Obama’s ears went unnoticed until put front and centre, so to speak

One of the many reasons no sane person should ever consider politics as a career is that it’s the only profession where ears matter.

Their appearance, I mean, not their function. Since television focused us on the appearance of politicians, they have been judged on their height, weight, amount of hair (if they’re men) ankles (if they’re women), teeth and smiles. As of now, the ears are also in play.

A prominent American columnist had a go at Barack Obama’s ears recently. You might not have thought that ear shape was a substantive issue in the candidacy of a frontrunner for the American presidency, but there they were. In print. In a prestigious and authoritative newspaper: Obama’s ears, the limitations of. The owner of the ears got mad as hell and told the columnist off in public about what she had written.

My problem with Obama’s ears is that I didn’t meet them first. I was introduced to him through his memoir, which I liked so much that I really wouldn’t have cared if the author looked like the back of a 44A bus after a tangle with a truck.

As it turned out, when I did get to see him in action, he was reasonably attractive. Not stunning. But tall, with a spare face and big expressive eyes. The unfleshy face dominated by the big eyes undoubtedly contributed to his early reputation as an inspirational speaker, because the TV camera loves fine-boned faces and big dark eyes. The ears went pretty much unnoticed until the columnist put them front and centre, so to speak.

Now, a private criticism of one’s ears can be got over. Men pretend not to be bothered when someone jokes about their baldness or receding hairline, but they really hate it. Ears, though, are less of an issue. They can genuinely be joked about. Indeed, Bing Crosbie used to enjoy quoting the casting director who remarked that the crooner’s ears were so free in their ways that he looked like a taxi cab with both front doors open.

But to read in a national newspaper that your ears aren’t up to scratch has to be wounding. Especially if you have children who will get parental ears thrown at them, at least metaphorically, when they go to school. So Obama lit into the columnist for what she’d written. Which caused all the other columnists to pile in on him, criticising him for a) chastising her in public (although she’d done precisely that to his aural orifices) and b) lacking a sense of humour.

The poor devil must be glad to be in Afghanistan this week. I’ve never heard of ears as a major current affairs issue out there, have you? No. Didn’t think so.

God love Obama. Because he can’t go “ho jolly ho” about his ears getting lacerated, he’s found guilty by media of a sense of humour deficit.

Now, it’s fair to assume that Obama objected, not out of reflex ear defensiveness, although we probably all have a bit of that, but because it maddened him that instead of addressing the hopes and dreams, the policies and plans he has outlined as part of a new kind of presidency, major space in a key newspaper would be devoted to the shape of his ears, with the knock-on annoyance that every time he goes on TV for the foreseeable future, whole families are going to react, not to what he’s saying, but to his ears. There will be discussions all over America about whether the criticisms of them were right or wrong.

Yet Barack is supposed to go “ho jolly ho”, like the way he’s supposed to laugh about his wife being cartooned on the front cover of New Yorker magazine as a gun-totin’ latter-day Angela Davis, and when he doesn’t, is found guilty of being too serious. You’d think, after so many years of a smirking, winking, thumbs-upping presidential personification of have-a-laugh triviality, media might have been ready for a little gravity, but no.

He’s going to have to live with this idiocy, and more’s the pity. The visual, these days, is assumed to deliver significant information that the words used by a politician do not deliver. Or, perhaps, by their ears you will know them. Viewers, since the advent of that infinitely evil medium, television, have credited themselves — wrongly — with the intuitive capacity to judge what a politician is really like by their appearance.

Prior to television, politicians were judged on what they said and did. Their selection by a political party was influenced by family ties, loyalty to the group, energy, intelligence and capacity to stir crowds by great oratory. One of the admirable aspects of party politics is that parties still tend to select their leaders based on those traits, despite the pressure to pick the pretty one. It’s media — us arbiters of authenticity, us plumbers of the shallows of political candidates — who write and talk about appearance, dress and body language. We do it because TV makes us do it. Instead of encountering a politician through print, which would allow us to understand their thinking, or in person, which would give us a sense of how they relate to other human beings, we see them prepped and primped, usually in close ups or medium close up shots, on TV.

Sit in a pub when Prime Time or any other current affairs programme is on and listen to the comments after the presenter introduces the topic and the camera pans to the participants.

None of the comments relate to the content. All relate to the appearance of the politicians and are negative. They’re fat, they’re old, they’re bald, they’re badly dressed, they’re mutton dressed as lamb. Or, this week, vis-à-vis Taoiseach Brian Cowen on his United States visit, he’s sulky and what possessed him to wear a big dark winter suit and him in a shot surrounded by summery celebs wearing light-coloured linen?

That’s how television works. It delivers visual impressions, not content, although a great television performer can, through hard work, get past the visual impressions barrier.

Once upon a time, when the tectonic plates of Europe shifted in a way carrying dire implications for the future of that continent and of the wider world, Winston Churchill opined that, “From Stetin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.”

Because it happened in the good old days prior to the arrival of television, nobody, when Churchill delivered the Iron Curtain speech, discussed his ears as if they mattered or commented on his bulldog face. Nor was he attacked on the grounds that, as an undersized male, he was driven by a Napoleon complex.

Yet, when Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France and of the European Union, commented this month about a shift in Europe’s tectonic plates which carries potentially dire implications for the future of the continent, some of the comment portrayed him as a little guy suffering from “small man syndrome”.

What the hell has the man’s height got to do with it?