As a society, are we able to interpret meaning in a standard manner at all? Or is everything just a novel now?
The other day, I was visited by Oliver Willis, who insisted without evidence, that Clinton's continued presence in the Democratic primary campaign was a matter of ego, and that by so continuing, the inevitable result would be a McCain victory. This is not just an inability to interpret correctly. It is, as Somerby says, just a novel. Everyone knows that Sen. Clinton is an egotistical harpy, concerned only with her own image and the pursuit of power at all costs. Since everyone knows this, interpreting every word, act, gesture, laugh, and hand clap becomes an exercise in the hermeneutics of the shrew. I may not be an insider or player like Willis; I may not link to celebrity T & A, driving up my hit count. I'm just a z-level blogger with a small but dedicated readership. Yet, I was able, without too much trouble, to figure out what she meant, because I did not assume that Mrs. Clinton wants Sen. Obama killed.
Somerby uses a Harold Meyerson column in The Washington Post to further illustrate how this hermeneutic of the calculating shrew works. First, from the word processor of Meyerson to our bleeding eyes:
Had Florida and Michigan conducted their primaries the way the other 48 states conducted their own primaries and caucuses—that is, in accord with the very clear calendar laid down by the DNC well before the primaries began—then Clinton's marchers would be utterly justified in their claims. But when the two states flouted those rules by moving their primaries outside the prescribed time frame, the DNC, which gave neither state a waiver to do so, decreed that their primaries would not count and enjoined all presidential candidates from campaigning in those states. Obama and John Edwards complied with the DNC's dictates by removing their names from the Michigan ballot. Clinton did not.
Seating Michigan in full would mean the party validates the kind of one-candidate election (well, 1.03, to give Dennis Kucinich, Chris Dodd and Mike Gravel, who also remained on the ballot, their due) that is more common in autocracies than democracies. It would mean rewarding the one serious candidate who didn't remove her name from the ballot when all her rivals, in deference to the national party rules, did just that.
Now, the soothing salve of Somerby:
Sorry, but even Meyerson surely knows that there was no “DNC dictate”—no “national party rule”—requiring Obama, Edwards, Biden and Richardson to remove their names from the Michigan ballot. Duh! They did so voluntarily, at the last minute (as was their right); that’s why Clinton, Dodd, Kucinich and Gravel were free to leave their names there. The candidates’ decisions were voluntary; indeed, all the requests were made on October 9, the day of the ballot deadline, to considerable uproar in Michigan. (The DNC had condemned the state’s primary at least four weeks earlier.) Indeed, in the October 10 Detroit News, party honcho Debbie Dingell said that Obama’s campaign “had assured her last week that he would remain on the ballot.” We have no idea if that’s accurate, but no challenge to her statement was ever published—and it only made sense because there was no requirement that names be removed from the ballot. All the uproar, surprise and confusion occurred because there were no “rules” or “dictates” requiring names to be removed.
Request to Meyerson: What was the “dictate” to which you refer? Any chance you could quote it for us?
This is how not just political reporting should operate. This is how interpretation should run. Rather than continue to assume bad faith, especially when there is no evidence of bad faith, why not report facts? I realize it is more fun to construct a novel, the plot and characters of which everyone knows. Thus, the hermeneutic of the shrew.
Political reporting that relies not just on bad faith and factual inaccuracies, but assumptions of motive and character without any reference to anything other than what everyone seems to know to be the case needs to be called out for what it is - nonsense. Pure and simple. It doesn't matter who is the target of the nonsense, because, in the end, we all suffer from a press corps gone mad with the hermeneutics of the shrew.
