without dissolving into flames, I thought maybe we could try politics.
Not so much "where do you stand," but more "how did you get there?"
Take Obama's lapel pin.
Since 9/11, pretty much every American politician has worn a little American flag lapel pin. It started off as a symbol of solidarity and patriotism, but now it's pretty much just added as a matter of course.
A symbol only has as much meaning as you give to it. For some, the pin is still a symbol of true patriotism. For others, it's a fashion accessory, something you have to wear if you want to be taken seriously, just like a tie. Doing that only serves to devalue the symbol.
Obama
stopped wearing the pin , feeling that there were better ways to show patriotism than with a token gesture. And if you search the internet for "Obama lapel pin," you'll see the results. Or you can read
this article about the media reaction to the "missing" pin.
It's not an isolated issue, either.
This article from the AP today is what caught my eye in the first place. It talks about how stray remarks, token gestures, and unsubstantiated rumors (in this case, about Obama) are made into issues and could well become talking points in the general election.
Comedian Lewis Black discusses these non-issue issues , including the lapel pin, and makes his point better than I could.
To some degree, it's the media. Focusing on superficialities in general. Making things into issues that really shouldn't be, for whatever reason. Maybe because they don't have anything better to talk about, or because they don't know how to talk about more important things, or because they're afraid that if they do, they'll bore people and lose viewers.
I don't think that's all there is to it, though. People actually do care about these things. They hear about it enough, and it sways them. They listen, and they accept what they're told without taking the time to really think about it or look into it any further.
Meantime, it's a lot harder than it should be to find things like
this simple chart , which compares the major candidates' stands on key issues.
I've used Obama as an example here, because that's what the article I saw was talking about. But I'm more interested in the more general view.
Is it like this in other countries?
How much is the media, and how much of the election is actually going to come down to trivialities and hearsay?
Or should these things matter, after all? How much does presentation count? Are issues like this really superficial?
What do you guys think?
