Author Archives: Glenn W. Smith

CPAC and SXSW: an American Stew

Posted by on March 17, 2013 Comments Off

It was spring break all over America.  It was SXSW in Austin. It was CPAC time in Washington, D.C.

While I was listening in Austin to Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, CPAC attendees were complaining about life as beleaguered white people. Oh the prejudice they most overcome, and they will one day.

The cultures of SXSW and CPAC are so radically different that it’s a stretch to remember they are taking place in the same country or even on the same planet. Imagine the face of horror on the CPAC secret agent who gets a glimpse in his Victorian-era telescope of the revelers in Austin. “Run away, run away!” he would shout.

Now, I realize that the events are staged with wildly different purposes. SXSW is a music, film and intertubes festival that celebrates today’s stars and showcases tomorrow’s. CPAC is a cuckoo’s nest all the card-carrying cuckoos must attend.

Here was Sarah Palin speaking of Ted Cruz: “He chews barbed wire, he spits out rust.”

And here’s Cruz on Palin: “I’m not remotely cool enough to be Sarah Palin.” It’s hard to be cool with a mouth full of rust, Ted.

Now, I’ll tell you who’s cool, Ted. Robert Randolph, a genius on the pedal steel who combines the blues, soul, funk, southern rock and Hendrix to create a musical wonderland. I saw him yesterday on the massive outdoor stage at Auditorium Shore here.

Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris are cool to. So was the Midnight Ramble Band, the late Levon Helm’s gift to the world. I could go on and on about all the cool at SXSW.

On the dark side of the universe at CPAC, we return to the white-people-are-victims-of-racism party. Please, I’m not making this up. Benjy Sarlin tells us about CPAC’s breakout session from hell:

The session, entitled “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?” was led by K. Carl Smith, a black conservative who mostly urged attendees to deflect racism charges by calling themselves “Frederick Douglass Republicans.”

Look out Washington. There’s trouble on the hill. Sarlin continues:

Scott Terry of North Carolina, accompanied by a Confederate-flag-clad attendee, Matthew Heimbach, rose to say he took offense to the event’s take on slavery. (Heimbach founded the White Students Union at Towson University and is described as a “white nationalist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

“It seems to be that you’re reaching out to voters at the expense of young white Southern males,” Terry said, adding he “came to love my people and culture” who were “being systematically disenfranchised.”

Smith responded that Douglass forgave his slavemaster.

“For giving him shelter? And food?” Terry said.

 

At this point the event devolved into a mess of shouting. Organizers calmed things down by asking everyone to “take the debate outside after the presentation.”

Those young white Southern males just can’t get a break. I dunno. Whenever American conservatives start talking about race weird shit happens. I think they are deeply puzzled by people who don’t look like them.

Anyway, I was just thinking of what a great country this is that we can have spring break, SXSW and CPAC all at the same time and there’s no end-times earthquake or giant squid attacks on Des Moines. God bless us, every one.

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CPAC and SXSW: an American Stew

Posted by on March 17, 2013 Comments Off

It was spring break all over America.  It was SXSW in Austin. It was CPAC time in Washington, D.C.

While I was listening in Austin to Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, CPAC attendees were complaining about life as beleaguered white people. Oh the prejudice they most overcome, and they will one day.

The cultures of SXSW and CPAC are so radically different that it’s a stretch to remember they are taking place in the same country or even on the same planet. Imagine the face of horror on the CPAC secret agent who gets a glimpse in his Victorian-era telescope of the revelers in Austin. “Run away, run away!” he would shout.

Now, I realize that the events are staged with wildly different purposes. SXSW is a music, film and intertubes festival that celebrates today’s stars and showcases tomorrow’s. CPAC is a cuckoo’s nest all the card-carrying cuckoos must attend.

Here was Sarah Palin speaking of Ted Cruz: “He chews barbed wire, he spits out rust.”

And here’s Cruz on Palin: “I’m not remotely cool enough to be Sarah Palin.” It’s hard to be cool with a mouth full of rust, Ted.

Now, I’ll tell you who’s cool, Ted. Robert Randolph, a genius on the pedal steel who combines the blues, soul, funk, southern rock and Hendrix to create a musical wonderland. I saw him yesterday on the massive outdoor stage at Auditorium Shore here.

Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris are cool to. So was the Midnight Ramble Band, the late Levon Helm’s gift to the world. I could go on and on about all the cool at SXSW.

On the dark side of the universe at CPAC, we return to the white-people-are-victims-of-racism party. Please, I’m not making this up. Benjy Sarlin tells us about CPAC’s breakout session from hell:

The session, entitled “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?” was led by K. Carl Smith, a black conservative who mostly urged attendees to deflect racism charges by calling themselves “Frederick Douglass Republicans.”

Look out Washington. There’s trouble on the hill. Sarlin continues:

Scott Terry of North Carolina, accompanied by a Confederate-flag-clad attendee, Matthew Heimbach, rose to say he took offense to the event’s take on slavery. (Heimbach founded the White Students Union at Towson University and is described as a “white nationalist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

“It seems to be that you’re reaching out to voters at the expense of young white Southern males,” Terry said, adding he “came to love my people and culture” who were “being systematically disenfranchised.”

Smith responded that Douglass forgave his slavemaster.

“For giving him shelter? And food?” Terry said.

 

At this point the event devolved into a mess of shouting. Organizers calmed things down by asking everyone to “take the debate outside after the presentation.”

Those young white Southern males just can’t get a break. I dunno. Whenever American conservatives start talking about race weird shit happens. I think they are deeply puzzled by people who don’t look like them.

Anyway, I was just thinking of what a great country this is that we can have spring break, SXSW and CPAC all at the same time and there’s no end-times earthquake or giant squid attacks on Des Moines. God bless us, every one.

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Politics, Coonskin Caps, and the Stories That We Are

Posted by on March 10, 2013 Comments Off

I was Wyatt Earp when I wasn’t Davy Crockett

How was it that as a boy of four or five I came to wear a Davy Crockett coonskin cap or a Wyatt Earp outfit complete with a red and gold vest, striped pants and boots? I suppose it was at least precociously post-modern of me to be carrying a candy-filled plastic walking stick instead of a gun.

One answer, of course, is 1950s television. Another is the profound importance of our cultural narratives to the way we think and act, to the personae we take on, to the choices we make. It’s easy to forget this fact when one of the dominant cultural narratives tells us we are immune to the influence of cultural narratives as autonomous, self-contained individuals.

Popular culture scholar Margaret King wrote:

Americans like to think of themselves as rational people – rooted in fact. If this were true, Consumer Reports would be our best-selling magazine instead of TV Guide.

Well, TV Guide is no longer No. 1. AARP The Magazine is. Still, King’s point is well taken. We don’t choose presidents or products by rational means. We choose them because of the stories they come wrapped in, stories that dress us up, too, sometimes in Wyatt Earp garb.

My parents used to tell me I could sing “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” before I could speak another word. I was only a little more than one year old when the original Disney three-part series aired on TV. So it must have been re-runs and the 1956 Disney movie, Davie Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier that had me singing. I had a coonskin cap, of course, but I couldn’t fine a photo. Wyatt Earp will have to do.

I’m still a sucker for Davy Crockett lore, so I devoured Bob Thompson’s wonderful new book, Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier. Thompson found it delightfully impossible to separate the real David from the Davy of American myth and popular culture legend.

True story. In the early 1990s I shared an office with a close friend who had produced several movies. I answered the phone one day and heard a strangely familiar voice. It was Fess Parker, the actor who played Disney’s Crockett! I was suddenly a kid again, listening to Fess Parker pitch a new series idea that would have had Crockett surviving the Alamo taken prisoner. Escaping his captors later on, he and his sidekick, George Russell, would return to Texas to discover they were heroes. They’d hightail it out of there before they were recognized, sacrificing their return to their former lives to the legends they’d become.

Thompson mentions Fess Parker’s unfulfilled hopes in his book. He also does a fine job of reporting on the nascent American celebrity folk culture that Crockett’s life helped fuel. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of these stories to shape our thinking. We are children of culture. Illusions of independence from the stories that make our lives are just that.

Our values ride the stories we tell. And when we seek to share those values or persuade others in political or social spheres, we have to be aware of the existing narrative environment. Facts without stories are not just unpersuasive. They are almost without meaning. King writes: Read more »

Voting Rights, Democracy, and the “Dignity of Man”

Posted by on March 3, 2013 Comments Off

President Lyndon Johnson opened his remarks to Congress urging passage of the Voting Rights Act with these words:

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause.

A few moments later, Johnson quoted Matthew 16:26:

What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on a challenge to the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The conservative justices lobbed hostile and for the most part uninformed questions at defenders of the historic legislation. It’s obvious that those judges couldn’t give a fig about the dignity of man or the destiny of democracy.

It is also clear in this and other instances – Citizens United comes to mind – that the Roberts Court is all about protecting material profits of the few from the justice sought by the many. Gain the whole world they might. Their souls I’ll leave for others to judge.

The American Right’s recent war on voting rights is a disgrace. For all their endless prattle about freedom, their voter suppression campaigns betray their anti-democratic natures. It is not citizen empowerment they seek, it is the guarantee of their own power. It’s hard to imagine how they can reconcile their anti-democratic behavior with their professed love of democracy.

Their rationalizing gymnastics require two twisted beliefs. They must first diminish the humanity of those they seek to disenfranchise. Sociologists call it infrahumanization. The targets of out-group prejudice are considered just a little less human than in-group members. Sadly, recent studies show this is a habit shared by many around the world. So when the perpetrators of voter suppression hear a phrase like “the dignity of man,” they think it refers only to them and not the targets of their suppression efforts.

In a related move, vote suppressors have to believe in a natural hierarchy or order in which God or Nature has chosen their group for dominion over others. Most who hold this belief would deny it, of course. They may even deny it to themselves. They may never utter a racial epithet. But their world is turned upside down when someone from the out-category is suddenly in a position of power over them.

There are also cynical Machiavellians who know better, of course. They are quite happy to exploit the bigoted to enhance their own wealth and power.

It is obscene that there’s even a question about the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act. And the Roberts Court may understand the potential public backlash. Consequently, some observers think the court will leave intact the critical Section 5 of the act that requires Justice Department pre-clearance of changes to voting laws in several states and jurisdictions. Instead, the Court will gut the Act by undoing Section 4, the formula for choosing the jurisdictions to which the VRA applies. This could allow the Court to try and escape the charge of overturning the VRA.

If we want to continue to gloat about being the world’s greatest democracy, we should be moving in the opposite direction. We should remove any and all barriers to voting by eligible citizens. The VRA should be expanded to cover the entire nation. We should expand early voting. Election day itself should be made a holiday. We should streamline registration efforts and allow for same-day registration or, better, automatically register all eligible Americans when they reach age 18. We should have real, universal voting standards that apply to all citizens no matter where they live.

The destiny of democracy is at stake, just as Johnson said it was in 1965. The recent assaults on voting rights across the country prove that the VRA is not obsolete, as the enemies of popular democracy argue. They prove that there are a good number of Americans who do not believe in democracy at all. We cannot let them prevail.

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Life Is a Carnival

Posted by on February 17, 2013 Comments Off

“We’re all in the same boat ready to float off the edge of the world.”

The Band

“Life is a carnival,” sang The Band, and I imagine the passengers stranded in the Gulf of Mexico aboard the cruise ship Splendor wished it weren’t so true. Or maybe truer. They couldn’t, despite the promise of the song, walk on water. Still, they were lucky. The meteor hit Siberia and not the Splendor, after all.

Chuck Shepherd began his syndicated “News of the Weird” column in 1988. I’ve always enjoyed tales like that of the bank robber who put is gun in the sack after the teller filled it with money, only to have the guard tell the hapless, suddenly disarmed criminal mastermind, “Excuse me sir, but could we please have our money back?”

Contemporary events, however, make me question the distinction between today’s news and “news of the weird.”

This was the week that Marco Rubio America added a water-bottle prop to the GOP’s Dickensian message to America: “Stay thirsty, my friends.” It was the week another GOPer, Ted “Carnival” Cruz of Texas channeled Joseph McCarthy in his innuendo-laden attacks on poor old Chuck Hagel.

I’ve run out of ways to apologize to the world for launching yet another dangerous clown upon the stage. Cruz is a dangerous man. Don’t let his wacky Agenda 21 paranoia fool you. He may really worry that the United Nations is preparing to take over America’s golf courses. There’s no Second Amendment right to bear golf clubs, but Cruz doesn’t care. So far in the Senate, his drives are hitting the greens just about every time. Weird indeed.

Cruz may be the real reason Rubio gulped. There’s not room for both Republicans in that party’s presidential parade. Cruz, in just a month, is the Tea Party’s new darling. Cruz thinks he should be president or maybe king of the world. The only thing more obvious than his moral depravity is his ambition.

Back to the news. On Valentine’s Day, Slate’s Mary Mycio published a piece on archeologists’ discovery of the world’s oldest known pornography. The frolicking folk in the rock carvings may be 3,000 years old. They were found in the westernmost region of China, but physical characteristics indicate the artists came from the West. California’s San Fernando Valley, probably.

Now, this is real news. To young-earth creationists the sexy rock carvings could have been around at the time of Noah’s Ark. Hell, it could have been one of the reasons the Ark was necessary, if you get my drift. Or, it could make history’s censors look like fools as a healthy love of sexy time seems to predate the first prig. We report. You decide.

This was also the week I got around to watching Argo. The Iran hostage crisis began in the fall of 1979, just two months after I went to work as a reporter for the Houston Chronicle. I covered a different bunch of imprisoned folk at the time – prisoners in the Texas Department of Corrections. The only television in Huntsville, Texas, came via cable. Upon moving into our new home, I hooked up the cable to see what would happen and it worked. I’m not sure I was ever billed. Those were the days.

Argo reminded me of the enormous impact the Iran hostage crisis had on the world, the nation and my life. It gets some of the credit for the defeat of Jimmy Carter and election of Ronald Reagan. And it didn’t just simply increase U.S. media awareness of the U.S. role in Mideast politics. It led to the creation of new media that has had, for better or worse, an enormous impact on how we consume the news.

Recall that ABC launched the news program, Nightline, just four days after the hostages were taken. CNN launched as the first 24-hour news program a few months later. Not long thereafter, Reagan eliminated the fairness doctrine from broadcast and right-wing radio was born.

We are, it seems, as adrift in the sea of news as the poor passengers aboard the Splendor were upon the waters of the Gulf. We can’t escape the carnival-like atmosphere of today’s news, weird or not. There is no farther shore. There is no Ark.

Life is a carnival, and I’m with The Band on this one:

“Take away, take away this house of mirrors

Give away, give away, all the souvenirs.”

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Houses of Cards

Posted by on February 10, 2013 Comments Off

House of Cards, the Netflix original series, just might be the best of a genre that ought to be called the “political sleezie.” Wildly entertaining, it stars Kevin Spacey as Congressman Frank Underwood and Robin Wright as his wife Claire. Majority Whip Underwood is so underhanded it makes you feel guilty that you almost root for him to succeed.

The term “house of cards” dates all the way back to John Milton in the 17th century and still means what Milton’s figurative phrase meant then: a flimsy, morally reckless structure that threatens to come down on the heads of its builders.

It’s not hard to see in recent history something like card house sprawl. Wall Street? Congress? Most state governments? Higher education? Public education? Bridges, dams, and levees? Cards are cheaper than brick, and in so much of what we do we look for the best return on the cheapest investment.

And beyond individual institutions the climate crisis, the ultimate huff and puff, is threatening our global Cathedral of Cards. Civilization that in our arrogance seemed so permanent is not so invincible after all.

“I’m just a lowly House majority whip,” the powerful Underwood says in House of Cards. “I keep things moving in a Congress choked by pettiness and lassitude. My job is to clear the pipes and keep the sludge moving.”

I doubt anyone will argue with that “choked by pettiness and lassitude” line. The approval rating of Congress is so low one wonders if they’re playing a comic game of limbo, forever bending backwards under a lower and lower bar.

I’m tempted to agree with Chamfort, who wrote, “The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.” But only tempted, because I’m not altogether certain there’s not another one coming some day soon.

Now that I think of it, the tone of House of Cards is much like that of Chamfort’s. Congressman Underwood drawls his stinging aphorisms with more than a little humor. He’s mad with power, but not so mad that he doesn’t recognize his own folly right along with the folly that surrounds him.

Does humor open our eyes to dangerous cynicism and help us find new ways, or does it just make us all the more cynical? I think it’s the former. Maybe I should say I think most of us think humor is at least a palliative if not a cure. But is it enough to awaken us before our houses of cards all fall down? Maybe.

Corruption is more contagious than a cold. When all around us begin to play cards with the future we join the game. Ask an honest business person if she likes the constant campaign shakedowns and bribe-driven political culture in America and she will likely say no. And mean it. But everybody’s doing it, and survival appears to depend upon it.

A biting humor can put the lie to that peer-driven passivity. I think it might even work better than tragedy because it’s not cathartic. It sticks in the throat.

I think the makers of House of Cards believe this too. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a comedy. But you can’t listen to Underwood’s sly observations on his own clever deceptions and machinations without smiling a little.

Kevin Spacey starred in a well-reviewed stage version of Shakespeare’s Richard III before filming House of Cards. That was good prep. But now that they’ve found poor Richard’s bones under an English car park, the hunchback king’s defenders are discovering new audiences for their revisionist view of Richard as a just ruler. All that evil stuff was just from attack ads from the Tudors.

And that’s what a show like House of Cards can do for us. It makes us look again, and maybe we’ll find some better angels before the grave.

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Revisionairies and Tooth Fairies

Posted by on February 3, 2013 Comments Off

PBS last week aired “The Revisionairies,” a remarkable documentary about the hard-right, creationist Christian takeover of the Texas state school board and its impact on the nation’s school textbooks. Texas’ student population is so large that publishers often push the state’s choices on the rest of the nation.

And what choices they are: the earth is 6,000 years old; diminished focus on the Civil Rights Movement; Thomas Jefferson is marginalized and John Calvin exalted. You’ll be happy to hear that more moderate folk are getting elected to the board. Then again, how could they not?

Not long after watching “The Revisionaries” I came across an article in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, “Abolish Social Studies” by Michael Knox Beran. In it Beran fantasizes about a century-long conspiracy to indoctrinate American children in “collectivism.” Teaching children to work and play well with others, is, in Beran’s nightmare world, just a bit short of teaching Maoism.

Not only Scott Foresman but other big scholastic publishers—among them Macmillan/McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—publish textbooks that dwell continually on the communal group and on the activities that people undertake for its greater good. Lessons from Scott Foresman’s second-grade textbook Social Studies: People and Places (2003) include “Living in a Neighborhood,” “We Belong to Groups,” “A Walk Through a Community,” “How a Community Changes,” “Comparing Communities,” “Services in Our Community,” “Our Country Is Part of Our World,” and “Working Together.”

Heaven forbid we should teach kids how to work together or point out that they probably live in neighborhoods. Teaching the importance of the greater good? The road to Stalinism, of course.

To state the obvious, there are thorny questions to be raised about the tricky relationship between the individual and society. The questions are hardly new. But the paranoia about some kind of collectivist conspiracy intent on destroying the individual is downright kooky.

The deep contradiction in the agendas of the Christian Right and the Randian fantasists is that while they claim to be subverting indoctrination, indoctrination is their method. Individual freedom is not their goal. It’s universal conformity to their pre-modern worldviews that they demand.

The success of the flat-earthers is due in large part to the fact that more sane people view their theories as so far-out that they aren’t taken seriously. For instance, how is it that the region surround NASA south of Houston has elected some of the most anti-science school board members (and Tom Delay, too!)? NASA’s scientists and engineers wouldn’t have become scientists and engineers if they’d been taught the anti-science curricula promoted by the Right.

It’s not apathy, exactly. Oddly, part of the answer lies in a persistent progressive faith that the pursuit of knowledge will always outrun its enemies. So, political choices can safely be made on other grounds. That’s a mistake. History has its dark times. There were, after all, the Middle Ages.

The fantasies of the every-man-is-an-island hyper-individualists are part of a general intellectual and cultural retrenchment that’s long been tugging against modernism and technological change. There are always those who believe in tooth fairies. They can’t contemplate a life without them.

So be it. But I wish they could stop characterizing their antagonists as monsters under American beds. They’d be happier people if they could pull it off. I’m not anti-religion. I am an individualist who believes in the obvious fact that we depend upon one another for survival. The greater good is a greater good that should be taught.

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Us Versus the Volcano

Posted by on January 20, 2013 Comments Off

I wish we could require all Americans – at least all decision-makers – to read Joseph Stiglitz’s new essay in the New York Times. Inequality is strangling us economically, politically, socially, he writes.

…with inequality at its highest level since before the Depression, a robust recovery will be difficult in the short term, and the American dream — a good life in exchange for hard work — is slowly dying.

The various Austerity Furies here and around the world are punishing the poor and middle class because…why? I think their economic theories are invented to hide their belief that human lives must be sacrificed to appease their invisible gods with the invisible hands. The Austerity Furies are like Biblical Jephthahs or Homeric Agamemnons, sacrificing their children with prehistoric ritualistic fervor.

The cultists are not disturbed by the failure of magical austerity in Europe. Hey, sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t. So throw a few more bodies into the economic volcano.

In his essay, Stiglitz details the consequences of inequality:

The most immediate is that our middle class is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically driven our economic growth.

This means the rich have captured enough of the nation’s wealth that their servants can no longer afford the hammers to build their masters’ mansions.

…the hollowing out of the middle class since the 1970s, a phenomenon interrupted only briefly in the 1990s, means that they are unable to invest in their future, by educating themselves and their children and by starting or improving businesses.

This points to the creation of a permanent peasant class. The one percenters have become economic termites eating away at the foundations of their wealth.

…the weakness of the middle class is holding back tax receipts, especially because those at the top are so adroit in avoiding taxes and in getting Washington to give them tax breaks… Low tax receipts mean that the government cannot make the vital investments in infrastructure, education, research and health that are crucial for restoring long-term economic strength.

When you throw people into a volcano what you get are burned people. No gods appear to build your roads and bridges or educate your kids. The Austerity Furies believe the failure doesn’t prove the failure of their magical thinking, it just means they haven’t thrown enough bodies into the fire.

…inequality is associated with more frequent and more severe boom-and-bust cycles that make our economy more volatile and vulnerable.

This means that the magical thinking isn’t just failing, it’s causing the very problems the human sacrifices are supposed to solve.

The question is, what is to be done about the cultists? It’s very likely that democracy cannot survive the Austerity Furies as anything like a fair and open experiment in self-government. So something must be done, but what?

First, the cultists have to be exposed for what they are. Too many in the media are happy to describe them as advocates of a legitimate economic theory. They are invested with good intentions they do not have. What they mean to do is punish and sacrifice people in the superstitious hope that the gods will turn austerity into prosperity. That’s not going to happen, and we need to say so to everyone we meet.

Also, sad to say, many folks seem willing to throw themselves into the volcano. Hopes are vain that we can enlighten these people through appeals to the “rational self-interest”. The self-immolating can’t hear such arguments because they come wrapped in a language they do not know.

We need them to understand that they’ve been duped by the Austerity Furies, and painting vivid pictures of the cultists is a first step in getting that done. Stiglitz’s essay helps in that task.

Photo by Kahunapule Michael Johnson under Creative Commons license

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The Perils of Media Parallax

Posted by on January 13, 2013 Comments Off

It is by now a commonplace to note that the world as presented to us by various media is not the world of flesh, blood, earth, fire, water and air. Media reality is altered, making the use of the term “media parallax” fitting as it comes from the Greek parallaxis, meaning “alteration.”

The parallax effect can be used to get a more accurate picture of reality. Look at an object with one eye closed. Then look again with the other eye closed. Neither mono-view gives an accurate representation. Humans have two eyes and use parallax for greater depth perception and a more accurate view of the world.

Media flatten our natural stereoscopic view of reality. We get a singular perspective. This is, in part, a technological consequence. But it also involves the way media is used.

In news reporting, he-said/she-said “balanced” reporting gives us two views, neither one accurate. It’s like the eye experiment above. We get a view with one eye closed and then a view with the other eye closed. We see one Cyclops arguing with another Cyclops.

I got to thinking about this after re-reading a couple of books by Jack Kerouac recently and re-calling the tragedy of his life. Whatever his personal difficulties, they were exacerbated by the distortions of his celebrity. Neither detractors nor worshippers got him right. They were just tribes with different blind eyes. The video above shows the author being interviewed by Steve Allen in 1959. I used it because Allen was an intelligent man and the interview is, by today’s standards, responsible and informative. Even so, the Kerouac presented is not Jack Kerouac. He is a Kerouac from an alternative universe.

Ignoring the obvious pain this caused Kerouac, the example of his media displacement is a rather benign one. Today’s celebrities sometimes suffer from the same pain, but most have adapted to living life in at least two worlds.  In many ways, it’s their specific job. They are paid to inhabit multiple worlds.

The dangers of media parallax become dire when we turn to more critical issues. With one eye closed, society can’t know where the cliffs are, to use a current favorite metaphor. What can we do about this?

We all share in the dilemma, and it’s not enough to pretend to be above it all and blame various journalists or media. I certainly can’t blame Steve Allen for the alternative Kerouac we saw on his show. It was an easygoing, even supportive, segment. It is the case, of course, that many media have learned to market the one-eyed view. They are exploiting, irresponsibly, a hard-wired media characteristic.

We can’t begin to seriously address the dangers to the earth of a warming climate until we can get the stereoscopic view in full context. How do we do that?

I think it requires a far more responsible approach to both media production and consumption. We are at the end of a media era that resembled a land rush. It was so easy to make money in the media. It was so easy to enjoy its first fruits. It was so easy that we didn’t pause to consider what it would mean to responsibly inhabit this new world.

The flattening and altering of reality by media is, as noted, at least partly a technological problem. We have to take substantive steps to overcome it. We have to educate ourselves about our blindness. We have to seek out broader perspective and construct accurate contexts for ourselves. Citizens are going to have to be taught how to do this, and it’s a fair question to ask whether an educational system controlled by politicians who succeed through media distortions will ever be allowed to teach us to pierce the illusions.

Those who work in media also have to recognize the distorting effects and do whatever they can to overcome them. I know many journalists who try to do so. Many don’t get much help from their employers. Others simply follow old habits.

I’m tempted to say we ought to put on our flats screens a warning like those placed on cigarette packs. “This Is Not Reality, But Just A One-Eyed View Of It.” Something like that.

Much of postmodern culture and communications theory taught that a limited perspective is all that’s ever available to human’s limited vision and intelligence. That may be true, but it doesn’t mean we can’t mitigate the limitations somewhat.  We can do more to see reality as it is. The dangers we face make it a moral imperative to do so.

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Of Cancer and Crony Capitalism in Texas

Posted by on December 9, 2012 Comments Off

It is a growing scandal that could forever change Texas politics. As national political players look toward turning red Texas blue, something that would put the electoral college out of Republicans’ reach for years, many see the scandal as the beginning of the end of GOP dominance in Texas.

Republican Gov. Rick Perry and his cronies in and out of public office have diverted funds intended for cutting-edge cancer research into the campaign pockets of Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. You read that right. Proceeds from millions in taxpayer-backed bonds awarded by the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) have fallen victim to corruption and cronyism. Cronies get the state money; the cronies give some of the money back to Perry and others.

The agency might better be named the Crony Capitalist Research Institute as searches for cancer prevention, treatment and cure are sacrificed to the feeble political ambitions of a few petty politicians and greedy plutocrats. It is hard to imagine a greater moral failing. Unless, of course, you remember that Perry and his cronies are the very same people fighting against the expansion of Medicaid and the creation of health care exchanges under the Affordable Care Act. People are going to get sick and die because of the actions of Perry and others. That is not hyperbole or political spin.

CPRIT is the nation’s second largest source of cancer research money, behind only the federal government. Texas voters approved the agency’s bonding authority in November 2007 (a few days later, wannabe recipients of the largesse were lavishng money on Perry and Dewhurst). The agency could spend $3 billion over ten years.

In a series of explosive articles, the Dallas Morning News has revealed that many of the grants went to Perry and Dewhurst’s allies and donors. The agency’s scientists that review grant proposals have resigned in protest. Those actions have already made the scandal news in international science journals like the well-respected Nature.

Amid calls for state and federal criminal investigations (I filed one of the state complaints under the auspices of Progress Texas PAC), agency officials are scrambling. Now it has been revealed that key emails among those officials have disappeared. That is a sign that evidence is being destroyed and that a coverup is underway.

The players involved include such stalwart Perry-ites as James Leininger and Jimmy Mansour. They have also been central players in the right wing’s nationwide effort to privatize public education. Even though he once held stock in a company that received CPRIT funding, Mansour remains chairman of the agency’s Oversight Committee. Other Oversight Committee members include Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and State Comptroller Susan Combs. Perry, Dewhurst and the Texas House Speaker appoint the others.

For his part, Speaker Joe Straus appears concerned and has ordered up a committee investigation of the scandal. But because of the deep involvement of the state’s top Republican officeholders and the power they wield over the Legislature, it is doubtful that anyone in state government will accomplish much.

That is especially true of CPRIT officials. They – including Mansour – are very busy executing a public relations plan that has them posing as outraged champions of reform. In fact, they, along with Perry, are the source of the scandal. They are not going to turn themselves in.

That is why federal and state authorities must launch investigations of their own. Forget the politics. The diversion of money intended to for the fight against cancer is a moral crime that cannot stand. If state and federal laws have been broken, the culprits have to be brought to justice.

The Dallas Morning News video above gives a thumbnail version of the growing scandal. I would also encourage you to read articles here, here and here.

This scandal opens a window into the crony capitalists’ privatization mania. What will happen to public education when the greedy and morally unmoored get their hands on taxpayer money through school privatization? Or through Medicare vouchers? Or Social Security private accounts?

If these people will sacrifice victims of cancer to further their own wealth and power, it is doubtful they’ll resist the temptation to destroy education or raid our earned savings and health care insurance. If crimes have been committed, maybe the perps will get to spend some time in a private prison. That might end privatization mania forever.

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Give the Texas Secessionists a Boat!

Posted by on November 25, 2012 Comments Off

Buh-bye

Talk of secession is heating up again in Texas. I know, I know, many of you are thinking, “Adios, mofos.” I can’t say I blame you. But, there are some of us here behind the curtain of ignorance (otherwise known as the Red, Sabine rivers) that need your prayers.

There’s a part of me that wishes the yahoos could have their own place, call it Yahooville. I’d like to watch them try to get along with one another and with the world. Imagine their dream state: no public education, no science, everyone is armed, and everyone is home schooled to obey their immediate supervisor (parent, boss, secret policeman) and to distrust everyone else.

I’d like to tell you this recent brush with insanity has nothing to do with race. Can’t. It has everything to do with the presence of a non-white person in the White House. Most of the folks rant about a federal government while picking up their Social Security checks or getting their parents or grandparents help through Medicare or Medicaid.

They don’t know Obamacare from lawn care. It’s the name that throws them. And it wasn’t long ago they were all yippeeing themselves over President George W. Bush, a president that drove the country deep into a debt that they never gave a hoot about until a black man was in charge of it.

Now, Governor Rick Perry started this nonsense, of course. A couple of years ago he spoke of secession in glowing terms. Now he’s repudiating the little know-nothings he created in his image as if he had nothing to do with the phenomenon. So it goes.

The thing is, it is a decided minority of Texans that talk this nonsense. Please believe me, although I know you see a lot of evidence to the contrary. Texas is a wondrous place. It’s part of the South. It’s part of the West. It’s part of the Great Plains. We went to the moon. We have Willie Nelson.

We also have a great bunch of hard-working, compassionate people who deserve better than to be thrown a bunch of paranoid, bigoted loonies. The greedy feed the loonies to keep Texans distracted while they loot the treasury. It’s not a new story, although it remains a sad one. The distractions work. Republicans I know secretly hate the fact that their club is now run by the nuts. But then, they were happy enough to make common cause with the nuts to put themselves in power.

So, when the secessionists make you think about throwing this particular tub of bathwater out the window, remember, some of us are the babies.

I’d entertain thoughts of giving the crazies the Panhandle. But there are good people in the Panhandle, too, and I hate to seem them jettisoned from the Union on a whim.

But here’s another thought. How about a big damned boat? Why don’t we give the secessionists their own giant cruise ship. They can then go where they want and be men-without-a-country together.

That’s the thing. These idiots think of themselves as patriots, when the only thing they really worship is their own sorry selves. The more I think of it, the better I like the boat idea.

A different kind of Boat People. There’s a certain symmetry in that I could grow to appreciate.

Photo by ecstaticist under Creative Commons license.

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A Hostess Brands World

Posted by on November 18, 2012 Comments Off

Twinkies!

As a kid, I ate my share of Hostess Twinkies. I wasn’t a big fan of the chocolate cupcakes, which gave me an odd and disagreeable buzz. Twinkies provided a mellow yellow high and, I’m sure, a shorter lifespan. I now live with the unhappy knowledge that the endless boat row-row-rowing of my youthful immortality was but a dream.

Twinkies are deadly, siren-filled islands in the stream. If lucky, the bonds will hold me tightly to the mast. I must not be the only one to resist the seductive Twinkie tune because Hostess has been forced to shutter its ovens and its corporate cubicles, too.

The closing of Hostess is a moment of some importance in our cultural history. Some in the news try to tell us that General Petraeus’ sex life is more important. Humbug. A person of power having illicit sex is a dog bites man story. Hostess going down is proof that in this universe things fall apart and the creamy center does not hold.

The company, which has more than $860 million in debt to Bain-like private equity firms, is letting the vulture capitalists cake-walk and blaming the bakers union. I guess blaming the candlestick makers was too far-fetched.

It’s easy to criticize Hostess for the great hoax of selling us confections full of fat and sugar and devoid of any positive nutritional value. As a symbol of this American life, though, I think the Twinkie is almost as good as the bald eagle. The latter is not as predatory as Hostess or the private equity firms that sank it. And, while America’s not dressing up as eagles, just about everyone in politics, entertainment and news is imitating the Twinkie.

Is it possible that Hostess is a harbinger? Could it be that America will soon reject its cotton-candy culture as it has rejected Ding Dongs?

The obsession with the Petraeus affair is not a good sign. The General’s fall from grace is already receiving more attention than what threatens to become a multi-generational American war in Afghanistan. Where is Saint Popeye when we need him? Here we are again, swallowing sacks of sugar and ignoring our spinach.

In America, if something sells, it is good and moral, as are the misleading advertisements that tell us just how good it is. That’s as true of cigarettes as it is of Twinkies, the Ford Pinto or DDT. Sugar and fat sell. And we wonder what the Devil does with his time…

American mass culture is a sugar castle in the sand. When the seas rise, it might simply dissolve. What, then, is to be done?

There is some cause for hope. I never thought kale would be a big seller, but it is. A good many people have quit smoking. Cars are safer, even if the atmosphere they warm isn’t. Still, I don’t think anyone will soon succeed with a Popeye-like spinach pitch in the office towers of our cultural elite. If the ghost of Ed Murrow came back, they’d probably just cast him in a remake of “Topper.”

The insidious thing about cultural superficiality is that the easiest escape from it is more cultural superficiality. I feel guilty about eating a Twinkie, panic ensues, the need for comfort and escape grows, so I eat another Twinkie. The more we hear about the Kardashians, the more we gotta hear about the Kardashians.

However, Hostess has fallen. Will the Kardashians be next? Will cream-filled news give way to healthy discussions of issues that matter?

I don’t know. No more Twinkies, though, and I think I’ll just take it one day at a time.

Photo by Larry D. Moore under Creative Commons license.

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Mars Attacks: Notes on the 2012 Campaign

Posted by on November 4, 2012 Comments Off

Assuming that interpretations of the Mayan calendar are wrong and the world won’t end on December 21, the presidential campaign of 2012 is about as close as we’re going to come to end-times mania. Maybe I should say “depressia.”

Mitt Romney’s campaign of lies seemed stuck on an an adjective accelerator, from big to bigger to biggest. Maybe the latter was his claim that President Obama bankrupted Chrysler which was now moving all Jeep jobs to China. Maybe it was that he opposed overturning Roe v. Wade. The accelerator moves too quickly to judge.

However the election turns out, Romney took the legacy press to something of a crisis point (or a teaching moment if we want to be kind). What is a reporter to do when one candidate just rejects reality, all previous statements and well-known facts? In a real way the Romney campaign and its operatives were saying a free press no longer matters. Political campaigns have always stretched the truth, of course. And presidents have lied. But I don’t remember a campaign of the past whose very premise was the Lie. It’s as if Romney’s real campaign message was, “I’ll Lie for You.”

The campaign, from start to finish, seemed more like a sack race in an asylum than a contest for the leader of the Free World. Remember those Republican debates? Remember when Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s “oops” moment was big news? All the GOP hopefuls were so afraid of America’s Hard Right that they came close to advocating the summary executions of everyone suspected of being less than a papers-carrying citizen. Maybe they did, but since memory is now the first victim of the modern political campaign, I can’t recall.

The manic behavior didn’t start or stop with loony candidates. This is the first presidential election I’ve gone through while participating in the Twitterverse. As a source of news, Twitter was terrific. I was able to follow some of the writers and analysts I respect.

I have to confess, however, that Twitter simply wore me out. It was the party I couldn’t leave ’cause it always seemed there was one more pretty fact about to sashay into the club. One hundred and forty characters passing by me at the speed of light was often more than I could take. It was like looking for the One True Sentence written on a ping pong ball being slammed back and forth by world champion ping pong players.

Also written on the plastic balls were one million polls, each of them with one million interpreters. By the end I longed for the days of the single ping pong ball, because it seemed to me I was now being asked to learn the current political landscape by reading regression analyses on the churning plastic balls of a lottery machine.

Did I mention that in the middle of all this the Republican Party decided to go all in on voter suppression? The GOP launched a serious effort to return to the 19th century when non-whites, women and property-poor Americans were denied the right to vote. They aren’t even hiding it. It’s like the Campaign of Lies. They dare America to call them what they are, figuring that what they are is so extreme that few will believe it if someone takes the dare.

Then there was the massive press over-reaction to Obama’s flat performance in the first debate. Judging from the coverage, you would have thought Obama, behind a Nixonian five o’clock shadow and a sweaty upper lip, had compared himself to JFK and said “oops” after claiming that pre-1989 Eastern Europe wasn’t under Soviet domination. But Obama didn’t make any substantive mistakes. He was just uninspiring. “Meth” Romney, on the other hand, gave a Red Bull performance that was downright scary. If he’d acted like that sitting next to me in a bar I would have left the place in a hurry.

Another word about this. Obama’s performance was poor, no doubt about it. However, if a magician had appeared in America and made all the post-debate cable pundits disappear (a guy can dream, can’t he?), I don’t believe the polls would have moved an inch. Romney got a bounce from the exaggerated press analyses, not the debate. I know, I know, I’m splitting hairs here because there is no distinction between debate and post-debate. It is all one circus. Political journalists are the stars of debates because for those brief shining moments the campaign is not a campaign billions of dollars in television commercials that penetrate the psyches of voters without intervention from the press. The press is back in charge.

I get the sense that the collective soul of America understands that our democracy is about as secure as the permafrost. Oh, and speaking of global warming, how can there be a presidential campaign in 2012 that completely ignores the greatest danger humankind has ever faced? Really? America was once worried that Russian subs would come up the Mississippi River and, I dunno, poison our precious bodily fluids or something. Americans like to be scared. Why don’t they like to be scared of the looming environmental catastrophe? Maybe because it is not a movie they can walk back to their cars from after the lights come up.

Among my favorite characters in this season-long disaster of a campaign are those pundits and players who keep channeling Jack Nicholson from Mars Attacks. “Why can’t we all just get along?” Well, for just one reason, we don’t want to. On one side are authoritarians happy to bring back racial segregation, gender inequality, poor houses and forced child labor. On the other side are people who, well, don’t want those things. (I wish our side was a little better at messaging than this. But oh well, once our team gave up so many draft choices in order to get the truth on our side, we were bound to face some disadvantages.)

Actually, I think there a many, perhaps a majority, of regular Republican folk who don’t really share the extremist views of those in control of their party and their political campaigns. But they have been intimidated into silence. There are no extremists on the Left with the voice and power of extremists on the Right. That’s a false equivalency advanced by journalists afraid they will be attacked if they point truthfully to the real villains.

I don’t know. All I can do is struggle to see the messages written on the ping pong balls. Sometimes I think Mars has already attacked. And won.

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Sandy and the Election

Posted by on October 28, 2012 Comments Off

"Hurricane" Photo by Chalky Lives (Flikr)

What matters more, the right to vote or adherence to local voting rules and schedules even if a force of nature intrudes? We might find out the answer to that question if a perfect storm disrupts voting in the Northeast or Midwest or both.

As a twitter follower reminded me, in 2000 the U.S. Supreme Court basically decided that the right to vote was secondary to process. Of course, the Court’s political desire to appoint George W. Bush was so obvious the justices took the trouble of stating that their opinion could not be used as precedent.

Hurricane Sandy is expected to hit the coast and then duke it out with two winter storm systems coming at it head-on from the north and west. The timing and duration of the storm – and the devastation that could be left in its wake – will determine how much the will be disrupted. Coping with such a disaster’s impact on voting may prove difficult since election administration is left largely to individual states. One state might extend the time for voting while another does not.

The bad weather is also running into a perfect political storm as Republicans in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia pull out all the stops to disenfranchise as many Democratic voters as they can. Let’s say GOP election officials in Ohio do what they’ve done in the past and put one voting machine in Democratic areas for every three machines they put in Republican precincts. The point of this tactic is to cause long lines and delays for Democrats. Now imagine voters have to endure those lines in the wind, wet and cold. Maybe their homes are flooded. Maybe their electricity is still off. Maybe they are running short of food and water.

If it takes a lifeboat to get to the polls after one’s already been evacuated to an emergency shelter, what then? This is, at the moment, just a thought experiment. But it’s one we should think about now, not later.

The Republicans’ voter suppression efforts make clear what they will argue if weather becomes a barrier to voting – especially if it looks like enough folks will be kept from the polls that Romney and/or other GOP down ballot candidates look like they are ahead. The result is shipwrecked democracy.

The Right has always been about getting and maintaining power. Authority is their imperative. Popular democracy is their enemy. Try as they might to disguise it, they really believe that only those that agree with them should have voting rights. Everyone who disagrees with them is less than a citizen.

Texas Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott, one of the nation’s greatest enemies of voting rights, has gone so far as to threaten foreign election observers with arrest and criminal prosecution if they show up at the polls. What does Abbott want to hide?

Well, that’s obvious. Once again, right-wing vigilantes will be out in force challenging and intimidating African-American and Hispanic voters. The courts enjoined the new Texas voter ID law, but you can bet GOP election officials and their election-watcher thugs will be telling voters they need a picture ID anyway.

The AP poll released this weekend showed that a majority of Americans hold a bigoted view of African-Americans. This explains, in part, the conscious or unconscious rationalizations of the Right’s anti-democratic voter suppression efforts. People are divided into human and sub-human categories, and it becomes the imperative for those who place themselves in the human category to make damn sure they are in charge of the sub-human.

I don’t think the voter suppressors think they are doing something wrong. They think they are carrying out their moral responsibility. You can see it in their gazes of superiority. So just imagine, when Nature intervenes and does a little of the work of suppression for them, what will they think? They’ll think it is the natural world confirming their beliefs about their own superiority.

America is not polarized around issues of health care, education or jobs. It is divided – profoundly and maybe irrevocably divided – among those who believe their superiority demands their authority over others and egalitarians who believe us all deserving of equal recognition and opportunity.

We do not have to wait for this perfect political storm to arrive. It arrived long ago. It is time the press and pundit class saw the storm for what it is and quit pretending everyone is an egalitarian democrat in their hearts. Today it looks life half of America likes democracy only when they control enough of it to guarantee the outcomes they seek. Otherwise, democracy must be subverted in the name of their Natural Superiority.

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Of Freedom and Bridges

Posted by on October 21, 2012 Comments Off

Photo by Boston Public Library

Republicans believe the elimination of the commons will make Americans free in ways they aren’t today. We will soar once we are freed from the chains of public education, crossable bridges and drivable roads, from the curse of clean air and clean, drinkable water, from the prison-house of effective disease control and safe pharmaceuticals.

These are some of the things that citizens provide for one another through the agency of government. That fact is a drivable bridge too far for the moral worldview of many conservatives. In their view, freedom has two elements: it is all about the individual, not the community; and it is possible only within a hierarchical, authoritarian framework. In other words, freedom is the freedom to obey.

I spent the weekend in Dallas with George Lakoff in front of several different audiences. In each, the topic of freedom came up.

Lakoff notes, importantly and accurately, that public education issues are issues of freedom. “You can’t be free if you haven’t learned about the world and your possibilities in that world,” Lakoff said. He goes on to note that you can’t have a successful business without court-enforced contract law. You can’t be free if you risk death every time you open a can of beans.

American democracy is based upon the value of mutual care. We decided that for any one of us to prosper (and be free), all of us must have the opportunity to prosper. If this seems like common sense to you, you have a progressive moral worldview.

Progressives believe in both personal and social responsibility. Conservatives reject social responsibility. In a perverse twist, they believe that everyone benefits when the predatory and the pampered are allowed to scoop up all the wealth without regulation or restriction. By such is the Moral Hierarchy maintained. As a portrait of the pure conservative, this is not exaggeration or parody.

As you might imagine, the consequences of the triumph of this worldview would be devastating. Wait, we don’t have to imagine them. Look what the so-called “austerity” budgets in Europe have done to actual living people. The pain is horrific. By the moral lights of progressives, the princes of power and finance in Great Britain, Germany and elsewhere are simply evil when they promise that joblessness, poverty and poor health make their people more free and secure the long-term public good.

Even more troubling to me are those people who don’t really hold completely to the conservative worldview but are willing to abandon their more compassionate values out of fear. These are the people lifting Mitt Romney from, say, no more than 30 percent of the vote to half the vote.

In this context, let me once again raise the topic of public education. At the peril of democracy, we underestimate the selfish motivations behind the conservative push to close down public schools and turn education over to private corporations. And that is what they want to do. Once they have pushed passed a certain point, there will be no return to the kind of public education Americans have enjoyed for decades. Here’s why.

Take millions of students out of public schoolrooms and it won’t be long before the infrastructure of public schools will shrink. School buildings will be sold to private companies. They’ll be turned into pizza parlors or car lots. Even if all America should awaken to the extraordinary reduction of opportunity and equality, rebuilding the public school system will be nearly impossible.

Conservatives know that such consequences would be unpopular if they spoke of them. So they don’t. That means it’s up to us. It means, as Lakoff has been telling us for years, that we have to publicly advocate the progressive moral view behind public education, behind our commitment to one another through maintenance of the commons.

I once thought that was just a matter of good politics. I now believe it is a matter of survival.

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