Written by
There are certain unfortunate conventions in all storytelling. Minorities are among the first to die in any “slasher” film. A woman driving a car, in any daytime soap opera, is almost always guaranteed to wreck. The city is a wicked Gomorrah; the country is a wholesome paradise. Bad guys wear black, good guys—white.
And so, I thought, of Fox News’ latest props: doctors with the conservative American Association of Physicians, always smartly-dressed in the symbol of their profession: a white lab coat. This makes it easy, I thought, for Fox’s audience to quickly identify “the good guys.” It wasn’t until sometime later—this last Wednesday—that I understood the real reason for this wardrobe decision. Shortly before an October 5th photo op in the Rose Garden, Obama administration staffers handed-out white lab coats to roughly 150 doctors, assembled as a show of support for the administration’s health care overhaul. Fox’s AAP doctors don their white coats as a subtle jab at the administration’s stage managing—a subversive act of parody.
Score one for the Fox audience, which probably to a man gets this little inside joke. Subtract one, for investing more time and energy in an event which the larger public dismissed as a (rose) garden variety publicity stunt, white coats or not.
And such is the problem with administration opponents. You know more about Obama’s seemingly inexhaustible pressers than the progressives you daily mock as Obama’s legion of zombie followers. You are developing an unhealthy obsession, and don’t think that others haven’t started to notice. Like a European football hooligan, you know all of his fan songs, and chant them frequently. You can speak in his velvety call-and-response cadences. You’ve studied his body language. You’ve studied his Certificate of Live Birth closer than you’ve studied the creases in your no doubt long-suffering spouse’s brow. Any closer and you’d be legally joined, depending on your state of residence.
Halloween is right around the corner, so I’m suggesting you use the occasion to take a “mental health day.” Go on a hay ride; feel your way through a haunted house; brush-up on your nation’s founding literature (I’ve always enjoyed, in Franklin’s autobiography, the epigraphical “Indeed, I scarce ever heard or saw the introductory words, ‘Without vanity I may say,’ &c., but some vain thing immediately followed”). Whichever you choose, please take a day off. Nothing worth catching is ever caught through single-minded, fevered pursuit. And you may gain some larger perspective in the bargain (for shame!).