Recent commentary from National Journal:
Legal Affairs: Prayer and Creationism -- Met With Supreme Hostility, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (July 18, 2000)
It's unclear how and where the Supreme Court can somehow stop its slide down a slippery slope.
Political Pulse: Wanna Run? Where Ya From?, by William Schneider (July 18, 2000)
This may be a close election, so a prospective veep's home state could matter a lot.
Social Studies: Can the Death Penalty Be Saved From Its Supporters?, by Jonathan Rauch (July 11, 2000)
The people who stand to gain the most from doubt reducing steps are the proponents of capital punishment.
Legal Affairs: How the 'Conservative' Supreme Court Leans to the Liberal Side, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (July 11, 2000)
The justices should not consult public opinion before dealing with hot issues.
Media: Anyone But Us, by William Powers (July 11, 2000)
The incumbent liberal media is terribly unpopular. Let's elect a new media, and the sooner the better.
Political Pulse: The Court Still Amazes and Outrages, by William Schneider (July 11, 2000)
Late June's flood of Supreme Court rulings left conservatives churlish.
More from National Journal.
Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte.
Media:All the World's a Chrysler Building
In order to better appreciate our thoroughly modern media, let us turn our gaze to the Chrysler Building. The jewel of the Manhattan skyline was in the news this week, and it was a story for our times.
The Detroit News & Free Press reported that DaimlerChrysler, the global automaker, wants to rent the top five floors of the building -- which is owned by other parties -- for a new "virtual headquarters." Why would a company want a virtual headquarters when it already has two real headquarters, one in Michigan and one in Stuttgart, Germany?
Ah, but there's the problem. DaimlerChrysler was created last year when Daimler-Benz, a German company, acquired Chrysler Corp., an American company. At the time, they called it a merger, but it wasn't. It was a German takeover. The shots are being called from Stuttgart, and nobody is fooled by that Michigan mail drop. DaimlerChrysler's stock price has suffered for reasons explained by The New York Times in a nice follow-up to the Detroit scoop. Wrote The Times' Robert D. McFadden:
"Standard & Poor's did not include the merged corporation in its list of 500 top American companies, on the grounds that it was a German company. One result of that decision was that many American investors, who made up half of the shareholders of the merged company in 1998, have sold the stock, and Americans now make up only about one-fourth of the shareholders."DaimlerChrysler wants to bring back those American investors and lift its stock price. So it has seized on a beloved American symbol with which it happens to share a name. The building would serve only as a meeting place for the DaimlerChrysler board, and as an office for what the Detroit paper calls "a small contingent of staffers." The company's legal headquarters would remain in Stuttgart.
This story is worth pausing over because it's not just about cars or real estate or even business. It's about the richest subject of our time, which is staging. Daimler's plan for a Potemkin head office is pure staging, a bit of artifice designed to achieve a goal. In one sense, there's nothing new in this. When it opened in 1930, the Chrysler Building was an artificial symbol, too, of one company's power. The Times reports that while Walter Chrysler had offices in the Chrysler Building, his company remained firmly headquartered in Michigan.
So Chrysler, which doesn't really exist anymore, will finally have its home -- albeit a make-believe home -- in the Chrysler Building, which in a sense was never the Chrysler Building at all and certainly isn't today.
You can shake your head over this shape-shift world of ours, and lament that so many modern companies and people are not what they seem. You can wish for a simpler time when image wasn't everything. Or you can accept that there never was such a time, and there never will be. Weren't the pyramids just PR staging, humongous image-builders?
What's relatively new here, and I think encouraging, is that staging is an increasingly legitimate subject for journalism. It wasn't always so. Our profession has a cynical reputation, but at heart it's always been an earnest trade, full of people wishing for a world where things are just as they seem. We've shrunk from covering staging, the whole squishy world of images, and public manipulation. And when we've had to cover it, we've done so without enthusiasm. Because covering artifice felt like participating in it, and that was wrong. Our response to staging and image manipulation was not to try to understand its meaning, but simply to expose it as an outrage.
This is especially true in political journalism, where matters of staging -- image-making, atmospherics -- still have a bad name. Enough already with the theatrics and the horse race, say the defenders of earnest political coverage. Please stick to the issues that matter to real people. Tell us where the candidates stand on health care and the environment, period.
But real people grow up surrounded by artifice, and know its power. They see a Chrysler Building for what it is: a transparent device, a symbol. And watching how that symbol is manipulated helps them understand the manipulators. The tone of the Chrysler Building coverage wasn't one of outrage, it was matter-of-fact, sophisticated, and revealing.
A few weeks ago, The Washington Post ran a memorable piece about George W. Bush's rhetorical style. David Von Drehle wrote that the Texas governor eschews eloquent, mellifluous language, and consciously strives for an informal, "homespun delivery." Republican operatives explained that Bush hates being "handled" and "packaged." And to sharp readers, I'm sure that felt like a kind of packaging, a sly way of making Bush seem more authentic than his opponent. It was a bit of staged anti-staging.
Von Drehle gave examples of how Bush changes the text of his speeches, makes sure his delivery seems rough and unpracticed. In this way, the piece said, Bush is the opposite of Ronald Reagan -- that consummate performer -- and this fact has some Republicans concerned. Or pretending they're concerned.
It was all very inside, very horse race and theatrical. It was purely about staging. And, as with the Chrysler Building, the staging spoke volumes about the stagers.
So, bring on the conventions!
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte.
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More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly.
William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.
For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com.
All material copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
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