Around 1979-1980, longtime “Miss America” Pageant TV host was fired by the organization. It turned out to be a very unpopular decision. There was a huge outcry, fueled in part by Johnny Carson’s on-air campaign to get Parks reinstated.
Bert Parks was a nice man, but I didn’t understand what people were so outraged about. And I remember reading an opinion that made sense to me: the angry public was transferring their frustrations from the stagflationary economy, rising gas prices, the Iranian hostage crisis, etc. to something they could do something about (or thought they could - Parks was not rehired).
I thought of this recently in the context of people who seriously believe the nonsense about Obama’s birthplace.
These are similarly trying times, and many people understandably feel that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. I think a similar transferrence of energy to the obsession with Obama’s birth certificate might be a way of dealing with the concern that our kids are facing less prosperous futures than we did, that Medicare and Social Security may be drastically reduced for us, and that things may never be as good as they were fairly recently. And that this is going to happen not matter who’s in office, so politics isn’t the answer. Substantive politics, that is.
I’m not referring here to people like Donald Trump and Glenn Beck: they know it’s nonsense but are using the outrage for their own goals. And Lord knows, they’re not going to have to worry about the effects of societal decline.
It’s the true believers of the birther movement that are facing increasingly bleaker futures, and they’re dealing with it like the “Parksers” did.
Although to be fair, the windmill they’re squaring off against - the legitimacy of Barack Obama to be president - is at least in the realm of public affairs, and thus, marginally closer to the real cause of the problems facing America than who gets to sing, “There she is…”
I think you are onto something with the birthers, but Bert Parks is a bad analogy.
Well, Parks was strongly identified with the pageant. Even if the economy had been booming, there would have been an outcry about him being fired.
The Parks incident is equivalent to the outcry when Arthur Godfrey fired Julius LaRosa – in 1953, when the economy was doing fairly well. The only big difference was that Parks was rehired.
And, come to think of it, the birthers are no different than the 9/11 truthers, or Kennedy conspiracy theorists. People like to believe in conspiracies, no matter what the economy.
I think you could make the argument that, outside of the attention whores making hay, as it were, the true believers, who will not/can not accept the facts, well, I do have a sinking feeling that those people are, at heart, a little racist, and cling to this idiocy, rather than admit the truth or accept the facts.
I’m not seeing a valid analogy. The birthers may be delusional but they’ve focused on an important issue - the legitimacy of Obama’s election.
To me, an equivalent issue would be if the people who were upset about the general state of American society focused their anger on who got voted off American Idol.
Like any social phenomenon, birtherism is complex.
Some portion of it, maybe as much as half of it, is just about Barack Obama having a foreign-sounding name, a non-native Father, and having spent time in other countries growing up. People have a shaky grasp of his childhood for whatever reason, and aren’t informed enough to know that he was born in Hawaii. Also in this category are people who are just sort of irrationally skeptical (i.e., they didn’t personally observe where he was born, so they report not “knowing” even though they know in the ordinary sense of the word). This group as a whole doesn’t see foreign birth as a negative, however, and split over his job approval on other issues. This is why in the polling something like a third of people who suspect Obama was born outside the US still support him as President.
Another significant portion of it is a more pernicious version of the above – something closer to racial resentment. Basically, the same background facts cause racists and xenophobes to have a much stronger reaction to Obama than the above group; the sort of reaction they also have to immigrants, say. Society has so conditioned people to not admit that they are racists that they people sublimate their racial hatred into being mad at Obama for being a foreign usurper.
A final portion is just plain partisan derangement syndrome. The same people who think Clinton killed Vince Foster think Obama planted news article in Hawaii newspapers so he could socialize the US auto industry.
Does some portion have to do with general populist anger over the state of the country? Maybe, but I’ll be its not a big factor. IIRC, neither income nor education levels change the birther poll results that drastically.