Sitcom Politics

Back in the day when media guru Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message,” he wasn’t kidding. The medium not only is the message, it also shapes the mind. Our expectations have been molded so thoroughly by the solve-it-in-thirty-minutes sitcom storyline (or an hour if you’re into TV dramas) that we’ve translated that mentality into real life.

Fact is, life isn’t a sitcom or an hour-long drama. Families with kids aren’t nearly as funny as those on “The Middle” or “Modern Family,” show choirs never look like the ones on “Glee,” and modern crime-fighters—no matter how high-tech—have nothing remotely as cool as the scientific and technological gadgetry on “Bones” and “NCIS.”

Yet here we are, coming up on midterm elections, with many voters expecting the multiple crises that took years to create during the two-term presidency of George W. Bush to have been solved within the first two years of the Obama presidency. The Bush presidency took the economic surplus that was the Clinton legacy and converted it into massive debt and an American-led global recession, helped along by two ill-conceived wars and lack of proper oversight of the financial and housing markets—and a lot of other things that ought to have be been seen to.

The fiction of wishful thinking so glibly purveyed by rightwing pundits and their puppets won’t change reality. But with sitcom mentality firmly in place, it doesn’t have to. Conservative politicians who have sat on their hands for two years, parroting Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” to any collaborative strategies to solve the nation’s problems, are now waving their hands in the air and, like Chicken Little, squawking that the sky is falling. Their solution: Elect politicians from the party that made the mess in the first place.

Mess? What mess? Oh, that’s right. The Bush presidency was over half an hour ago. All has been forgotten now—never mind the men and women still out of work and still dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 1967 Marshall McLuhan published The Medium is the Massage, a word play on his famous saying. But it was a well-considered pun. McLuhan used the word massage to describe the effects media have on human senses. He wrote:

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. (p. 26)

In some ways the media have positively reshaped human awareness, but in other ways we have been diminished. If we expect the impossible because we have seen the impossible realized so often in fiction that we now confuse it with real life, then we have arrived at a truly sorry state.