TikTok-ing away. Yale is just talking to itself

Oh Yale, my Yale. How can you not see that the new world of social media has turned your professorial pronouncements into boring gobbledygook for the average voter? You are just talking to yourself.

It is the average voter who is going to elect a president, not the college-educated privileged voter who thinks in complete sentences: subject, object, verb, subordinate clause, final punctuation.

I listen and watch on CNN and MSNBC to Yale history professors David Blight (who was my teacher in an NEH week-long seminar on slavery in 1992) and Timothy Snyder, as they both lament the threat of “authoritarian” tendencies in former president Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

Who do these Yale guys think they are talking to when they are interviewed on television? Their history students in Linsly-Chittendon Hall?

And I ask that question as a Yale graduate myself: 1980, Yale Divinity School. Thank goodness I grew up as a “townie” in New Haven and Hamden and have not erased what it is like to be on the “outside” of Yale.

It is that sense of outsiderness to institutions of “higher” learning which has morphed into a quiet anger, flowing like magma under the feelings of voters, threatening to explode like a volcano.

That outsiderness begs this question: Is learning outside the hallowed halls of academia therefore “lower” learning? It smells that way to many.

The word “authoritarian” as used in the calm, logical, complete-sentence sound bites of Dr. Blight and Dr. Snyder is as effective as a limp washcloth to the average TV viewer.

Are those Yale professors even watching the television channels they appear on? The former president has a glitzy advertisement featuring his imposing 6-foot self, saluting our soldiers, eating with them in their mess halls, standing attention as the flag waves.

Those patriotic “eye bites” are interspersed with President Joe Biden stumbling three times as he climbs the stairs of Air Force One and flipping a quick look at his watch as if he is impatient with what he is doing at the moment.

And what is he doing ? Reviewing a military function, along with the first lady, as soldiers pass by, perhaps in a funeral or memorial event.

That same wristwatch impatience decades ago in a primary town-hall event punctured the second term reelection hopes of another president, George H.W. Bush. “Can’t wait to get out of here” was the message Bush’s peek at his wristwatch sent to viewers.

More devastating than the eye bites of Biden tripping up the stairway of Air Force One or peeking at his wristwatch, is the ear-candy which the former president’s advertisement offers to listeners: smooth and catchy background music.

Corny you say? An appeal to emotion? I wouldn’t be surprised if my Yale alma mater teachers agree, with a dismissive elitist sweep of their professorial hands: “Huh! Emotion!”

Dismiss these advertising appeals to emotion at your peril my dear Yale faculty oracles.

Social media has already captured our voters. Anyone who wants to win this presidential election had better quickly hire a brigade of 16-year-old screen-addicted geeks to create TikTok election advertisements in eye bites and music smoothies.

I suspect one side has already done this without the help of professors attached to their lecterns by academic umbilical cords.

Cheap advertising gimmickry you say? The first rule of communication art is “Consider your audience.”

So beware the complete-sentence trap. And if you dare to add a subordinate clause? Click.