Easy Answer to Stupid Question: It’s neither, assholes. There are racists in both parties, and I could readily provide examples from my own personal experience and from your own newspaper in the past year. Or has everyone else forgotten the primary campaign and then the general election?
There are also racist communists, and racist anarchists, and obviously racist fascists and racist Libertarians and racists in the Temperance Party and the Green Party.
I really enjoyed this conversation–there was much more we could’ve talked about, but we discussed the problems with environmentalism for its own sake, local economies, politics, how to save journalism, Karl Marx, corporate libertarianism, and centralized currency. His book Life, Inc. covers a lot more ground, and I’m not exaggerating when I say I think it should be required reading. It comes out June 2, and in honor of Rushkoff’s premise, you should get it from your local bookstore.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview, and the video preview for the book. Check it out.
S: A lot of the things that you mention as solutions, like buying local, are being tossed around now because they’re environmentally friendly, but you talk about them as good in themselves, because they connect you to the place where you live and the people that you know.
DR: Right. Which would I rather do? Hang out with these pretty girls on an organic farm, get some really bright gorgeous chard, or go into the fluorescent-lit A&P and push a cart around with a bunch of bored people? It becomes an easy choice when you think about it from a sensual level, rather than just an intellectual level. I’m trying to show people that I’m not asking them to live an ascetic life of renunciation and denial, but actually a much more abundant life of fun and pleasure.
When people are doing stuff out of guilt, which is what people get from the sort of Al Gore/”Inconvenient Truth” method of environmentalism or the Noam Chomsky approach to politics and economics, you get the feeling that you have to hole up somewhere and not consume anything. There’s this false dichotomy set up between doing it for the world OR having fun.
S: You talk about the connection to work, whether it’s on a farm or whatever you do—when I say it that way it almost sounds like the classic Marxist argument, that people are alienated from their work.
DR: Marx really did get a lot of it. It got used in some really silly ways and was a terrible basis for a movement. That’s why in the book I speak out against movements in general—you join this whole big thing and then the movement itself becomes a distraction from whatever’s really going on.
So this morning I heard NPR quote without argument the idea that the tea bag protests were “populist outrage” at government spending. And of course, I dispute that idea–if there was so much populist outrage at government spending, where were these people back in 2004 when Howard Dean ran on a platform of among other things, returning to a balanced budget, while Bush was racking up record deficits?
The populist anger welled up because people who are struggling to pay the rent were watching their governments pay billions of dollars to the same companies that caused the recession that was making it hard for people to pay the rent.
The press has a long history of simply ignoring protests or, when they do cover them, making them sound like they’re a few nut jobs who hate America. So when Fox News decided to cover the tea bag protests and legitimize them, the other news stations responded–even the hosts, like Olbermann and Maddow, who live to discount the junk spewing from Fox wound up oddly legitimizing the protests by talking about them. People who were pissed about bailouts suddenly heard their anger reflected–but deflected from the plutocrats who richly deserved it onto Obama’s budget, which would, among other things, give those people struggling to pay the rent a tax CUT.
Where does balance come in? Well, as Jay Rosen pointed out, “he said/she said” has long been a substitute for actually finding out which side is telling the truth. And Digby noted that the press also uses the lack of official voices making an argument as an excuse not to cover the argument–hence the usual coverage of political protests not legitimated by an Establishment political figure.
So when Republican Congresscritters jumped onto the tea parties as a way to seem in touch with the people, the protests gained even more legitimacy, and news stations were “forced” to cover them. Now they’re news! Politicians are there! Look, Rick Perry wants to secede!
And so suddenly protests that were populated mostly by John Birchers and Ron Paulies and people generally opposed to the very existence of government are being covered as if they’re seriously representative of the opinions of half the American people. “Balance,” right? We have to cover all the people’s opinions!
Except the relative loudness (and in many cases, well-fundedness) of certain voices doesn’t mean they actually represent large portions of American people.
But if you have enough money and elected officials, you can get any view into the sphere of legitimate debate (to cite Rosen again). Meanwhile, the actual left-wing equivalent of the tea party protesters are more like the few anarchists in any crowd of protesters, and protest movements full of average people (and far larger than the tea parties) are ignored or only covered when violence breaks out.
Basically, this is a perfect storm of the problems with the press: pack coverage leads mainstream journalists to follow the lead of Fox News, of all ridiculous outlets. Ideals of “balance” lead journalists to cover these protests far more than they actually deserve relative to how many people actually attended them. “Official” voices serve to legitimate wild, outlandish ideas. (Secession! Could you imagine if Deval Patrick suggested that Massachusetts secede?) And of course, money talks. Left-wing anti-government types tend to also be opposed to corporatism, while right-wing anti-government types seem to have no problem with mass corporate rule.
And so we have a situation in which a very narrowly held view suddenly is being discussed constantly, while very widely held views (like the idea that we should actually investigate the torture regime of the Bush administration) get ignored.
I forgot to cross-post this yesterday, but I ripped the LA Times a new one over at Global Comment for its lousy reporting and hit piece on my girl Jill Biden. And yes, that is DR. Biden to you.
I have to wonder, if we were discussing a male academic who taught at a prestigious Ivy League university, the reporter would feel the need to spend the entire piece debating whether he deserved the prefix “Dr.”
The article’s dismissive tone is symptomatic of the way the media treats women, particularly accomplished women in the public eye. Jill Biden has several advanced degrees, and yet chooses to teach in a community college, helping students who often cannot afford to attend school full-time. This is worthy of respect, not a quibble over whether she deserves the title as much as someone who stitches up wounds, treats skin conditions, or performs nose jobs.
But it also underlines the problems with much of newspaper reporting today: it relies on “experts” rather than information, it presents multiple opinions within a narrow range and purports them to be representative of the culture as a whole, and it focuses on ginned-up controversy instead of the actual story. It took me two minutes to find an “expert” who outlined the other side of the story. The Times could’ve done its research.
Instead, they went to press at first with a story that was not only offensive, but contained factual errors. No wonder newspapers are dying.
Ms. Pop Feminist has, as always, an interesting take on the Bitch magazine “bailout,” which sounds so much stranger after the rash of bailouts of the financial sector. She makes excellent points about the way the campaign was conducted, the nature of print, and the nature of the Web, and I wrote her a small novel in return, which I’m reprinting here, since it was giant, and rather interesting.
As always, I love you for your willingness to put shit out there.
And here, you’re absolutely right.
The death of old media is in part the death of our need to be talked at. I say this with three print copies of The Nation next to me (home of several of my fave “public intellectuals,” including Naomi Klein and Barbara Ehrenreich).
A friend and I were discussing the lack of liberal public intellectuals a few weeks back. It was in the context of television and how well the conservative movement has done in funding think tanks and providing “experts” for television.
But especially in the feminist movement, you’re quite right that the desire to conserve print is the desire to conserve some form of authority. One that we simply don’t need.
Blogging is not journalism, but neither, for the most part, is what Bitch does. It’s also opinion writing.
The largest problem that I can see with the move to the Web is that it is harder to monetize. Much as I hate the word, the fact remains that Virginia Woolf’s argument from “A Room of One’s Own” remains true. I’m broke, I have to work to make a living, and that leaves me less time for actual journalism, blogging, reading, research, and creative work. If I cannot make money doing any of those things, then I have to find another way.
But rather than clinging to print as the last way we can make money (sort of) as writers and therefore dedicate ourselves to being if not public intellectuals, at least stimulators of the discourse (yeah, that sounds pretentious too, but I can’t think of a better word), we need to be figuring out how we can make a living as writers and artists in a world that gets its media primarily over the Web.
So I’m reading and idly thinking about the difference between a “scene” and a community.
A scene is a place to be seen. It is by the very choice of that word, a setting, something visual, spatial, artificial. The scene is the clothes you wear to the punk rock show–the community is the group you go home with afterward, or stumble to the diner to talk it all over afterward.
The scene can be a place for community to grow, but it can also kill community by creating the illusion that this is all there is. If all it appears to be is clothes and club nights, then you reject everything when you take off those clothes and stop going to the club nights.
If it means more than clothes–if it means music, art, politics, blood, bone and love–most of all love–then no matter what you wear or how old you get, your community will not fail you.
This is why modern hipsterism feels so damn empty. It is nothing but visual, spatial. You can’t be a hipster on the telephone. You can be on the internet, but only in pictures snapped at the cool parties, with the cool kids, in the cool clothes. You cannot be a hipster alone in the forest.
To write, create, you must go beyond hip. You must go beyond the scene. My writing prof is always nagging us to write a story, not a scene, to find something deeper, something meaningful, something that changes you.
This is why I have more love even for a book like Twilight, cheesy, occasionally inept and often laugh-inducing when it’s not meant to be, because it has not the slightest bit of irony. And this is why it has a rabid fan base (more later). Because to write, to create, you have to put yourself out there to risk being mocked.
And this is why books like that create communities, friendships, bonds, even though many people cheerily admit that they know it’s terrible.
The blogosphere is my new punk rock scene, but more than that, it’s my new community. As I grow older and hide my tattoos under sweaters and skirts and high heels. It creates communities because we cannot be seen. It is not temporal–once you put something on the Internet it is there for good, and you lose control of it–and it is not spatial, because where is the Internet?
While we may blog our bodies, perhaps, we blog those inner pieces that are not so easy to see or to change. Perhaps I would have been more accurate to say that we blog the experiences our bodies have had, have caused for us or been through. After all, would blogging as a Jewish woman be the same for me in Israel as it is in Philadelphia? Was I the same in Boston as I was in South Carolina? It is not just our bodies but the social construction of and around our bodies that really shapes who we are.
And we find community within those lines and across them. Because we put ourselves out there, not to be seen, but to be understood.
As we noted in the comments to my “blogging our bodies” post, the idea that language and the user of language can be neutral is impossible. Queen Emily noted that it is cisgender white men who write with the “objective” voice, that others are always assumed to be Other, to be biased.
In studying journalism, it’s been pointed out to me several times that women journalists and journalists of color are always presumed to be biased when dealing with issues that relate to their gender or race. White men, by contrast, can be “neutral”–can live up to the famed journalistic goal of being “objective.”
Of course, this is crap.
Straight, cisgender white men write from a straight, cisgender white man perspective. In the field of journalism, most of them are also from the middle or upper classes, are educated, and thus bring additional slants to their writings. (Witness the coverage of the bailout of the financial giants v. the coverage of the proposed bailout of the big 3 automakers.)
In any case, “objectivity” is impossible. I would maintain that facts and truth are possible (at least truth insofar as it relates to empirical fact–George Bush is President, Nancy Pelosi said something, John McCain voted for that bill, it contained this text), but the idea that a journalist can put aside his or her own personal feelings and more importantly, his or her background to write from an “objective” position is impossible. The best we can hope for is, as one of my profs said, verification.
We see more and more verification being supplanted with this false idea of “balance” these days. Balance is even more screwed up than objectivity. Remember Jon Stewart going on Crossfire (a purportedly “balanced” show) to bitch out the hosts for hurting America?
“Balance” means that you go find someone from one side of an issue, and someone from another side, and get both their opinions, and then you’re being “objective.”
Yeah, well, there are lots of problems with that. But the one I’m thinking about right now is that it once again buys into a false binary. The idea that there are only two sides to any issue is a lie, but it sure buys into the way we like to see things in this country.
This leaves out so much nuance that it’s disgusting.
For instance, the auto company bailout. I hate the auto execs–they’ve fought environmental restrictions for years, they’d love to bust their unions themselves, and it was damn stupid of them to fly private jets to Washington to ask for money. I would much rather see $25 billion spent elsewhere. But I think we should do it, because millions of jobs would be lost, because bankruptcy would completely break the unions for good, and because the auto companies are finally starting to invest in green technology, and right now would be a good time to continue supporting that.
In any case, I would argue that our binary fetish is one of the biggest problems we’ve got in this country, and it’s being made worse by this obsession with “both sides” in the media. There are never just two sides to any issue.
It’s even worse when the binary drawn is completely false: black voters vs. gay voters over Prop 8, for example. Two completely different categories–as if one cannot be black and gay, or that these categories have anything to do with one another, even if you accept that they are categories with clearly defined boundaries, which I don’t.
One of the things I liked best about Obama was that he seemed to understand that issues are more complex than two sides. That he can and will talk to people who are on “the other side” and find common ground, and that being biracial, being raised by a white family while being read as black by society, he understood that binaries are not what they appear to be. I hope that continues.
So back to journalism. It would seem that the profession, which often talks about the need for more diversity, understands that bodies and language are not neutral, that one cannot leave one’s body and background behind to be objective. Yet it still clings to these ideals as though there is no other way to be.
Well, those of us in the blogosphere know otherwise. We neither leave our identities at the door, nor bother trying for “balance.” Yet at least some of us try to verify our facts–the very custom of linking to other blogs, to news organizations, YouTube videos, documents, government sites shows that. You can’t just state a fact in the blogosphere without backing it up–well, you can, but you’re soon going to be asked for backup.
And since we have unlimited space to rant and rave and receive comments from readers, we get to explore many, many perspectives on complex issues. Our readership may (except for the occasional troll) agree with us on core principles, but any comment thread on a well-read blog will show you plenty of differences, arguments, and hairsplitting. This is a GOOD thing. It’s far healthier than tossing up Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson and pretending that these two rich white guys actually cover a range of opinions.
Some thoughts on Palin coverage from the Washington Post:
The top comparison, of course, is to Hillary Clinton. It’s far too easy to reach out to the last woman to run for the office, but Palin was chosen by McCain to join the ticket with little work of her own, while Clinton may have at first gained the spotlight through her famous husband, but busted her own butt on the campaign trail for months.
The other comparison I found, as Palin’s image went down, was to Harriet Miers, Bush’s failed appointee to the Supreme Court, who was challenged by the Right as well as the Left and withdrew her name from consideration. The Right complained that she was unqualified, and several op-ed writers noted that Palin, similarly unqualified, was embraced by those same people. They note that it’s a matter of ideology, not qualifications, that the Right really cares about.
Fewer mentions of the beauty pageant than I thought I’d see, though definite implication, again by op-ed writers, that McCain was besotted with Palin and chose her because of her looks and charm.
Others pointed out, as Campbell Brown did, the sexism of keeping Palin away from reporters and in the perception that Obama and Biden had to be nicer to Palin than she did to them. True equality, one noted, would come when they could call a woman out for being a bully without fear of being called one themselves.
Charisma and charm and the difference between them were noted as well–as charming people “get invited to parties,” and charismatic people “get invited to boardrooms.”
Everyone’s favorite characterization of Palin, in straight news stories as well as op-eds, was “hockey mom.” I bet hockey was discussed more in relation to Sarah Palin than it ever has been before in this country. I’ll get an actual tally of the “hockey mom” references, but my thoughts on “hockey mom,” in no particular order:
Hockey is the whitest sport in America. While the “soccer mom” conceit implied suburban whiteness, hockey implies an even greater whiteness.
Hockey also implies violence not inherent in soccer or little league.
it’s still an unpopular sport in the U.S.–but this played to Palin’s advantage. Hockey mom, like “lipstick,” she was able to claim for herself. When you hear that term, you now think of Palin.
Op-ed writers also love to mock other op-ed writers who liked Palin. I didn’t end up with any rabidly pro-Palin op-eds, just some rather catty anti-Palin ones.
Her ambition, much like Hillary Clinton’s, was constantly mentioned, but with Palin it was often coupled with criticisms of her abilities. Ambitious women are still something to be feared, but the implied contrast with Clinton says, “At least that woman deserved to be ambitious.”
From the beginning to the end, almost every writer noted that Palin was chosen to try to peel off disaffected Clinton voters, and many pointed out that the attempt failed and that Palin polled better among men than among women.
I’m not comparing coverage of Palin to coverage of similar candidates, so I can’t compare how often she was quoted, but I can note that when she is quoted it’s often in an attempt to make her look bad. Her quotes are rarely used to illustrate her knowledge or issue positions, and instead to show her on the campaign trail or her defenses of herself when she’s screwed up (whether it’s Troopergate, interviews or the debate).
Questions about her kids faded into the background as questions about her competence took center stage.
It may have simply been the size of my sample, but I found few articles about the clothing scandal. Maybe when I collect my Salon.com articles, I’ll find more.
OK, those of you who’ve been following me on Twitter or elsewhere might have realized that I’ve become sort of a sap since Tuesday’s victory. I cried then, of course, and several times since. I cried at The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants yesterday, damnit.
So while I’m blaming Barack for my newfound connection to my emotions, I must say that Keith Olbermann’s “special comment” on Prop 8 might have made me cry in any case.
You are asked now, by your country, and perhaps by your creator, to stand on one side or another. You are asked now to stand, not on a question of politics, not on a question of religion, not on a question of gay or straight. You are asked now to stand, on a question of love. All you need do is stand, and let the tiny ember of love meet its own fate.
You don’t have to help it, you don’t have it applaud it, you don’t have to fight for it. Just don’t put it out. Just don’t extinguish it. Because while it may at first look like that love is between two people you don’t know and you don’t understand and maybe you don’t even want to know. It is, in fact, the ember of your love, for your fellow person just because this is the only world we have. And the other guy counts, too.
You can read the rest, but I recommend the video. Both are here.
I’ve made the joke several times lately that Sarah Palin kills feminism. That my most stridently feminist friends (and myself) find ourselves yelling words we wouldn’t normally allow anyone to call a woman at the TV, and that we find ourselves making the arguments against her that we would hesitate to make against another woman.
I was an Obama supporter, so I’ve been making arguments against a female candidate for a while now, and I will go to my grave defending the notion that that doesn’t make me a bad feminist. But my arguments against Hillary Clinton (and my serious arguments against Sarah Palin) were policy-based. I don’t want a warmongering president. I would like to maintain my rights to my reproductive system. Etc.
But the major arguments repeated over and over again about Sarah Palin are still the same old sexist arguments writ larger. She’s incompetent. She spent too much money on clothes. She’s nothing but a pretty face. She’s bitchy. She’s incapable of making difficult decisions. Her family is used as a prop.
We may argue–but Sarah Palin IS incompetent. $150,000 IS a ridiculous amount of money to spend on clothing, especially when you’re trying to pretend you’re Joe Six-Pack Hockey Mom.
But the fact remains that we’re still making the same old arguments that have always been used against us. Inexperience, “not ready,” it was pointed out in the primaries, have always been lines used against “minority” candidates, whether that’s women or black candidates. And focus on the woman’s clothes? Yeah, we know how that works.
The coverage of the clothing scandal has been amusing–I’ve been saving bits and pieces of it on my Tumblr for later reference–but what’s been rarely pointed out is that it appears to have been a man who did the shopping for Palin. What does that say for our gender perceptions? Something different, I’d bet, but instead the frame in the news is of the hockey mom going on a shopping binge with the RNC’s credit card. It fits the stereotype of women, right? Look at what they’ll do when they get their hands on the cash. What will they do when they get their hands on the budget?
(sorry, this is just kind of me vomiting my thoughts onto the page while I’m reading)
The selection of a woman who so gloriously fits into all the usual frames for a female candidate (when so many others didn’t but were forced into them anyway) by the McCain campaign can tell us something hugely important about them: this is how they see women. They’ve bought, full stop, into the media perception of female candidates. In a year where we saw a woman candidate who was very few of these things, the McCain people still thought woman equaled pretty and family-friendly, and that competence was impossible to come by.
Perhaps they realized that any woman was going to have to face a tougher battle to prove competence and so figured it didn’t matter that Sarah Palin couldn’t hack an hour-long TV interview.
But will Palin’s reinforcement of pretty much every prevailing stereotype of women in politics have adverse effects on the next women to run? Or can we hope that people will remember that there are women out there–on both sides of the aisle, not to mention in third parties–who are competent?
