Where's my flying car?
Jan. 21st, 2009 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labellementeuseHere's what I think about the inauguration: You know all those movies, usually vaguely crappy sci-fi/natural disaster movies, set somewhere in the indeterminate future? Like Independence Day and Deep Impact and stuff. Well, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sixth_light and I realised some time ago (because we watched a lot of aforementioned vaguely crappy SF movies) that the President was always black. It's like it was a rule: In The Indeterminate Future, the President will be African-American. Putting This In Our Movie Makes Us Seem Liberal, Right?
So anyway. Welcome to the future, y'all.
sixth_light and I realised some time ago (because we watched a lot of aforementioned vaguely crappy SF movies) that the President was always black. It's like it was a rule: In The Indeterminate Future, the President will be African-American. Putting This In Our Movie Makes Us Seem Liberal, Right? So anyway. Welcome to the future, y'all.
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Date: 2009-01-20 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
I think James Earl Jones was the first future black president, if I recall correctly, in a movie made back in the '70s.
Some day, my flying car will come....
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Date: 2009-01-21 07:28 am (UTC)On a more serious note, I read a lot of airport potboiler techno thrillers in the 90s, and a lot of them had black presidents. Clearly the idea was something that people were sufficiently comfortable with to be presented as an aside rather than a subplot (let alone the main plot).
So the $1 billion question for me is, does this sort of mainstream pop-culture depiction of black presidents create acceptance of the concept?* Or does it simply reflect acceptance?
*Not that I would suggest it entirely creates it, natch.
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Date: 2009-01-21 07:51 am (UTC)Both. I think there has to be a fundamental kind of acceptance for it to appear to start off with, but I think once it's out there it exerts its influence in rather profound ways. So, for example, for there to be a portrayal of James Earl Jones as President there had to be, at minimum, a sufficient number of people who found this acceptable, interesting, or believable to produce a writer, director, cast, production team, and very importantly studio to support it - Hollywood studios are famously skittish about what will and will not make them money, so obviously they also thought that it was broadly accepted enough to do that. But then once it's out there, in the zeitgeist if you will, the notion of a non-white President is slowly being acclimated - so that to start off with you have James Earl Jones in a film that is about the drama and struggle and hardship inherent in being a President of colour, a film which I will add doesn't allow him to be elected, only to inherit the position; but by Deep Impact, it's just, you know, oh, there's wise Morgan Freeman being the black president demonstrating how far we've come. Or something. And seeing these films, reading that pulp fiction (and, by the way, I think films like Deep Impact are the cinematic equivalent of that kind of stuff) does make people accept that concept in a natural way.
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Date: 2009-01-21 08:31 am (UTC)As I may have said to you before, I always felt that the USA would accept a black male president before a white female president. This is largely because, in pop culture, the positive traits associated with black men (strong, steadfast, confident) are seen as an asset in the Presidency, while the positive traits associated with women (nurturing, consensual, caring). Conversely, the negative traits associated with black men (violent, angry) are not seen as a drawback, while the negative traits associated with women (indecisive, withdrawn) are.
This is basically because while Americans may not particularly want a man in the presidency they definitely want somebody who acts in a stereotypically male way. If anything the negative stereotype of a black man takes the image of manliness and exagerrates it into an ultra-manly form that even those who are comfortable with stereotypical male roles see as a step too far. The 'regular' (eg white) man is ready to be violent when it's needed, while the black man is violent unecessarily. The regular man gets angry when he's wronged, the black man gets angry all the time. Etc etc.
So what I am trying to say, in my long winded way, is that I think the stereotypical black man is a better fit for what Americans want out of their presidency than the stereotypical woman.
And that's why it rather surprises me that the black President we do have doesn't fit this stereotype. Obama doesn't resemble the prototypical black President as represented by Freeman, Jones and their numerous imitators. He's not a paternal, protecting father-figure who gets righteously angry, he projects the image of being more of an intellectual and non-aggressive type*. Whether this is because he wanted to contrast himself with Bush and McCain, who definitely aspire to be credible the same way the fictional Jones/Freeman presidents were, or whether he's simply trying to not be too black, I don't know. But it is interesting.
I worry that the first female President, whomever she is, will feel the need to overcompensate for the stereotype by being a bomb-biffing warmonger. While I wouldn't say Hillary Clinton indicated she would do this, she didn't really convince me she wouldn't, either. I wouldn't want this not because I think this hypothetical female president would be being untrue to herself as a woman - as you probably know, I don't think there's anything innately non-violent about women. Merely because I don't want politicians like that having their hands on the levers of power.
*I'm reserving judgement as to whether he will actually act this way, let alone whether this matches his inner convictions. But this is definitely the image he projects.
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Date: 2009-01-21 08:58 am (UTC)However much we may come forward, however, no atheist is going to get elected in this lifetime. America will take your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, so long as they pray to somebody every now and then. Atheists are generally put on the same level as rapists by even the more moderate people of faith. I was frankly shocked when Obama even mentioned 'non-believers' today--I have never, ever heard a neutral-to-positive reference to atheists before by a public figure. Look back through all those schlocky disaster films we know and love and try to recall even ONE atheist who isn't a bitter, God-hating scientist or some grieving husband who turns back to the light by the end.
Huh. B-movies as a way of measuring contemporary American opinion. It works pretty well, really.
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Date: 2009-01-21 09:21 am (UTC)This is funny because in New Zealand, politicians have been known to bend over backwards to *avoid* acknowledging religious faith, particularly politicians in majority parties - there is room for politicians in smaller parties to be overtly devout, but not so much for prime ministers. I certainly find your description of the attitudes towards atheists to be shocking, and very unlike attitudes here (except those held by, again, the very devout.)
For a similar reason your remarks about women leaders having to be attractive is amusing, because our first elected woman PM was... well, I love her to pieces but she's not the most attractive woman out there - a fact which did indeed get dragged through the muck. A lot. Calling her a dyke in casual conversation (despite the fact that she was married to a man, although childless) was not uncommon and referencing the fact that her voice was rather mannish was extremely common, even to be expressed in formal media.
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Date: 2009-01-21 09:44 am (UTC)But yes, I agree overall that generally people are accepting of atheist politicians. Even people who saw it as acceptable to attack Helen Clark for her (percieved) lesbianism didn't bother with her atheism.
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Date: 2009-01-21 09:49 am (UTC)I think there's the rub, for me. I do not think we would be extremely tolerant of someone who spoke as often or as passionately about his religion and faith as Obama has. YMMV, of course.
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Date: 2009-01-21 09:52 am (UTC)I think the consensus could be inelegantly summed up as "It's OK if you are religious and even if your religion informs your political views, but we are more interested in the views themselves than the way you formulate them"
Of course for somebody whose religion was outside those that are widespread, that might not hold true. For instance, a satanist.
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Date: 2009-01-21 09:40 am (UTC)I seem to recall Mitt Romney made some big 'faith in America' speech last year explaining why it was okay that he was a Mormon which essentially said 'It doesn't matter in what manner you believe in Jesus, as long as you believe in him'. Pretty progressive by the standards of 1930, but it very much reflects the comments you've made. He later clarified in a press release that he was down with atheists too, but that IMO is just trying to have it both ways.
One statistic I am fond of quoting is that there are more Muslims than Atheists in Congress. Given Islam's lack of popularity in the USA right now, that's pretty telling.
Of course as an atheist I care less about whether or not a candidate believes in god or not than whether or not s/he will enact policies I support.
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Date: 2009-01-21 09:51 am (UTC)I agree. But it seems to me to be a luxury to think this way, because religion clearly affects at least the rhetoric of American politics, across the spectrum, in a way that confronts and confounds policy I support. If you know what I mean?
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Date: 2009-01-21 09:57 am (UTC)Personally I find it very hard to bite my tongue when somebody uses a religious justification for a policy I agree with. If anything I actually feel a greater need to confront them than if they were using a religious justification for something I disagree with, since there's no assumed solidarity.
Of course usually such justifications take place in the realm of abstract brainstorming rather than political programme-building (thanks, the internet!) so I don't always hold back.
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Date: 2009-01-21 10:12 am (UTC)This seems to me to mesh interestingly with your earlier statement that you don't care what somebody believes and are more interested in the policies they enact. Thought experiment: there is a politician who is a devout Catholic and therefore feels strongly that it is a Christian's responsibility to support people who cannot support themselves; responding to some of the Christ parables, she thinks we should be accepting of prostitutes, foreigners and people of colour, etc; she agrees with you on a wide range of issues, her policies are significantly to the left, and yet her policy is founded on her devout belief in the word of God as it is expressed in (her interpretation of) the Bible. Do you vote for this politician?
Well if you find that members of a particular religion oppose what you want politically 99% of the time
It's less that, and more the fact that I feel like Americans would be less likely to invade other countries if they weren't quite so sure they were God's chosen people and he was approving of them from on high. (Note to Amerians reading this: I don't mean you, at all!) I know plenty of lovely religious people and often they agree with me for mostly the same reasons, and sometimes they don't; but although their faith might motivate them to hold the religion they do, they rarely resort to its rhetoric to support themselves or attempt to convince me - people who I know who voted for ACT aren't going to appeal to some Bible passage to convince me that it's a good idea for me to do so. This is all by way of saying that I think American reluctance to elect atheists has a lot more to do with the publicness of religion in that country, and conversely the way we in this country tend to treat it as a private matter.
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Date: 2009-01-21 10:30 am (UTC)As for the christian politician, it obviously depends on the alternative. I'd certainly pick him over an atheist libertarian capitalist like Rodney Hide. My only worry would be that if they had a crisis of faith they might abandon all their socialism too, but I'm not aware of any examples.
That politician is, of course, not that hypothetical. In New Zealand those sorts of politicians dominated the Labour party right up until the 1980s.
And I agree with you on the religious thing. I'm not sure that an atheist American wouldn't be as interventionist as it is - I think there are economic factors which both religion and belligerence spring from. But it is interesting to note that most religious groups use reasonably secular logic (even if things like "the family" and "traditional values", while theoretically secular, are increasingly code words for religious conservatism). Presumably it's because they can't afford to alienate non-religious or atheist conservatives, whereas in the USA that is such a small group it effectively has nowhere to go but the mainstream conservative movement.
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Date: 2009-01-21 09:23 am (UTC)Here's a question: do you think Helen Clark's supposedly masculine traits - physical attractiveness; assertiveness; being the power figure in her marriage; being forceful, direct, and confident; "talking like a man" - etc - helped her or hindered her? Do you think they changed NZ's attitudes towards the competence of women, or reflected an idea of her competence being derived from the fact that she was less traditionally feminine?
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Date: 2009-01-21 09:36 am (UTC)However, I think New Zealanders are less demanding of stereotypical masculinity in our Prime Ministers than Americans are in their Presidents. The office of the Prime Minister is less powerful on both an absolute and relative scale. Less powerful on an absolute scale in that the New Zealand state and its head-of-government commands far fewer resources, particularly co-ercive ones, than the American state. Less powerful on a relative scale in that, while the New Zealand PM is not checked by the regions or the judiciary wing of government, they are much more subservient to Parliament, particularly in the MMP era.
In other words, a New Zealand PM doesn't need to make as many quick, personal, non-consultative decisions as an American President does, particularly decisions involving co-ercive instruments. So much of the thought process the US public and punditocracy goes through when assessing people as candidates for President involves command of the armed forces, particularly the nuclear arsenal. But even in unrelated areas the language they use is so often that of confrontation and personal struggle - in foreign policy, they ask if a President can go 'eye to eye' with Putin or Ahmadinejad. In health policy they talk about the President pushing through reform. This may not have been the case prior to World War II and the buildup of the nuclear arsenal - American Presidents generally seem to be less flamboyant before Roosevelt, but that may simply be the product of less mass media.
Once again I'm straying from the point. To the degree that Clark was masculine in that she was confident and correct, yes. But for the most part, New Zealand politicians do not need to be as stereotypically masculine-acting as American politicians need to be, and they also don't need to rely as much on their personality traits, as opposed to their policy platforms, as their American counterparts. As you can probably guess I don't think this is due to some innate wisdom of New Zealanders. It's partly due to the reality of the New Zealand' states lack of co-ercive power on the world stage, and partly a product of a party-based, rather than personality-based, system of government.
This is why I get annoyed when elections are framed as a contest of personalities. It's moving us towards the American model, which prizes values that I don't - and while it's bad that these values are stereotypically masculine, even if they were seen as gender neutral, I would think them undesirable.
As an aside - physical attractiveness is seen as a masculine quality?
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Date: 2009-01-21 10:01 am (UTC)Yes, although I dislike John Key, I found the Slippery John rhetoric kind of annoying last year, and would have liked to see more policy-based material coming from the LW (from the RW, too, it goes without saying.)
re: physical attractiveness, actually that was me trying to be tactful and coming out incoherent. I meant physical unattractiveness (although I really don't think she is any less attractive than any of her colleagues, TBH, except maybe Metiria Turei who is kind of cute) but what I should have been referring to was her general physical presentation.
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Date: 2009-01-21 10:12 am (UTC)Even if WWIII did break out, I don't think we'd reach the same level of militarisation of the head of government as the USA has now (let alone if WWIII broke out!). Even if we were spending positively obscene ammounts on defense, we would still be followers, not leaders, and crucially we wouldn't have the long range strike capacity - not necessarily nuclear, cruise missiles and bombers and all that count too - that informs so much of the popular conception of Presidential decision-making. Going back to pop culture, it's much more common to see the President angsting over, say, a meteor pulverising earth or some bunch of terrorists who need a good beating than a healthcare plan or a tax cut. Part of it of course is that such things make good B-grade dramas, but I think that says more about why you see more American Presidents in American TV programs than New Zealand Prime Ministers in New Zealand TV programs.
I also found the slippery John stuff a bit frustrating. I also found the lauding of Helen Clark's personal qualities a bit annoying, for the same reason. I'm sure Helen Clark would be the first to say it was a team effort.
OK, now I get you. I'm not going to get into speculation about whether or not Helen Clark was attractive. But I do really think her look is not untypical of middle aged, middle class pakeha women. I don't mean to stereotype, but having short hair and wearing pants could well be the norm. It certainly fits most of the people I know in that category.
Her voice... well, to me it never sounded particularly male. It was too idiosynchratic for that... I always knew it was her talking, don't get me wrong, but it didn't sound particularly like a man's voice, because it didn't sound like anybody's voice!
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Date: 2009-01-21 10:26 am (UTC)No, indeed, but I think that some of the same traits for which she was punitively called masculine - and I'm referring here to personality traits like directness, ambition, and discourse style - were those which were appreciated by her voters (including me.) I guess my question really is, would we see someone like Jeanette Fitzimons, who is perceived as a more consensus leader, in the PM's seat? - leading a party like National or Labour? Leaving aside the assertion that personality politics generally are less important in NZ, with which I agree with you and for which I am grateful. I actually think that the ability to be reconciliatory is something which might be applauded in a male leader (as someone getting in touch with his sensitive side, or whatever) even as it is criticised in a woman as indicative of a softness. Of course that is more speculatory.
Indeed. I very much disliked the Trust-themed pamphlets that were being distributed by Labour (as well as thinking they were not likely to be especially successful since no-one trusts anyone, party or politician, who's been in power for 9 years.)
I agree that her look is not unusual. I guess what I'm responding to here are the comments I had from a LOT of young women - and rarely men, but the men I usually heard it from were straight-up assholes, whereas the women I was hearing it from were sometimes polticially naive but otherwise perfectly nice people - that they "just didn't like her" because she's "just not feminine/too butch/whatever" (insert a range of comments here that went from the very vague to the extremely specific.) *shrug* I mean, I think it's a ridiculous thing to even have to talk about - I can count the number of seconds I spend thinking about Key's appearance on one hand - but there you go.
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Date: 2009-01-21 10:37 am (UTC)Yes, I thought those trust pamphlets were a bit jarring. I'm not sure I want to live in a polity where the relationship between the electorate and politicians is mainly one of trust. But that's neither here nor there.
I wonder if part of it is a generational thing? I imagine most of the people you were talking to were around your age? I'm not suggesting they'd be totally unfamiliar with her look, but it might inform their view somewhat.
I suspect most of the men who said it had already made up their mind not to support her - I'll be charitable and be say for other reasons - and that most of the women were probably unsure. Generally she, or at least her party, attracted significantly less support from men than from women. Of course that may have been true before she became leader, and it may continue to be true afterward.
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Date: 2009-01-21 03:22 am (UTC)Which leads me to conclude that if Hillary Clinton had won the nomination, we would either have a mysterious alien message arriving through SETI or...be living in a Jeffrey Archer novel. Hmmm.
(Also, re:Independence Day, how do you mix up Bill Pullman and Will Smith? Srsly?)
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Date: 2009-01-21 05:31 am (UTC)On to the black presidents of future past. Shockingly, Wikipedia does not have an index of fictional black American presidents. This took a while :D Yay for obsession! Wonder if
-JAMES EARL JONES in some 70's movie I desperately want to see called The Man, where he basically becomes President by accident and actually deals with a pile of prejudice when he gets into office. (Dude's already king of the savannah AND Zamunda AND true ruler of the Republic, so props for universal domination).
-Tom Lister, the president of The Fifth Element.
-Chris Rock in Head of State.
-Left Behind: World at War, some poor bastard named Louis Gosset, Jr does the honors.
-Denis Haysburt of 24, which I've never actually seen but now might check out simply because the man is a FOX.
-Surprisingly, Michael Dorn, AKA Worf the Klingon, in Heroes. I gave up on that show in Season 2; I'm waiting for DVD rentals I can fast-forward through. That'll be fun.
-Last but not least, Danny Glover in 2012 (which will be out in March 2009, actually, so... does this mean it's following the trope or the election?).
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Date: 2009-01-21 06:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-21 06:38 am (UTC)re:ID, I have no fucking clue what you're talking about, probably because all I remember of that movie is that there are aliens and Will Smith flies things. (I never thought he was President.)
Oh! I forgot to say, I love the fondue set! :D :D :D
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Date: 2009-01-21 08:45 am (UTC)I want the instant meal-maker. Not one of the crappy ones, one of the awesome ones that you can say what you want and have it prepared in seconds.
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Date: 2009-01-21 09:23 am (UTC)