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C H A P T E R 6 The Good Mother Think for a moment about the stories you tell to explain events in your life to others. For example, when you’re late for an important meeting with someone because you’ve been sitting in jammed traffic, you typically don’t launch into a 20-minute discussion of traffic flow patterns or the level of federal and state funding for highway projects in your area— you talk about your anger, how lousy the drivers around you were (with vivid examples that may or may not include a middle finger directed at them), and how all of this conspired against you to make you late. You construct a narrative. A narrative is made up of “symbolic actions—words or deeds—that have meaning for those who live, create, or interpret them” (Fisher, 1987, p. 58). As the author Joan Didion (1990, p. 1) observed, “[W]e tell ourselves stories in order to live.” We use narratives to help us create a sense of order “on the flow of experience so that we can make sense of events and actions in our lives,” as Sonja Foss points out (1996, p. 399). When trying to describe a significant other, you probably would not rely on a bullet-pointed list of the characteristics that you admire, or that attracted you. You’d probably share a story about that person. If someone asks me what drew me to my beautiful wife, I’d probably recall how we met at my brother- and sister-in law’s Christmas party. I’d tell them about how my now brother-in-law was my roommate in college in the early 1980s, and how we hadn’t kept in touch, and when we finally reconnected, I got the chance to meet my wife, who is his wife’s sister. . . . OK, it needs a little editing. But it also says a lot about us. A good story, says Foss (1996), “provides clues to the subjectivity of individuals and to the values and meanings that characterize a culture” (p. 401). Stories are structured so that the person hearing the story can pick out logical reasons for the actions of the participants—and learn 97 something about the storyteller along the way. To keep a reader or listener interested, a story has to hang together, and it has to ring true. The accuracy of the story is less important. Sometimes stories are downright incorrect—and annoying, like some of the stories your parents or loved ones tell about you. You know the story is wrong, or missing some important facts, but you typically sit, listen, and laugh—even though at times you would like to throttle the storyteller. An effective, resonant story needs clearly drawn characters with which we can easily identify— or, in Michael Newdow’s case, dislike and distrust. As described by reporters, Newdow was the ultimate outsider, the perfect antagonist. To personalize the issues raised by Newdow, and to make a complex constitutional question accessible to their audience, journalists had to personify the thousands of students—and elected officials—who reflexively saluted the flag in the wake of the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, threatened legal action against the judges who, in the eyes of our elected officials, had the unmitigated audacity to rule the presence of “under God” in the Pledge unconstitutional. They had to find a true protagonist, a “white hat”—a hero. Newdow’s daughter, while a compelling character, was only an abstract presence in the story to this point, thanks to Newdow’s ongoing insistence that the case revolved around him. Reporters had successfully isolated him—moved him to Daniel Hallin’s (1986) “sphere of deviance.” But they still needed someone to sustain their version of the story so that we, in turn, would use it to understand the Newdow controversy. That’s where Sandra Banning, the mother of Newdow’s daughter, comes in. She gained full legal custody of their daughter in February 2002. To get a better handle on Banning’s evolving role in the narrative, we return briefly to a key issue in the case: standing. The Ninth Circuit panel ruled in June 2002 that Newdow had standing to bring suit on behalf of his daughter . The school district had unfairly usurped Newdow’s right to guide his daughter in matters of religion, said the court. In the initial wave of coverage of the panel’s ruling, the standing issue received scant...

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