Big Boys Do Cry
Grown men crying on TV operate, it seems, like buses - you wait ages for one, and then three come along at once. In little more than a week we've had Peter Andre, Alistair Campbell and Gordon Brown all welling up during interviews.
We're well used to the pop culture celebrity circus eliciting emotionally charged responses, but it's a less frequent sight in the dry-eyed political arena. So what prompted Alistair and Gordon's tears? For Campbell, it was Andrew Marr's suggestion that his former boss, Tony Blair, misled Parliament over the intelligence for going to war in Iraq; in Brown's case, it was talking to Piers Morgan about the death of his baby daughter, in an interview to be broadcast this weekend.
What is fascinating about the media coverage is not the subject in itself - we all know boys cry - but the angle reports adopt. The press appears to want to call the tunes to which emotional displays should be set - maligning those who don't cry when they should (cf. Luke 7:32), yet suspicious of those who do.
So it is that Blair's lack of tears before the Chilcot inquiry is interpreted as arrogance and inhumanity, while Campbell and Brown's tears are cynically assumed to be a show for the sake of improving the Labour Party's media image.
Yet, Brown merely responded humanly to a genuinely emotive question. It was not a dissimilar situation that prompted the naked reportage that constitutes the shortest verse in the Bible: 'Jesus wept' (John 11:35). The context there makes it clear that Christ's emotion was very public, but that far from being a manipulative attempt to elicit sympathy, his tears were bound up with empathy for the loved ones of the deceased Lazarus, whom he counted as a friend. Nor do we approach these verses cynically, for we understand that they emphasise the humanity of Christ, an example that he truly is able to identify with all that we experience.
The humanity Christ shares with us is one we all have in common - including Campbell and Brown. So perhaps we should seek to exercise a little more restraint when it comes to judging the emotional displays of others. Which is to say, perhaps we should be a little more willing to let people be human.
The expenses scandal might indicate that a degree of cynicism is in order when it comes to politicians. But should that really extend to a default position whereby a significant aspect of their very humanity is denied?
Nigel Hopper
Links
You can hear Alistair Campbell talking about why he became emotional in the Andrew Marr interview on the BBC website...
The transcript of the Marr/Campbell interview is available to view online...
An advance clip Piers Morgan's interview with Gordon Brown can be viewed on the ITV website...
Cynicism is always unhelpful in Christians. If we expect the other to do wrong then we will fail to spot the good they do and affirm them for it. It is the property in journalists that fills the media with bad news. It creates an atmosphere which makes it hard for the readers to contemplate doing a good thing. It enpowers our defeated foe.
Date:
2010-02-12 10:54:58
Author:
Alan Joinson