OPEN UNIVERSITY MARCH 6, 2007
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by Christine Stansell
I bet you haven't thought about handwriting since you've been, maybe, in sixth
grade and read a book about graphology. Graphology would be: handwriting as the
key to a person's personality. Why that dumb girl's bubble writing showed that, in
fact, she really was a bubble head. How the tidy writing of the class brain showed
that she was really well-organized but oh so uptight.
Well, now it turns out that the high science of graphology can illuminate the deeper
workings of at least one of presidential candidates. And the results appear not in an
Onion article, but in a front-page piece in our paper of record on the
buildup to next year's New Hampshire Democratic primary. I wake up to the
morning edition of The New York Times and its you-are-there account of Hillary Clinton signing an
autograph (she "signs autographs meticulously, drawing out each line and curve").
After the jump inside the paper, the piece carries a photograph of Hillary Clinton signing autographs. As
if this weren't enough, we get a blow-up photograph of this very same signature, a
very neat and clear "Hillary Rodham Clinton." And, though its not a suspenseful bit of
detection, we now know beyond a scintilla of doubt that Senator Clinton really does
write like the smartest girl in the class or, worse still, like your fourth grade teacher
who taught you cursive in the first place.
You would think they would have learned their lesson at the Times, with
their dismal record of jeering at various permutations of nerdiness and uptightness
in credible Democratic candidates only to cozy up to a real guy who could get down
on the election trail, kick back and help a lonely reporter have fun. That guy was
George W. Bush (even if, come election time, the paper dutifully endorsed the
Democrats). But apparently not. Faced with the long vistas of New Hampshire back
roads and town halls, what's a writer to do but come up with some clever angle to
interrupt the endless middle-of-the-road electioneering that liberal candidates
necessarily resort to in a conservative state.
I'm sure that people's intense reactions to Hillary Clinton, for and against, are
extremely complicated. It can't be just because she's a woman that she's mocked for
being too prim and too steely, too uptight, and too ingratiating. Maybe its all in the
handwriting--graphology is destiny.
But why, I wonder, did it take so long for reporters to discover this fundamental tool?
Has there been a purportedly serious article on a candidate's handwriting on the front
page of a major newspaper in recent memory? Ever? Because up till now, of course,
all the candidates were men.
Maybe it's because guys write so badly, no one has bothered to look.
4 comments
I think you got it wrong in thinking it's a sexist issue, that's not why the journalists scrutinize Hillary. The real reason is the other one, which you cogently delineated remembering New York Times and Bush in 2000: journalists will always go for the stupidest and most populist guy. You can bet your life on that. How many times have they endorsed based on 'character' and 'charisma'? In fact, 'charisma' is really diagnostic word: if you read that in someone article as an approval word, you may be absolutely sure that person is an imbecile. What he or she is saying, it's false AND THE TRUTH IS NOT THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT THEY SAY. In other words, if such a person tells you even Good evening!', all you may be sure of that is it's not evening: it maybe dawn or noon or morning, who knows - all except for what they say. It's not a personal thing: shallowness is built in their profession as media fellows who have to turn out written opinions very often. That means that by design what they do is shoddy and superficial and that a few years in this profession make even the rare smart person wandering in the idiot circus of media become cliche-spouting chimpanzees. You don't sculpt Pieta in two days - though you might paint a rusty '70s Cadillac. That's the difference between intellectuals and journalists. That is also why you shouldn't expect them to be anything else than garbage material - and if you look for cathedrals there, all you will end up is a load of junk.
- sleepyavl
March 7, 2007 at 2:22am
The awful state of the news media is not a function of ideological bias. It's a function of modern business practices and 21st century technology, which rewards intellectually lazy, speculative, unscrupulous reporting. News stories can find their way to the internet within minutes of an event occurring. If a news division has to make a profit by drawing the most ad-viewing eyeballs to its site, it's in their interest to be the first with the report no matter how inaccurate, poorly analyzed, or badly written it may be. This isn't a new phenomenon (minus the overriding profit motive), but the internet and other innovations have reduced the time-frame within which a reporter or editor can write, fact-check, and contextualize a story and still have the scoop.
- gperez-
March 7, 2007 at 2:53am
- arutenberg
March 7, 2007 at 10:00am
The comments are right. Journalists always fall for the "popular" guy who will let them hang out with him. They are are lazy with bad memories (forgetting what Bush did to McCain) who pander to their bosses (mostly conservative) and to the cool guys (witness their love affair with McCain). They are nerds without the intellect and hate those they see as nerds; hanging out with other nerds makes you nerdier. So they hate Al Gore, John Kerry and love Bush, McCain and now Guliani. Hilary is Harry Potter's friend Hermione; thus a nerd and thus worthy of mockery. They think Obama is Harry and they want to hang out with him.
- lschupp43
March 12, 2007 at 2:05pm