The Power Of Narrative

On Wednesday, The New York Times gave us another installment in “The Long Run,” its series of biographical profiles of the presidential candidates. This chapter focused on Barack Obama’s time as a lecturer at the University of Chicago’s law school. And what did we learn?

That Obama was thoughtful and evenhanded. That he avoided taking positions on contentious issues. That he inspired the young. That some saw him as arrogant and presumptuous. That he was politically ambitious. That he was very smart.

Those are the very traits that have driven the narrative used by pundits, allies, and opponents to define and frame Obama from the earliest days of his campaign. Everything I needed to know about Obama, I learned in law school.

Or take another recent “Long Run” profile of McCain, which showed his years as the Naval attaché to the Senate. Turns out McCain was a bit of a joker. A bit of a womanizer. He worked with legislators on both sides of the aisle. When he thought his bosses wrong, he thumbed his nose at them. Policy details weren’t his strong suit. Sound familiar?

Put aside their shopworn qualities. Are theses narratives even true? After reading a piece like Wednesday’s on Obama, you’d certainly come away thinking that they are. Look! All the details supporting the narrative are right here.

Most reporters mean it when they say that they go into stories with an open mind. But at the same time, a lot of decisions are made before the first phone call. Like, for example, to whom that first phone call is going to be. And what questions will be asked.

So, hypothetically, if you are a reporter assigned to do a piece on Obama’s teaching years, what might you ask? Questions that speak to the questions of the day: Was he talking about his political career with his colleagues? What opinions did he express on contentious issues in lectures?

And if you were a former student or colleague, called up by a reporter, what sort of information would you offer? Maybe a we-saw-it-first boast about his intellect, or his charisma. Or, if Obama wasn’t your cup of tea as a colleague or candidate, a dig or two.

It’s a sort of self-fulfilling cycle, where the existing narrative guides new stories about the subject and his life, which themselves reinforce the existing narrative. There’s an inbred consistency. We know about the press’s love for consistency on policy matters—changes of position are easily fact-checked, and don’t require journalists to make any judgments on the relative pros and cons of policy. But this consistency is rooted in another journalistic axiom—the revealing anecdote. Somewhere in a candidate’s past is an event or moment that betrays something deep about his or her character, or, even better, is at the root of his or her character. And if character is unerring, then the narrative that’s meant to reveal it is on a rather short leash, too.

Obviously, there’s a thin line between developing a narrative and mythmaking, the latter of which the candidates are enormously invested in. But so are voters. Articles like these Long Run pieces reconfirm the idea that a certain kind of someone—someone whose earlier years are so worthy of dissection in chaptered biography—is deserving of the presidency. After all, what do we usually remember about our gloried presidents? A fog of feelings about what their persona in office tells us about ourselves and our nation at that time. Sure, a rock outcropping of actual achievement—a war, a major piece of legislation—will show through here and there. But even so, that’s usually only if it supports the more emotion-driven narrative. Reagan will always be better remembered for cold war bellicosity and attacks on domestic spending than for his concurrent dedication to nuclear arms reduction and expansion of the federal bureaucracy. But all those things happened.

Narratives have power for clear and simple reasons. From the campfire to the Cineplex, humans are drawn to good stories. Not only do they help us remember information, they help us sort and order information.

And today, more information is available than ever. Think of the relative ease of tracking down a group of Obama’s former law school students in an age of Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And think of the relative ease of disseminating what they have to say, tidbit by tidbit. The narrative serves both the journalist and the voter, by the same process—sorting unwieldy facts into something memorable, understandable, and hopefully illuminating.

But there’s a difference between interesting and illuminating. Rarely is it asked what, besides a false sense of personal familiarity, is actually imparted from these stories. And these narratives can be obscuring, not only for the space and attention they draw, but for the way they subsume information that doesn’t fit or isn’t familiar. We hear a lot about Obama’s mention of arugula, and little about McCain’s $520 shoes. We know about Obama’s days as a community organizer, but little about McCain’s pre-Senate stint as a U.S. Representative from Arizona.

Without stories, we couldn’t much make sense of the world. The challenge to the non-fiction storyteller, and to the audience, is to test the ready tales against as much nuance and evidence that doesn’t fit the ready tale as possible. It’s an imperfect process, but an important one.

– By Clint Hendler

Popularity: 2% [?]

CNN had a “news” program on today (8/2) to create the narrative, the Official Story, about the real estate disaster in this country. They told a great story with lots of interviews and pictures of cold people whose heat was turned off who will be losing their homes. But most of the story they told was boloney. Lies. Deceit. Fabrication. The Official Version. So the public should say “Oh, I see,” then walk away.

Among the lies are the focus on sub-prime loans, as if the problem has mostly been caused by poor people whose loan terms are understandably tougher because they have a bad credit history. But that’s the red herring, not the real story.

They also kept referring to this as an accident. Greenspan said this was an “accident” just waiting to happen. Krugman said something to that effect. But that’s just silly. This wasn’t an accident — everyone knew exactly what was going to happen. Greenspan set it in motion by his intentional acts. Not an accident.

Here’s what’s really happened: the Bush administration and neocons wanted to loot the treasury, loot the country and most of its people of their assets, create previously unimaginable personal and national debt, sell off everything that we own or turn it over to private ownership, eliminate health care, pensions, job security, minimum wage, osha, workers’ rights, environmental restrictions, and laws against monopoly control of industry. Almost eliminate taxes for the rich, stop all public investment, and open the borders to massive illegal immigration.

At the end, possibly 5% of the people end up with 95% of the wealth. Everyone else is broke. Right now most of the beaches in California are occupied and controlled by hedge fund managers and other criminals and thieves who build multi-million dollar homes, put up fences to restrict access to the ocean by any individual, bribe the local officials to they do not put public parking to allow people to park and walk. Voila: the California beaches now belong to the hedge fund scum. Which probably explains the high level of fecal matter in the water this summer. And eventually someone like Dubai will come in, buy out even the hedge fund scum, rope it off, patrol it with Blackwater, and the people will only see a beach on TV.

Of course all Congress had to do, if they weren’t so corrupt, was tax every piece of compensation above $250,000 at 90%, and use that money to guarantee public control of our beaches forever. And at the same time prevent these people from accumulating so much wealth with its devastating effect on the rest of the country.

Greenspan told his friends on wall street that he would hold down interest on my piggy bank funds, the treasury, and loan my money to his friends for 2%. They in turn loaned to real estate developers at 5%, who built housing with illegal immigrant labor at $8/hour instead of the $25/hour they paid pre-Bush.

The developers sell the home for $400,000 because borrowers can borrow more money and pay the same amount with the low interest rate. For example, a borrower could borrow $200,000 at 7% and pay about $1400/month. But they can borrow $400,000 at 3%, interest-only, teaser for two years, for the same or less. All borrowers ask is how much will it cost per month. When the loan readjusts they can’t pay. They paid $400,000 for a house only worth $200,000, and now they’re in foreclosure.

The real estate developers made a fortune. So did mortgage loan brokers (all now independent, formerly all employees of banks, but the banks made them become “independent” precisely so the banks wouldn’t be held financial liable for this con). Real estate brokers make a percentage of the sales price, so their income skyrocketed. The lenders and financial institutions and boys on Wall Street made a fortune by loaning twice what the house should have cost then bundling the loans and selling them off to others before the teaser rates re-adjusted. So the lenders loaned home buyers $400,000 instead of just $200,000, which would have been the case pre-Bush, and the lenders make a fortune.

How do all these financial institutions avoid liability for this con? They get rid of the money. They pay it out to their insiders by the tens of millions. Then they say they’re broke, go ahead and sue. Or they hide everything they do, bribe Congress to look the other way, operate outside the level of scrutiny generally required and call them selves hedge funds or equity capital funds, put their money in the basement or send it to foreign countries.

This was not an accident. It was an intentional program to transfer massive amounts of public wealth to the private institutions — the financial institutions and the boys on Wall Street, Greenspan’s good friends. They all were in it together, they all made fortunes, they all knew exactly what they were doing, and they are all wealthy beyond any of the rest of our ability to understand. They have stolen our money and destroyed many communities. They should be sued and the assets seized.

If the Bush people had not secretly spied on Spitzer to catch him having a BJ and throw him out of office, then Spitzer undoubtedly would have all these people named in a lawsuit. Is there anyone else out there who has not been paid off by these criminals? Applications are being sought.