Manliness and the Super Bowl Ad

As regular readers know, one of our current projects is a study of masculinity in relation to religion and to media.  The mediation of manliness is thus always of interest.  Thus, I could not help but notice an interesting theme-and perhaps trend-in this year’s Super Bowl Advertising.

I hadn’t thought about this as  trend until I read Joanne Ostrow’s receap of the topic on today’s Denver Post.  And, might I add that she continues to be one of the best TV reporters there is.  We’re lucky to have her nearby.  Anyway, Joanne noted what she thought was an emerging shift in SuperBowl ad treatment of the modern man.  Joe sixpack, she noted, is being replaced by…by what?

Joanne didn’t specify, other than to note at least one postmodern-man ad from Dove soap, that moved in the metrosexual direction.

What I thought was most notable was something else.  A whole series of ads that verged on hostility at the boundary of gender relations.  Dodge was the most striking, but the same thing turned up in a mobile TV ad and the one urging men to put their pants back on.  There were further skirmishes in several of the  Bud Light ads (though how Bud can possibly imagine that real men would like-and like being seen drinking-that swill is still beyond me).

I’d have to say that this is a trend that should make us slightly uncomfortable.  It confirms something we’re finding in our research.  Second-wave feminists predicted and social observers have been assuming that somehow new gender relations are evolving into new settlements of domestic relations.  This seems not to be the case.  What we (in our research) call “elemental masculinity” remains and remains a force in mens’ identities.  These ads capture a set of relations that are still not comfortably worked out.  At least that is what we are seeing.

That the Ad industry has caught on to this is notable and may point to a need for us to re-think how this is all supposed to work.

Parsing Religious and Political Identity

In the Post-9/11 world (and I admit to some discomfort with that over-used trope) the question of what is religion and what is politics looms large in public and media discourses.  Is a political movement or social change organization “religious” because it says it is, or because the majority of members are, or because it claims to stand for the rights of religions or the religious rights of individuals?  We can think of examples in each of these categories.

And, good journalism would be that which would help keep those things straight.  So, it was with some interest that I saw a story fed within the current news cycle by the Associated Press on the long-awaited deal on the Norther Ireland judiciary.

Remember Northern Ireland?  Yes, there was factional fighting there for over four decades (and most of us forget that the tensions along that fissure have existed for centuries).  When we talk about religiously motivated terrorism, we need to remember that a great deal of that took place during “the troubles,” as this struggle came to be called.

Today’s AP story covered the announcement of the conclusion of important negotiations in power-sharing between former enemies.  Now, as we should know, on the one side are Irish nationalists who are mostly Catholics and their cause was rooted in part in claims concerning anti-Catholic discrimination.  The Unionists on the other side are largely Protestant, identifying religiously, as in other ways, with the United Kingdom.  The AP correspondent chose to identify the leaders of the two sides in a curious way.  Martin McGuinnis, the leader of the Nationalist political party, Sinn Fein, he described as “Irish Catholic leader, Martin McGuinnis, while Peter Robinson, head of the Democratic Unionist Party, is “British Protestant Leader.”

The nuances are everything here.  Martin McGuinnis is not a Catholic leader.  He is a former leader of the Irish Republican Army, the Nationalist group that is, as I said, majority Catholic and for whom Catholic identity is central, but he is not an ecclesiastical leader, as this appellation implies.  Robinson is Protestant.  In fact, the is a prominent Evangelical figure, well known in both the US and the UK, who has recently been embroiled in a sex-and-money scandal that would make Jimmy Swaggart blush.  You can look it up.  But, I doubt Robinson would wish to describe himself, in this context, as “British.”  Yes, he’s a unionist, and yes, his party favors Ulster remaining in the UK, but to say that he is British, in the argot of Irish politics, almost implies he’s not really, well, Irish at all.

As I said, it is complex, and readers deserve more careful identification, and deserve it from the AP.  These labels take a specific stance on the complex question of whether and how these movements were, or were not, “religious” or “about religion.”

The meaning of words

I am in England (yes, just England) for a few days, and as always, I am intrigued by the subtle and not-so-subtle contrasts between this context and my own.  Sunday’s papers were full of stories about the Chilcot Inquiry, a formal investigation into Britain’s entry into the Iraq War.  Many of us in the US have longed for such a process.  The current governments on both sides of the Atlantic are downplaying the importance of doing so “…its in the past…” one Tory over here said recently.  The Obama administration seemingly feels likewise, and the Democratic leadership in the US Congress has other fish to fry at the moment.  So, we will have to experience it vicariously throught the inquiry here in Britain.  And, it has functioned that way.  Goverments fail to realize that, while they can feel some kind of closure on the epochal nature of the run-up to the war, the rest of us aren’t there yet, and shouldn’t be.  We need to ponder this.  In light of this, Americans would be advised to look into what Chilcot is revealing about our own Administration’s actions 2001-02.

More than one US pundit noted that Barack Obama’s appearance at the House Republican retreat last Friday bore a resemblance to the British tradition of Prime Minister’s Questions.  Those sessions involve a give-and-take unheard of in US politics, where Presidents typically insulate themselves from direct, public, accountability and scrutiny.  I, for one, always had a fantasy of George Bush being interviewed by the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight.  It would not have been pretty.

Americans who don’t know what I’m talking about: look it up.  Former British PM Tony Blair experienced the British form of accountability the same day as he appeared before the Chilcot Commission.  That was the theme of much of this Sunday’s coverage.

But, as a scholar of media and religion, something caught my eye in a commentary about Blair’s testimony.  Writing in The Independent on Sunday, Patrick Cockburn was devastating in his criticism of Blair, suggesting that he was, above all else, incompetant:

“It is this mixture of amateurism and evangelical conviction which made Mr Blair such a lethally inept leader before and during the war in Iraq,” he writes.

The use of the term “evangelical” caught my eye.  as I pondered its intent, I began to unravel layers of meaning in it.  As I thought about it, I came to reaqlize that these involve both meanings that are particular to, and reflective of, the contexts of the US and Britain.  Here are a few of them:

There is, of course the “real” meaning of evangelical in this context: something like “advocate.”  Then there is the historic meaning in Britain, with it commonplace over here to point to the role of evangelicalism in social reform–particularly anti-slavery activism–in the 19th century.  Thus, “evangelical” can mean religiously-motivated political action here.  Then there is the transcultural meaning.  It is one of the effects of mediated globalization that people in the UK have had ever more instantaneous access to US political discourse for the past few decades and are increasingly confident about invoking American political tropes into discourse here.  Thus a British commentator can also mean a received trope of US Evangelical politics when the term is used.  This is doubly meaningful in light of Bush’s own Evangelical roots and motivations–a matter of great suspicion on this side of the Atlantic.  Thus, evangelical an also mean naively interventionist, given that history and context.  Interacting with this notion is another referent specific to the UK context: the abiding suspicion over here of Blair’s own religious roots and motivations.  Observers on the left, in particular, were always concerned that Blair’s public professions of faith were signs of an imminent turn in Bush’s direction.  Cockburn’s juxtaposition of it with “amateur” is telling.Blair’s subsquent conversion to Catholicism has done little to diminish this suspicion.  That is also a layer.

So there is a lot to that word, “evangelical.”  At least to a scholar of media and religion.

Islam and the Media

This morning, NPR’s Morning Edition ran a story about online Jihadism.  Ordinarily this would not have been notable, but I found it personally ironic, given that we just concluded a conference titled “Islam and the Media” here in Boulder this past weekend.  It featured 104 papers from scholars across a wide range of disciplines and keynote presentations from global experts on things ranging from digital Islam to Muslim popular culture to news framing to emerging Muslim voices in the media sphere.  Over 140 people attended from five continents and 21 countries.  NPR new about it.  So did CNN, BBC, and our local media here in the metro area.  Did any of them come?  No.

So you can see how I might find it ironic that, just a few days after it concluded, NPR chose to give major attention to Islam and the media with no reference either to our meeting or to the kind of scholarship presented there.   Now, of course I am not naive about news processes and news values, so am not really surprised.  But there is a lesson in this.

What was the NPR story about?  It was about “online jihadism” and referred specifically to the recent CIA assassination in Afghanistan and the way the perpetrator is being remembered in some places online.  This means that, in spite of all the good scholarship out there that is helping us understand the range of ways that media and mediation are inflecting Islam, the primary media framing is still around terror and security.  That, we continue to learn, is the “real story.”  If they had attended the meeting, they would have received a much deeper understanding of many of the questions they asked in their story (and that their interviewee could only speculate about).  They wanted to know a lot about both the production and reception of online jihadist material.  Scholars present at our conference brought important insights into these matters and could have helped broaden and deepen public understanding of the implications of what is happening online.

The expert interviewed in the story, Jarrett Brachman, is a well-known security expert who teaches at North Dakota State (he was formerly at West Poiont).  He may be a competent scholar, but he is not a media scholar, and it showed in the interview.  I am not saying his insights are not important, but they are only part of what we need to know to understand these things.  A broader, interdisciplinary view is necessary. That is what academic discourse should be about, and it is what we had at our conference.  We all know the conventions of journalism that leads it to move quickly to certain taken-for-granted framings.  That does not mean we should not expect more, or be aware of what it misses.

Where are the moderate voices of Islam?

I have once again be remiss in regular posting here.   Alas, I am a professor, and this is that time of year.  But today I am moved to comment on a persistent question.  Ever since 9/11, many voices in media discourse (and no doubt in public discourse as well) have posed the question above.  The latest to ponder it is Tom Friedman in a New York Times column that ran this week.  Friedman is rightly outraged at recent acts of violence in Iraq and Pakistan.  Why, he wonders, did the recent Swiss vote banning minarets evoke more outrage from prominent Muslim voices than these horrors?  An astute observer of Middle East politics, Friedman notes that Arab governments seem duplicitous in their relations with radicals.    This is a valid criticism.  But, along with many in the media, he makes a leap of logic by extending his argument to a challenge to moderate clerical or authoritative voices to be more forthright in their condemnation of terror and violence in the name of Islam.

There are several assumptions implicit in this challenge, assumptions that are rooted in and framed by the way Journalism tends to look at these questions.  First, it is framed by an ecclesiological bias that thinks of religious authority in centralized and hierarchical terms.  Islam is not Catholicism.  There is no Pope, of course, but there is also no particular tradition of Ex Cathedra articulation of doctrine in a way that aspires to bind large swaths of geographic or theological turf.  Second, it assumes that individual clerics or schools within Islam would recognize what Friedman calls “the jihadist minority” as sufficiently Muslim to be “their problem,” as it were.  How many Christian theologians felt it necessary to take responsibility  for Timothy McVeigh?  Third, into what discursive space is this “moderation” supposed to be inserted?  Fatwas are intended to articulate doctrine of a sort, but are also traditionally focused on the Ummah. They are not traditionally proclamations like Papal bulls.  Fourth, Friedman and others want voices of moderation to insert themselves into a global, Western, and secular sphere of political discourse.  It is an open question who in Islam would presume to speak in this way.  And there are geopolitical impediments and complexities involved.  Which Islam is to take on this responsibility?  Should Indonesian clerics or laity, for example, take this up?   And what does it mean for a Muslim voice be seen to apologize for the faith in settings “outside?”  Readers might reflect on the criticism President Obama has received for seeming to “apologize” for American values when speaking “outside” our borders.

Thinking about Islam in Europe

It has been awhile.  I know.  In the meantime, there have been developments in media discourses of Islam.  Christopher Caldwell’s  Reflections on the Revolution in Europe has received a lot of attention.  Both laudatory and critical reviews.  I’ll comment on this book more once I have finished reading it, but I have a reflection on the way various media representations are framing the question of Islam in the U.S. in relation to the European situation.  It struck me, while reading a column by Ross Douthat  in this week’s New York Times, (that itself pivoted off Caldwell) that one way we can evaluate media articulations of the situation is whether they treat the European situation etically or emically.  Like Coldwell, Douthat begins by treating the European situation etically.  That is, he speaks from the perspective of an outside (American) observer, evaluating the situation with Muslim immigration in terms of the particular policies on the continent.   Beneath this, for both Caldwell and Douthat, seems to lurk an implicit (and problematic) “emic” view that the European experience with Muslim immigration is somehow predictive of the future in the U.S.  It would help if writers such as these would be more explicit about these comparisons and concerns.

Framing Nadal Hassan

Like everyone else, I have been watching coverage of the Ft. Hood shootings with great interest and with an ear tuned to the framings or the codes (to use Stuart Hall’s term) that are competing to rule the media discourse.   So, I intend my provocative and intentionally ambiguous title to telegraph that question.  How are Hassan and his actions being framed?  I’ve been watching CNN and listening to NPR primarily, so those are my field materials here.  There, as well as in the newspapers and blog entries I’ve seen, several different framings of Hassan seem to present themselves: 1) he is a solider with PTSD; 2) he is a troubled person caught in a personal crisis over career and relationships at midlife (thus he’s more like a “Post Office Shooter” or the DC Sniper); 3) he was motivated by religion, but it was his own individual interpretation of religion; 4) he was motivated by religion but he was influenced by someone (or someoneS) else (the suspect today is an Imam named Anwar al-Awlaki) who told him to do this (thus he’s some form of an “Islamic terrorist”).  These are circulating in a nearly textbook case of competing and contested framings.  So, let’s see what happens.  The structuralists, modernists, liberal-pluralists, and rationalists among you will of course want to point out to me that the “facts of the case” will resolve this as they become known.  To which I will respond–as  a post-structuralist–that the framings in fact will influence the facts in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.  This is obvious when we look ahead to whether, where, or how Hassan can be judged by an impartial jury.  The way the situation is commonly framed will impose determinations along a number of dimensions.

One quick example of the competing framings, occasioned by the coincidence (?) of the Orlando shootings.  On CNN, on Friday, within a single three-minute news hole, CNN personalities framed Hassan as someone who was clearly influenced by something larger and outside himself, and called Jason Rodriguez a “wacko.”  There is a lot here.

Oh, yes, I’ll be self-revealing here.  I’m interested to see what kinds of ways this post may be deployed as a result of the way I’ve titled it.

Dog-wagging in the new media age

Boy, is there a lot of religion news circulating now. And a lot of good commentary.  I’ll do something soon on the Church of England-Vatican frisson, and then something about R. Crumb, and then about Laurie Goodstein’s excellent work for The Times on priestly indiscrections.  But, for now, something I’ve been wanting to develop my thinking about: The way the “mainstream media” (OK, I’ll use “their” apellation here–you know what I mean by “their,” right?) are increasingly allowing themselves, and–by extension–ecnouraging the national political discourse to be determined by the margins.

Here’s what I mean.  We’ve allowed a kind of groupthink to develop around the twin forces of talk media-by that I mean radio talkers and cable news–and the online-blogosphere.   We let them set the agenda. And they are newsworthy voices in that they originate ideas that are interesting, even (mostly) scandalous.  Things that might once have been thought but not said (except over coffee at the diner, around the cracker barrel, in the coffee shop, or on the shop floor) are now said on radio, television, and online.

The question is, what do the rest of us do with those sayings?  Journalists are fairly consistently treating them as authoritative.  I think we’ve got to ask “authoritative of what?”  A fact to keep in mind: the total evening audience for all the cable news channels combined at latest count was ab out 3.7 million.  A lot, but compared to what?  Certainly not compared to the total population or the audience for news overall?

And, an example of how this dog-wagging happens appeared in this morning’s Indianapolis Star (where I currently am).  Under the head “Obama trakes flak for girls’ flu shots” we get an AP story that a few blog posts and online sources had found a few parents who were frustrated that they had to wait for their own kids’ shots.  It happened, but was it the same thing as “flak?”  How much did it matter, really, politically?  What kind of news judgement took a small story and 1) put it on page 2A and 2) with that head?  Worth thinking about.

Truckin’ Through Genesis

I’m watching the roll-out of R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis: Illustrated.  Crumb’s complex, enigmatic, inspired and amazing work has always fascinated, as has his own very complicated personal history.  Not surprisingly, the book is getting a good bit of attention from what our friends on the right call the “MSM.”  Its reading has been predictable.  The book runs against the Topos of religion as best imagined within limits of sobriety, modesty, respect, and deference.  The sound of the other hand clapping has not come yet.

What will defenders of tradition say and think?  Some small burbles so far from the UK.  A story in the Telegraph, apparently, quoting some conservative Christians over there as horrified.  And a completely gratuitous and (actually) surprising item on the Fox News website, titled:  “Comic-Strip Artist R. Crumb Mocks Book of Genesis.” Leaving aside the cultural tone-deafness implied by the misnomer “Comic-Strip Artist” in describing Crumb (the genre of the graphic novel has apparently escaped notice in FoxLand) the larger issue is the inaccuracy of the headline.  The story, straight from AP, says nothing of the kind. In fact, Crumb is portrayed as wishing to treat the text with respect.  But, he is not too attracted to religion, and perhaps that is the problem, or the graphic way he portrays the more salacious passages.

These two aspects of this complex: the–let’s be honest–graphic nudity that is so Crumb, and so faithful to the text, and the fact that Crumb himself does not pass a litmus of proper respect to the tradition, are the bases on which we can expect some criticisms to be built.  Will they, though?  I wonder.  It would be different if it were a graphic novel obviously aimed at a youth audience.  Imagine what the reaction would be.  But Crumb’s audience remembers when the Stones were young.

But, I’ll await developments.  I think the “litmus” is in a way the most interesting dimension of this.  Time and again, we’ve seen moral panics about media attributable more to the question of who is behind a given text or image than to its content.  My most notable recent example is the differential readings some gave to Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings.  While the first Potter film and the first Ring film seemed to me to show spiritualism, pantheism, and paganism, the latter was argued to be a Christian allegory based on nothing more substantial (in my view) than exterior assumptions about  JRRT’s religious faith.

Religion and New Media

I’m trying not to feel snarky.  Several colleagues mentioned recently that they’d seen “…something to do with religion and media…” in a September issue of Christian  Century. I need to admit, first, that CC is a central medium for my “tribe.”  My father, a minister, read it religiously, as do many of my old classmates from my seminary days, and most of the people I worked with during my monastic period.  But, my relationshi;p to it  has been love-hate in part because of its centrality in the discourses of the intellectual-theological establishment that still is at the center of liberal Protestantism.  I remain frustrated at that establishment’s resistance to taking the media age seriously, either in its theological education or in its theological reflection (though there are a few exceptions, of course).

I am not a regular reader, even though John Dart, a religion journalist I respect a great deal, is news editor.

So, with great interest and anticipation, I picked up the Century’s “news filter” feature titled “Navigating the New Media.” I was pleased, first, to see so many friends of mine represented.  Each, in his or her own way, has adapted media habits to the new, digital reality.  And in ways that are typical of our social/intellectual fraction.

But I expected more. Not from these writers who were, after all, following their story assignments.  I expected more from the journal’s own perspective on the question of religion and new media.

The overall framing of the media in the Century has been that described so well by Sally Promey in David Morgan’s Icons of American Protestantism.  Sally demonstrates there how the Protestant Theological Establishment’s take on the media age was produced as a concatenation of neo-Levesite elitism, Frankfurt-school  mass-society social anxieties, and  derogation of image and sensation in favor of more intellectualist approaches to knowledge and practice.

Well, this symposium does little to break out of that frame.  The new digital media age is a tacit, transparent, and entirely unproblematic framing of intellectual inquiry.  The particular ways digital media might be contributing to a re-making of the religious and theological objects sought by these writers is not reflected on.  And, I think the fault is not theirs.  They were asked to inhabit the Barthian ideal: “the Bible in one hand, the Newspaper in the other….”  That that is the appropriate mode of theologically-grounded media practice is unquestioned.

Oh well.