Putting President on Par

Through images, slogans, seals and manerisms a portrayal's imagery permeates. Its emblazing personality upon a public produces a numbing effect.

As the TV networks continue hamming up history through Entertainment Tonight-style journalism, the deception continues in prompt personality form. The New Year has brought an unprecedented amount of presidential focus stories. Interestingly enough, a large majority of the content does not discuss the major events facing the world, but rather work to introduce and familiarize the personal life of the American leader.

In a presidential first, Barack Obama sat down with NBC for a pre-Super Bowl interview. With a captive audience at hand, news and government officials combined forces to shamelessly try to win public admiration. Bob Costas shared a few light moments with the President chatting about the continued Iraq War as well as Obama's plans for escalating the almost eight year War in Afghanistan. But to NBC and the greater Super Bowl public, these glaring facts held little value. Bob and Barack went on to talk about more feel-good things like Super Bowl predictinos and acknowledging certain campaign contributors from Pittsburgh. Also, they rummaged around family dialogue in promotion of the goodness of the corporate side of Super Bowl. Costas also was able to bring the President into tabloid converstaion guffawing over Jessica Simpson and squealing with delight at his ability to illicit any face out of the leader of the once free world.

Even mainstream American historiography of its reflexive self has fallen into the great meat masher of thoughtless existence.

So we settle for a projected personality, an enjoyable farce. We turn away from discover, ending all dialogue. The more we boast of our greatness, the less great we seem to be. For in the Age of Information, information does not seem all that important.