In an essay in the February 2006 issue of Harpers, Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, reviews Bernard Goldberg's 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken is #37) and, in the process, makes some enlightening points about the conservative movement and political culture in general that got me thinking...
Being a bit of a political junkie myself, I've observed the last 10 years or so with a mixture of bewilderment and disgust. As the country's dominant political discourse has shifted to the right, I've seen the proliferation of indignant political anger as a norm - not the exception, read the flame wars raging over political minutia in the blogosphere, and shook my head at the rise of "blame politics". The last straw for me was the indifference, by both the mainstream media and the candidate himself, to the "Swift Boating" of John Kerry's military record during the 2004 presidential campaign - the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth being a "non-profit" group that slandered Kerry's war record with no pretense to accuracy. Kerry, of course, felt the accusations so venal that it was beneath him to respond, but the charges, as baseless as they were, were repeated in the MSM as fact for weeks until, too late of course, Kerry fought back. The damage was done and he went on to lose the Oval Office by the slimmest of margins. Frank's essay links the brutal attack politics personified by the Swift Boat group to a larger trend in American culture: the love of spectacle of over substance.
Frank says that this is the logical conclusion of the television era: "Just as speech trumps deeds, so do individuals trump larger social forces. In the world of the right, as in the world of television, personalities rule." One only has to see the effectiveness of George W. Bush's never ending vacation struggles with the brush on his Crawford, TX ranch as proof of this--Bush clearing brush makes for a good picture, but where does all of the brush come from? Is clearing all of it necessary? The answer is of course not - it's merely image making, reality subsumed to political theatre. I myself marvel at W.'s ability to get away with Orwellian labels like the Fresh Air Initiative, which makes the skies dirtier, the No Child Left Behind Act, which leaves many children behind, the Healthy Forests Initiative, which encourages forests to be chopped down, and, the cherry on the cake, his continued vows to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after hurricane Katrina while devoting little to no funding for this rebuilding. The sad fact is that by erecting smokescreens of civility (Compassionate Conservatism, Last Throes), conservatives can hide the elephant in the room - the fact that their policies intentions and goals are widely divergent from, and often directly opposite of, what they claim they are. The reason for this is, as Frank says, "...Entertainment is news. Speech trumps deeds. Sitcoms trump stock markets. Gangsta rap trumps gangsters. Trite phrases that take people a few seconds to utter on television are more important then an act of Congress, the growth and destruction of industries, the movements of armies at war." How did this come to be? It doesn't take a lot of reading to learn the truth behind these facades, and I've been amazed that people - intelligent, normal people that are no fools - either don't see through the ruse or support W's brand of Republicanism due to loyalty to a pet issue (be it abortion, religion, tax breaks for the wealthy, or, misguided souls, believe that W. actually believes in limited government). As Thomas Pynchon famously put it: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."1
If you look at politics in this light, the success of W.'s cynical approach becomes understandable. In a world of ADD, the message that slips into enough consciousnesses winds, and W. has shown, if nothing else, a real skill for communicating his catch phrases to the masses. It helps explain why Bill Clinton's Monica scandal garnered infinitely more attention then the Bush administration's numerous misdeeds: it had a great tag line (Bimbo Blows the President!) and involved sex - always ratings gold. W's scandals are harder to understand, require a knowledge of all the facts (many of which are just starting to come to light as of this writing), and time to understand the Byzantine interconnections of corrupt Washington culture. The news media - the Mainstream Media (MSM) in the chic phrasing - can't fit these stories in to an easy storyline or catchphrase, so it (sometimes) mentions them in passing and moves on to the latest Bradgelina revelation. Since the MSM is now profit driven (note about due to deregulation?), market forces drive the news agenda, and since nobody wants a downer story after a hard day at work (unless it inspires indignant anger, but that's another story...), we get convenient soundbites rather then serious analysis. We get gossip in place of policy. Frank again: "Each little hit-piece flickers by, the previous installment's outrage instantly forgotten, the staggering, mind-stopping contradictions flowing without narrative consequence."
(At least on the national level. Local politics, due to its small scale and reliance on face-to-face contact rather then through television, can be quite different. One need look no farther then Vermont's Bernie Sanders for an example of a local politician who combines not only subtlety but also honesty, and in doing so, has become wildly successful with not only fellow liberals - he labels himself a Democratic Socialist - but also the reddest of the red conservatives in Northeastern Vermont. But that's a tale for another day.)
So how to fix this problem? How to reverse this crumbling of cause and effect, the unwillingness or inability to analyze things as they really are, not as they are presented to us? There are a few paths out there. The first one says that the most important thing is power - it is only because the conservatives are powerful (i.e., control all three branches of government) that they can get away with things. Many liberals feel that the number one goal is to remove the conservatives from power, and that to achieve this, the liberals must use their own tactics against them - i.e., create a liberal Fox news, a liberal Rush Limbaugh, etc. After all, as Tzvetan Todorov writes: "... intransigence has always defeated tolerance."2 Once the conservative grip on power is loosened, liberals can go about not only correcting the misdeeds of the recent years but also constructing a new method of politics (usually from the grassroots) that does not rely on misdirection and untruths. One of the best blogs out there, dailykos.com, promotes this idea all the time. This realpolitik leaves me cold; not only do I suspect that using the cynical Rovian tactics would make us no better then they are, but I doubt the integrity of any politician to get to power using a tactic and then vow to stop using it. But while I'm suspect of this scorched earth approach, I tire of seeing the best, most honest candidates out there - John McCain, Howard Dean, and, yes, John Kerry - fall victim to viscous attack politics. I think that if Kerry had quickly and forcefully attacked the Swift Boat attacks when they first arose, he could have received the extra few thousand votes he needed to win the election.
The second method, and the one I prefer, is to teach people take the time to question what they are being told. As the bumper sticker sez, Question Authority. Before W. came to power, I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh so that I could hear what the other side was saying about him and the Democrats. (And he would make some good points too, but they were filtered through such awful righteous indignation that it quickly became unpalatable when his "team" was in power.) Only once people realize the truth of what their government is doing in their name - divorced from the smokescreen of political spin - will their be a public outcry to hold these public servants to their misdeeds. Americans must learn how to question, and force honest answers from, the architects of W.'s cynical policies.
Of course, waiting for the MSM to contribute to an honest discourse will prove to be a long wait. Sweets sell more then bitters, and the MSM is too focused on presenting "soft news" while grubbing for ratings to focus on any sort of objective or reality-based reporting. No, we must learn to welcome alternative viewpoints. Sources I've found for alternative views are the Economist, the UK Weekly that is like a Wall Street Journal in that it's conservative and mainly focused on money and stock markets, but also has a wide range of reporting that honestly attempts to present both sides of the issue without remaining"objective". It doesn't hurt that that, not being American, they don't have a dog in the fight. A good devils advocate for the Bush administration is Paul Krugman, an economist writing for the New York Times OpEd page, although his writings have recently disappeared behind a pay wall which render them basically useless for the average person. However, these few bright points aside, alternative viewpoints to the parrot media -- CNN, the major networks, etc. -- are not readily available, you have to search them out.
Which brings me to a third approach to introducing reality back into politics: simply slow... things... down. To have people take the time to pay attention to what they are being told. Why do people want their news in bite-sized Metro blurbs, with no real analysis at all? Is it that people are implicitly lazy? I refuse to think so - I think that the pace of modern life is such that one is left with no time for the details, so the demand for drive-thru quickie fat-free low-carb alternatives grows, until there are no MSM alternatives unless you actively seek them out... Now, being a train commuter, I completely understand the speed in which the world moves today, and sympathize with those who feel harried enough without having the responsibility to question their government's motives thrust upon them, but why can't this be a realistic goal? One could argue that our children already see the agendas behind everything they are taught, a major factor behind that generation's stereotype of being noncommittal about everything. (I believe this is part of the reason behind the obsession with not being a sellout in indie rock, or "Keeping it Real" in the Hip Hop community, for example.) I don't think these folks are unmotivated or uncommitted, I just don't think they are inspired by anybody when they can see the blatant agendas behind everything. As Yeats sez: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity."3
Frank makes some great points about the status of the modern media today. I believe that people have to start realizing that the large companies - the real powers in the United States today - are banking on keeping us plugged into the MSM stream, using our money to buy their products on their technology financed by their credit, keeping us so diverted with made-up controversies that the real crimes that are taking place right under our noses go completely unrealized. (As Stephen Colbert puts it: "You American workers haven't seen a increase in real wages since the 1970s ... But are you rioting? No. You're voting for Republican candidates who give people like me tax cuts. You know what? I think that's your way of saying 'thank you.'") Until average people wake up, learn about what's happening, and vote based on their true interests, things are only going to get worse, no matter what political party is in power.
1. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow. Penguin, New York, NY 1995.
2. Tzvetan Todorov, p. 106. The Conquest of America. HarperCollins, New York, NY. 1985.
3. William Butler Yeats. From The Second Coming. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, Revised. edited by Richard J. Finneran. 1294. Scribner.
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