Eloquence, insight and truth-telling

My friend Joan Rutkowski and I have been writing back and forth about Barack Obama's Philadelphia speech. In the course of our correspondence, she shared with me an as-yet-unsent letter-to-the-editor.

I thought I would share it with you, with her permission. Here it is in slightly shortened form.

Never in my life have I looked forward to hearing a politician deliver a speech.
As a 33-year-old, I have observed just enough of the political process to distrust politicians.
But on Monday night, after hearing that Barack Obama was going to give a speech about racism in America and about his pastor’s comments, I wrote myself a reminder to watch it the next day.
I had viewed a few of his campaign speeches online before this and had already been moved by his inspirational and eloquent message. So, I was quite interested to see how he would handle an immediate, controversial issue.
As expected, he offered a nuanced and deeply thoughtful perspective on this country’s history of racial issues. But what most interested me, in the end, was how much I was drawn to listening to and thinking about his words. This was a full 37 minutes of watching someone stand at a podium, and yes, my attention span sometimes falters when it comes to television. But I was listening to every word. Closely.
This is the kind of communication that I think most of us long for from our political leaders — and almost never hear. What is most compelling to me, and many others, is what this speech exemplifies about his entire campaign and his character in general. Obama continually demonstrates a unique ability to communicate with both eloquence and insight about the issues that confront us. He can be pragmatic, as when he talks about his health care ideas, yet inspirational at the same time.
Hillary and others desperately try to write off his campaign as style over substance. But what cynics do not understand is that the inspiration he conjures comes not just from his eloquence, but from our gut feeling that this guy is telling us the truth . . .
Because we have many difficult issues to confront and solutions that are unlikely to make everyone happy, we need a leader whose words not only inspire, but educate and engage citizens.
This may explain why, in another first, my Republican-leaning father, mother, and brother, and myself, are all supporting the same candidate. It seems that hope, change, and unity are possible when expressed by the right person at the right time.

Escape from the Electronic Cave

“Television and the Presentation of Reality,” Philosophy 197, is a Portland Community College course being taught this summer by Matt Stockton, a young philosophy instructor well versed in contemporary media.

My friend Joan Rutkowski and I are both active in the media literacy movement so we went out to the Rock Creek PCC campus to meet Matt and to attend the first class.

Matt told the 16 or so students that the course is really was about media literacy.

The syllabus description lays out some of the dimensions of the subject. Electronic media, Matt writes, “has emerged as the most popular source of information concerning our perspectives of reality.” He notes that the 2000 census reported the average American spends nearly 1,600 hours a year watching television. That’s about 4.25 hours a day, or 29 percent of our waking hours.

Philosophy 197 looks like a great class. I came away from my visit with two or three new ideas, not the least of which is that our expectations shape (Matt actually said expectations “dictate”) our experience.

Of course, the media are all about shaping expectations — about appearance, about resolving conflict (usually violently), about the meaning of success (the one with the most toys wins), about time and its value, about entitlement, about knowledge and about what is “cool” or not “cool.”

More than shaping experience, media expectations shape our values, our decisions, our lives.

Matt put it another way too. We are born into a world with a gap between who (or what) we are and who (or what) we want to be. Media managers and advertisers happily fill that gap for their own purposes.

But this is a philosophy course and the first class wasn’t without its philosophy, in this case Plato’s Cave Analogy, which, when you reconsider it, is a pretty good description of our relationship with media.

You’ll recall that Plato describes a situation in which a group of people is confined from birth in a cave so that all they can see are shadows cast on a wall. (Think, very big screen but no cable fee.) The shadows are what the prisoners understand to be reality. One day a member of the group escapes only to find that the shadows, far from being reality, are really images made by a person standing in front of a fire and manipulating the shadows. Any escapee who leaves the cave and its manipulated images will find a “new” “true” reality.

Through understanding, discussion and critical thinking, the students in Phl 197 may be on the verge of their own escape.

That is what media literacy is all about.