Images Make a Great Spectator Sport, but What’s the Score?

This being an especially political season, we’ve been peppered with lots of images as of late. Campaign professionals are paid dearly to drop these cluster bombs.

Sound bites, photo ops, headlines, a quote or two, these are the info-bits that lodge, like splinters, in the recesses of our brains. The mind throbs from the effect.

Ross Perot, the little engine that could, steamrolls across the country, quoting Winston Churchill: “Never give in. Never give in. Never. Never. Never.” If the American people demand it, the rap video version may be next.

Bill Clinton, Blues Brothers cool, slithers with his sax on “Arsenio Hall,” then he raps Sister Souljah for mouthing a racist line. Not bad, Bill. And I notice you’ve been leaving Hillary at home.

A presidential George Bush poses in front of the White House with Barbara, Boris and the presidential dog. He sends out Dan Quayle for the real bruising stuff, a shadowbox with “Murphy Brown” and follow-up bouts with “The Cultural Elite.”

The sparring had been pretty intense, leading up to a grade-school spelling bee where the stakes were especially high. But Mr. Potato Head falls.

All of this, of course, is what makes politics a great spectator sport for we of the cynical press. (I’d lay claim to being part of The Cultural Elite, but I can’t quite recall the plot of the last “Masterpiece Theater” I saw).

Images are the popcorn that we can all enjoy, tasty little puffs, fun to crunch, very lite. Only the truly sourpussed cannot appreciate the image of Quayle addressing the United Negro College Fund and claiming its slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” as his own.

“What a waste it is to lose one’s mind,” the vice president said.

Images are born in an instant, mass-produced and, alas, produced for the masses to an alarming extent. They are easily manipulated. They paint pictures. And they flat-out lie.

Examples, however, are entirely something else. “Set a good example” is what we tell our kids. Don’t worry about images, we say. Just do what is right.

This is a steady process, a series of steps, some falls, but always a forward progression toward doing some good--we hope. This is much harder to translate to the political scene. Examples take time. You can’t broadcast them with a single quote.

This, it seems, many people do not quite get.

When I write to suggest that Dan Quayle might draw his moral dividing line differently than I do my own, I hear from many who say that the vice president is moral and I am not and, no offense intended, but I should take “Murphy Brown” and go straight to hell.

When I write that contrary to what Ross Perot might believe, gay people should be treated the same as anybody else, I hear that I am encouraging the spread of AIDS, that I am obviously a lesbian myself and many other things that are unsuitable for publication here.

Some readers take a more charitable approach. They say that they are disappointed in my stance on “family values” and that they will pray for my soul.

All of which proves that the cynical manipulation of images works. Nothing surprising here. It seems American politics has always been about separating them from us. Today, however, the standard bearers seem to be borrowing more and more from the likes of MTV, firing off factoids that at best add up to a “composite” of real life.

Yes, Quayle has unsheathed a touchstone of the American way of life, albeit clumsily while reading from a script. Babies should have mothers and fathers who support and nurture them, who take responsibility for bringing a child into the world. And we should have a government system that encourages them to do this. We don’t.

“Systems,” of course, are rather unwieldy jousting partners. We like our enemies to have a face, an image that can be reproduced time and again. Then we are free to interpret these images as we want. Not all of us have the correct tools.

We can be like the sixth-graders who, while “playing Rodney King,” kick a 12-year-old classmate on the grounds of their Poway elementary school to the tune of the nursery rhyme “London Bridge.”

“Rodney King is falling down, falling down. . . . My fair black man,” the five boys sang to their “friend” on the ground.

Or we can take a bad image and turn it into some good. We can call our own sense of morality into play. We can try to understand that there is an important difference between the negative images that divide us and the good examples that unite.

Here’s a little more of what I mean. A close friend of mine took his 4-year-old son out for a bite to eat, just the two of them, man-to-wannabe-man.

The 4-year-old, terribly excited about this quality time with his dad, pointed to a beer poster on the wall.

“Look, Daddy!” he said. “That’s beer, just like the kind you always drink. When I grow up, that’s what I’m going to drink too. I’m going to be just like you!”

My friend has been sober now for more than a month.