Politics & Poetry
posted by Frank Pasquale
Though change was the order of the day this election season, there was remarkable stasis in the New Jersey Congressional delegation. One of the incumbents who won was Mike Ferguson, whose unfortunately named opponent (Linda Stender) was the subject of countless ads proclaiming “Linda Stender is a Spender.” (Some early ads featured a multicultural chorus, accompanied by a bouncing ball passing over the text of the Stender/Spender j’accuse.) At the climax of the campaign, Stender’s service in two government jobs became the focus of the ads, which crescendoed into
Linda Stender
is a spender!
and a double dipping
pension padder, too!
As pure poetry, it’s pretty priceless-we’ve got a trochaic rhyming couplet followed by delicious alliteration in the second pair of lines. A few of my colleagues have told me their kids ran around singing the slogan in the same mocking tones of the announcer.
It’s still too early to tell if Ferguson won (in part) because, or despite, the ads. (Now there’s an interesting empirical research project.) But for those who would despair of the place of poetry in politics, I highly recommend this amazing tribute to Seamus Heaney by Adam Kirsch. A taste:
A genuine artist almost always wants to feel answerable to something. . . . [T]here is liberation in feeling responsible to an ideal reader—the best poets of the past, perhaps, or the unbiased readers of the future; or to an ethical principle—speaking truthfully, bearing witness, offering sympathy; or to an aesthetic ideal—the radiance of beauty, the genius of the language. Not until you know what a poet feels responsible toward can you know how he wants and deserves to be read.
I tend to think many of the best election ads merge art and rhetoric, combining music, graphics, and words in particularly forceful ways. But the question remains: who is the “ideal viewer” of these ads? And does conditioning by the ads change us in some nonideal ways?
November 10, 2006 at 1:45 pm
Posted in: Politics
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