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ok so next day, without a couple beers under my belt...what i found strange last night, and find even more strange today, is the idea that the racism that's surfaced in some clips, and so which frames the relations of *some* conservative voters to mc-cain, is only visible because "liberals" want to use it for their own advantage.
now there are two ways that this could be interpreted. one was the conspiracy route that i went through last night, which is absurd. the other is that the selection of clips is not neutral---this is a different issue, and there's no doubt that this is the case--the problem here is that the way matthew framed his position last night tended toward the former, but that latter seems to me a stronger argument.
there is the question of what kind of imagery is "newsworthy"---it is continually the case that for every clip involving a racist outburst from somebody there's an unknown number of other possible clips that do not include such outbursts. and if you think about the total number of possible clips, the set that includes racist outbursts is probably quite-to-vanishingly small in comparison with the other (hpothetical) set of clips of the same rallies which do not include them. that the clips which would circulate would come from the smaller set is not surprising if the mediation is a news organization, because from that viewpoint, clips that show people walking into or out of a palin rally, say, in the context of which nothing particular happens apart from walking into or out of a rally is probably not going to be understood as "newsworthy"---but this would obtain regardless of the political biais that you might assign to any given news outlet--fox news is no more likely to air clips in which nothing particularly out of the ordinary happens than is any other. but in selection of anomaly as information has consequences, and one of them is that the Image (in the metaphorical sense, the Impression) that is generated is not that *some* palin supporters are also racist, but rather that to be a palin supporter is to probably also be a racist. this doesn't follow. but i think everyone knows this--on the other hand, if television imagery really is a basic battleground across which various conceptions of the world are built, then these clips are a Problem for conservatives. but the Problem follows from the fact that anomaly=information in a "news" context and that racist statements are anomaly, so are information in a "news" context.
there's no need for any paranoid claim about "liberal plants" (i still want to make jokes about my geraniums here)....
i can see how conservatives who are not racist would be offended by the impression that's generated by these clips---but the response seems to me problematic when the issue is dodged--and the issue is that, like it or not, there *are* people who support mc-cain and palin because they're racist. but elementary logic tells you that it does not follow that therefore all do.
beyond that, i think the previous posts raise other framing questions---that you have a conservative identity politics that pitches toward xenophobia, which in turn rationalizes racism by legitimating it (when it seems functional for political reasons--ask almost any arab-american about how much fun it was for them right after 9/11/2001 to be arab-american...)---that the mc-cain campaign has pitched itself way to the right in order to shore up the "base" and so finds itself locked into using this kind of language, even as they try to distance themselves from the bush administration, which legitimated it's "war on terror" using the same kind of language---these are tactical problems.
all this in a thread about the action of a crazy=seeming person who apparently thought this discursive situation was an interesting space for theater....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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