The Political Palimpsest

The movie, The Ad and the ego has caused me to spend a bit of time thinking about the overall effect of political messages getting etched in our consciousness, only to be scraped away for newer messages to be added, a sort of political palimpsest.

As an aside, I am ever indebted to Judge John M. Woolsey for introducing me to the word “palimpsest” in his decision in the case United States of America v. One Book Called "Ulysses.", which I found in the forward to my copy of the book Ulysses.

Joyce has attempted - it seems to me, with astonishing success - to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impression carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious.

I started exploring this idea in a post I put up on MyDD entitled, Ad Watch and the Ego Research.

Since I was offline for a few days, I’m digging through all the emails that have piled up in my inbox. There is the standard collection of emails from Howard Dean, John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, and so on, asking me for money, to take time off to get out the vote, to vote in a poll on who my favorite progressive candidate is, etc. I’ve often wondered if these political request emails have become superfluous. I typically barely glance at them before I move them off to my ‘requests’ archive, paying them no more attention than I would an advertisement on TV.

That is when it struck me that we need to look at all these requests in a similar light as we look at the advertisements on TV. It isn’t about the request or the messaging, it is about residue that gets left on our political palimpsest.

My email box is still overflowing, but I can only take so much at a time, so I took a moment to try and catch up on blogs that I follow through Bloglines, as well as a few others that I go directly too. I scanned a couple hundred posts on official campaign blogs from around the country, again, with about as much attention as I devote to advertisements on TV. This too, then is another part of the political palimpsest.

What then, is the emerging image of our political landscape? I have my own thoughts, which people who read me regularly probably have a sense of, but I wonder what the vista is to you? Perhaps more importantly, are political campaigns thinking about this in their messaging? How could or should they change the whole of their communications to more effectively bring about the change they want?

Posted by Aldon Hynes at October 13, 2006 10:57 AM | TrackBack