NASHVILLE, Tenn. ñ What does the outcome of the 2004 presidential race
ñ one that seemed to find the nation evenly yet definitively divided
along regional and ideological lines ñ say about the overall narrative
of the nation? Frank Rich, cultural critic and associate editor of The
New York Times, will discuss "Culture Wars in an Election Year" on
Wednesday, Nov. 10, at Vanderbilt.
Rich’s lecture will begin at 6 p.m. in Ingram Hall at Vanderbilt’s
Blair School of Music. A reception in his honor will precede the
lecture at 5 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public and
sponsored by the Chancellor’s Lecture Series.
Rich draws on his background as The Times’ longtime drama critic to color his observations on art, entertainment and politics.
Since March 2003, he has written a weekly essay running as a column on the front page of The Times’ Sunday
"Arts and Leisure" section. In his last column before the Nov. 2
election, Rich likened the two candidates to opposing characters in the
"plotline" that was the 2004 election, and he equated the American
public’s willingness to be engaged by the plot with its larger desire
to be entertained.
According to Rich, John Kerry’s attempts to develop an identifiable,
everyman persona were never successful ñ whether by riding a Harley
onto Jay Leno’s set, "reporting for duty" at the Democratic National
Convention or donning a camouflage jacket to hunt geese in Ohio. Kerry
was too leaden, too long-winded. "If the clichÈ of 2000 remains true,"
Rich wrote in the Oct. 31 column, "that entertainment-addicted
Americans will never let a tedious president into their living rooms
for four long years, then Mr. Kerry, like Al Gore, is toast."
On the other hand, "no president has worked harder than George W. Bush
to tell his story as a spectacle, much of it fictional, to rivet his
constituents while casting himself in an unfailingly heroic light,"
wrote Rich, citing how the president reenacted his dramatic, May 2003
"Mission Accomplished" landing aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln by
landing by helicopter in sports stadiums to the theme from Top Gun in the final days of his campaign. "Yet this particular movie," one in
which Bush is cast as the champion of his own brand of action film,
"may have gone on too long and have too many plot holes," wrote Rich.
"It’s possible for America to overdose on entertainment."
With more voters citing "moral values" as a factor in how they cast
their ballots than the war on terror, will the role the president has
played be rewritten? For a nation divided into red and blue states,
what will the new plotline be?
Rich served as The Times’ chief drama critic beginning in 1980 and was previously a columnist on
the op-ed page starting in January 1994. In 1999, he began writing a
longer opinion piece that ran on the op-ed page every other Saturday
and was given the additional title of senior writer for The New York Times Magazine. Currently, as associate editor, Rich assists in planning the
journalistic undertakings of the paper and serves as an adviser on the
paper’s overall cultural news report.
Rich is the third lecturer in the 2004-05 Chancellor’s Lecture Series
at Vanderbilt. The Chancellor’s Lecture Series serves to bring to the
university and the wider Nashville community those intellectuals who
are shaping the world today. For more information about the series,
visit www.vanderbilt.edu/chancellor/cls.
Media contact: Kara Furlong, (615) 322-NEWS
kara.c.furlong@vanderbilt.edu