Neither poetic nor profound, these dozen words still capture the exasperation of trying to reach a person whose view of the world cannot accommodate the truth.
Sometimes a perfect response will stick for a lifetime. A person captures in a few words all of the intangibles that seem to be in play when an encounter ends with an impasse. So it was with a former British Prime Minister who spent his share of time facing questions from the opposition in the weekly parliamentary ritual known as Question Time. Questions to the Prime Minister give members of the opposing party a chance to query the leader of the government they would like to replace. Policies are challenged. Priorities are questioned. That’s the parliamentary system, making the Wednesday session with questions the high point of Britain’s political week. The meeting of the two party leaders–fueled by an impatient Prime Minister in waiting—is often better than what is running in any given week on Broadway.
And so it was when Prime Minister James Callaghan rose to answer questions from his opposite just two swords length away, each standing in front of separate little podiums known in the House of Commons as Dispatch Boxes. It was 1976 and the beginning of his three stormy years as leader of the government. His interrogator at the time was the formidable Margaret Thatcher, who would eventually win the general election when Labour party unity collapsed a few years later. But in 1976 his Government was ready for all comers.
Callaghan uttered a simple phrase of exasperation that I have never forgotten. Neither poetic nor profound on it own, somehow its dozen words managed to capture the angst that comes when trying to reach people who have locked themselves into a belief that cannot accommodate what you have said.
Better than most, Callaghan understood the impossibility of moving a rock that has no intention of being budged. I have a hunch his response had long been a part of his rhetorical repertoire.
After an exasperating exchange over the state of the economy where he was challenged on some basic numbers, these perfect words were spoken in a tone of regret and gentle rebuke.
“I can tell you the truth,” he said, “but I can’t make you accept it.”
It’s a perfect comeback to other members of the species who cannot free themselves to acknowledge the facts on the ground.
Several reasons make the response apt. It affirms the speaker’s belief that some statements cannot be negotiated away as mere opinion. At the same time it judges the intransigence of the listener more in regret than in anger. And that’s the right note to strike when others in the room need to be reminded that an interlocutor is incapable of dealing with the obvious.
Perhaps the closest American parallel is in the famous courtroom showdown is in A Few Good Men, Rob Reiner’s 1992 legal drama. Young military attorneys press a career commander played by Jack Nicholson to reveal more of what he knows about the death of a Marine at the Guantanamo base in Cuba. “I want the truth Colonial Jessup!” demands the young and callow lawyer. After a few beats the older man works up a full head of steam, and he rages back with the line that defines the film: “You can’t handle the truth!” Jessup has heard all he can stand from the young Lieutenant whose military experience has been confined to a few months in the Judge Advocate General Corps. “Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom.”
The whole scene with its line about handling the truth is a great movie moment. But Callaghan’s rebuke is the more elegant of the two. It can be said in a whisper and be just as effective. It bites more completely with its tone of dismay for the inability of the receiver to accept the world as it is. If Colonel Jessup’s comment is a chainsaw in full throttle, Callaghan’s words more quietly cut through resistance like an industrial laser.
Are we a nation that is still addressable as a society that coheres?
Since the early democracies in Sicily a person or group with specific persuasive goals has been said to be locked in to the requirement to formulate messages that build on community attitudes. This idea is a central canon in communication studies. For most scholars in the field, the study of public persuasion would be unmanageable without this convenient notion. We understand an audience to be the generative source of successful persuasion attempts. It’s from their views that a persuader fashions ways to connect with them.
Yet this basic assumption is increasingly problematic. We still lean heavily on the belief that we can lump individuals together in cohesive groups with demographic and lifestyle similarities (age, sex, income, region of residence, and so on). Traditional media outlets such as television networks often “sell” their audiences to advertisers based on some of these features. And virtually every music, film and television producer is convinced they know their “market.” Even so, the concept of the audience rarely works as well in fact as it does in theory. In their study of The Mass Audience, James Webster and Patricia Phalen remind us that “audiences are not naturally occurring ‘facts,’ but social creations. In that sense, they are what we make them” (p. xiii).
There are two problems with this core idea the audience. One is that with the proliferation of “new” media choices contained in the Internet as a gateway supporting many “platforms.” In this environment audiences turn out to be neither uniform nor very predictable. Even the motives of those who self-select themselves into the same group can be surprisingly diverse. For example, it would be risky to infer much about the audience for content on Snapchat or any of the thousands of sites that stream video and audio content for free. Even analysts at The Nielsen Company—the nation’s most visible audience research firm—would concede that it’s extremely difficult to come up with reliable metrics especially for “one-off” events.
The second problem is even more daunting. The structural changes in our newly dominant media make individual usage far more scattered and fragmented. Aristotle wrote one of the first studies of human communication (The Rhetoric, circa 335 BC) with an eye on the challenges of addressing a few hundred citizens within a small city. Today, by contrast, audiences are sometimes defined in the millions, with messages delivered to them on a host of platforms that increasingly muddle the question of what makes a message “public” or “private.” We may still assume that most men do not read Cosmopolitan or Vogue. But beyond recording “hits” to a site, even popular message aggregators like the Daily Beast or similar news sites cannot be easily defined by their audiences. The impact of their customizable messaging is difficult to access.
Consider just two snapshots of current media use:
Digital devices of various sorts get about ten times more attention than newspapers and magazines. Most of these devices are accessing the web, where the average time spent on a single page is under a minute.
Among American teens who will shape future discourse, texting has become a time-consuming preoccupation, with an average of 60 separate messages a day, and 6-hours at social media sites over the same 24 hours.
Usage patterns like these hint at the paradoxes about the nature of modern discourse. Does our dependence on digital devices borne from imagistic platforms (graphical interfaces loaded into virtually all digital devices) disallow the kind of thinking about uniform attitudes that is thought to be needed for message development? Put another way, if modern life now proceeds as continuous exposure to a series of visual riffs in broad-based and space-restricted media such as U-tube or Google Plus+, is there any chance to create a series of appeals that speak to the needs of their heterogeneous users?
Is the fraying of our faith in a true national community one of the prices we will pay for the fragmentation of our media?
Beyond our love of shopping malls, mass market films and television, do we share anything like the common civic culture that was easier to see in the pre-digital age?
When Americans witnessed the first moon landing in 1969 there were just three national television networks that made up what some media historians have called “the national hearth.” Together they had a 93 share, representing about half of the nation’s total population.1 Are there still universal values and ideals that define our national life? In classical terms, is the collective polis still addressable as a common unit?
Some social theorists have noted that we are less a “melting pot” that blends away our differences than a culture that more or less accommodates them. If that is the case, the older idea of an audience sharing the same property of a common culture may be simply a fiction of media and communication disciplines. Should that turn out to be even partially true, we need to ask what a viable alternative model of communication that is not based on assessing audience-oriented appeals looks like. There is growing evidence that we already see the withering effects of undirected communication: for example, rhetorical bomb-throwing for its momentary thrills. “Trolling” in the “comments” section of news site is just one symptom.
All of these concerns may appear rather abstract. But they have real consequences. We traditionally assume that effective messages usually get their energy from appeals that trigger a sense of identification with a source and their message. We also assume that communication failure can often be attributed to messages that have “boomeranged,” meaning a piece of discourse has actually alienated those who received it. But, of course, you have to care about the effects of your words. So a fading tradition that assumes our words are chosen to match the needs of a given audience raises practical questions about whether enough Americans have the will to function in a society that coheres.
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193 percent of Americans watching television were tuned to this event. TV By the Numbers, July 17, 2009, http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2009/07/17/moonwalk-draws-125-million-viewers-cbs-and-cronkite-win-big/
