I like my roommate’s dog. He’s a sweet golden retriever named Grizz and when he waits by the refrigerator I give him an ice cube, and when I say, “Go to bed,” he goes to bed. We understand each other fairly well, yet outside of these deals we’ve worked out in his brief existence on this planet, I don’t expect too much from him.
When, several weeks back, I came home to find he had left some little mud muffins on my bed, I didn’t get angry. Instead, I forgave him. After all, he was just a pup.
I did, however, learn to keep my door closed.
Likewise, Americans are shutting the proverbial door on the media as viewers become increasingly cynical. A Gallup poll conducted last month has shown that 60 percent of Americans, the highest percentage since the poll became a fixture in the ‘90s, have “little to no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly.”
This type of pessimism always rises in election years, but I propose that this year, instead of just electing a candidate, we elect to end the silly myth of the Superman president.
We perpetuate the idea that the president, whether being elected for a first or second term, is capable of vastly improving the nation in a short period of time. Right now Mitt Romney is trying to convince us he’s the man to do it while, amid broken promises and a startling deficit, Obama is trying to do the same.
But most of us don’t believe either one of them. Mass media is meriting little trust from the general public, but a 2011 survey given by the Pew Research Center has shown more people, 68 percent, don’t trust presidential candidates. Similarly, a Yahoo! News poll released last month stated that over one-third of the people who viewed advertisements by Obama or Romney found they contained at least one lie.
The true nature of politicians has always been before us: They are humans — replete with the same personal quirks, odd appearances and capabilities for failure that we have. Comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert practically make a living mocking the humanness of politicians.
Hell, many of us were introduced to this type of humor as kids, watching a little girl dressed as Ross Perot throw around bags of money on Nickelodeon’s “All That.”
Where is the disconnect? How can we mock politicians and denounce the media that covers them while simultaneously elevating candidates to Superman status? Perhaps this myth is built into the candidates’ vocabulary itself.
“I’ll restore that $716 billion to Medicare,” Romney said in his closing statements at the first presidential debate last Wednesday. The phrasing — the strong emphasis on himself rather than his party — contributes to the false notion of a single person acting as the catalyst for broad, sweeping change.
According to Pew, however, “just 29 percent of Americans say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time.” I trust Grizz more than that and he’s only spent a little more than half his life not peeing on the carpet.
The truth is we’re an insatiable society. In Action Comics Annual No. 3, Superman actually — hypothetically if you really want to get technical — became president. That wasn’t enough, though.
No, on top of that he had to defeat a Green Lantern and receive an offer to keep his ring. He turned it down, but as Americans even a story in which Superman is president isn’t sufficient.
I won’t advocate lowering our standards, though. Few great things are accomplished with mediocre ambitions. We should, however, start being more realistic.
We don’t trust the media to tell us the truth about candidates, we don’t trust the candidates to tell it themselves, and we certainly don’t trust them to always do the right thing. Letting go of the idea that a candidate can quickly fix all or any of our problems won’t resolve any real issues, but it will alleviate the agonizing disappointment we face when they fail.
