November 01, 2006 (2): Tell it Like it Is, Matt!

Once again, Rolling Stone has made its mark in quality political journalism, again thanks to the perceptive writing of Matt Taibbi! This time Matt has decided to take on "the Letterman-O'Reilly dust-up last week," where Bill O'Reilly (in Taibbi's usual colorful language) "ended up skewered and turned over the video-spit by the end of the segment, with an apple in his mouth and Sumner Redstone's massive billionaire foot wedged firmly in his ass." The point, however, is that this was the full extent of Taibbi's celebration of this event, because, at the end of the day, there really was not that much to celebrate. His point is that Letterman and others of his ilk (meaning those media "performers" who only recently have begun to reverse their position on the Iraq war) really deserve no praise for what amounts to taking forever to recognize the baldly obvious. Here are Taibbi's words again (in language that, this time, may be too colorful for some readers):

What's dangerous about what's going on right now is that an electoral defeat of the Republicans next week, and perhaps a similar defeat in a presidential race two years from now, might fool some people into thinking that the responsibility for the Iraq war can be sunk forever with George Bush and the Republican politicians who went down with his ship. But in fact the real responsibility for the Iraq war lay not with Bush but with the Lettermans, the Wolf Blitzers, the CNNs, The New York Timeses of the world -- the malleable middle of the American political establishment who three years ago made a conscious moral choice to support a military action that even a three-year-old could have seen made no fucking sense at all.

It doesn't take much courage to book the Dixie Chicks when George Bush is sitting at thirty-nine percent in the polls and carrying 3,000 American bodies on his back every time he goes outside. It doesn't take much courage for MSNBC's Countdown to do a segment ripping the "Swift-Boating of Al Gore" in May 2006, or much gumption from Newsweek's Eleanor Clift to say that many people in the media "regret" the way Gore was attacked and ridiculed in 2000. We needed those people to act in the moment, not years later, when it's politically expedient. We needed TV news to reject "swift-boating" during the actual Swift Boat controversy, not two years later; we needed ABC and NBC to stand up to Clear Channel when that whole idiotic Dixie Chicks thing was happening, not years later; we needed the networks and the major dailies to actually cover the half-million-strong protests in Washington and New York before the war, instead of burying them in inside pages or describing the numbers as "thousands" or "at least 30,000," as many news outlets did at the time; and we needed David Letterman to have his war epiphany back when taking on Bill O'Reilly might actually have cost him real market share.

This all reminds me of a lecture I heard John Cage deliver at the Philadelphia Museum of Art some time in the vicinity of 1974. On that occasion Cage chose to read an acceptance speech he delivered for some award he had recently received (which may very well be the first time he had been acknowledged with any such prestigious award). Since those of us who actually knew Cage are declining in our numbers, I have to explain that Cage was probably the closest approximation to a saint I had ever met (although, if one could call him a saint, it would have to be a Buddhist saint). The number of times I ever heard him break with his serene equanimity and voice anything like a complain could be counted on one hand. So it was quite a surprise to discover that the message of this particular lecture (and, for all I know, he delivered it while holding the award just given to him) was, "Where were you when I needed you?" Both John Cage and Merce Cunningham spent more years than any of us would wish to number on the brink of poverty, wondering where the next meal would come from, just because they wanted to be true to their ideas of how music and dance should be made. (Cage even told the story that, when Cunningham received his first serious grant award, someone asked him what he would do with the money; and Merce answered immediately, "Eat.") For all that serene equanimity, Cage could not forget persevering the poverty when finally awarded the fruits of recognition.

Nothing has changed. Attention was not paid to John Cage and Merce Cunningham when they were struggling to make their voices heard. Attention was not paid to those few to dared to speak of the folly of going to war in Iraq when the question was still being debated in the Congress. Today also happens to be the day that Nelson Mandela was capable of offering up a few kind words for P. W. Botha. When will the United States of America come to terms with the concepts of Truth and Reconciliation? When will we accept responsibility for our mistakes of neglect?

July 12, 2006: Why Irrationality?

Reading Jim Hansen's report on global warming in the July 13 New York Review left me wondering why it should be so hard to communicate such a painfully clear message. My reflex was to resort to a comment by Herbert Agar (which I used to associated with James Reston): "The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear." This is what makes the title of Gore's lecture/book/film so appropriate: the inconvenience of it all. On the other hand, Antonio Gramsci may have come closer to the mark with his theory of ideological domination. Here is how Randall Collins explained it in his Theoretical Sociology text:

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, writing a few years later in his Prison Notebooks (1928/1971), however, argued that the working class is most afflicted by the power of the dominant class’s ideology. If not deceived by outright illusions, their minds are subject to ‘contradictory consciousness,’ with confused and fragmented judgments on the nature of the world they inhabit. This is because the ruling class is hegemonic: controlling not only property but—even more importantly—the means of producing beliefs about reality. These include religion, education, and more recently, the mass media. Thus the working class is severely crippled in its ability to revolt against the dominant order, or even think critically about it. (For modern examples, see Gitlin [1979] on the power of television, or the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s [1984] theory of the stratification produced by differences in personal taste and styles of entertainment, which he calls ‘cultural capital.’)

In other words, in less elevated langauge, what we prefer to hear is what the media tell us we prefer to hear.