Month: September 2009

30,000 angry, suggestible victims

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This film was produced and edited by New Left Media’s Chase Whiteside (interviewer) and Erick Stoll (camera operator). Critics might suggest that they cherry-picked for the stupidest people they could find. That might be true. Nonetheless, it speaks to a larger phenomenon best described by Matt Taibbi at Smirking Chimp:

After all, the reason the winger crowd can’t find a way to be coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. That’s why even people like Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over. Beck pointedly compared the AIG protesters to Bolsheviks: “[The Communists] basically said ‘Eat the rich, they did this to you, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” He then said the AIG and G20 protesters were identical: “It’s a different style, but the sentiments are exactly the same: Find ‘em, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” Beck has an audience that’s been trained that the rich are not appropriate targets for anger, unless of course they’re Hollywood liberals, or George Soros, or in some other way linked to some acceptable class of villain, to liberals, immigrants, atheists, etc. — Ted Turner, say, married to Jane Fonda.

But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.

This isn’t new in America – the art of public relations (now known as “corporate communications” – the PR people changed the name) is misdirection. Yes, ordinary people are angry. Yes, they are being fucked over. Yes, they know this …. and yet, as noted in the film, when it comes down to specifics, well, they really aren’t sure why. Just who.

It is true that there is racism as a subtext here, but that’s an expression of fear, nothing more. All of us hold out some reservations about other races- it’s part of our makeup. Setting this aside, the key here is that anger is cleverly channeled away from the true culprits – the Wall Street barons who so recently mugged us, the insurance companies who are leaching on our health care system, and the public relations (corporate communications) industry whose propaganda is the Vaseline that eases the pain of rape.

Retraction

Either here or in a comment at some other blog, I regretfully referred to the march in Washington, DC over the weekend of 9/12-9/13 as the “60,000 moron march.”

That remark was not original with me. Someone else said it first, and I thought it was really clever.

I’ve been chastened and corrected, and I humbly apologize. Apparently, the number of morons was somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000.

The Ballad of Jessica Lynch

We went to a talk last night by Jon Krakauer, author of three best sellers, Into Thin Air, Into the Wild, and Under the Banner of Heaven. Unknown to me, Krakauer is a Boulder resident. He will surely invite us over once he learns that a blogger has moved to his town. If not, we’ll have him over, right after David Barsamian, from whom we also expect a call.

Krakauer’s latest book is “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman“. It looks interesting, and as with any story involving the Pentagon, he found much, much more to that story than has been told. There are lies, lies about the lies, and lies about the lies about the lies, and military men who know that their careers are over if they say anything that is true. It will be a fun book, I’m sure, and just as interesting when it comes out in paperback as it is right now.

Krakauer talked quite a bit about the phenomenon known as “friendly fire”, which killed Pat Tillman. He says it is far more common than we realize, and that the impulse to cover it up as natural as any other lying instinct within the military. It is automatic and instinctual, from the bottom to the top. On the day that Tillman was killed, the only person who did not know it was friendly fire was his brother, Kevin, a member of the platoon, and kept in the dark.

What got my attention most of all was Krakauer’s brief mention that Tillman was somehow involved in the Jessica Lynch affair in Iraq. This falls right in with my belief that everything we see in politics and war is a lie. Telling the truth can be fatal, even saying something offhand that is true can end a political career.

(Side note – Mitt Romney’s honorable father, George Romney, was considered the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 when he went to Vietnam, and came back and said something that was true – “When I came back from Vietnam [in November of 1965], I’d just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.” Exit political career, stage left. Since that time, no American politician has ever said anything true.)

Nothing is true in politics, and I kicked myself last night after I realized I had believed a story that was a classic lie – a can of whipped cream sprayed on a turd of truth. During the invasion of Iraq, seventeen marines had died in friendly fire in one incident – a PR disaster. The Pentagon searched around for a cover story, a diversion for the leashed media, some raw meat to throw them to keep them away from a real story.

The result: The Ballad of Jessica Lynch.

P.S.: We paid $15 each for tickets, and books were on sale there – the entire proceeds for the night go to a group called Veterans Helping Veterans Now, a truly grassroots group that started when a Vietnam combat Marine vet reached out to help an Iraq War vet who had been jailed on his second DUI charge. In addition to donating the entire proceeds, Krakauer is matching dollar for dollar.

A counterintuitive study by Pew

A while back Bill O’Reilly got his panties in a twist when he found out that the vast majority of social studies teachers at an Oregon college were Democrats. He assumed hiring bias, and did one of his patented ambush interviews with the department head to make his point.

I suspect that if they did a study of the business school at the same college, they would find a preponderance of Republicans. There’s no bias involved – just an attraction of certain types of people to certain professions. I am a CPA, and a European-style socialist. But the vast majority of accountants and CPA’s are conservative and Republican. The profession does not attract many socialists, and tends to favor black/white thinking – hence, conservatives.

Pew Research did a study that gave me pause for thought – I never would have guessed this. Among the general public, 23% consider themselves Republican, 35% Democrat. Among scientists, the numbers are wildly skewed – only 6% Republican, and 55% Democrat. When pressed as to which party they “lean” to, it gets even wilder: 12% Republican, 81% Democrat.

There have been some self-selected and non-scientific polls showing that in journalism, most reporters are Democrats. Conservatives assume hiring bias, but a more likely explanation is that more Democrats are drawn to journalism than Republicans. I might even take it a step further – given their exposure to a wide variety of issues and people, and the need to examine all sides, journalists develop a more open and questioning thought processes (or had that tendency to begin with), and end up as Democrats because the party is less doctrinaire than the other.

But that’s just a guess. Regarding the wild skew in the number of Democratic scientists, I’m both surprised and at a loss. Hard scientists are trained in hard science, and would, in my mind, tend to be apolitical. There is no political indoctrination going on in science classrooms … maybe I’ve hit on something there.

Maybe not. I’m stumped.

The defenestration of ACORN

I have often said here and elsewhere that the Democratic Party is the place where progressive movements go to die. Usually, they are just marginalized – ignored until they disappear. In the case of single payer advocacy, they were arrested. In the case of ACORN, the party has taken extreme measures – a public disembowelment not unlike that given William Wallace in Braveheart.

The films of various ACORN agents offering crazy and stupid advice could be real – top to bottom. The ACORN employees could be agents provocateurs. The people who set them up could be what we used to call investigative reporters. They could be party hacks. It would take years to get to the bottom of the sting – is it Scaife? Is it Dick Armey? Or is it Rahm Emmanuel.

The sins of ACORN appear to be real – but don’t forget that Elliot Spitzer’s offense was real, but that he was only singled out for his prosecution of powerful figures on Wall Street. Prosecution of high-level crimes in politics is usually selective, with a few exposed and most similarly guilty unaffected. There is more here than meets the eye. As usual.

What ACORN agents apparently did was stupid, but not worthy of a death sentence. But real or not, the important thing to note is that ACORN is done, destroyed.

The question is, whodunnit? My guess is that the Democrats did this sting operation, and they did it because ACORN was dangerous. They were willing to tolerate the group when they were stirring up the peasantry in support of Barack Obama, but the real work of the organization is grassroots organization for things like community housing discrimination and access to health care. They are community organizers. The Democratic Party wants nothing to do with them.

The ferociousness of the slamming and castration of ACORN ought to be a lesson to Democrats everywhere about the true nature of their party (as if there were a shortage of such lessons). But mainstream Democrats will likely be glad to be rid of them. The business of the party is to cover the backs of Republicans as Republicans advance the interests of wealth.

ACORN was just a sideshow, a useful group when it came to electing a corporate Democrat, and now a nuisance. Long live ACORN.

Living in fear

I am reading Rick Perlstein’s book Nixonland. It is an enjoyable stroll through the period when Nixon entered politics to his exit in 1974. Richard Nixon is one of the most fascinating people ever to enter U.S. politics – a complex, twisted, tortured and brilliant man, one who knew the globe like most of us know our own city streets. Even Henry Kissinger admired his intellect, and what could have been. His famous quip “He would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him.

I think he was a great man, though I certainly do not love him.

I am currently following Perlstein through the sixties and the civil rights riots and debates. I was very young then, and was as naive a spectator as has ever lived. I was very conservative, and very much feared black uprising, even in Billings, Montana. Pundits of the time on the far right ascribed the discontent to socialists and communists. Many allusions were made to Hilter. How little things have changed.

This ties up many loose ends for me. Back in 1988 I sat in our family room in our house on Pine Street reading, and was struck by a thunderbolt. Communism, I realized, posed no threat to us. The Russians did not threaten us, nor did the Chinese.

Not too long after I realized they posed no threat, the Soviet Union collapsed. The world since that time has been confusing and hard to understand. It will never get easier. But it is different since that day in 1988, and would have been different for me back in the sixties had I achieved the breakthrough earlier.

I’m not afraid. In the months in years after that day, I grew more liberal, and eventually eschewed conservatism and all right wing thought. It’s a natural progression. Absent fear, the mind is clearer, the world safer, people less threatening. Liberal and progressive politics and absence of fear go hand-in-hand.

What I see all around me with teabaggers, right wing web sites, immigration debates and health care reform is fear. The right wing is afraid. The are manipulated by fear, governed by people who rely on their fear to advance agendas having nothing to do with safety.

In the post below, which I wrote yesterday, I was making fun of certain right wingers for being stupid. I knew was I was doing – I was poking them with a stick. Yesterday afternoon as I drove to the store, a caller on talk radio hit on an excellent point. Right wingers, he said, are not stupid. That’s not why they behave the way they do, or believe what they believe. They are afraid. Their minds are polluted by fear, and it distorts thought processes. It makes the world a muddled and scary place full of demons and bad guys. It makes people defensive and accusatory. It allows them to call on Hitler to help them demonize every politician they do not like.

I lived in that neighborhood. I grew up during the Cold War. I was manipulated, my thought processes were muddled. People who were not afraid, like George McGovern, scared me. People who exploited my fears, like Richard Nixon, were my ideals.

So I invite anyone on the right wing who reads this to experience what I did, to feel the weight of the world lifted from your backs. There are no new Hitlers, socialism is not scary, national health care works everywhere it is tried, illegal immigrants are responding to rational economic impulses (which need to be addressed), there are no terrorists of any note, you are safe when you fly, and most of all, there is no conspiracy of liberalism to enslave you. Life is a beautiful thing when you just cast your fate to the wind, drop the load from your shoulders, and do what Atlas did – shrug.

P.S. Osama bin Laden, far from hiding in the hills of Pakistan, most likely suffered an ignominious death, probably in late 2001 and surrounded by a few of his fellows of no note. He spirit lives on in films, where he has gotten noticeably younger.

Michele Bachmann speaks

See Update!!! and Update II and Update III and Update IV below.

Michele Bachmann on Joe Wilson’s outburst:

The President’s speech on Wednesday was just the same plan you have already rejected wrapped up in the President’s charisma. They can’t argue on the facts or the issues, so they have to make it about personalities and they have to paint stupid conservatives like me as evil, uninformed, or crazy.

Update!!! I am told I got that quotation wrong. She did not say “stupid” conservatives like her. She said “strong”. I want to set the record straight, and keep the journalistic integrity at this site above average.

My bad.

Update II: Shortly after posting this I got an email from Halberto Fredlund at the Institute for IQ Evaluation in Landover, MD. According to Fredlund, Bachmann “is indeed stupid, by our measurements. Her grasp of issues is narrow, and her frame of reference is ‘us’ versus ‘them’ where ‘them’ are ‘elites’ and ‘pointyheads who brag about their education as if it gave them ‘common sense’, which I have a lot of,'” in Bachmanns’ own words. “Such defenses,” said Fredlund, “are standard for the low-IQ reactionary, and are especially prevalent among conservative Christian right wingers.” I can only add to that a study done by Jonas Beerston of the Paramount Institute, which quantified the IQ of various public figures by measuring the quality public rhetoric and scaling it according to broadness of frames of reference, reactionary nature of thoughts, and “black” vs “white” thinking. According to Beerston, Sarah Palin’s IQ was “almost negligible, perhaps in the low 80’s”, while Bachmann scored a good deal higher, at 90. Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, scores in the high 130’s, indicating that there are indeed significant intellectual abilities are in the Republican party, but that they seemed confined to a few very smart leaders who have many dumb followers. The Democratic Party, said Beerston, is “pretty much the same.”

Update III: Another emailer, this from a reader in New Hampshire, says “Cut the snidety! You ain’t no Einstein.” To which I confess, I ain’t no Einstein. I could be in way over my head, not understanding negotiating and confrontation theory and all. Still another emailer, this one from Montana, says “There is more knowledge about journalism in a thimble than you possess.” To which I confess, I know nothing about modern journalism, other than it isn’t very informative.

Update IV: True sotry: Police in Radnor, PA, interrogated a teabagger accused of a crime by placing a metal colander on his head and connecting it with wires to a photocopy machine. The message “He’s lying” was placed in the copier, and police pressed the copy button each time they thought the teabagger wasn’t telling the truth. Believing the “lie detector” was working, the teabagger confessed.

Please submityour stupid teabagger jokes here.

A stain on our liberal souls

I sat down to read this morning and rested a cup of coffee on the arm of my chair. Then reaching out to grab something, I spilled the coffee on our beige area rug. Instant panic – I am a Philistine! I rushed to the kitchen for paper towels, and then later started dabbing with a mild solution of dish soap and warm water.

Folk wisdom says that Woolite® does not work as well as simple shampoo on wool, but costs five times as much. It might even damage wool. As I dabbed at the carpet, the thought ran through my head – go to the store you Philistine … you’ve stained her beautiful carpet … go to the store, buy some carpet stain remover… buy some carpet stain remover. I thought about the Woolite factor, the 5X$ factor, then I thought about Philistines in the chapel, and I got in the car and headed to the store.

Bill Press was on talk radio, and health care was again the topic. He had on some guest, some guy, and the guest remarked that the Democratic National Committee had put together a remarkable machine to bring voters out to vote for Obama, but that machine sat there idly during the health care debate.

How could they not see what was coming? How could they be that naive? Are they that dumb? Why did they not put the machine to work to get health care passed?

These are savvy liberal talk show guys, I remind you. Savvy liberals.

RESOLVE® Triple Action Spot Carpet Cleaner 1) Penetrates, 2) Breaks Down, 3) Lifts out. (Note that certain stains may cause discoloration even after cleaning.)

I paid $6.15 for a bottle of RESOLVE®. If you walk in our house today, your eyes might be drawn to the coffee stain by my reading chair.

Man, what an easy mark I am.

September 11 Remembered

September 11 should not pass without remembrance of honorable people who died in an act of disgraceful cowardice. A building symbolic of democratic government had its dome blown to bits. A respected president died of an apparent suicide in the face of probable execution at the hands of thugs. Then followed concentration camps and inquisitions, and a fascist government installed – one of the great criminals of the 20th century, Augusto Pinochet, came to power.

September 11, 1973 was the day the democratically elected government of Chile was overthrown in a US backed coup d’etat. It is a dark day in history.

May we never forget Pinochet or the thousands of victims left in his wake. May we 36 years later vow that it never happens again.