Bill O'Reilly: cultural anthropologist

Although I think Bill O'Reilly is, indeed, an asshat, the clip from his radio show that Media matters has picked up as evidence of him being a bigot shows something much more sickening--Juan Williams chatting with him like Bill's as pluralistic and aware as the next guy. I heard Williams on NPR a few weeks ago in a short segment about the role African-Americans journalists play in the news. As an illustration of the pressure he felt as a spokesperson for Black issues he said:

"I remember once I was covering Marion Barry here in D.C. and I remember standing at a bus stop one day [back when I had to ride the bus]. And this guy comes up to me and he says, "You know that White newspaper you work for, The Washington Post, you know that paper goes all over the country, all over the world and it's creating a real bad image of Black people, you know, you should know what you're doing, you know, working for the Man and putting down Black people."

That certainly is a great burden to bear. It's a good thing he's over that. Now he appears on Bill O'Reilly's show, effectively, as a member of the black upper class, assuring Bill's 70+ year old white, male audience that there are some Negros out there who are civilized and well mannered and not corrupting our youth. In the segment he has the keen insight to say that it's really okay for white kids to listen to Gangsta rap because that has no effect on them except for providing them an outlet for rebellion (oh, and creating a certain impression of race relations--but who could that hurt?) It's the Black youths that have a problem here because:

too many of the black kids take it as, "Oh, that's what it means to be authentically black. That's how you make money. That's how you become rich and famous and get on TV and get music videos." And you either get the boys or the girls. The girls think they have to, you know, be half-naked and spinning around like they're on meth in order to get any attention. It really corrupts people, and I think it adds, Bill, to some serious sociological problems, like the high out-of-wedlock birth rate because of this hypersexual imagery that then the kids adapt to some kind of reality. I mean, it's inauthentic.

It's like it came from the script of a movie drafted by Reaganite propagandists about race. I'm not going to really engage with the argument about the effect a certain set of role models has on young people: obviously it has some effect but since the "black kids" we're talking about here are cardboard cut outs fashioned by the minds of these two stooges I'll leave that to one side. What I will point out is that, as these two guys with their major public presence on the US airwaves forget to mention, is that this image of "gangstas" etc. is hardly new and their widespread promotion isn't just some random, democratic result of us having sorted through all the possible Black entertainers and coming up with these guys. Up at the top there are some White homies that are making plenty of bank off of this--and have been for some time--and their marketing and promotion tactics are keen to the popular impressions they've helped to create.

But all of this is sort of beside the point. Because what Bill begins his segment saying is that he's so unfamiliar with the way that "Black America" (as if such a thing exists) works that a stroll through Harlem is his only source of authority for talking about "Black America." Juan Williams should have called him on that right off. If you're such a stranger to these areas, how do you know so much about the children in them? The answer is that he simply doesn't. And I'd imagine Juan Williams doesn't know much more. The effect they are talking about (kids imitating gangsta rappers) is simply presumed from the content of the media. The ridiculous idea that they can blame the increase in out-of-wedlock births on "Gangsta Rap" would be charmingly back-woods if these two fools weren't having their rap session on a nationally syndicated radio show.

I mean, everyone knows Reggaeton is much more popular than Gangsta rap in most US cities!



MOREOVER...

In thinking a little longer about this, I really do wonder what the larger context for Bill and Juan's little diatribe is and my suspicion is that it was addressing the events in Jena, which, if it was the case, really disgusts me. This lead into the whole discussion makes me suspect that it had something to do with what is going on there, in which case Williams should really be ashamed of himself for playing along:

Now, how do we get to this point? Black people in this country understand that they've had a very, very tough go of it, and some of them can get past that, and some of them cannot. I don't think there's a black American who hasn't had a personal insult that they've had to deal with because of the color of their skin. I don't think there's one in the country. So you've got to accept that as being the truth. People deal with that stuff in a variety of ways. Some get bitter. Some say, [unintelligible] "You call me that, I'm gonna be more successful." OK, it depends on the personality.

Right. I guess those kids in Jena just didn't take up the challenge those nooses posed with the right frame of mind.

[okay, I admit, I'm jumping to a conclusion here. But since I am not going to pay to listen to the 9/19 version of his radio show, I'm going to assume that, since the story aired the day before the big rally in Jena it is hard to imagine any story about race (especially one that focuses on the age old white problem of having to put up with uppity, yet uncivilized, Negros) not beginning from that point. And if it wasn't starting from that point, then it is even more disconnected from reality than I imagined.-]

Politics in Black and White - New York Times

Krugman says, of the changes that the protests of Jena help illustrate :

In other words, it looks as if the Republican Party is about to start paying a price for its history of exploiting racial antagonism. If that happens, it will be deeply ironic. But it will also be poetic justice.

I think calling it poetic justice is inadvertently giving the Democrats too much credit for actually doing anything minority issues on their own accord. If the Republicans are still committed to the southern strategy (fully evoking the antebellum meaning of the term) then the Democrats are just as committed to a Northern Strategy (i.e. where race was definitely an issue throughout the 19th century, and where full equality for African Americans was never on the agenda) have done little more than cash in as the "other party." The real justice would be if minorities of all races (and classes) created a third party that was actually committed to the issue of racial equality. It would mean that the Democrats couldn't just wait for electoral windfalls from simply being the "less evil" party. One could say the same at this point for issues of gender (especially reproductive freedom) but I've seen way too many haughty middle class white women lately who seem to think that the Republicans are their party to expect a mass of women to move any closer to protecting their own interests than possibly jumping to the Democrats. I don't know if Hillary makes that any more or less possible, but either case isn't very promising in terms of the issues that should matter most.

On that note, I've been really struck lately at how much women--especially new mothers--will put up with in terms of the boundaries their employers put on them. I guess at that point there is not much that can be done by an individual, but in an earlier age having to use vacation time for maternity leave (as one new mother I know has) or having to quit work altogether because the employer won't work with you on child care issues and flexible work schedules after only six weeks of maternity leave--these are the kinds of things that would get people pissed off and start rallying other mothers for some sort of expansion of maternity rights on a national level. It would seem that the absence of this even in the face of all the "culture of life" bullshit the GOP likes to brand itself with really goes to show how cowed we all are. Maybe there is some "netroots" going on about this somewhere, but most of the energy seems to be channeled into the dead end catacombs of the old party apparatuses, which seem to be committed to the "culture of life" in proportion to the life giving force of Dick Cheney's womb.

All of that will, of course, come to a head in the next few days when Bush commits the rhetorical/PR blunder of vetoing a bill on children's health care. I have no illusions right now about the robustness of the Democrats desire or ability to really change the health care industry, but it is actually poetic irony to have Bush signing such a veto: "Life begins at conception, but our responsibility for protecting it ends at birth." Sign on, you fanatical hypocrite; sign on.

[I suppose I should follow that by saying that the ideological framework of the Republican party is fully able to make this seem completely coherent. The danger, on the other hand, of cornering them on this point, is that the neither of the pure ideologies--19th century capitalism or 15th century theocratic absolutism--are all that appealing, though both find plenty of adherents within different sectors of the US public. If they were to choose one of the two for the sake of consistency, then it might turn off some of the swing voters, but I don't have complete faith that either would be stomped at the polls. There seems to be a genuine longing among a good portion of the US populace for the comforting arms of fascism or totalitarianism of some stripe so I wouldn't put it past them to overturn the rest of the 20th century for the committed adherence of any party to a comprehensive (and easily comprehendable) master narrative. I know this is a fairly cliched thing to say in this post-post-modern era, but I say it as a hypothesis rather than a conclusion.]

Alexander Cockburn: On Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine"

Cockburn makes a good general case for some of the absence of novelty in Naomi Klein's thesis of "Disaster Capitalism"

The Chicago Boys laid waste the southern cone of Latin America in the name of unfettered private enterprise, but 125 years earlier a million Irish peasants starved to death while Irish grain was exported onto ships flying the flag of economic liberalism. Klein writes about "the bloody birth of counter-revolution" in the 1960s and 1970s, but any page from the histories of Presidents Jackson, Polk or Roosevelt discloses a bleak and blood-stained continuity with the past. Depatterning? Indian children were taken from their families and punished for every word spoken in their own language, even as African slaves were given Christian names and forbidden to use their own, or to drum. Amid the shock of the Civil War the Republicans deferred by several years the freeing of slaves, while hastening to use crisis to arrange a banking and monetary system to their liking.

but even as he is saying this, he really seems to be missing the point. As obvious as this may be to the average leftist with some sense of history, she does have a point in that the rise of American Empire (or, if you want to sound like the more PC Liberal version, "The American Century") has been accompanied by a significant ideology of "freedom" and "democracy." And there is a very clear bias towards remembering the last half century as one of the peaceful progress towards the "End of History."

On the other hand, as vitriolic as 1960s leftists like Cockburn were in their disdain for the welfare state, many of the social wage gains it provided were not just some corporate fleece job. Ditto the gains of civil rights. Yes these were won through struggle, but the international image of the US was in the forefront of the minds of the leaders who eventually had to re-write some of the hegemonic discourse to allow for these new articulations of freedom. No it was not an unmitigated success and yes there was still plenty of problems with the normalizing "regime of truth" through which the institutions of the state produced the ideal national subject.

The change in the 1970s, which Klein seems to be pointing to, is one in which many of those gains were articulated as some sort of special pleading by weenies who couldn't cut it rather than the hard won gains of people who actually contributed to the society--or as social supports for people who the state's actions (in line with the interests of globalizing capital) left in increasingly dire straits.

If Cockburn's argument is that there is never any difference in the relationship between capital and labor or capital and the state, then that, also, is an "interesting perspective" (as he says of David Harvey's Brief History of Neoliberalism). But it seems no more historically specific than Klein's account to say that nothing has really changed. On this point, I have recently been having some fairly unpopular thoughts.

I don't know much about Soviet history. I grew up in the Reagan presidency so my earliest understanding of it was as an "Evil Empire" But it seems like much of what was gained in the 20th century in the US was gained because the Soviet Union was always lurking as a counterbalance. I'm certain that the propagandistic image of that society that I had in the US was as filled with inaccuracies as the official version promoted by the Kremlin, so I can't say anything about how good it was for the Soviet people. It doesn't seem that it was a whole lot better than the social ruptures caused by capitalism and imperialism in the 19th century, but in world politics, it was at least there to keep the US (more) honest. The civil rights movement in the US and the anti-imperialism movements throughout the world not only had a friend in the Soviet Union, the possibility that they could be more friendly with the USSR than the USA made the latter pay a little more attention to (appearing) consistent. That, it seems, has been lost.

This brings me to Cockburn's example of India. I don't have sources handy on this, but I recall accounts of the pressure placed on India with the fall of the Soviet Union to transition quickly to an alliance with the US. I believe the discussions were related to the recent Nuclear alliance between the US and India, but the point was that there was a crisis that led to the Indian adoption of the neo-liberal model: the loss of its key strategic ally in the world. And clearly the Indian elite--like the Soviet elite, the Chilean elite, and the "global North" in general--were the greatest champions of this model at the time and its greatest beneficiaries. But there was certainly a cataclysmic change that took place.

It is in this context that the adoption of these policies appears to be natural and where people like Jeffrey Sachs can present a striking unawareness of the history of where the good stuff in the US came from in the interest of establishing a model that has rarely, if ever, existed in human history. The intervention Klein is making is to inform a new generation of the "global north" that it isn't just "brand bullies" we have to contest, but the entire model itself. And to do this sometimes requires the expulsion of some nuance from the argument in order to focus on some other nuances. Since her other recent work--such as the documentary The Take--is focusing precisely on the resistance to the model, I can't help but think Cockburn's critique is basically just another crusty leftist trying to retain his authority.

For even the most well organized, grassroots change in Latin America could be easily branded as some communist (or "terrorist") campaign by the sympathizers of global capital, which, because the repressive arm of the US state is currently tied may not result in the kind of intervention we saw in the cold war, but can let them legitimize local thuggery in its interests. This has been the tack taken, for instance, in the recent dealings of the Ecuadorian state with the indigenous movements there when they try to resist oil or mining on their lands--and they have one of the most well respected movements in Latin America. In other words, it is very public condemnations of the current model of capitalism that help provide the counter-hegemonic lens through which people in the North can better understand what their Southern neighbors are up to. In the end that may not help much since many of them wouldn't bother to stop some rent-a-cops from shocking an unarmed student five feet away, but every little counts, right.