Commentary: Bristol Palin and the Tone Deafness of Adults to Popular Culture

I always swore that I would never make the same mistakes and I always admired the adults that could still relate to younger people.  I bring this up in light of watching Bristol Palin’s rather awkward pitch for abstinence alongside Mike Sorrentino, who is himself a bit of an icon on MTV’s reality show, “Jersey Shore.”

Bristol Palin, the 20-year-old now-single mother, rebuffs his advances and the two have a discussion about sex and abstinence, the importance of safe sex, and of course, the importance of abstinence.

From any kind of effectiveness level, the effort is an embarrassment.  The dialogue is steeped with fake colloquialism that tries to convey hip and contemporary jargon, but mostly comes across as a string of cheesy one-liners and contrived banters.  They close with what is apparently the organization’s slogan, “pause before you play.”

You can watch it for yourself:

The spot is more likely to inspire jeers and Saturday Night Live potshots than have any impact on teen’s sex habits.  To be frank, such references would have been played out when I was 20.  The idea that this spot would impact the thinking of any hormone-driven youth is ludicrous.

Not that this is a new thing.  There have been other comical attempts at reaching youth.  Who could forget The Partnership for a Drug Free America and their ad with the egg in the frying pan commercial where the man holds up the egg and says, “this is your brain.”  Next he points to the pan, “this is drugs.”  Finally he cracks it onto the hot frying pan and as it sizzles away he says, “This is your brain on drugs, any questions?”

My question was at the time, how dumb are you guys, thinking that is going to work?

In the 1980s when I was in high school, they launched into the “just say no” campaign to teach kids not to use drugs.  I remember our school used to do what they called, “Red Ribbon Week,” and the slogan was “See Red, Say No.”

Of course, it was a strange ploy anyway since officially our high school did not have a drug problem.  But then if you scratched beneath that veneer you might have found something very different.  I will never forget as a freshman walking out with my red ribbon on my shirt into the parking lot, and seeing some kids with their red ribbons smoking joints.

Just say no was something we laughed at and mocked.  The tone deafness of the public figures, thinking they had any clue as to how to reach impressionable youth.

This of course led to more sophisticated anti-drug efforts such as DARE, which was another one of my pet-peeves.  This follows well my commentary on court practices failing to test their assumptions before admitting into evidence untested claims of experts.

DARE was an abysmal failure.  Do not just take my word for it, the General Accounting Office in 2003 finally put an end to the misery of millions of kids with a report that showed what most had known for a long time – DARE did not work.

The GAO report found that “In brief, the six long-term evaluations of the DARE elementary school curriculum that we reviewed found no significant differences in illicit drug use between students who received DARE in the fifth or sixth grade (the intervention group) and students who did not (the control group). Three of the evaluations reported that the control groups of students were provided other drug use prevention education.”

It continued, “All of the evaluations suggested that DARE had no statistically significant long-term effect on preventing youth illicit drug use. Of the six evaluations we reviewed, five also reported on students’ attitudes toward illicit drug use and resistance to peer pressure and found no significant differences between the intervention and control groups over the long term. Two of these evaluations found that the DARE students showed stronger negative attitudes about illicit drug use and improved social skills about illicit drug use about 1 year after receiving the program. These positive effects diminished over time.”

From 1983 to 2003, DARE operated in 80 percent of all school districts across the US and also in some foreign countries.  We are talking hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, on a program that the GAO said did not work.

Tone deafness has a very serious component to it, and when public officials do not design programs with a healthy perspective on youth and good research to back it up, money is wasted on ineffective programs.

Apparently, groups have not learned that these things do not work.  They get mocked.  Bristol Palin is probably not the person to reach impressionable youth anyway.  But if she were, the skit in the ad is not the way to go about doing it.

It is horribly written and laced with cliches, and no one is going to take it seriously.  Do they focus-group this stuff?  Everyone is making fun of it.

Speaking of pop culture, former President George W. Bush has a book out that he is soon going to wish he never released.  There is all sorts of material in the book that will be mined over by media looking for their kicks, and President Bush provides them with much ready-made material.

In the book, President Bush claims that the lowest moment of his presidency was when Kanye West, a rapper and singer, called him a racist and said in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that “Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

Let us just recount a few things that happened during Bush’s presidency.  He had the attacks on 9/11, which was one of the lowest moments in American history and many people’s lives.  We had the revelations that weapons of mass destruction, the backbone of his war in Iraq strategy, did not exist or at least did not exist in any kind of quantity that made Iraq an imminent threat and justified preemptive war.  We had Hurricane Katrina, where an American city was devastated and the government’s response was stunning incompetence.  We had revelations of Abu Ghraib, where photos were shown of US soldiers mocking, if not torturing, Iraqi POWs.  We had the collapse of the US Financial Markets and almost the entirety of the developed world.  I could actually go on from there.

But for Mr. Bush, the low point was when a rapper gave him a personal slight?  Are you kidding me?  We used to criticize him for being shallow and self-absorbed, but this really takes the cake.

Bush told Matt Lauer on NBC,  “I resent it, it’s not true, and it was one of the most disgusting moments of my presidency.”

Bush writes that he can barely think about the moment “without feeling disgust” and that it outranks people criticizing him for the war in Iraq or his efforts to cut taxes to benefit the rich.

This response really embodies the problem here – President Bush ranks his worst moments those of criticism – something that comes with the job.

Matt Lauer pushed the former President, telling him that he will take heat for saying the worst moment was not watching the misery in Louisiana caused by the hurricane and the ineffective government response, but rather because someone insulted him.

“The misery in Louisiana affected me deeply as well,” Bush told Lauer. “There’s a lot of tough moments in the book. And it was a disgusting moment, pure and simple.”

Because, of course, Kanye West is important enough to be able to cause the President’ worst moment.

Moreover, Kanye West was saying what millions of blacks in this country were thinking, that if this had been a bunch of white people on the roofs of buildings waiting to be rescued, the government would have moved much more quickly.  Not saying they were right about this, only that this was the thinking.

I find it amazing, on a consistent basis, how myopic, thin-skinned and petty people are who are in public office. Criticism and even insults come with the territory.  If you cannot handle it, perhaps you are not fit for public office.

—David M. Greenwald reporting