Obama and Clinton, Sliced and Diced: A Demographic Operation

Race v. gender is a simpleton’s analysis. Instead, why not consider the whole array of factors, known as demographics, in addition to race and gender: blood (family), age, nationality, education, religion, economic status, social class, politics, occupation or profession?

Other categories to be evaluated regarding the “just words” and “speeches” issue between Clinton and Obama should be the categories of their usage in the verbal code (vocabulary, syntax, semantics, style) and the nonverbal code (kinesics, haptics, oculesics, vocalics, appearance and dress, facial expression, etc.) That judgment is much tougher than judging them on two rather obvious surface appearances. DUH!

That is, if you really want to know. Is the person we are to put in the office of President worth a thoroughgoing analysis? I think so.

Measure each factor using a scale of evaluation, a nominal, ordinal, or interval scale to rise above the simplistic analysis. Everyone right now is groping around in a dimly lighted discussion. The additional criteria are really being used but in a way that voters do not and probably cannot know what they are doing, judging without awareness. Most can only say they have a vague feeling of affinity or repulsion. Using the additional categories should brighten an awareness. Isn’t it possible that Obama or Clinton can be compared in the whole matrix of criteria and a calculation could be made into a better index of suitability for each candidate?

List the categories vertically and make two columns, three,with McCain thrown in. Assign 33⅓% to each of the three. Then adjust the percentages according to some nominal evaluation you wish to make. Such an exercise would sharpen one’s view and support a more rational choice.

I have done it, and I have made my choice. It is the one person I would choose to be the personage I would be more delighted to hear in all the ceremonies pertainng to that office, and in addition would be more likely to make the better decisions. I grew to see that candidate perform brilliantly in a diplomatic role for relations abroad and in a political role making the agenda for policies that would work for the betterment of all U.S. citizens.

On Hearing Sen. Obama’s Pastor: The Flip Side

I heard Sen. Obama’s Church of Christ pastor preaching today. I can hear the uproar now even before turning on the talk radio station or the news. I know without listening what they all are about to say. He must denounce and reject that man’s preaching against the singing of the national anthem. Well, hold on. There is a positive side that may not be heard.

Have we ever had indications from Sen. Obama that tell us how deep into the “culture of the black people” he is? Can that be judged by the voters? I know there is a domestic culture of black people that has language, paralanguage and nonverbal dimensions that most of us white folk know little about. I have encountered it and been found wanting in understanding the offenses that may innocently be committed without my awareness. (I know that political correctness should be defined as “cultural astuteness”. PC is an exhibition of CA.)

Since I believe one of our social goals in the U.S. is to have peace and understanding among all citizens of this melting pot, defeating in the long haul all vestiges of racism, sexism, and so forth, it is my obligation to continue my education in the best ways of communicating across cultural differences.

In that spirit, I see a black pastor preaching to his congregation with content I find ridiculous. But that’s his prerogative. His congregation accepts it rather enthusiastically. He is holding up the nation of “the man” as a villain to be disrespected. So that’s the status of our society. People need to know that. That feeling of disrespect is still strong. The report of his preaching puts it out in the open. And that’s the way it should be!

The kicker is that we might now have a President who will bring this society even closer to the problems of our racial divide. (Just as Hillary’s campaign has brought us all closer to an understanding of how a woman might campaign for President. Her campaign will constitute a model for future women candidates for President.)

Obama’s candidacy and perhaps eventual presidency may accomplish some additional healing, of the sort which I heard Bill Cosby and others talk about.

Hearing Obama’s pastor was not a bad thing. Hearing Obama’s pastor was an interesting event, not something Obama should have to show regret for. He should say that it was an event encouraged under Constitutional protection that we can all learn from, learn toleration, understanding, and something about a man who might be our President.

His incendiary speech set nothing on fire. He was asking, in a church building, his deity to damn the U.S. If there had been a tsunami or a tornado or a hurricane devastating our countrymen immediately after he uttered those words, that would have constituted, to the Jerry Fallwell or Pat Robertson types, proof of the deity’s retribution. There was no breaking of the rules of free speech by the pastor. How often and how many people everyday curse our government for this or that?

Voting Against Your Own Best Interests Because You Were Seduced by Irrelevancies

Mark these words by JIM WEBB, the Democratic senator from Virginia, concerning the coming CLASS STRUGGLE IN THIS COUNTRY. What he said before the 2006 election. Read the full text by clicking the post in the column on the right. DO NOT CLICK if you want to have a nice day undisturbed by serious thinking.

Here is a sample:

“The politics of the Karl Rove era were designed to distract and divide the very people who would ordinarily be rebelling against the deterioration of their way of life. Working Americans have been repeatedly seduced at the polls by emotional issues such as the predictable mantra of “God, guns, gays, abortion and the flag” while their way of life shifted ineluctably beneath their feet.”

What he says is sickening to anyone who is not one to act like a fat cat.

The Don Imus Disease

 

Don Imus is a regular Typhoid Mary. He is a carrier of the “cultural disease”, and the symptom is language. He has the misfortune of working as a professional talker in a mass medium, where a mini-medium might have been “preferrabble” for his uses. He is an infected person walking among the masses. He cannot give the disease to other carriers of his own affliction; they can recognize his language of infection and give an elbow dig-dig and a knowing heh-heh. He can only pass his ailment to the uninfected, unless they are resistant to it or have acquired an immunity.

The cultural disease is found in people who share the code-system of one in-group. But when a Don Imus talks to people who do not carry his code system, his out-groups, his disorder becomes noticeable. Culture is a code system in verbal and nonverbal behavior internalized and understood as a habit within groups large and small.

The language used by Imus betrayed his affliction. To his fellow sufferers, he appears normal. What he said was an improvised cultural explosive device. The explosive charge was language, and the perpetrators are membes of the Imus in-group that, by U.S. social  standards, are a sort of cultural terrorists.

I heard the coach of the so-called “victims”, the women of the team, speak at extreme length in defense of her team as if they had been injured or afflicted by Don Imus’s disease. To whom was she speaking? I never selected to listen to Imus, but if I had, I would have merely shaken my head at his xenophobia, chauvinism, racial intolerance.

Anyone who has decried the concept of  “political correctness” has done so to the detriment of a democratic society and has led to the sheltering of  those like Don Imus who need political in-correctness to do their business, rotten as it may be. Political correctness is cultural astuteness, a sensitivity to cultural differences and an adaptation to behaviors of people raised in other cultures, people whose verbal and nonverbal codes are unfamiliar, different. A democratic society has the modes of that sensitivity and skill in recognition and adaptation to differences. “Can’t we all just get along?” What do we do with computer viruses and other criminal interferences with internet communication? How do we treated AIDS and other pandemics? That’s what we should do with cultural viruses.

  Imus shows no cultural astuteness. The defense mpounted by the women’s coach was useless in the face of the Imus in-group, and unnecessary in the face of his out-groups, those who have an adequate background in intercultural communication. Both sides knew what he was saying and its intent to ridicule, dominate, and exploit.

Those who chuckled with knowing recognition of a membership in the in-crowd have a diseased culture in these times of growing democratic sensitivities and cultural ideals.

What is the cure? Imus got his go-downance. But will that make him culturally astute? Watch and wait. And those like him? Just as the terrorism problem rests mainly in the hands of the Islamists to confront, so too is the problem of the diseased culture of racism in the hands of that in-group to redeem themselves by learning in intercultural communication, or suffer more such public floggings earned by Imus.