Lately a number of writers have begun to mark the 30th anniversary of the TV series “Dallas.” Of course, someone had to spoil the party by being too serious about it: Nick Gillespie, an editor at Reason, has published a piece in the Washington Post claiming that the “Dallas” phenomenon had a “shockingly unremembered” part to play in the “long twilight struggle between communism and capitalism.”
Sure. Yes. What?
I take it as self-evident that the thesis is intended to be impish. But the essay interests me because it is a fine example of how to manufacture a sense of substantiality to a claim that lacks meaningful evidence. The heart of this strategy lies in how Gillespie arrays several successive versions of his hypothesis.
To begin with, although Gillespie wants to claim that D. helped end the Cold War, these are not the words that he puts on the page at the outset. Instead, he claims that D. was simply a “turning point” in the conflict; it had a “part to play,” it was “important.” These are patently weak statements. So long as Gillespie does not specify any of these issues, the claim seems acceptable. And now that we have already agreed with the prose once, we are likely to continue reading.
The claim changes in the second paragraph. Here, Gillespie says that D. “shook the world” – an ironic allusion to Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed’s classic account of the Russian Revolution. Gillespie gets us smiling with the gag, but although humor has put us on his side, we may doubt that the show truly had ramifications on a scale of those of 1917. To reduce this doubt, Gillespie follows up by claiming that plenty of foreigners indeed found the show “irresistible,” so the “shake the world” idea may have something to it after all.
In this way, the prose gets its reader to concede after a moment of doubt, which is an important way to build trust. These moves reduce our expectation that the author is misleading us, which is a good way of priming us to be misled.
Only after this trust-building work do we begin to see stronger, above-board claims: in paragraph four, D. becomes “an atmosphere-altering cultural force” that “helped define the 1980s as a glorious “decade of greed,” ushering in an era in which capitalism became cool, even though weighted with manifold moral quandaries,” and “created a new archetype of the anti-hero we loved to hate and hated to love.”
Of course, all alone these claims are internally poor. “Atmosphere” and “cultural force” are extremely hard to gauge rigorously. The 1980’s would have been the “decade of greed” even without “Dallas” (what about “Wall Street?”). And I doubt that the society of “The Godfather” and “Taxi Driver” was unfamiliar with anti-heroes. For that matter, it’s a little nuts to say that we introduced such characters to the nation of Pushkin, Turgenev, Gogol and Dostoyevsky.
However, all of these claims seem more reasonable because Gillespie took his time before revealing them. Instead of placing them at the beginning, where readers have a high degree of skepticism, Gillespie offered them at a juncture in the text in which doubt has been first manufactured and then removed. In this way, Gillespie makes these claims more likely to be conceded, irrespective of their natural merits.
Another example of this positioning takes place later on in the piece, when Gillespie pivots from the international implications of D. to its impact on domestic politics. He writes:
It would be too much to say that the show made the rise of George W. Bush possible, but it’s certainly the case that “Dallas” helped shift the center of American culture from the right and left coasts to the great cowboy middle, decentralizing the traditional sources of power elites in social and political terms.
So it would be “reaching” to say that Dallas affected one election, but far more moderate and reasonable to say that it remade the long-term firmament of American politics? Of course, the second claim is way more powerful than the first, but the manner in which Gillespie relates them makes it seem otherwise.
The lesson here is that preposterous claims can be made to seem more reasonable by positioning them strategically. Indeed, this policy continues throughout the essay. By the fifth paragraph, we are asked to believe that by virtue of watching the show, people in Warsaw Pact countries “came to believe that they, too, deserved cars as big as boats and a swimming pool the size of a small mansion.” Of course, we have no evidence to think that this is the case. All this is speculation. But once such speculation becomes the standard, it is easy to let all standards slip. By the seventh paragraph, the author quotes Larry Hagmen, who played J.R. Ewing, as if he were a keen political scientist:
“I think we were directly or indirectly responsible for the fall of the [Soviet] empire,” Hagman told the Associated Press a decade ago. “They would see the wealthy Ewings and say, ‘Hey, we don’t have all this stuff.’ I think it was good old-fashioned greed that got them to question their authority.”
Next, Gillespie posits that Dallas showed Romanians a “luxuriant alternative to communism.” This comment is pretty derogatory. Prior to Dallas, how could the poor benighted Romanians even conceive of luxury? The implication is that the Romanians were unthinking partisans to a dogmatic party line, unable to even imagine other ways of life, and would not have risen up against regimes that oppressed, mistreated and murdered them. At least not without watching “Dallas” first. This analysis really makes the Romanians seem like pawns in their own liberation.
Of course, there is one final version of the main claim: a notion that the lust for luxury is a motive force in history; that this lust can be mobilized and fomented in irresistible ways; that this lust is not only good, but universally so. It is an extreme belief dormant beneath a banal argument. Notice how this belief is made plain in the last paragraph:
At the same time, “Dallas” functioned as an update on Benjamin Franklin‘s “Autobiography,” giving jes’ plain folks a step-by-step guidebook to how things really worked – and stoking them with the desire for all the baubles once only enjoyed by the country-club crowd. In demystifying wealth production — and pouring enough sex, scandal and whiskey to drown communism here and abroad — “Dallas” arguably stimulated our domestic political economy every bit as much as the Reagan-era tax cuts.
Some people may believe that desire for wealth is what ended the cold war, but fewer people really believe that desire for wealth is “the way the world works” in every circumstance. By dribbling this idea through two loose sentences, Gillespie successfully makes this deep version of his claim seem less radical than it is.
To sum up, then, here’s the entire sequence of claims that Gillespie makes:
D was an important turning point
D “shook the world,” and people loved watching it
D promoted a decade of greed and anti-heroism
D made people in Warsaw Pact countries want big cars and mansions
D was directly or indirectly responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union
D transformed the American political landscape
D showed us how the world really works, which is through lust for luxury.
Notice that each one of these claims is stronger and more contentious than the one that preceded it, as the stakes of the argument become greater and greater. This structure represents one way to lead a reader along the garden path. By the time that we get to the end, the reader will have conceded more than he or she expected to concede at the outset, and will not have noticed that the actual evidence is poor, inappropriate or absent.
