Some eagle-eyed viewers might have noticed a novel feature of Anna Bligh’s press conferences lately; a grimacing,gesticulating presence to the immediate left of the Queensland Premier, translating her words into sign language for the deaf. For those of us fortunate enough to have no hearing impairment, it’s as absurdly distracting as a breakdancer at a funeral - so mesmerised am I by the almost Vaudevillian exhibition on screen that I no longer pay much attention to what the Premier is saying. Even the deaf might find it all a trifle unnecessary, considering they surely have access to closed captions, if they bother with TV at all. And, if the Queensland Government’s own information is correct, less than 3000 deaf people in the state use sign language. So what’s this grand demonstration all about? I suspect the answer to that question might be found in the rebounding fortunes of a certain man who might be the next President of the United States.
Last Thursday, as Cyclone Yasi was cooking in the Pacific, Haley Barbour, the Republican Governor of Mississippi, broke months of speculation by announcing to reporters that he was “seriously considering a run for president”. It is a remarkable achievement for the former lobbyist and unsuccessful U.S. Senate candidate from Yazoo City, whose first few years as Governor of Mississippi (he took office in January, 2004) were so mired in charges of corruption that many were astonished when Barbour survived to a second term.
But there’s nothing like a civic catastrophe to revive a political career that’s on the nose, and, for Haley Barbour, his luck changed in August of 2005, when Hurricane Katrina visited upon the south-eastern states of the USA. Of all the public figures to address the nation during that chaotic time, it was Barbour who seemed to connect with the people, his frankness and calm during his media briefings moving fellow Republican Billy Hewes to remark: “He is to Katrina what Rudy Giuliani was to 9/11.” Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal concurred:
“Mississippi’s Gov. Haley Barbour came closest to the Giuliani model,” she wrote. “In news conferences he laid out with breadth and precision the facts of the Mississippi coastal devastation. He had to keep telling the press and the public that there would be more dead than they understood, a delicate thing to have to do. He did it with candor and transparency but no defeat. He had command of what facts were known. His face was shocked and sad, but he never looked beaten; he referred on Larry King Live to the rebuilding of the coast as if it were a foregone conclusion but one that will take massive work. He seemed straight, unillusioned, human. Watch Mr. Barbour. If he continues like this, he’s going to become a significant national figure.”
Barbour took the advice to heart, rode his post-Katrina reputation to re-election at the end of 2007, and now looks certain to be a candidate for nomination in the Republican race for the White House in 2012. The folksy Mississippi governor has, in the eyes of some, “played the press like a violin”.
One of Barbour’s little trademarks - a novel addition to the press conferences that were to become standard during hurricane season - was the very visible inclusion of a sign language interpreter. There is no evidence that a single deaf person ever benefited from these exhibitions (indeed, deaf viewers were outraged when Barbour’s translator, during a TV interview, justified his position by claiming that most deaf people couldn’t read subtitles), but, as a piece of window decoration for Haley Barbour, the idea was inspired - that madly gesticulating figure to his left made the rich, conservative, anti-abortionist Republican seem as if he gave a hoot about minorities all of the sudden. People came to see it as symbolic of a leader so totally on top of a crisis that he had thought of almost everything, even the few people who could neither read nor hear. For many, it gave birth to the thought that maybe Haley Barbour wasn’t so bad after all.
Now, it might be just a coincidence that Anna Bligh started using sign language interpreters when the storms came, or that her stage set-up - with the interpreter to the left and her rear flanks covered by emergency personal - is identical to Barbour’s, or that Bligh’s most memorable line - “We are Queenslanders...We’re the ones that they knock down, and we get up again” - is a mirror of Haley Barbour’s now-famous war cry to his own from 2007 ("We got knocked down hard, but Mississippians got right back up..."). It might be a coincidence that Anna Bligh, prior to the storms, was looking down the barrel of political extinction, and that people are now comparing her to Gillard, and asking how she might cope as Prime Minister. All of this might be a coincidence.
To believe so, one has to accept that those sign language translators really are there for but 3000 Queenslanders, and are not meant to send any messages at all to the rest of Australia.
I’m not sure there’s a hand sign for what I think about that.
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