GREAT "Campaign Journal" coulmn in this week's New Yorker by Philip Gourevitch about Errol Morris and ads for MoveOn, with real people.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040823fa_factMeet Rhonda:
Rhonda Nix—thirty-six, blond, and trim—spends her working days stained with ink, rebuilding laser printers and toner cartridges, in Shreveport, Louisiana. Her husband’s parents, retired public schoolteachers, own and run the business she works for, which is thriving (Halliburton is one of their biggest customers), and when her father-in-law learned that she was taking time off to fly to Boston to be in a political ad sponsored by MoveOn, he phoned her up and told her that he didn’t want to have anything more to do with her.
“Tell me about that,” Morris prompted.
“He has this attitude—he’s a Southern man,” Nix said, and explained, “Where I’m from, there’s two things. You’re Southern Baptist and you’re a Republican. You’re closed-minded.” Her father-in-law’s view is that we’ve got a Christian President from Texas and we’ve got to keep it that way, and although Nix said, “That’s not good enough for me,” she didn’t blame him, exactly. Like everyone else she knew, she had been a “huge Bush supporter” in the 2000 election, and the next year, on September 11th, she had felt, she said, that “he’s going to take care of us. . . . He’s going to take care of America.” But she also found herself wondering, Why do people hate us so much?
September 11th made Nix painfully aware of her ignorance of politics. “I didn’t know anything about democracy,” she said. “I don’t even think I knew how to spell it.”
She decided it was “the patriotic thing to do” to get informed about America and the larger world, and, as the Administration’s hunt for Osama bin Laden gave way to war in Iraq, Nix felt hoodwinked: “They used our fear from 9/11, and they shifted our direction to Saddam Hussein, to Iraq, when all the time it wasn’t them.” After that, she said, “I changed completely. I realized I was a Democrat.”<snip>
Nix spoke for nearly an hour, time enough for a motivated, well-prompted person to tell you a great deal about herself and her concerns. It’s tougher to express a world view in thirty seconds, which is how long Morris’s ads are—and the last four seconds don’t count, since the law requires that they be devoted to a placard and voice-over identifying the ad’s sponsor.
A week after Morris finished filming his interviews, I went to see him at his studio in Cambridge, and there, on the monitor, was Rhonda Nix in twenty-six seconds: “We’ve got to take care of this country. It upsets me that you can go and spend billions and billions of dollars trying to liberate other people, when there’s so many people here—they don’t need liberation, but they need health care, they need food on their table, they need education. It is time to invest in this country. That’s what I want to hear about, that we’re being taken care of—here, at home. I’m still a Baptist, but I’m no longer a Republican.”Emphasis mine. Go Rhonda!:bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: