Pulling the world out of a thermo-nuclear Armageddon by boldly rejecting the military option““that too, against the unanimous advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff even after the downing of an US aircraft““during the Cuban Missile Crisis, was irrefutably the greatest accomplishment of President Kennedy, after perhaps, the truly remarkable act of getting himself elected.
Developing soon after the presidential election““one of the closest ever; the national popular vote showed Kennedy leading Nixon by two-tenths of one percent““the Crisis““the closest ever to a nuclear war““threw up history’s two intriguing ‘what ifs’; one of which is obviously ‘what if Nixon was president during the crisis?’ Being a hawk in military aspects, he wouldn’t have needed any expert advice to go for the military option, and would have obliterated Cuba, partly destroyed America, and wiped out a third of humanity including those in USSR and China. The second ‘what if’, mercifully less morbid and seemingly disparate, but one that would have made the first ‘what if’ a high probability, is ‘what if there was no television?’. Or more accurately, ‘what if the Presidential Debates were not televised live?’. There are many in politics who believe that if it wasn’t for television, Kennedy would never have become President, including Kennedy himself, who famously conceded that “It was the TV more than anything else that turned the tide.”
The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates were the first to be televised, enabling the American voter to watch the two aspirants stand side by side, and go head to head, inviting direct visual comparison hitherto impossible. The incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon, the authoritative, confident voice that held forth on economic strategy and foreign policy on radio““impressive enough to give him a six point lead““was, on television, anything but. Sickly, with his injured leg and a ‘five o’clock shadow’, his attire blending with the background; visibly edgy and diffident,
Nixon was a visual wreak when juxtaposed with a make-up wearing Kennedy with his Irish good-looks; young, charismatic, debonair and confident.
Apparently, the American voters liked what they saw; over what they heard or what they read. The relatively unknown Massachusetts senator was catapulted to the presidency, as media historian Alan
Schroeder noted “in a single night”, dramatically changing not only American political history but world history as well. That night, television emerged as a medium for serious discourse““until then it was all entertainment““and became a formidable and indispensable weapon in political campaign strategies, replacing the old faithful, the radio, with which Franklin Roosevelt once held, for more than a decade, a nation together, in times of great trepidation and despair.
The innate nature of television, the fact that it’s visual and auditory, negated the need for the viewer to be literate, aided its rampant proliferation, and insidiously transformed societies from a text based culture to a image based one, where the concept of reality is not inferred by cerebral pursuit, but evoked by spinal reflex, based on material from a world mediated by television. Sentimentality replaced thought; reflex replaced reflection. Emotive responses were summoned where rational responses were warranted; Rationality and logical discourse gave way to triviality and spectacle. Perception stood in for social reality and ‘optics’ became a fashionable term to describe that perception.
Author Austin Ranney, in his seminal work ‘Channels of Power’ illustrates the extent of viewer scepticism with an existentialist question: “a tree falls in a forest but the event is not videotaped or broadcast on the nightly news, has it really happened?”. Television amended the pistemology““how we interpret the world““conditioning us to respond to visuals and not text, to believe in images and not facts, and more significantly, to invest in personalities and not ideas.
This sub-culture of personality““especially true in politics, but also in advertising, appearing as celebrity endorsements““is a direct upshot of the innate character of television““woefully inadequate in pitching idea against idea but spectacularly effective in pitting people against people, consequently nudging politics from being party-centred to candidate-centred. From ideology-centred to personality-centred.
For the people, ensconced in a cultivated reality, belief in a person conveniently allows one to circumvent the tiresome demands of electoral politics““being informed, objective approach to issues, and forming opinion. It offers a short-cut to democracy, to utopia, straight from one’s living room. The inculturation is so intense that the belief does not stem from the expertise, competence or experience of the person but from the feeling that the person evokes through dramatic performances, selective associations and well crafted rhetoric.
The politics of personality that television brought about, at first inadvertently and later by design, is perhaps the single most significant transformation of our time, endorsed by the very fact that it’s the temperament of personalities, not the nature of ideologies, that make or break political coalitions. It’s in personalities that we’re programmed to seek succour, place trust, and solicit guidance. The rest, any pundit will tell you, is just show.
