The Beer Heard Around The World
Four men sat at a table drinking beer--the most photographed beer in the world. That is pretty much all there is to say, which is just how President Barack Obama wants it.
Across the Rose Garden lawn, on a small landing outside the Oval Office, White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs and Vice Presidential Spokesman Jay Carney stood there grinning, as content as cats in a windowsill watching the dozens of photographers and scribblers scramble for a few seconds to document the visual contrivance. It was, let history note, a public relations coup, a photo-op to beat all photo-ops. The two combatants in a confrontation that roiled the nation, raising unresolved issues of race, class and police power, were shown to sit together with the nation's political leaders. Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley, Vice President Joe Biden, Obama and four glasses of beer. That was all, save some peanuts. Never mind the complex issues. Never mind the question of resolution. Never mind what they said.
The press had been warned not to expect any substance. It has been conditioned to swallow its pride. Forty feet away for 40 seconds, the media was told to expect at one point during the day. That was later changed to 50 feet away for 30 seconds, much too far to shout a question or hear the genial mumblings of the men pretending that they were not being watched like penguins in a zoo pool. Would Gates and Crowley hash out the factual disputes of the accounts of their arrest? Would Crowley apologize as Gates had demanded? Would the president, in any way, do anything to make what he called "a teachable moment" in some way educational?
No. Gates and Crowley plan to meet again in the coming weeks to deal with the actual dispute. In the meantime, the photo was all politics, an image of four men at a table drinking beer, a symbol instead of something real. The beer was important because it stood in for the substance. "What happened?" your coworker will ask at the water cooler. "They had a beer," you will say. As the comedian Stephen Colbert observed after the darkest days of the previous presidency, "No matter what happens to America, she will always rebound--with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world." So it was, again.
The photo op can be a particularly nefarious beast for a healthy democracy, where issues are supposed to be resolved through debate and transparency. It inevitably tells a fiction, not an entirely false one--they really did sit there drinking beer at a table--but something entirely contrived to look uncontrived. Consider the dozens of journalists milling about a few dozen feet away, the aides herding them like cattle. The four men pretended it wasn't happening. Obama snuck some peanuts. Biden cracked a smile. Crowley adjusted his tie. Gates spoke. None did the obvious thing by acknowledging the absurdity of pretending not to be watched. None broke the illusion of the fourth wall.
Consider that the beer they drank had been chosen for its symbolic value. Obama sipped Bud Light, the top selling beer in America, with 22 percent of grocery, drug and convenience store sales, according to industry data. It is a beer so bland that it advertises itself by proclaiming its "Drinkability," which is another way of saying its similarity to water. It is the safest beer the president could possibly have chosen, the stuff of poll testing and focus groups. Crowley drank the wheat beer Blue Moon, the unthreatening choice of a police officer with a sweet tooth, who is not afraid of a brew served often with a lemon wedge. Gates, who had talked up Red Stripe and Beck's, finally chose to represent his home state of Massachusetts with a locally-brewed Samuel Adams Light. The vice president, who does not drink alcohol, sent a message to the kids, nursing a non-alcoholic Buckler.
But then this is just how it goes with the photo op. The nothing replaces the something. The beer becomes the thing. Before the press was led out to the lawn, its distinguished members talked amongst themselves in the briefing room, marveling at their own ability to be manipulated and the fate of their professional souls. Both MSNBC and CNN had posted countdown clocks to the beer picture (or at least the scheduled time of the beer picture), as if this was a thing worth counting down. For days, White House daily briefings had been consumed by questions of beer. It had long become embarrassing. So the press had made a joke of it. Ha. Ha. What a farce.
After a while, it was difficult to remember the thing that the photo-op had been designed to replace. The arrest of Gates had been one thing, the result of a confusion and a confrontation in a nice Cambridge home. Then President Obama, the first black man in the White House, had taken sides in the dispute, saying the Crowley had "acted stupidly." This was a surprising violation of Obama's carefully crafted pose on matters of national division. It is Obama's habit to rise above disputes, to mediate, to find common ground, to project a post-tribal vision of America and himself, with a white mother and a black father. At a press conference last week, he instead was identifying with one party, the black Harvard man, calling Gates a "friend" and noting "I may be a little biased here." He described the incident as a possible case of "racial profiling." He spoke of blacks and Hispanics who get picked up by the police for "no cause." The president violated his own first rule when it came to questions of race by participating in old categories, instead of transcending them.
The solution to this blunder, in addition to a near apology a few days later, was to stage a photo op, which would again position the president as a mediator, standing outside of race and class and building bridges. After the beer had been carted away, Obama's staff sent out a statement in the president's name. "I have always believed that what brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart," it read. "I am confident that has happened here tonight, and I am hopeful that all of us are able to draw this positive lesson from this episode." The president seemed to be suggesting that the two men had found common ground. But there was little evidence of this. (In a press conference afterwards, Crowley said they had "agreed to disagree," and offered no apologies.) The more evident lesson of four men drinking beer at a table was far more cynical. When real dialog is difficult, and when the hard work of mediating disputes has little political upside, then it is better for all involved to pose for the cameras and have a drink.
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1
Thanks, Michael. Jacques Derrida would be proud.
Although many in the Corporate Media would instead adhere to Andre Agassi's “Image is Everything.” Maybe you can post The Photo here and then go have some Stoli, yes? Za vas! -
2
Great. And you felt the need to write a post longer than most articles you have done to celebrate the moment.
By the way Obama never said "Crowley acted stupidly" he said the police acted stupidly for arresting the man in his own home after they determined Gates lived there.
Further more he did not describe the incident as a possible case of "racial profiling" he used the event to talk about "racial profiling."
But I could be wrong and your rewriting of history could be right.
"My understanding is that Professor Gates then shows his I.D. to show that this is his house and, at that point, he gets arrested for disorderly conduct, charges which are later dropped," Obama said.
Police dispute the extent of Gates' cooperation, saying he didn't initially provide identification when asked and berated the police.
However, Obama continued, "I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that [Gates case]. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact."
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2.1
After all the money spent on an Ivy league education at the Columbia School of Journalism, too bad Michael Scherer didn't turn out to be a better journalist. Not only did he get all of the facts wrong, as you so accurately noted gunny, he didn't notice or managed to give himself credit for doing the President one better. But apparently he was too busy making himself eligible for this year's most immature journalist award, he failed to grasp that his own posts here at Swampland were producing a more substantive debate on race than the President could ever had hoped to result from his beer-fest photo-op.
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3
Indeed, MS. A contrived photo-op. Nothing more. Nothing less. Thanks....
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3.1
My comment above very much took into consideration our back and forth in an earlier post. I think I've learned something substantive through our conversation that will keep me from indulging my knee jerk reactions in the future. While I'm sure we will continued to disagree on political issues I will consider that they were offered in good faith.
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4
You and your WHPC colleagues have done this to yourselves,Michael. Always the focus on the trivial, the inane, the vacuous, your colleagues have forgotten how to be reporters. The WHPC are nothing more than gossiping fishwives of the politically powerful. Y'all have made it manifestly obvious, with your whining, cynical boredom, that you have no interest nor capacity for the serious. So they serve this up for you. And weren't you all excited! A beer countdown clock! Because this is how you did with health care policy.
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5
I have mixed feelings.
As simply a piece of writing I found it quite enjoyable. Your reference to the fourth wall helped me understand the whole event. (I'm reminded of a certain statuue being pulled down)
But as gunny notes above, the Presidents remarks are clearly misrepresented. If your going to castigate Obama for going off script, you could at least provide a little more indication that you are speaking about your perception. Not everyone hears the same words the same way - which is of course the biggest part of the problem
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6
Sheesh, yes, a contrived photo op. But the press should have reacted to Obama's comments not as a "blunder" but as a cue -- this should be the start of a national discussion about police brutality and instead we're talking about beer.
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6.1
Police brutality? Oh yes, Mr. Gates was savagely brutalized. Please. This has nothing to do with police brutality, it was a minor incident in which Gates acted like a fool, and pushed a cop into making a questionable arrest. Plenty of blame for all involved. Unfortunately, more often than not, if you mouth off to a police officer long enough he/she will find cause to arrest you.
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7
God damn, just start a "Buy Scherer a six-pack" fund!
What do you drink? IPA? Guinness? Red Hook? Newcastle? Hefeweizen? Heineken?
If it's Budweiser or Miller Lite I'm not chipping in.
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7.1
If possible I'd buy Michael a case of Stoli and set him up on a date with Elena Dementieva. Or better yet I'd go on the date and leave Michael with the vodka.
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7.2
decon - Scherer's clear desire for delicious beer is indicated by the three (three!) posts he's put up on the topic.
And who the hell is Dementieva?
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7.3
Russian tennis player, has not won a (major) Grand Slam event but is highly ranked and won gold medal at 2009 olympics. The real reason, though, is…
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7.4
Man, how do the Russians keep producing these gorgeous blond tennis players?
Although Kornikova or whatever her name was seems to have fallen off the map.
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7.5
...2008 games, spelling error
Maria Sharapova is the more famous Russian player but she lives in the US now. -
7.6
Right - from what I understand (my parents are big tennis watchers) Sharapova's actually got some talent.
Weird that this has segued from beer to hot tennis chicks.
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7.7
…check out Maria's Google images, but sorry about the tennis babes, my bad. It was a friendly-natured soft-pillow poking of MS from his post http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/07/16/what-remains-rotten-in-russia/ ....some Russian commenters really gave him grief. But I'll return to beer now.
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8
At least the beer garden party's over and back to work…after Morning Joe and others pick it apart for a week.
Michael, at tomorrow's WH press conference, PLEASE stand up proudly and ask, “…and that this beer pong is over and everyone's back to solving our nation's problems, for which we thank you. Now, my award-winning colleague KT and her online fans want to know which Senators are under the heaviest cash influence from Big Insurance to keep Single Payer[tm] off the table – and what the President and Sec. Sebelius are doing to bring them under heel already?” Then cover your face with a paper bag and sit down really fast. But think of the headlines....
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9
MS, we know that you love your job (especially in these times in which, once laid off, another job may be difficult to come by.)
But do you have to write paragraphs about this non-event as if it really was all that? [Like you are under duress?]
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10
Bud Lite? The leader of the free world throws like a girl and drinks girl beer.
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10.1
Ahem.
Splosh, in case you haven't noticed it - you walk on twos like a girl, and talk like one and even breathe air like one ..And that is good, right?
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10.2
I'm in my 40s. I can still throw a baseball well over 70 mph. I've boxed in front of thousands of people. I work out with 4 plates on the bench press. And I am too ugly to look or walk like a girl. And I guarantee I could whip anyone in here in a 40 yd dash.
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10.3
Actually, Blue Moon, the choice of Sgt. Crowley is a girl's beer (I hear you drink it with fruit) if ever I heard of one. Bud Light is a working man's beer. The Prez is doing what he can to counter his image as an elitist.
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10.4
Well, I'm in my 50's, 6'3" tall, a "bear", work outside year round, used to be able to dunk a basketball before I blew my knee out, wear size 12 shoes, have a 5 o'clock shadow that gets a 10 o'clock shadow, carry a baseball bat in my truck (I don't play baseball) and I drink mudslides that I mix with milk.
What a man drinks has nothing to do with masculinity or being "girly". On a serious side, do you know how hard it is to find a decent pair of size 12 pumps?
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10.5
...and don't forget that per ounce, many "girly" drinks such as cosmos are stronger than beer. A lot stronger. Fortunately there are "manly" cocktails such as classic manhattans and martinis (my fave is the James Bond-inspired vesper martini). Then there are the LI iced teas which transcend all gender groups with a vengence.....
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10.6
My drink of choice used to be moonshine. Now that's a "man's" drink. Grandma used to make it. Her still was next to her marijuana garden out it the woods. Some guys used to go to their grandma's house for milk and cookies. Sissies.
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10.7
spob
July 31, 2009
at 9:16 am
I'm in my 40s. I can still throw a baseball well over 70 mph. I've boxed in front of thousands of people. I work out with 4 plates on the bench press. And I am too ugly to look or walk like a girl. And I guarantee I could whip anyone in here in a 40 yd dash.And you recently quit as governor of Alaska after single-handedly building a Bridge to Nowhere, right?
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11
Goddammit cfukara we all agreed not to engage in a certain activity on Thursdays
DO NOT RUIN THIS FOR US -
12
[...] original here: Obama and Gates: The Beers Heard Round the World (Time Magazine) Tags: beer-the-most men-sat obama president president-barack pretty-much table-drinking [...]
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13
"marveling at their own ability to be manipulated and the fate of our professional souls"
I work on the river and I distinctly remember the souls being sold down the river long ago.
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14
The president should have better things to do than wasting precious energy and invaluable time over such trivial fuss.
A wonderful dreamer if not pure idealist, he is certainly not coping well at all with the dirty, nasty and ugly reality.
If such beer party can help solving racial problem, go for it. Open up more new pubs.
(btt1943) -
15
It is sad to see that magazines like "Time" waste space on their website with articles like this. Shouldn't we discuss more lofty, serious and worthy topics and not hype up with such "trivial fuss" as tanboontee correctly calls this.
There are more important and imminent problems - nationally and internationally - to be solved.
Shouldn't you journalists focus on issues that really matter?!?!?!
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15.1
@sritzel
Thanks for being supportive.
Indeed, we all hear you loud and clear: TIME should focus on issues that really matter.
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15.2
Yeah, totally agree...I don't think they've picked up on Jon & Kate's dating others when the series resumes. Get moving, TIME, already. Slackers.
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16
[...] only ponder the significance… also see Michael Scherer, on how the White House press corps got played on this [...]
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17
[...] Source Share and Enjoy: [...]
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18
Aside from the misrepresenting of facts regarding what Obama actually said (as already pointed out he very explicitly did not call this incident racial profiling) I found this article very enjoyable. It was a frank and honest look at the lack of dignity and lack of quality in todays media.
It would be even better if such insights into your profession and your own behaviour caused you to change how you act and become a true reporter, but I guess insight without action is still better than no insight at all. At least it can be hoped that it's a first step on the way to self-realization, and it's a lot better than what most "journalists" manage.
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19
MS: "[the press] has been conditioned to swallow its pride."
.
At moments like this, Michael, I can't help but visualize the MSM/press as a housecat, perched on the beltway sofa, looking out disdainfully at the American public living room....then, with the flick of a switch, goes wildly scrambling after the red laser pointer spot bouncing across the rug....
.
Other than that, I found your post to be enjoyable. Let's just hope that when the group ordered beers, it didn't go down like this...
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19.1
Oh, and another thing. I noticed that Biden was at the table as well. Does this mean that Jay will follow up with a post on how Obama, Gates and Crowley didn't get a word in edgewise..?
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19.2
In my comment #19, the words "beltway" and "American public" should have strikethroughs in them. They looked OK in preview, now they're gone. Any ideas sheriffs?
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20
Four years ago I saw the movie Crash which showed the virtual tinderbox of race relations that existed in our country. Today, sadly, race relations are not any better, despite a Black President. The overwhelming outpouring of letters posted to this site and many others after the President's comment about the Gates incident clearly indicated that we also have not come any further than we were after the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial was announced sixteen years ago with Blacks celebrating and Whites in stunned disbelief. Each side has their own views about race and sometimes, oftentimes, even while perceptions may not be true, perception for that race becomes reality.
One thing I know for certain is that someday life on our planet will end but it will not be because we did not do enough about climate change. It will be because we did not do enough to change the climate of hatred, bigotry, anger, mistrust, hopelessness, and despair. Whether in our own country, the Mideast, or in many countries around the world, we are more concerned about what divides us instead of the things we have in common that can bring us together.
The past two weeks I spent several hours reading postings about the Obama/Gates comments and on Israeli media sites about the Arab Israeli conflict. I came away after reading hundreds of letters feeling very sad about my fellow human beings. If we could only bottle half of the energy we expend hating and mistrusting others and use it to fight disease, poverty, and hunger, this world would be a lot better off. Before we worry about climate change let's concentrate on changing the climate about working together to make this planet we inhabit a wonderful life for everyone.
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21
The summit went well, everyone made nice, the press had their requisite field day...
Can we stop paying attention to this nonsense?
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22
@Exiled_At_Home who says "unfortunately if you mouth off to a police officer long enough he/she will find a reason to arrest you..."
Isn't that a problem? Because the constitution kind of protects my right to mouth off at cops without fear of arrest.
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22.1
Destor
~
I was not supporting or legitimizing this police conduct, hence the word "unfortunately."
~
However, my point was that this routine abuse of power transcends race. I know many white college buddies who landed themselves in jail simply by mouthing off to local cops. Arrogance and perceived entitlement are quick methods of ending up behind bars, at least for a few hours.
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23
[...] Michael Scherer on the Beer Summit: “It was, let history note, a public relations coup, a photo-op to beat all [...]
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24
Your language, your word choice, seems to want to undermine and/or subvert the occassion. "Never mind" you repeat three times... A substitute for something real, you write...
I don't think so, one could also see it as a way of humanizing all those involved... Being arrested is dehumanizing in itself, especially if wrongly arrested or rather mistreated while being arrested for minor offenses... And it can happen to anyone - wasn't former President George W Bush arrested once?
Then there's the race issue, racial prejudice, which may be sometimes only or best dealt with by simple symbolic humanizing moments... There was a time 60 years ago when no President would consider hosting such an occassion.
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25
You don't drink Blue Moon (or wheat beers in general) with a lemon wedge, but a orange wedge. The flavor combination is often described as tasting like blueberries.
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