I've not watched any TV in months, and even when I did watch TV I didn't watch cable news, since I found it uniformly insipid. But even with that background of disgust,
this might be the stupidest thing I've ever read. Even aside from the not-so-subtle bit of ongoing smear/slander against Obama, can you envision anyone with an IQ over 80 watching this without feeling like part of their brain was leaking out their left ear?
From the June 6 edition of Fox News' America's Pulse:
HILL: A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently. We'll show you some interesting body communication and find out what it really says.
[...]
HILL: First, the president of America chest bumps an Air Force graduate. Next, Michelle and Barack Obama fist bump or fist pound -- people call it all sorts of things -- but what happened to the old pat on the back? A handshake? A hug? Today's body language and what we can glean from it. Janine Driver is a body language expert and joins us now. Janine, thanks for being back with us.
DRIVER: Hi, E.D. Nice to be here.
HILL: OK, tell me about this whole thing. Let's start with the Barack and Michelle Obama, because that's what most people are writing about -- this fist thump. Is that sort of a signal that young people get?
DRIVER: I'm sure it is, without a doubt. And it's a connection that they have together. It's something just personal between the two of them, like "I'm proud of you." You know, my husband and I, if we're walking down the street and he's proud of me, we have our own little method. He squeezes my hand three times, which means, "I love you," and I squeeze his four times, saying, "I love you, too." It's something intimate between them, but I'm sure young people in this country are going to kind of like them kind of representing a little bit.
HILL: Uh-huh. Has our communication style changed as a culture in America?
...
HILL: OK, let me ask you about this then, because I -- you know, George Bush is a little older than Barack Obama, and he did one of these -- look at that. Look at that, folks. Stop. Turn around. Look at your TV screen. He's doing that chest bump. Now I see that in the end zone in NFL games after somebody scores a major touchdown. I don't normally expect to see the president of the United States doing it. What does that mean?
DRIVER: E.D., you know, it's funny. When I saw these pictures, and your producers sent them to me today, I really cracked up laughing. You know, I -- these pictures with George Bush are being taken -- the president, George Bush -- are being taken out of context.
I realize it must be difficult to fill 24 hours a day on a US cable news channel, where the focus seemingly has to be only on US events. (Why they can't do world news half the time, I don't know?) That kind of "coverage" of the US inevitably leads to idiocy like this, with a body language expert required to "explain" Michelle and Barack Obama giving each other a fist bump of the type every single baseball player has exchanged after a home run for the last fifteen years. But how can a person paid to be on TV ask, in a credulous tone of voice, "has our communication style changed as a culture in America?"
What? Next thing you know our cultural values, vocabulary, food choices, and entertainment interests might change over time as well. Better keep electing old white men to the presidency, just in case. One with some dignity, apparently, since Dubya's succumbed to the same creeping cultural rot!
Labels: politics, the media
