For where I'm coming
from here:
My first college term paper, sort
of, was an exercise in a writing course where the assignment was to find a
historical event from the week of one's birth, research it, and write about it.
Having been born in 1943 — a year with a lot more history than is healthy — I
had many options but chose to write on the Battle
of Stalingrad, arguable the
decisive battle of World War II and in any event one of the crucial battles in
world history.
Some
of my research was reading a military history book or two of the many on the
subject, but what I spent most of my time on was reading the contemporary
coverage in The New York Times,
especially the official daily Communiqués from the Germans and from the
Russians, and comparing (and contrasting) the Communiqués with what I was
reading from the academic historians.
Somewhat surprisingly,
especially given that— SPOILER ALERT! — the Russians eventually won the battle,
the Russian communiqués generally included more lies than those of the Germans.
I grew up during the Cold War, and
could say with Bob Dylan,
"I’ve learned to hate Russians /
All through my whole life" and was propagandized on how the Ruskies
couldn't talk without resorting to propaganda. Well, yeah, yeah, and so forth.
But: But my grandparents fled the Russian Empire back when there was an
emperor, one who proudly called himself "Autocrat of all
the Russias," and I had some personal reasons to distrust Russians. Plus,
crucially, I had also grown up on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and its detailed analysis — from a Left
perspective — of how lying was built into Stalinism and had become a tradition
in the new Russian Empire.
So a couple weeks back I was
surprised to find myself flipping to channel 216 on the TV in the exercise room
of my condo complex to watch RT the Russian
TV network for a fix of hard news. I wasn't the only one of the gym regulars,
either: we no longer got Al Jazeera,
and BBC America only had a couple hours of news a day during gym hours — so
that left the Ruskies.
More exactly, it left the Ruskies
given how repetitive and shallow CNN and MSNBC have become — and how Fox
remains what it was in the classic analysis and mea culpa of Bart Simpson:
"Then I had this crazy dream that my family were all just cartoon characters and that our success
led to some crazy propaganda network
called Fox News."
Which is the rant on
where I'm coming from, leading into a fairly brief, epitomizing rant on a few
places where CNN, MSNBC, et al. can go to replace some of their incessant
repetition and add a depth to their coverage. This comes from me, an amateur at
best in the journalism biz, and on the basis of listening to just one pretty
respectable NPR news-panel/call-in show covering a week in (perhaps
significantly) early September 2015.
*
A listener called in to the show to mention the Colin Powell interview on Meet the Press for 6 September, where he
came out in favor of the Iran nuclear deal. It was an important interview, not
for its immediate political effects — which a panelist noted were minimal,
given where the Republican Party is nowadays — but more for a major figure like
Colin Powell's introducing into the debate on ISIS the double-m phrase:
"Mass Movement." ISIS spearheads a mass movement in its militant
phase, the phase featuring fanatics who embrace self-sacrifice (and don't much
mind killing other people). We need news shows explaining and applying Eric
Hoffer's 1951 analysis of The True Believer for
the history of such movements through World War II and note how very closely
some key elements of the situation today parallel those that saw the rise of
the early Christian Church and Islam, and, perhaps more so, given advances in
communications technology, the parallels with the Wars of Religion growing out
of the Protestant Reformation and lasting through much of the 17th c., where
the printing press was crucial. In a sense, ISIS is, as President Obama said,
the "JV team," and al-Qaeda Little League — compared to the
full-fledged mass movement likely to succeed ISIS, if they can find a
charismatic leader to inflame the faithful.
Osama
bin Laden may or may not have read Hoffer when he concluded that what was
needed to reinvigorate Islam was an attack by the Great Satan of America. The neocons
in the Bush administration undoubtedly forgot their Hoffer and similar
arguments when they responded to the attacks of 11 Sept. 2001 by giving bin
Laden exactly what he wanted. But they did what they did, and this awakened not
just the Arab Spring but the forces of sectarianism, tribalism, nationalism,
and fanaticism that can consolidate into opposing mass movements that can shake
the world as much as those of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation (in
Protestant terms) in the 16th and 17th centuries, and Hitler
and Stalin et al. in the 20th.
*
A second story of the week was the decision of the US Department of Justice to
go after big-time finance criminals, and a member of the news-panel noted that
many of the disastrous financial moves leading up to The Great Recession of
2008 were legal. That is the story,
people! That is the scandal! That is a more important issue than
putting into jail a few bad actors on Wall Street and, in terms of its effects
of most people's lives a hell of a more important story than finding parts of
crashed airplanes. (I know it's perverse and paranoid to do so, but I sometimes
wonder if CNN staff are tempted to shoot down the occasional aircraft on what
for them is a slow newsweek. But I digress.) The bad actions of a compliant US
Congress that allowed the Crash of 2008 and invite another one — that is the
story that needs development over several weeks or months or as long as it
takes to drum some basic ideas into the heads of at least the portion of the
public that watch and listen to news.
*
On a lighter note, relatively speaking, there was the latest round of US Kulturkampfe ("cultural
struggles") as evidenced in the story of the jailing and releasing of
Rowan County Clerk Kim
Davis for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples and then, with
equal opportunity, to any couples.
When
the dust settles, "Higher Law" appeals need to be taken seriously and
argued about. In a portion of the Book of Deuteronomy that contains a lot of
oppressive rules and some really bad ideas (Ki
Teitzei), there is the commandment, "You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped
from his master to you; he shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place
which he shall choose within one of your towns, where it pleases him best; you
shall not oppress him" (23.15-16). The Code
of Hammurabi and its successors long before and long after Deuteronomy "decreed
death as the penalty for sheltering a fugitive slave" (RSV 244 n.); and the laws of the
American colonies and the United States required returning fugitive slaves
until 1864. There would be much to be said in praise of local officials and
Federal Marshals refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 — or clerks
refusing to cooperate with the Nazi Nuremburg Laws on racial purity; and
"Higher Law" arguments can be useful. We need some in-depth
conversations there long after we've forgotten who Kim Davis might be.
We
also need to discuss why adult Americans would need permission of the
Commonwealth of Kentucky to get married, and we need some lawyers competent in
simple English to explain on TV and in other media that the State doesn't get
involved in marriage directly — or not so much any more — but in contracts for
setting up a special kind of household. And then
we can slog on to the legal privileging of those households that center on a
married couple. Back when "Be fruitful and multiply" made a lot of
sense as a commandment to human beings, such privileges also made sense, as part
of a strategy to use marriage to encourage fertile heterosexual mating where it
was likely to produce children who'd be raised in a stable family unit. The
times they have a-changed, and our debates on the environment and resources
have to turn to issues of population ... which leads us back to what sort of
households the State should be encouraging to handle responsible reproduction
and child rearing — and providing an effective home for people.
Gays
should be pissed to hell that now that only with gay marriage US society might
get around to discussing the privileging of marriage and how we'll define
marriage — but, sorry, guys and gals and Other: inter-racial marriage wasn't
enough to get the conversation going, but gay marriage is sufficiently controversial,
a "sexy" enough news story, to do so.
So
with this larger issue, too: Come on, US media, the chum is in the water and Kim
Davis gave you had a nice feeding frenzy on sex, religion, and politics.
"Life is uncertain; so eat desert first" — and it's time for your
figurative veggies and protein and to get to more profound issues of the
individual's obligations to the State in matters of faith and morals and
crasser question of "Who gets what — Who profits, who pays?" in terms
of marriage and households and taxes.
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