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Banned
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Is Main Stream Media's Portrayal of "THE LEFT" in America, simply "LEFT LITE"?
This past wednesday (May 25 '05) roachboy started a thread titled, <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=89682"> sydney schanberg on bushworld</a>. In a followup post in his thread, roachboy observed,
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http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...1&postcount=11
that this apparatus is not coincident with the entirety of the press in the states is obvious--i am not sure what the point is of saying it--that the dominant frame of reference within which most of the american press operates is conservative is also obvious--think about the extent to which all media outlets in the states understand capitalism as an unqualified good, and move from there. very little space for serious critique of the existing order, either at the economic level (globalizing capitalism) or at the political level. that the right media relies on perpetuating the illusion that it is marginal, under attack from its evil fantasy double--you know, this fiction they enjoy called "the Left" in america (which again seems to lump together everyone to the left of paul weyrich)--is another form of projection. nothing else.
that the net provides easy acces to an international press, and thereby to the possibility of gathering and processing information from viewpoints not either directly dominated by the american right or working from a frame of reference significantly shaped by the right, is a fine thing--but at the same time, it reflects the sad state of affairs that obtains domestically that one would have to search out other papers from other countries just to get anything like an idea of what is happening in the world outside the narrow, self-defeating view of the bush administration and its buddies in the conservative press.
maybe the situation would not be so bad if the conservative press provided anything like an accurate picture of what is going on in the world--but it doesnt--think about the iraq war for example. personally, i think conservatives in general are afraid of the world, afraid of dissonance, afraid of information, afraid to think that maybe reality is complex and easy judgements are absurd...........
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and I started a thread titled, <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=89769"> Rumsfeld: Free people are free to do bad things</a>
In my thread starter, I featured a new column by Joe Bageant of Winchester, Va. Bageant's background is:
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http://www.energygrid.com/society/ap-bageant.html
The reason that you have probably not heard of him before, is that Bageant is not an ambitious writer, and has been happy to live the life of a low-profile magazine and newspaper editor, although as a senior editor with Primedia Magazine Corp., publishers of over 300 American magazines, he is certainly highly regarded within his profession. All that changed, however, when Bageant discovered the internet earlier this year (2004) and realized that it gave him the perfect platform to freely speak his truth. Writing a string of uniquely perceptive articles during these dark times in America's history have put an end to that relative obscurity, thrusting Bageant and his message of a true and caring democracy squarely into public awareness.
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Bageant first came to my notice last year when I read this article that he had written, (an excerpt):
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http://www.energygrid.com/society/jb-england.html
Good for you, Lynndie England, you chinless, inbred, runty, androgynous backwoods mutt! When you mimed a crotch-shot at that hooded detainee, you reminded us all of what Imperial service should be like: one long S&M tour of the tropics, where every man, woman and child of the conquered peoples exists solely as an object for your pleasure.
- John Dolan, columnist for the website, "Exile."
* * *
When I saw the above arrogant, piece of witty horseshit, I wanted to go strangle John Dolan myself. Then I came back to the realization that all writing is masturbation, mine included, and that some of us do it with our eyes closed — as John Dolan does. If he had even one eye open he would have seen the pathos and national hypocrisy represented by "the girl with the leash."
Lynndie England never had a chance. Abu Ghraib, or maybe something even worse (an RPG up the shorts, for instance) was always her destiny. Nearly half of the 800 Americans killed in Iraq to date came from small towns like hers, like mine. Forty-six percent of the American dead in Iraq came from towns of less than 40,000. Yet these towns make up only 25% of our population. Most of the young soldiers were fleeing economically depressed places, or dead end jobs like Lynndie had at the chicken processing plant. These so-called volunteers are part of this nation's de facto draft — economic conscription. Money is always the best whip to use on the laboring classes. Thirteen hundred a month, a signing bonus and free room and board sure beats the hell out of yanking guts through a chicken's ass.
And there are those big bucks for college later. Up to $65,000. Lynndie was supposedly going to college after her enlistment to become a "storm chaser," like in the Helen Hunt movie "Twister." Yeah, right. There are millions of openings in the tornado chasing business. And I'm going to be the centerfold in the next Playgirl beefcake issue. I suppose lots of poor kids do go to college on their military benefits. But personally speaking, I can count the number I know who actually did it on one hand. Let's be honest here: graduating from a small town redneck white high school not knowing where Alaska is on a map of the US is not exactly the path to the fountain at Harvard Yard. But I suspect that down inside Lynndie knew her lot in life from the start — she wore combat boots and camo outfits to high school. Swore she loved it. If you are doomed to eat shit, you may as well bring your own fork.
I grew up poor in Winchester, Virginia — about as poor as the pinup girl of Abu Gharaib — in a moreover scabby rundown town about forty miles from Lynndie's ancestral mobile home over there in Fort Ashby, West Virginia. Sometimes I walk the street on which I grew up, across the railroad tracks that have divided the classes here since before the Civil War. And when I look around I see the likes of Lynndie everywhere. girls of the type I dated as a kid. They are all fatter, thanks to the fast food that was unavailable in my youth, but they are the same cigarette-smoking, in-your-face white girls I knew then, the tough daughters of the unwashed. Here in my old neighborhood, over one quarter of adults do not have a high school diploma, and there are lots of yellow ribbons in the windows just like the one on Lynndie England's family trailer, for those serving in Iraq or elsewhere on the far-flung perimeter of our expanding empire of blood and commerce.
Lynndie Rana England was born in 1982. I have a son her age. Like my son, she graduated high school in 2001. Folks in Fort Ashby say she did well in school, which is no great achievement in these places where the academic bar is set so Dmned low it is buried in the ground in hopes that any student who bothers to even attend school will meander across it. Then, true to local form, she got married at age 19. I'm sure she married mostly out of smalltown boredom. I got married that way once, though I've got sense enough now to be positively embarrased to tell you how young I actually was. Anyway, Lynndie is in a "relationship" with a fellow reserve unit member and is now pregnant at 21 and facing a possible prison term. I wonder if she still thinks much about chasing tornadoes like Helen Hunt.
All hail to the flag people!
To talk about Lynndie's class you have to talk about that other class, her betters. The class that would not piss on her if her shirt was on fire — the flag people. The kind who smirk at "the mutt girl." I live among them now, on a street where the American flag hangs from nearly every Antebellum or Georgian or Greek Revival front porch, in the part of town where every man is a business man, solidly "patriotic." All went to college and few if any have been in the armed services. The regional tire distribution kingpin across the street (who is also a Republican city councilman with, they tell me, a contract for the city's vehicles) flies his flag. Next door the local office supply hotwire (former mayor and born-again chairman of the city GOP) flies two flags, one American and on of his alma mater. The bigtime landlord up the street, another steel bottomed Republican, flies her colors. She too is on council and her daughter is state GOP chairman to boot. Next house down is the daughter of a mogul hard-right-wing developer. She has never worked a day in her life; Daddy just bought her a half million dollar home. They are all waving a flag. They are all super GOPers and shitting in the tall cotton.
Waving a flag and making a mint. What the folks on the "good streets" understand but never say is that America's class war is over and they, the business class, won. Now they can sit back and be outraged by the pics of an ignorant girl in the testosterone choked air of an American torture chamber. They won on the backs of the other nine tenths in these non-union towns where the annual wage is less than three-quarters of the national average. And they won because god wants it that way. Their families got here first and stole early. Their daddies stole land from farmers during the Depression and they made millions later selling it to Wal-Mart, the new medical center, and all those low wage non-union factories (after conveniently rezoning it to suit their interests while on city council.) Contrary to common belief, the bedrock of this nation's rip-off by the rich is in the small and medium sized towns, where the so-called "small" business associations have a direct phone line to the state capital, where they can stymie any increase in minimum wage or snuff anything even remotely resembling a fair tax structure. And if Lynndie England wants a piece of their American pie, well, she can start in the Army reserves by posing for mock crotch shots in the belly of Abu Ghraib, then claw her way up from there. Just like their great granddaddies did.
My hometown friend and drinking buddy, Richard, is an heir to an old line real estate fortune in the tens of millions (and is a fourth generation city council member, naturally.) He says there is absolutely nothing wrong with this system. I say there is absolutely nothing right with it. And as long as I keep my proper place in the scheme of things, and he continues to be able to hold his liquor (because I sure as hell can't) I suppose we'll go to our graves remaining fairly civil about what we both know is the injustice of it all. You won't ever see any of his privately schooled kids eating MREs in Iraq. Nor any of mine, if I can possible help it. But for opposing reasons. He's raising his kids to rule in the New Republican World Order and I raised mine to be resistance fighters against that same order.
We've seen the shy and pretty blonde Jessica Lynch exploited as a fake hero rescued from the swarthy hand of the godless Muslim. We've seen the coarse, not-so-pretty Lynndie forced to pose for a bondage torture flick, and then be publicly scourged in the name of some corrupt justice understood only by those powerful men whose fancy was tickled by an unlawful military attack and occupation. I simply do not see how even a morally and philosophically bereft country such as ours can come up with another way to exploit graphic images of women at war.
A bass boat for the angel of Abu Ghraib
Whatever the case, in the end, Lynndie will get some bucks out of all this, if she has not already, from her Today Show appearance, or maybe the book deal or the movie that will come along to feed our national lust for pain made visible. What the lawyers do not take from her, she had better save. But I suspect she will not. What do you want to bet that her alleged future hubby, Charles Graner, won't want a $50, 000 truck and a super bass boat, or that she won't waste enough of it by her very own petite self? I've seen it a thousand times. Hell, I've done it. It's a white trash gene. But things could be worse. She could go to prison if our commander-in-chief has his way (the same commander-in-chief who once called Africa a country and he didn't even go to school in West Virginia). Or worse yet, she could find religion and be West-by-god-Virginia "saved," a sure road to zombie trailer trash hell if ever there was one.
But hold there hoss! The Lynndie England show is by no means over yet. As I write a dozen committees are excavating for the truth about Abu Ghraib. And they remind us that we do not yet know the "full facts." We will not know them until they are done being manufactured by the administration and its stacked committees. And they are stacked. Stacked if for no other reason because the lawyers and politicos doing the judging never received orders to pose for war porn on behalf of a savage, pittiless republic, or faced the prospect of a stomach turning chicken plant as their destiny. They do not understand that here on the wrong side of the tracks, in places like Fort Ashby or Winchester, Virginia, here in the dominion of the whip, a homely girl with a leash is relatively speaking, an angel — albeit the angel of our brutish disregard.
Copyright © 2004 Joe Bageant
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Quote:
http://www.energygrid.com/society/ap-bageant.html
(Andrew P) AP: In a nutshell, what has Bush done for the average American?
Bageant: Given them faith in their own desperate hubris.
AP: If that is the case, and the average American is far worse off under Bush, then why is it that he still has such strong support, often from the very people whose quality of lives is most depreciated by this government?
Bageant: Because we have institutionalised our hubris in the schools and the churches and everywhere else. Because Americans think obesity and belligerence are virtues, and that Jesus Christ and a five piece band came down and made them the new chosen people.
AP: Why is somebody like yourself, who champions the ordinary American, regarded as unpatriotic for opposing a government and its policies that are so clearly destroying the American ideals of democracy and liberty?
Bageant: Because the government has nothing to do with real patriotism. Patriotism is a love of the place and the people who have shaped your heart and mind. not your willingness to die for oil or, as Napoleon said "for those baubles pinned on the chests of dead soldiers."
AP: Coming from the South, your views cannot be very popular with your neighbours. How do you deal with them or protect yourself from them?
Bageant: Well. for a while I was some kind of goddamed anti-Christ around here. All kinds of scary threats, and such. Now I have been laying low like old Bre'r Rabbit (You Brits don't have the slave tales of Bre'r Rabbit do you?). The locals are so consumed with being good Germans amid their neighbours, they do not even think about the internet stuff. They are busy keeping mental lists of which liberals they are going to put on trial when the Republican Reich finally dawns.
AP: In your articles you seem to indicate that it is hopeless trying to convince many of your compatriots that they are actually supporting a government that is not in the interests of the American people or of American ideals. Do you see any way through this?
Bageant: Nope. They gotta find their own way. That's what democracy is about. People finding their own way. Or not finding it.
AP: In "The Covert Kingdom" you illustrate the mentality of the Christian Fundamentalists that the progressive left is up against, a mentality that is only matched by Muslim Fundamentalism. How can we, in a democratic system, keep such destructive segments of society from harming the less vocal majority (assuming that they are not a majority!)?
<h4>Bageant: It can't. Until the progressive left gets out there on the street and recruits every ignorant piece of white trash and person of colour it ain't gonna happen. But here in the US, the so-called left is comfortable being in the catering class of college professors, managers, journalists, school teachers and others required to keep the capitalist system humming, they ain't gonna take any risks. They just don't get it that if they do not love their labouring brothers, beer belly, ignorance, crack habit and all, their ass is grass too. It's only a matter of time. But they simply do not believe these people are their brothers, or even human, for that matter. America is a class system first and foremost.</h4>
AP: Tell me some of your views on freedom. Many would accuse you of being left or communist. which can also be totalitarian.
Bageant: I am not a communist. I am a universalist humanist socialist. I would be a commie, but for the fact that communism seems too easily hijacked by despotic thugs. I don't know why, and at this age I do not have the time to find out. I'll run with what I know so far. Stick my spear in the ground and tie my leg to it and do the best I can.
AP: If you were President, what are the first things you would do to move the US away from fascism and back to democracy?
Bageant: I would cut the Pentagon budget in half and spread the dough around to health care and education here and in third world countries, and spend billions on peace studies and the ecology. I'm a simple fucker.
AP: When did you first go on the internet and what is your view of this medium?
Bageant: In April of this year. I loved the Internet from the very beginning as I had decided a while back that I was sick of the paint-by-numbers journalism that has ruined the print world, and was looking for an outlet in which I could say exactly what I wanted to the way I wanted to.The internet may well be the political hope of the world. Maybe someday we will have internet referendums on what to do with the world's wheat supply. Maybe someday the global corporations' knees will be broken and every knee will bow in humble submission to the needs of humanity. Every pharmaceutical company will be distributing AIDS drug to the beating heart of Mother Africa. But first there is going to be a lot of death and destruction. The Twin Towers were just the cartoons before the movie of global revolution.
AP: Are you surprised at your meteoric rise to cult internet writer considering you have only been online such a short time? How do you account for this?
Bageant: Yes, I am. I have always had good response to whatever I put into print. But that stuff was always distributed within defined circulation boundaries such as those of a magazine or a newspaper. If a magazine has 150,000 readers, then that is about all a writer is going to reach through that medium. But the internet can aggregate people of similar opinion and outlook with power and speed that is unimaginable in print.
Working in magazines for so many years, it seems to me that magazine and book publishers still just do not "get" the internet. They still suffer under the illusion that people will not read anything over 1500 words, etc. Yet a reader is a reader. They also get too trapped in "marketing segmentation," demographics, psychographics, and all that crap that was so hot with marketing people ten years ago. The net is an ocean of human beings and you gotta swim among them to understand them and what you need to do to stay afloat. There is no magic marketing plan you can wire into, other than provide what people really want on the sites they go to get it.
Half the nation doesn't read and never will. So they will be looking for small takeaway bites from the net. Fair enough. But people who care about ideas and information will devote just as much time to the net as to a book, and probably buy a book related the internet source too if it further serves their purpose. For example, I began restoring an ancient slave banjo from information on the net. Then later I bought a book by the same author I was reading on the net. That would not have happened if the net had not provided instant access to that luthier's advice. It also happened a lot more quickly than if I had had to research the subject by traditional means........
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My opinion is that Joe Bageant and roachboy are saying essentailly the same thing; that capitalism has failed too large a chunk of Americans for it to continue to be portrayed by virtually all of MSM as the "ideal" economic system, to the exclusion of any media coverage of capitalism's "record", much less any opening of dialogue regarding populist alternatives.
Sydney Schanberg goes over well with the Village Voice readers and people who Bageant describes as <b>"the catering class of college professors, managers, journalists, school teachers and others required to keep the capitalist system humming"</b>, but if the initial reaction to Bageant's writing, among the following that he has cultivated on the internet in the past year is any indication, who will have a better chance of filling the lack of coverage of the economic and social realities of people from places like the Appalachian town of Winchester, Va., Schanberg or Bageant. Up until now, the prominent voice for people of western Virginia is Jerry Falwell.
I read many comments in TFP politics that lament the "broken" political system, with "special interests" often pointed to as the culprits. Posters seem to believe that "one party is as bad as the other". Outside of roachboy and strange_famous, I see almost no one willing to engage in serious and informed discussion of alternative economic systems. In an era where we begin to notice and whisper about the unsustainability of a growth obsessed, oil addicted economy, why are we unable to compare ourselves to other western societies who are on different paths? Will a voice from Appalachia, writing on the internet, make us notice capitalism's failings? |