ABSTRACT
Given the pervasiveness of Kitsch within American culture, it is no wonder that both actual and would-be leaders embrace Kitsched proposals that are vivid in imagery and weak in detail.2 Lyndon Johnson declared “War on Poverty,” and a scant twenty years later Ronald Reagan declared a “War on Drugs.” Despite the vast complexities of the respective issues, both presidents offered easily consumable PRolicy visions of a strife-free America to the television electorate, refraining messy and horrendously complex social issues in the most simplistic military terms. Poverty and drugs became symbolic (and easily Kitsched) enemies of the American people. This does not imply that such “wars” had no real-life consequences. On the contrary, both served to regulate individuals deemed to be in need greater control and to buy broader political and social quiescence.3 This strategy is characterized by Murray Edelman as:
…the dramaturgical poses of public officials and politicians who display “courage” and “toughness” by requiring others, who lack political clout, to suffer in dubious wars that arouse popular enthusiasm in their early stages, or by espousing draconian criminal penalties that have no effect on the incidence of crime, except, perhaps, to increase it through their example of injustice and violence.4
