I really enjoyed this article from Mary Elizabeth Williams about how the presence of the moral police who hide behind "the children" in politics makes the ordinary work of being a parent who takes responsibility for your own kids that much harder. Though I do some times wonder that even the well-meaning parental guidance stuff---people who don't want to censor but also try to monitor their own kids' input---is coming from really remembering what it was like to be a kid. I owned Thriller and She's So Unusual as a small kid, and knew all the lyrics by heart, even though both albums would have, if they came out after the PMRC situation, probably gotten stickered. Frankly, I had no clue or no real interest in what it meant to say "Billie Jean was not my lover" or what the pages of "Blue Boy" magazine were. I probably just thought it was a lot of nonsense lyrics, since, you know, rock has a lot of those. I don't imagine kids are any smarter now.
The one thing I wished Williams had emphasized, however, is that the gulf between the One Million Moms effort and individual parents deciding not to let their kids buy raunchy records (do kids even buy CDs anymore, though?) is far vaster than this article would have you believe. One Million Moms doesn't give a shit about "the children". "The children" are just a cover story for a larger agenda of forcing pop culture to be compliant with and propagandistic for a fundamentalist Christian worldview. Their most prominent crusade to date has been trying to get a fully clothed, family-friendly Ellen DeGeneres off the air, because the mere existence of lesbians offends them, and they want them all to go away. That doesn't have squat to do with "the children". Children don't look at a nice lady in a blazer and jeans and think about all the hot-and-dirty lesbian action she gets at home. No, that's their stupid parents whose sexual repression has completely thwarted their brains to the point where they can't think about anything but sex, and how delicious and sinful and tempting and dirty it is. The funny thing about not believing that sex is dirty is that sex ends up being less of an obsession. I mean, you're still an animal, but you get to the point where you're only thinking about it like half the time, instead of it ruling your every thought. I can look at DeGeneres without really giving much mind to what she's like in bed. It's totally possible, if you get over your ridiculous homophobia.
This is really critical, because pushing DeGeneres off the air has absolutely no relationship to the desire for explicit sex on cable TV to air a bit later in the evening, when your kids are in bed. The latter is just a totally different debate. People who are worried about kids stumbling across explicit sex or violence have a real argument. People who just want to use their children as a cover to impose their bigotry on the country are another breed altogether.
I will say that my personal experience, as a voracious reader and a curious kid in general when I was young, that I do find the emphasis on sex over violence when being worried about kids weird and often upsetting. I saw a lot of R-rated movies at ages that many parents would probably think were too young, and I definitely was reading adult books as young as 10 years old, books that had explicit descriptions of sex. Despite all this, I still only had a hazy idea of what sex was, beyond just knowing it's something adults liked to do that didn't appeal to me, like listening to adult contemporary music or wearing muted earth tones. (The 80s: That's all I'm saying.) Sex's main appeal was as a dramatic force; we had Barbie sleeping with Ken, but mainly so that other Barbie would get all jealous and angry. I wouldn't underestimate most kids' internal clocks on this subject is all I'm saying.
Violence, on the other hand, is something that I---and I suspect pretty much all kids---understood immediately and on a visceral level. Violent movies had an immediate and negative effect on me: nightmares. I'd be a lot more worried about kids seeing violence than seeing sex on TV, just for their own mental safety and wellbeing. But nearly all censorship or censorship lite attempts I see, well-meaning or not, focus way more on sex than violence. For the not-well-meaning people, I understand why. They're just assholes. I'm a little unclear why well-meaning parents fall into that trap as well.
UT Austin's student newspaper is usually pretty progressive, but because there are a bunch of wingnuts lurking around on campus, occasional jaw-dropping lunacy gets into the pages of The Daily Texan on occasion. But even within that context, this was a surprisingly vicious cartoon that was recently published:
Needless to say, this is intensely racist, and not, as the butthurt are trying to pretend, simply because of the word "colored". People love to focus on individual syllables, wishing feverently to reduce racism to certain sounds said in a row, and ignoring more important issues such as content and action. No, this cartoon is racist because implicit in its argument is the idea that it's illegitimate for the media to treat what appears to be the cold-blooded murder of an unarmed teenager as tragic if the victim is black. Also embedded in this cartoon is the notion that it's preposterous for anyone to look at a 17-year-old black teenage boy and see someone who is "handsome", "sweet", or "innocent". The cartoon only works in the context Jesse outlines below, one where the reader believes black young men are criminally dangerous by definition and that anyone who thinks otherwise is clearly trying to sell you something. Without that racist assumption, this cartoon doesn't make any fucking sense. If you believe high school kids, even black ones, should be able to buy Skittles and return home unmolested, much less unmurdered, then a national outcry because that right is taken away makes perfect sense.
Which is why the responses of the cartoonist and a staff advisor at The Daily Texan are unacceptable.
I apologize for what was in hindsight an ambiguous cartoon related to the Trayvon Martin shooting. I intended to contribute thoughtful commentary on the media coverage of the incident, however this goal fell flat. I would like to make it explicitly clear that I am not a racist, and that I am personally appalled by the killing of Trayvon Martin. I regret any pain the wording or message of my cartoon may have caused.
First the "I apologise for any hurt" thing, instead of the straightforward "I fucked up, and am sorry" thing. But she doesn't really apologize even then. She says the cartoon was intended to be a commentary on the media, but as I note above, unless you're racist, the media's concern about this thoughtless bloodshed is appropriate. If a white teenager was being gunned down randomly in the street and the police refused to arrest the murderer and the murderer offered a highly suspect story contradicted by his own 911 call, I highly doubt Eisner would condescendingly accuse the media of being upset over nothing. The only reason to think that it's a waste of time to run stories about the continued problem of racism in our country is if you don't have a problem with racism, full stop. Denying that you're a racist is just a tailsman in this case. It's really a pointless exercise that makes this all about how bad it is to suggest anyone is a racist, and to distract from the real problem here, which is that a young man lost his life for no other apparent reason than the color of his skin.
Already with the headline, we're on typical ground here: Arguing that the offensive action the racist swipe at a murder victim and those who sympathize with his family's plight, but that the real crime is being upset about this horrible murder and the vicious responses that are emerging. Don't get all hysterical because a guy who shot an innocent kid for no real reason will walk free because he pulled the "black men are scary" card! Gosh, you'd think that cold-blooded murder was a serious problem or something.
The cartoon is admittedly flawed because it spelled Martin's first name incorrectly and it used a phrase ("colored boy") that is offensive and could have been avoided ("black teenager.")
I really, really hate the "racism is just a matter of using improper terms" argument. No, it's not. Even if the phrases had been swapped, the cartoon---as noted above---makes no sense without the racist assumption that the safety and well-being of black citizens doesn't matter.
I understand the outrage sparked by the Martin incident, but I trust I won't risk the anger of the mob when I point out that no one has been charged or convicted in the case thus far.
Which is the point. The country is beginning to realize that, in the state of Florida, you can just randomly execute young black men and get away with it as long as you claim you were scared. You don't even have to cool your jets in jail for a few hours while they rubber stamp your release.
The alleged shooter, George Zimmerman is claiming self-defense under a "stand your ground" law that is on the books in Florida and various other states, including Texas.
Well, gosh, if it's the law, that puts it above criticism, doesn't it? This guy is supposed to be a journalist, y'all. I wasn't aware that "uncritical stance towards law and policy as enacted" was part of our job description.
Where is the outrage over such an absurd law, which has been promoted across the country by the National Rifle Association? Who is angered by gun laws that allow "neighborhood watch" cop-wannabes like Zimmerman to walk around armed?
The people that Eisner and you are accusing of hysteria. By the way, I'm a little unclear on how we can both be in the wrong for being critical and not-critical of this law.
The newly minted civil rights activists and self-appointed media pundits
Oh wow, I love his unevidenced assumption that the people who are taking up this cause were utterly indifferent to racism before. Really? Because a lot of the heavy coverage of this that pumped it into the national media came from places like Colorlines, whose staff would, I'm sure, be surprised to find out they only just started to care about racism.
might want to ask themselves what is more inherently racist -- a poorly executed student cartoon or the fact that the African-American student population at the University of Texas at Austin (6 percent) is only half the percentage of the overall population of African-Americans in the state of Texas (11.8 percent.)
This is a classic derailing tactic. Feminists know it really well---how can you care about abortion rights when women in Saudi Arabia can't drive?!---and the intent is never to actually address concerns about racism and sexism. The same forces that allowed Zimmerman to make up some bullshit to the cops and walk scot-free after shooting someone he was told not to chase are the same forces that result in these numbers. I'm intensely skeptical that letting vicious racism run in the pages of The Daily Texan unchallenged is going to have a positive or even neutral effect on the student body's racial diversity. On the contrary, it suggests to would-be black students that UT Austin is an unwelcome campus, and could actively work against the goal of greater diversity. More importantly, the underlying prejudice that assumes young black men are inherently criminal is probably the number one reason that black enrollment at UT is so low. These racist fears of black people work to segregate black students into underfunded schools. These fears are part of the reason that black students are more likely to face serious discipline in school. At every point in the public education system, black students face prejudices that make it that much harder for them to put together that college application and get into schools like UT Austin. Look at how conservatives are salivating over the possibility that Trayvon Martin might have smoked pot. A white kid in a suburban high school who smokes pot is Harvard material in the U.S., but a black kid who does the same can be expected to have people write off his death if he's shot in cold blood for no reason. Anyone who thinks that doesn't have an effect on college enrollment numbers is an idiot.
It was kind of strange listening to two men I'd characterize as elite conservatives deal with Corey Robin's thesis, which I think makes a lot more sense if you look at the right as a whole. I also think it's funny how people swear up and down I don't have a Texas accent. I don't exaggerate it, like some politicians I can think of, but when I'm immersed in people who don't talk like I do, I can definitely hear it.
If you want to run for the Republican nomination for President in 2016 (and I know you do), then here are some handy tips for rocketing to the top of the polls for two weeks:
1) When you're polling poorly, it's because the mainstream media is shutting you out.
2) When you're polling well, it's because you managed to get around the mainstream media's filters.
3) When you make a mistake, it's a setup from the mainstream media.
4) When someone else makes a mistake, it's not being covered because of the mainstream media.
In the 2012 race, we've seen this pattern over and over again. But Ann Coulter, who appears to be receiving regular deliveries of the chilled souls of the innocent from the Romney campaign in exchange for support that manages to be both tepid and vitriolic at the same time, is running a new version of this scam. It's like Ocean's Eleven, except the other ten people can't stand to actually be around Ocean, so they just politely retweet the article and move on.
The mainstream media keep pushing alternatives to Mitt Romney not only because they are terrified of running against him, but also because they want to keep Republicans fighting, allowing Democrats to get a four-month jump on us.
I'm pretty sure that everyone else in the Republican field would be surprised that they're being pushed by the mainstream media. Rick Perry, for instance, would gladly tell you why that's wrong, once he rouses from his slumber. Herman Cain will tell you why you're wrong after he pushes a paper clip around on a table for two seconds and repeats your assertion excruciatingly slowly. Michele Bachmann will just assume you've gotten a Gardasil injection. Newt Gingrich...well, Newt Gingrich knows he's smarter than Ann Coulter, the mainstream media, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, Leonardo DaVinci, the Almighty, and Tom Brady, and will gladly tell you why so long as you're a female reporter.
The only consistent quality that's marked the GOP race this year is the search for the biggest victim of the mainstream media. Donald Trump was savaged by the media for his simple insistence that Obama show his already-released birth certificate. Sarah Palin is, of course, Sarah Palin. Bachmann was a nice Christian lady besieged because she was the walking version of an e-mail forward you get from your uncle that was cribbed straight from the blockquote beneath a "False" on Snopes. Perry was just like George W. Bush, and we know how they hated him. Cain was a black conservative - black, people! - and that made him perhaps the greatest victim the party could provide.
And now, we reach Mitt, the bland, telegenic frontrunner that everyone in the media has assumed will be the nominee since the moment he awkwardly called himself unemployed. He's a victim of the mainstream media in a manner even more insidious than all the other made-up ways the other candidates were: the very fact that this field of losers is competitive with him is prima facie evidence of bias against him!
That mainstream media, what a pack of wily and utterly, nonsensically contradictory scamps.
A couple of new items in my ongoing attempts to make like Amway and be everywhere. First, I just got back from MSNBC studios, where I spent a couple of minutes talking to Tamron Hall about the defeat of the personhood amendment in Mississippi:
For more on the personhood situation, please check out this week's podcast, which was what led MSNBC to contact me. I maintain, as I said on the show, that they're trying to do more than just pass laws with this whole personhood situation. It's also about shifting the discussion to the right, to make "lesser" restrictions on abortion seem moderate in comparison.
I'm also thrilled to have a piece with Reuters today about the Herman Cain situation, which I compare to the DSK rape situation, and wonder if the allure of the "nutty, slutty gold-digger" slur is wearing off:
Cain and his supporters are following the script as closely as they can. At first, they had few options, since the public had no information about the accusers beyond the fact that the two had settlements with the National Restaurant Association. But once Sharon Bialek stepped forward, Cain’s defenders had a target, and therefore a chance to change the subject from the evidence against Cain to accusations of nuttiness, sluttiness, and gold-digging against Bialek.
One thing we know is this isn't going to just slip away as easily as Cain clearly hopes.
And I have to link this post I wrote for XX Factor, simply because this story made my morning. It's about the greatest robocall possibly ever, and how it says more about the people who made it than about the candidate it was attempting to slur, or the "homosexuals" being brought in as weapons.
In the world of Lady Issues, most of the bandwidth this week is going to be taken up by the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain. I may have some thoughts on those later---I mean, who doesn't?---but first I want to highlight an article that just came out in the online and print edition of New York Magazine about the feminist blogosphere. This is really exciting for me, because most media coverage of other media tends to be in one of two categories: 1) A profile of someone specific who has done something above and beyond what the rest of us do and 2) A generalized profile of a bunch of Young Turks who have energy and new ideas. The latter tends to get people's ire up, not because they have anything against Young Turks, but because women are ignored, over and over again, for that sort of treatment. Women are seen in the media world as the worker bees (which is why they have a stronger presence in the editorial staff than in the front pages), which means that we're not looked to as innovative thinkers, even if we are. In fact, one of the early concerns when I was first blogging---which is discussed in the article---was how men, especially white men, were sucking up all the oxygen when it came to the liberal blogosphere. Those of you who were around then probably remember this:
Left-wing blogging was on the rise, a phenomenon that was strikingly male. As writer Amanda Marcotte says, laughing in recollection, “We had a running joke about how every three months, another guy would publish a post about ‘Why don’t women blog?’ And we would all comment, ‘We’re out here; fuck you!’ ”
That doesn't happen anymore, thank god. It points to why I have so much faith in the blogosphere and in internet media in general: I think it has demonstrated more flexibility and the people involved are more willing to change. Part of the reason is that the constant output of material makes it easier to portray your changes as evolution; in stale mainstream media, changing your mind or outlook is easier to see as some kind of waffling. Therefore, some of the men who were gave us pains in the early days are now some of our best allies. But mainstream media isn't so quick to change. They have a model of what an innovative writer looks like, it that model doesn't include a vagina. When women are innovative, we're generally seen more as silly and hysterical, but mostly we're not allowed to be seen as innovative. I won't belabor the point any further. You can just go read Ann Friedman's delightful satire of the problem here.
So I'm thrilled to see feminist blogging get the Young Turks treatment. Granted, it's by New York Magazine, which is one of my favorite magazines because they are willing to reject media norms and do their own thing. Hopefully, they're opening a door for women to be considered eligible for this sort of treatment.
Mainly, I wanted to highlight this because the writer, Emily Nussbaum, did a good job of making this piece about you. Instead of concentrating on a handful of blogs that get the most traffic, she sees the feminist blogosphere in its entireity, and includes the LiveJournal confessionals and Tumblr satires and all the other various forms of feminist discourse that are happening in the broad world of blogging. One of the major problems of media coverage of feminism is it rarely captures how much of it is about dialogue. Nussbaum understands feminist history really well, and how the archives of the second wave show a lively and diverse movement that had a lot more women in it than Gloria Steinem. She sees the blogosphere the same way: as a jungle of voices, and one where digging in the stacks instead of sticking to the chart toppers can often produce some truly fascinating reading. There's a reading list of blogs and a portrait slideshow that focuses on some of the most prominent voices, but the actual article itself is about the vastness of the discourse. Which is important, because it's a remarkable counter to the same tedious storyline about how feminism is dead. That so many people are online writing about feminism, and that it's not just a few prominent voices, demonstrates how much feminism is not dead, but is in fact undergoing a 21st century revival.
On a personal note, I have to say it's been amazing watching all this happen. There was no "feminist blogosphere" when I started, which is part of the reason I write largely about politics and pop culture and not just about feminism. (The other reason is: I want to.) But that anyone was writing about feminism at all in the early days turned out to be more inspiring and expansive than those of us typing in our kitchens and living rooms years ago could have imagined. Except maybe Jessica Valenti---I think she had ambitions for Feministing, but the rest of us were just doing our thing for the hell of it. And so much has come from it, for ourselves and for the larger internet community. Now you see feminist discourse normalized in all sorts of unexpected online spaces. And hopefully this article suggests that next on the list is the real world.
Via GOOD, the New York Observer had an awesome exclusive. A producer for Greta Van Sustern's show on FOX News was down at Occupy Wall St., trying to get some rambling stoners on tape to embarrass the protesters, and instead ended up interviewing Jesse LaGreca. LaGreca proceeded to dress down FOX news for being a propaganda outlet instead of a news organization, and then basically wiped the pavement with this guy. At the end, trying to salvage the segment, the producer concedes the point about FOX, but then asks what role Obama plays in all this.
The obvious objective here is to get a protester putting all the blame on Obama, so that can be aired on FOX, but LaGreca wisely doesn't take the bait and instead uses the question to call out the question for being disingenuous by noting that the conservative opposition to Obama is trying to stop him from doing any good in the world. I just wanted to stand up and applaud at that part. The left is getting to a point of Obama-obsession that rivals the right. It's not just the leftists who have convinced themselves the man can't do anything right, though they are a problem. Even the most stalwart Obama supporters have made the situation All About Obama, when in fact there's a much larger problem at hand than the fact that our President is oft-times a weenie. I have many of the same criticisms of Occupy Wall St. as others---while the hippie thing is overblown, I really do wish that there wasn't so much hostility to fellow travelers who look "straight"---but I'm a strong supporter of it for one reason above all other things. It's focusing people's attention where it belongs, on the banks and widespread social inequities. This is a problem that's expanded beyond just the electoral cycles and goes straight back to a larger trend towards the right in this country, a trend that's pushing Republicans to the far right and Democrats to the center. Focusing like a laser on Obama and making this about whether or not he's "betrayed" us fails to shed any real light on the problem. For good reason, i.e. Americans continue to elect Republicans in large numbers, both parties believe that Americans like the status quo of increasing inequities and corporate control of everything, and so neither party has a reason to change their approach.
Occupy Wall St. is blaming the right people, and pointing out the real problems in our society. It's a start. And LeGreca models the best way to keep our eyes on the prize, by making it about addressing underlying values and systems and not seeing a single politician as the force that will save us all, and then plunging into despair when he makes the rather inevitable compromised decisions that come with the territory of being a politician.
I was reading the latest issue of The Believer---the music issue!---today, and I found this tidbit interesting. It's from Hua Hsu's examination of the telephone in pop music history, and it made me cackle:
Early newspaper reports of Alexander Graham Bell's new invention, the telephone, exhibited a laughable narrowness of vision. Short of changing business or politics, the greatest effect, some teased, would be in the arena of courtship. "A fellow can now court his girl in China as well as in East Boston," an 1870s editorial in the Boston Times forsaw, before warning of "the awful and irresponsible power" such a device would give nagging mothers.
The technology changes, but the complaints remain the same: 1) Someone, somewhere is using this technology to gain pleasures you yourself are not experiencing and that's alarming and 2) Women are frightening creatures whose awe-inspiring powers to destroy are only being restrained by the lack of this new technology in their lives.
Nona Willis Aronowitz posted a video from MTV News in 1995 about the internet. The broadcasters were not panicked about the internet. On the contrary, they seemed to think it was a really cool invention that had a lot of potential. But they reported on the fact that a lot of people at the time were panicked by the internet, because, you know, orgasms.
(There's a little bit of Billy Corgan bashing Michael Jackson, too. Guess who won history?)
People's continual panic over technological innovation---the way we easily convince ourselves that a new medium or device will somehow be the ruin of us all---is one of those topics I find fascinating without ever really resolving it in my mind. I'm particularly amused at the knee-jerk assumption that older forms are automatically deeper and more interesting. I was compelled to think about that some today after reading the tedious, joy-killing comments at what I thought was a fun post at XX Factor about MTV's early years and what it meant to people like me. Using a little bit of colorful language, I said that MTV raised me, by which of course I meant that I watched a lot of it growing up and it had a big impact on my way of thinking. I made a substantive argument that this was a good thing, but of course the puzzling "OMG TV IS THE DEVIL" folks had to show up in comments.
It is sad....really sad. To think that so many young people (and now old people) park their behinds in front of a television and let mindless television programing become the "inspiration" and the open window into a view of the world and of their lives. REALLY.....I mean REALLY AMANDA? You were "raised" by MTV? That in and of itself is truely a sad statement about not just one generation but multi generations. It is sad, at least to me, that an entire generations view of what is important from their youth was coming home and parking in front of a television to watch a show about a bunch of musicians in made up videos about made up things. But that is also true of the generation that came home and parked in front of a television to watch Andy Griffith or Lassie, or Gulliagans Island. Again a generation defined not by the things they did but what they watched....sad but true.
I told him I rejected his "get off my lawn" argument, particularly the notion that I'm a stupid or sad person because I like music videos. But it did make me think: would such a person crap his pants if I wrote about an older medium changing my life for the better? What if I posted this song by the Velvet Underground and said I related to it? I'm guessing I'd be praised, because radio is an older medium and therefore assumed to be wholesome and intelligence-improving.
In fact, I got something of an answer to my question, as a number of people showed up in comments and shamed anyone who watched MTV for not being more into radio. Radio's superiority was assumed to be self-evident, even though I brought forth evidence in the post and people backed it up in comments that a lot of what was on MTV was simply not available on the radio in much of the country. In fact, I would say that's the point of the post. By simply having more diverse and newer content, MTV was automatically superior, in my opinion. But this notion that technological evolution is somehow immoral (I got both right wing puritans shaming me for the sexual immorality of watching MTV and liberal puritans shaming me for the supposed corporatist immorality of watching MTV) just is asserted as if it's an immutable truth of humanity and not just some arbitrary bullshit.
I remain puzzled as to why people so easily take it as a given that a communication/media technology's newness makes it more immoral and vapid than older forms, which were also considered immoral and vapid when they came out. I'm sure it has something to do with fear of mortality. Any way you slice it , there's an irony there, because I would argue that the knee-jerk rejection of a technology simply because it's new is what is vapid and quite often immoral, particularly when it comes to the people who begrudge young people whose lives are very often saved by fascinating new technologies that show them a world behind the limited ones that are smothering them.
Back from Netroots Nation, and while I'm still a little tired, I'm energized as usual after the conference. As many of you no doubt know, the pathetic shadow conference Right Online was closer than ever this year. And by "pathetic shadow conference", I mean it. Every year, Right Online finds out where Netroots Nation is and schedules near there, because there's something about being conservative that requires being childish and petulant. This year, it was especially ugly, because the Right Online was closer than ever to Netroots Nation, and they were in fact in the Hilton that many of us---including myself---were staying at. Which means that the childish, petulant behavior kept spilling over. And also that I ran into Andrew Breitbart downtown and took a picture of him standing with a friend (with his permission, of course!). Breitbart showed up at Netroots Nation, which is irritating because while the vast majority of attendees react to such behavior the way you should---with scorn bordering on indifference---a handful of people got provoked and taped themselves yelling stupid shit at him. Which is what he no doubt hoped would happen, and leave media with the assumption that "both sides" are bad, even though only one side schedules an entire conference for the sole purpose of irritating their opponents.
False equivalence is particularly a problem when you consider that the one incident that everyone heard about was a Right Online attendee harassing some Netroots attendees. The main victim of the harassment told her story in a panel about fighting Islamaphobia (which was, by the way, a great panel that I learned a lot from). She was wearing a hijab while standing outside a bar that was having a Netroots event, talking to some friends, and at least one of her friends was also wearing a hijab, and some dude from a shitty right wing blog rolled up and started to harass her and her friend. When they told him to kindly fuck off, he started taking their pictures. (For what purpose, I'm not sure---he seemed to be under the impression that someone could use the photos as some sort of expose of Netroots Nation, or maybe he thought the police would somehow stop free Americans from wearing what they like as they stand around on the streets of Minneapolis.) At this point, a number of people at the party came to the women's defense, and he was arrested. Marc and I walked up to the club right as the man was being shoved into a cop car, and I said something about it, since something about the situation seemed like it was more than a drunk-asshole-getting-arrested situation. Indeed, it was. And of course, someone got video of much of the confrontation between the man who was harassing the women and the Netroots folks who pushed back. You can see the confrontation (with my Texas buddy Matt Glazer!) starting at 4:30.
I want to highlight that the guy in question is threatening to call Andrew Breitbart, which again I don't completely understand. Does he think Breitbart has some legal authority to stop people from standing in the streets wearing clothing items he disapproves of? I suppose I can see how you'd get confused, since all this happened the day Anthony Weiner resigned. But it's unsettling to see how at least one of Breitbart's fans imbues the man with nearly god-like powers. I'm inclined to think the guy is bluffing, by the way, and was just hoping the threat of calling the Breitbart cops who would make the women pay for wearing hijabs would make them, I don't know, stop or something.
Anyway, the incident was understandably upsetting, and some people reacted by organizing a flash mob at the Hilton. I stood on the second floor and watched it; it was mainly a bunch of people milling around, many in hijabs. But it worked as intended, getting coverage for the incident and giving the protestors a chance to explain their point of view:
Jesse and I got in the elevator with some protestors after the incident and spoke briefly to them; they were excited and a little scared about everything that happened, but felt like they had made their point.
Of course, you can predict the right wing reaction, considering that what happened was a woman claiming a man harassed her: immediately hide behind claims that women are liars and not to be believed. John Hawkins of Right Wing News went straight to that strategy. Believe it or not, I was one of the liberal bloggers he was talking to, as was Jesse. I don't recall if I explained to him that I had seen the guy getting arrested, but you know, if he was so skeptical, he could have asked if we knew anything. By the way, the characterization of Netroots as "90-95% white" is really laughable from someone who was there with Right Online, since when we were talking to him the entire conference was moving from one location to another. But I wouldn't characterize them as 90-95% white, since that figure is way too low.
Hopefully, the right wingers won't be as close next year. While it did provide from some really amusing encounters (liberals are apparently very frightening to ride elevators with!), it's also scary, since there is the unhinged element of conservative activists, and a willingness to make casual death threats, as Melissa Clouthier did on Twitter, when she said, "Bunch of #nn11 folks in the elevator called me the enemy. I reminded that folks on the right pack heat. #ro11."
Greetings from Netroots Nation! I moderated a panel called "Challenging Mainstream Media Narratives on Right Wing Extremism", and Jesse was one of the panelists. You can watch it already here:
Other panelists included Sarah Posner, Adele Stan, David Neiwert, and David Holthouse. We talked about the militia movements, hate groups, Tea Party extremism, the Christian patriarchy movement, and the way that the relatively unremarkable New Black Panthers situation got far more media attention than the more serious acts of voter intimidation that go on all the time in this country.
Someone's Twitter stream had a link to this mess up. You see, some nutjobs have decided to make a film called "Gates of Hell" where abortion drives black people crazy and then they kill all of us, because they are dark angels of our souls, or something:
Black power. Abortion. Terrorism. "Prophetic fiction". Three years in the making, "Gates of Hell" is a documentary from the year 2016 that chronicles the crimes of a band of domestic terrorists known as the Zulu 9. Finnish filmmaker Ani Juva travels to the United States to better understand the mysterious black power assassins, the bizarre eugenics conspiracy theory that drove them to commit extreme acts of violence and how America's political landscape was transformed forever. Blending real history and real public figures with a fictitious (yet plausible) future, it is safe to say that you have never seen a film like "Gates of Hell".
Watching the trailer/sales pitch for the film (they're only $99,680 away from the $100,000 they need to do something something with this), the crux of this is clear: evil big government liberals use abortion as a secret method to commit mass genocide against blacks. Blacks who are also the most reliable group of voters for evil big government liberals. And are also a part of another conspiracy to have public money funneled to them so that they have more kids.
It's like a completely useless cycle where you earn money to buy matches to burn money, but it involves black people, so the soundtrack is by Young Money.
One might argue, if one were painfully naive in a manner that bordered on certfiable brain damage, that this is simply an effort for "pro-lifers" to get their message out using the corollary of violent black people uprising against a system of oppression. Of course, one might not have Googled the creatively named director, Molotov Mitchell (also known by the nickname on his birth certificate, "Jason"). You see, ol' Mol (or is it "Tov"? I never know when people have ridiculously stupid nicknames) makes a lot of videos. Some of them involve black people.
Some of them involve advocating for the murder of black people. Bet you didn't see that one coming, eh?
Molotov...okay, buddy, I'm gonna call you Jason, because it's a lot hipper than "Molotov", which is basically a tool for winos who are done with their wino rags and ran out of money to burn. Jason here advocated for the Ugandan anti-gay bill that would have allowed the government to kill gay Ugandans. For being gay, not for having abortions, which is a totally different thing.
Now, you might wonder what makes a policy of murdering actual human beings better than a policy of allowing voluntary abortion, but that, ladies and gentlemen, is a gotcha question. We don't think about the relative moral efficacy of comparative actions involving the same group of people. Duh. We care about the right people dying, and preferably white people not having to get their hands dirty doing it!
Incidentally, a sitting elected official is in this film, Representative Bobby Franklin of Georgia. Now, do keep in mind that we just saw a married Congressman get shamed on national television for using the internet to have dirty chats and send pictures of his junk; surely a state Representative who's taking to the internet to make race-laden murder fantasies deserves some scrutiny, too?
Ah, well, probably not. Let's tune in for the low-budget sequel to this, Gates of Crack-Addicted Black People Making Your GM Car.
Alex Pareene at Salon has an excellent report on how Matt Drudge has spent the past few years concocting a picture of America as one torn apart by a crime-based race war, where random black people are "rising up" and attacking and killing white people. If you, like me, find this image strange (including going to your window to make sure that so far, it's mostly birds chirping and moms pushing strollers, and not in fact mob violence), then you're not wrong! Crime levels, especially violent crime, continue to cascade downwards in the U.S. Overall, the nation has become a gentler one, at least within its borders. (The argument about our imperial adventures is outside the bounds of this discussion.) I would even argue that the one area where crime is going up---domestic terrorism---is partially a response to the other trends in the U.S. A lot of right wing extremists look at the growing emphasis on non-violence in the U.S. and feel like it's emasculating and turn more violent and gun-loving in response.
Even though crime is going down, there's a perception in the American public that crime is going up. There's a number of theories about why there's such a disconnect, but I would argue that Matt Drudge is a large part of the problem. In the past few years, Drudge has been steadily building up this image of a de facto race war, and since Drudge, as Atrios always notes, rules the world of the mainstream media, these local stories he trumpets become national stories. And he's fucking relentless, as John Cook reports. Alex summarized:
It all came to a head, as John Cook noted, this Memorial Day weekend when Drudge posted 10 separate headlines -- including the massive, above-the-logo one -- related to violent incidents involving "urban" people at venues like "Black Bike Week" in Miami and "Rib Fest" in Rochester, N.Y. There was an "Urban Melee in Charlotte," for example. Do you know what makes an "urban melee" different from a regular "melee"? It's not that it takes place within the city limits of a major metropolitan area. It's that it involves the world's most obvious code term for "scary black people."
As John at Gawker points out, the number of local news stories about crime invariably rise during Memorial Day weekend because holidays create crime peaks. it's the combination of time off and alcohol, basically. It goes up for all races. Drudge's choice of what stories to highlight is about creating a narrative, and the insinuation is now that we have a black President, all hell is breaking loose. One of the weirdest, most long-standing conservative myths is that black people are aching to "rise up" and take the nation by force. The argument is then that they have to, more in sorrow than in glee, argue against equal rights for black people. They'd want to share, but you know, violence! The notion that black America is revenge-minded is something that is surprisingly powerful for wingnuts. That's why there's non-stop chatter on right wing radio about slavery reparations, even though the subject has no traction in real world discourse, and even if it did, said reparations would look much different than right wingers imagine it would like. (They're picturing jack-booted thugs stealing your grandmother's pearls and giving it to some family you don't know to pawn, but it would more likely be a check that resembles a Social Security check or a tax refund.) And that's why Andrew Breitbart thinks that some court settlement to black farmers who were systemically discriminated against for decades is the biggest problem our nation faces. It's really a level of paranoia that's hard for me to wrap my mind around.
It was during the half time performance of the Black Eyed Peas last night, precisely when the dancers with boxes on their heads came out, when I realized I was in a very Devo set of mind, which is to say, really enjoying the de-evolution of culture as described by the band Devo. (Example: “Those two people over there in the polyester double-knit body suits driving that gas-guzzling Cadillac are more DE-vo than we could ever be.”) Some people would put boxes on their dancers’ heads to symbolize or represent something, to create an emotional impact with artfulness. BEP does it because why the fuck not? It’s truly beautiful, if you have a real appreciation for mediocrity, which I occasionally do, and why I have come to enjoy watching the Super Bowl. And last night was awesome, everything I wanted. Besides the actual game—-the fact that football players are really good at what they do justifies everything else that happens around the game—-last night was a glorious sea of mediocrity.
At its best, the spectacle of the Super Bowl proves the principle that aesthetics by committee will tend towards the mediocre, because that which offends no one will get more backing than that which is actually interesting. Of course, “offending no one” is another way of saying “boring”. Clay Aiken is the epitome of this principle, but last night’s Super Bowl really was competitive. The ads tended towards absurdity in an attempt to be eye-catching without having any of the bite that actual humor has. (One exception was the little kid playing at Darth Vader, which still had some bite in it.) The “jokes” in ads that dared to offend mostly were pretend daring to offend—-sexist jokes that are less about having bite than about reassuring the lowest common denominator that all their vicious prejudices are still acceptable. But the cake of mediocrity was definitely that BEP performance. That was the most perfect “offend no one, entertain no one” balance of mediocrity I’ve ever seen. I mean, they had the word “love” all over the place—-it’s unobjectionable, and in this context, utterly meaningless. Love? Who or what, to what purpose? I don’t know, but isn’t it a nice word?
They should have the Black Eyed Peas play every year, seriously. They’re the perfect halftime band. They can’t be too awesome, like Prince, which always causes complaints from the large idiot faction of the audience. But they didn’t make you want to hide behind your couch at the tragedy of it all, like The Who last year. They are white bread with butter: we can all tolerate it, but no one will really enjoy it too much.
Matt Zoller Seitz declared at Salon today that the Super Bowl spectacle (which is different from the game, which was actually interesting this year) is a temperature gauge of the national mood. And that would mean that the national mood is one of not wanting anyone to be too happy or too sad or too thoughtful or too opinionated or too intellectual or too stupid. The more meaningless and mediocre, the better. Add some sparkle to it so people don’t notice that it’s empty. It’s safer that way.
Some who are against abortion rights protested the show before it even aired. Conservative blogger Jill Stanek argued that, even though MTV insisted that it would cover the issue from all sides, no anti-abortion voices were included, and a few anti-abortion advocates swore off MTV entirely.
Here’s the thing: the documentary didn’t take “sides”. No pro-choice activists were included, either. It was just the three women and Dr. Drew Pinsky, being a decent person for once. He was compassionate towards the women and reported the facts accurately: abortion is common despite the silence around it, it’s not an easy decision, it’s extremely safe, and most women who do it really think long and hard about their decisions. Basically, the anti-choicers are angry about the facts, due to facts having a pro-choice bias.
How, exactly, were anti-choice voices supposed to play a part in a documentary that focused strictly on individuals telling their stories? Do they have 25 minutes of women talking about the pros and cons of abortion, and then say, “And now we’re going to cut to someone who has never talked to these women so he can screech lies about abortion at you for 5 minutes in the interest of ‘balance’”? Obviously, the very idea is silly. The documentary was short, but it was basic journalism. Here’s some facts. Here are the experiences of the people who lived through it. Draw your own conclusions.
It’s fascinating that conservatives basically are admitting up front that they have no argument if they’re not allowed to introduce lies and propaganda into the situation.
The sad thing is that this kind of bullying usually works on actual news networks, which feel pressured to give air time to overt lies in order to achieve “balance”. It’s a real shame to see MTV show up any news show that has ever allowed some wingnut airtime to spread lies without actually fact-checking their claims. Good on you, MTV. Hope everyone else is taking notes.
This is the part of Michael Moore’s interview on “Rachel Maddow” last night that was lighting up Twitter, because this is the clip where he changed his tune about the accusations against Julian Assange, admitting they were credible and saying that the women who accused him should be heard in court. I was fortunate enough to be in the audience for this, but on this entire issue I have more to say later. Right now, I want to talk about something else that Moore and Maddow discussed, in the second part of the interview. But I will bring it back to the rape case.
Maddow made an interesting argument, which is that a problem with Wikileaks is that incorrect propaganda can be leaked along with factually true information, which is incidentally exactly what happened to Michael Moore. A cable was released claiming that “Sicko” had been banned in Cuba, which was published to great sniggering all over the place. And was also total bullshit. (And also incoherent bullshit, but it seems like it was mostly because it was internal propaganda for the Bush administration. No joke.) Moore countered by pointing out that the record was corrected in this case, and in fact, the Wikileaks cables are improving journalism because every cable the news medias wish to cover they have actually follow up with investigations. In other words, the cables are the starting point. I think there’s this belief out there that Assange and the Wikileaks crew are all about information as some kind of solution in and of itself (or that they support a secret-free society, when they’ve actually redacted information in the cables and worked with seasoned professionals in journalism to decide what to release). But the idea of Wikileaks is to put the government on notice, which is working very well.
What Moore is saying is also very interesting, which is that once information is out there—-such as the fact that this cable was sent—-we can actually deal with it. So, yes, a lie got out about his movie and Cuba. But then the lie was corrected, and what we learned from the whole shebang is that the Bush administration had a lot of internal propaganda going on. This is an important thing to know, and will influence our understanding of history from here on out. (It shores up the sense that conservatives lie to themselves in order to gin up enthusiasm for lying to others.) Of course, that doesn’t deal with the problem of deliberately leaked propaganda, but still, he had a point.
And what better proves it than the Guardian publishing the leaked documents from the Swedish police regarding the Assange rape case? It’s ironic that Assange is so angry about this, because I can’t think of a better example of how effective the principles of free information are. Before the documents were published, there was a dearth of information, and when there is a dearth of real information, people start to fill in the holes with their own prejudices so they can make judgments. People who wished to believe that they were supporting a noble man in every way with Assange were eager to grab on to any scrap of information that shored up their hopeful arguments that the accusers were the strawfeminists of right wing imagination, women who cry rape if a man looks at them funny.
But when the actual depositions got out, that changed everything. Now people had something to work with. Granted, some of them are so dedicated to the “hysterical bitches” narrative that they read it into the information at hand. But others, including Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore, seem to have revised their opinions dramatically on the case, because being exposed to the information made them realize their knee jerk reaction that the allegations couldn’t be credible was simply wrong. The people arguing that we shouldn’t attack the accusers without evidence ironically got a better foothold when we got some information, because at least we had something to point to when making our case. It narrows down the field of possibilities. Before the release, those defending these rape accusers and rape accusers in general from scurrilous accusations had many tangents to go with—-you don’t have any idea what they said, it doesn’t seem likely that the only issue was a broken condom, there’s a possibility of hysteria but experience suggests to me most women aren’t just childish hysterics. Now it’s narrowed down to pointing to the details in the deposition and saying, “Look, X, Y, and Z are definitely wrong and should be punished if the prosecution can prove the case.” Meanwhile, if experience on #mooreandme is any indication, the rape apologists are still working with bad information that was imagined into existence when there wasn’t real information to work with.
Point for getting it all out on the table. Ironically, then, point for Wikileaks and the arguments for them. But like Moore said in the interview, this isn’t about Assange or one man, but about Wikileaks as a group, and the argument for free information in general.
If you want to run for the Republican nomination for President in 2016 (and I know you do), then here are some handy tips for rocketing to the top of the polls for two weeks:
Update: I should have noted earlier, 
It was during the half time performance of the Black Eyed Peas last night, precisely when the dancers with boxes on their heads came out, when I realized I was in a very Devo set of mind, which is to say, really enjoying the de-evolution of culture as described by the band Devo. (