Pearls Before Swine

Wikileaks' Lessons for Media Theory and Politics

2011-01-15T16:48:00.002+01:00

Regardless of whether one agrees with allegations that Wikileaks is an international security threat, a new media-facilitated champion of democratic accountability, or that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is a rapist, it is an unmistakably rich object of media and political analysis. Arguably, l’Affaire Wikileaks(hereafter WA) holds lessons about changing relations between new and old media forms and production; attention, circulation, media capital and celebrity; political economy and journalism; and even democracy and international relations.

The WA above all begs attention to attention.¹ The affair, not just the material released, became a huge agenda-setter in 2010. Several news organizations dubbed it a “top” story of 2010.² In Canada, Wikileaksfounder Assange was voted top newsmaker of the year by senior editors at Postmedia Network newspapers and canada.com.³ Even more impressively, Assange was nominated for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.⁴ Other global news organizations, such as France’s Le Monde, named him person of the year.

More Spin About Voters' Motives?

2010-11-09T18:09:00.002+01:00

More discussion of the voters' polling data from the election last week. Big article over at the New Republic. It supports my earlier analysis that people voted a bit out of confusion and anger (perhaps lack of knowledge) about the economy and what Obama's government has done to help improve it. However, a majority of voters said their financial situation was the same OR better than two years ago. A majority of the MINORITY (41%) who said their situation was worse voted Republican. The authors of the article spin it the other way. What to say about those 60% who feel better or at least don't feel worse off? That statistic causes problems for the quick inference that voters voted against Obama.

Calculate:

60% disapprove of Obama's job performance

60% say same or better off financially than two years ago

80% say very concerned about the economy

25% blame Obama for economy

Blame Obama and Democrats and vote Republican??

(Oh, and 20% think he's muslim, and and another 30% who just aren't sure. Figure that in)

The authors do overall suggest the voters are misinformed and voting out of frustration about their perception of the economy. As they say, and contrary to the spin about "the people" having had enough of "Big Govt" and the healthcare bill, blah blah blah, the data shows the contrary.

The authors write:

"The election did not appear to be a repudiation of the new health care reform law. About as many said they wanted to see it remain as is or be expanded (47 percent) as said they wanted it repealed (48 percent). Nor did it appear that voters were embracing the GOP position on tax cuts. A 52-percent majority of voters wanted to either keep only the Bush tax cuts for those under $250,000 or let them all expire compared to 39 percent who wanted to keep all the tax cuts.

Political commentators are notoriously prone to over-interpreting election results. Strategic and policy decisions certainly made some difference in the magnitude of losses, but in a horrible economy it's difficult to escape the reality that Democrats were poised to lose a significant number of seats no matter what they did."

This is more or less what I wrote a couple of days ago, albeit with a longer critique of public opinion polling and analysis that claims to speak for "the people." If you missed that, try it here.

Also published at OP-ed News

Nov. 2 "The People" Didn't Speak; They Grunted

2010-11-07T23:58:00.001+01:00

Americans awoke November 3 to more headlines and soundbites about "the people's voice." I'd call it more of a grunt.

We The People by self
"The American people's voice was heard at the ballot box," declared Speaker-of-the-House-to-be John Boehner. Soon variations of "the people's voice" echoed around traditional news and Internet. Obama has to say, "I hear you, and then, I heard the people speak last night," parroted columnist Mark Shields on PBS's News Hour . "The people have spoken" framecontinues to dominate analyses of what happened and thus what must follow. Seems clear, actually misleading.

Read on and please comment (tell me it sucks, it's great, ramble about something off topic--anything)

The New Elite (The Tea Party is Right About Something?)

2010-11-07T00:01:00.002+01:00

I happened upon this Wash Post article plugged on the great Arts & Letters site. At first I thought it's reference to "new elites" was a more journalistic argument supporting my claims about a new kind of authoritative source in the convergence of new media/old media news-making. Actually, it's about a sociologically observable new class of social and political elites in the U.S. and how the Tea Party at least have that right. That old chestnut? "Ordinary" Americans have for quite a long time been complaining about the bankers and fat cats, usually in a couple of metropoles and areas on the East Coast, usually whipped up by some populist orator and with common doses of bigotry in addition. One of my friends who grew up in rural Utah (yes, coastals, go ahead and prove the point of the article: "that's like saying "rural Kansas or Nebraska"--redundant!) tells of a sign on the main highway. In one direction, Los Angeles and the number of miles to it; in the other, New York and "not far enough!"

The thing is, as author and political scientist Charles Murray points out in the article, that this "provinci

alism" is as common in suburban Massachussets and Connecticut (insert joke about redundancy) as it is in rural Utah and Kansas.

So, here's what Murray has to say (I'm not saying it justifies the Tea Party, but...):

That a New Elite has emerged over the past 30 years is not really controversial. That its members differ from former elites is not controversial. What sets the tea party apart from other observers of the New Elite is its hostility, rooted in the charge that elites are isolated from mainstream America and ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans.

[...]

On the surface, it looks as if things have changed. Compared with 50 years ago, the proportion of students coming from old-money families and exclusive prep schools has dropped. The representation of African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans has increased. Yet the student bodies of the elite colleges are still drawn overwhelmingly from the upper middle class. According to sociologist Joseph Soares's book "The Power of Privilege: Yale and America's Elite Colleges," about four out of five students in the top tier of colleges have parents whose income, education and occupations put them in the top quarter of American families, according to Soares's measure of socioeconomic status. Only about one out of 20 such students come from the bottom half of families.

[...]

Far from spending their college years in a meritocratic melting pot, the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them -- which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege. Few of them grew up in the small cities, towns or rural areas where more than a third of all Americans still live.

Let me propose that those allegations have merit. Read on

Olbermann Suspended!?? Spin Circus!

2010-11-06T18:12:00.002+01:00

FTW?

So it's at the top of the tickers: Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's counter to Bill O'Reilly, is suspended on ethics charges. Hmm. Don't know where to begin. I'm a professor, if people don't like where I put my money outside of work, tough tartare. It shouldn't prevent me from doing my job. One could say this about hundreds of other jobs, too. But the analogy doesn't even hold. Olbermann is not a journalist, any more than Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh is. He's a daggum commentator, dagnabit. What is this spin circus? Stop the world and let me off.

Matt Taibi of Rolling Stone, says it pretty well.

ust quickly: I just found out about the suspension of Keith Olbermann for making political contributions. NBC apparently has some policy prohibiting journalists from donating to candidates, so they suspended him indefinitely without pay.

I went online and read the news and found the inevitable commentary by ostensible experts on journalistic ethics, who are all lining up to whale on Olbermann. One quote I found in this Bloomberg piece:

"Journalists who work for a news organization have an ethical responsibility to honor their guidelines and standards," said Bob Steele who teaches journalism ethics at Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. "If NBC and MSNBC spelled out those guidelines clearly and Olbermann violated those guidelines, then he should pay the price."

He should pay the price? Is Bob Steele kidding? What the hell is wrong with people?

We had a whole generation of journalists who sat by and did nothing while, for instance, George Bush led us into an idiotic war on a lie, plus thousands more who spent day after day collecting checks by covering Britney's hair and Tiger's text messages and other stupidities while the economy blew up and two bloody wars went on mostly unexamined ... and it's Keith Olbermann who should "pay the price" for being unethical? Because, and let me get this straight, he donated money, privately, to politician." Read on

That's Democratainment: Obama, Rumor Bombs, and Primary Definers

2010-10-24T22:46:00.002+02:00

Published in Flow

A recent survey shows nearly 20% of Americans now believe Barack Obama is a Muslim. That’s about 56 million Americans, a number that has climbed considerably since 2008 (to say nothing of the 43% or 120 million Americans who are “unsure”).1 The bigotry of the phenomenon aside, its durability points to the use of rumor bombs (RBs) to elect and govern, and to the role of a new kind of authoritative source therein.

In 2008, FlowTV published my article on the RB, in which I analyzed issue-agendas that convergence culture produced in the 2008 presidential election, including the RB that Obama is a Muslim (RBOIAM). I argued there was an agenda-setting interplay between old and new media technologies, enabled by YouTube, Adobe Photoshop, and Facebook, among others associated with the revolution in cultural production, distribution, and reception—all of which have been associated by some with a new democratizing agency but which I insisted has economic, political rhetorical, and social constraints. 2 Since then, other RBs have exploded in American media culture with greater and lesser damage (e.g. “death panels” RB regarding Obama’s healthcare bill, and the “racist” Shirley Sherrod RB).

Now I argue not only that accounts of democratizing cultural production must confront the contingencies of distribution in a context of information warfare (exemplified by RBs); but, further, that Hall’s concept of “primary definers,” significantly criticized in media- and cultural studies of the late 80s and early 90s, returns with a new applicability in convergence culture (CC), with the caveat that primary definers/opinion leaders have changed.3 “Primary definers” refers to elite sources who define hegemonic issues and frames for journalists who repeat and alter them. The media capital they wield complicates theories of democratizing media production and distribution in the forging of widely attended issues in public spheres.

Continue

The Rumor Bomb Barack Obama is a Muslim: Another Episode in Political Vertigo and Negative Politics

2010-08-03T00:23:00.002+02:00

Here's the link to my work in progress recently presented at the International Political Science Association's conference on e-democracy in Dubrovnik.

Abstract followed by link:

The rumor bomb Barack Obama is a Muslim: Another episode in political vertigo and negative politics

By Professor Jayson Harsin, Dept. of Global Communications, The American University of Paris

Presented at the IPSA E-Democracy Workshop, Dubrovnik, Croatia

May 2010

Abstract: This study uses the concept of rumor bombs in convergence culture to contribute to analyses of vertiginous public discourses in e-democracy. Furthermore, it has two primary goals: 1) to provide an empirical analysis of rumor bombs on TV news, and 2) to analyze the relationship between internet agenda-setting and "old" news agenda setting. First, it provides a case study of the Rumor Bomb Barack Obama is a Muslim from the 2008 American presidential campaign, a rumor bomb which continues to appear in viral circulation on internet and email over 1.5 years after the election of Obama, with increasing numbers of Americans who say they belive Obama's religion is Muslim. It provides a content and frame analysis of the "Muslim" rumor bomb on American TV news in 2008 in order to see how exactly it appeared and thus how audiences were invited to view the rumor bomb. Secondly, the empirical data is then interpreted within the context of psychological studies and theories of rumor, and of trends in political communication such as negative campaigning, and in news values, such as tabloidization and infotainment. The study finally shows that the links between traditional elite news media and the Internet, contrary to some arguments, demonstrate not the disappearance of elite "primary definers" but a new kind of elite primary definer as a key node in a network of often ideologically homogenous "news" and opinion.

Download working paper

Lost Histories of Economic Rights article-download

2010-06-18T18:33:00.003+02:00

Hello. Here's the MS Word version of my article
published in Cultural Studies, Volume 24, Issue 3 May 2010 , pages 333 - 355
Download
Abstract: This article examines the concept and the discontinuous historical usage of the term “economic rights” in American political discourse from the perspective of democratic political freedom. It views the idea and ideology of “economic rights” as a discursive marker pointing to historically contingent relations between government, national economy and individual freedom. It focuses on the only two American presidential articulations of an Economic Bill of Rights and their conjunctures: one by Franklin Roosevelt and another by Ronald Reagan. These two articulations represent two opposing political traditions of economic rights in the United States: the neo-liberal laissez-faire free market tradition and the liberal welfare-state tradition. Both of these liberal traditions are haunted by an older democratic-republican discourse of economic rights, from which they continue to draw normative and affective energy without ever confronting its guiding premises. Contemporary popular discourses about the economic crisis demonstrate the continuation of deeply entrenched though historically outdated understandings of the promise and possibilities of individual freedom and autonomy within the folds of a society completely transformed by capitalist modernity. Present considerations of this history reveal possible resources for political struggles.

Rumor Bomb article download

2010-05-09T12:42:00.001+02:00

Here's a new link to my original article on the Rumor Bomb. You should be able to click the title to download the Pdf. "The Rumour Bomb: Theorising the Convergence of New and Old Trends in Mediated US Politics"

Harsin, Jayson. The Rumour Bomb: Theorising the Convergence of New and Old Trends in Mediated US Politics. Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture; Volume 39, Issue 1; 2006; 84-110;
^ (reprinted in Michael Ryan (ed.). 2008. Cultural Studies: An Anthology. London: Blackwell.

Hurricane Katrina, Four Years Later

2009-08-31T15:01:00.003+02:00

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the property and lives of thousands of New Orleansiens. Indeed, 1,836 people died in the hurricane and subsequent flooding. Over 700,000 applications were made to FEMA for housing following the hurricane. Four years later, over 100,000 still live in the nearly 38,000 trailers provided by the government. There has been a lot of talk about security over the last eight years. Sadly the term has been largely applied to military preparations. Katrina was a poignant example of how government social security is absolutely necessary in any humane democracy where we have obligations to each other, not just to ourselves. That kind of humaneness and moral duty requires some financial sacrifice in the form of taxes. A private corporation can't provide this security. Who would pay for it but citizens, and their motive would be profit (sorry to even have to point this out, but extreme anti-government sentiments have recently reared their heads in the healthcare non-debate). IN addition, lack of resources or re-located resources in downsizing government, cutting taxes, cynically in the name of "security" was reportedly part of the reason the levees were not repaired and strong enought to protect thousands of citizens in New Orleans.

Let us have a moment of cyber silence for those who died, and those who are still suffering, their livelihoods, families, and possessions completely devastated by an act of nature and an act of government negligence (which many of us are complicit in, as we supported its ideologies).

Here's what I had to say about it three years ago:

"[Also appears atBlogcritics: http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/08/30/042440.php]

One year after Hurricane Katrina, the mediated remembrance of that American political (as much as natural) disaster remains sadly selective and, well, typical. On Katrina's first anniversary, American media cheerfully circulate a renewed barrage of stories about glorious private generosity in a time of need; and hackneyed political slogans about security, freedom, duty, compassion, and an ownership society. Those who deliberately use such words are obviously cynical since they imply that democracy does not require careful discussion of complex and emotionally powerful words/ideas such as freedom and security, so they use them with clear consciences to gain consent for their own agendas.

The material insecurity of thousands of American citizens in New Orleans (representative of millions of others in that country and the world) so terribly evident in the images of floating bodies, on the one hand, and an exodus of SUVs, on the other, was the bitterest of ironies since it came at a time when political speech and news media inundated the American public with platitudes about national security and freedom. Recent attempts to exploit the occasion of the uncovered London bombing plan have generated a similar mediated political climate on Katrina's anniversary. Yet such powerful but contested words, as Abraham Lincoln noted, must in the name of ethics be defined and their competing interpretations discussed:

Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name—liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatable names—liberty and tyranny.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty. (Address at a Sanitary Fair, 1864)

A year ago, it was obvious to many Americans (certainly to those waterlogged and praying on their rooftops for rescue of their bodies, since the material markers of their American dream were gone forever) that it was time for a re-thinking or rediscovery of security and government and citizen responsibility for the minimal wellbeing of all American citizens. This latter issue should not have to be argued here, but for those doubters, consider the caution of some of the world's greatest thinkers on the health of democratic republics. Katrina has everything to do with the health and future of American democracy as an example for the world.

Aristotle, for example, argued that it was in the interest of all that a democracy did not have great extremes in wealth (Politics 6.5, and discussed in relation to the founding of the U.S. by David Hopp): "Poverty is the cause of the defects of democracy. That is the reason why measures should be taken to ensure a permanent level of prosperity. "

He does not say that everyone should have the same amount of wealth, but just that great extremes are dangerous to the health of democracy, since they produce envy, faction, hate, and possibly even revolution. Ironically, George W. Bush has even unwittingly acknowledged this truth, applying it to Iraq and not to his own country:

I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again. As long as the Middle East remains a place of tyranny and despair and anger, it will continue to produce men and movements that threaten the safety of America and our friends. (State of the Union Address 2004)

America is a great force for freedom and prosperity. Yet our greatness is not measured in power or luxuries, but by who we are and how we treat one another. So we strive to be a compassionate, decent, hopeful society. (State of the Union Address, 2006; See Also Second Inaugural)

One of the greatest leaders in the history of democracy, the Athenian Pericles, went so far as to argue that this kind of equality and commitment to one another in a democracy even made its armies more formidable, as they had so much more to lose, unlike those forced to fight for regimes with huge discrepancies in power. One might recall this, too, as over 2,600 young Americans have now died and nearly 20,000 have been wounded in Iraq in the name of the duty to spread freedom and to insure American security by pre-empting terrorism.

One year later, the cutting irony than Katrina occurred in a media and political culture saturated with security and freedom talk has not abated. This is not wholly the fault of opportunistic politicians, Republicans as well as Democrats, who deliberately stultify such lofty terms as freedom, democracy, and security to suit their agendas. It is also the fault of the news media.

Political Communication scholars note the short-life of new stories or cycles. Newsgathering business values privilege certain orientations over others in the coverage of events--what scholars call news "frames." A frame refers to "persistent patterns of selection, emphasis, and exclusion which furnish an interpretation of events." An episodic frame is one the most popular news frame in U.S. news culture. Episodic frames fit into action entertainment genres. Something erupts out of a state of equilibrium, which then passes, resolved by the triumph of good and the punishments it metes or the healing process of grief. These events give way to another major newsworthy event designed to sustain interest for a short while. Thematic frames, on the other hand, give publics a deeper historical and causal explanation for events, and they would, ideally, provide voice to many different sources in the production of such explanations.

Sadly, though Katrina received some more complex explanations and discussions, they were not terribly widespread, and this partly due to the short time constraints of mainstream news presentations, which due to the structure of their productions, favor limited sources and soundbite explanations, if any at all (often viewers are left to infer what might be the cause of a huge event, such as the LA riots of 1992 or the Seattle Protests against the WTO). So it was with Katrina, and after quick rhetorical fixes and false promises to address the puzzling issue of unequal opportunities and conditions (even to exodus a disaster zone) with "bold action." Katrina, like the news frame that largely accompanied it, swept in like--a hurricane. Then it rolled out almost as quickly, as if such threats to security of citizens and the health of democracy itself were just another episodic news story. Such media and political treatments of the most serious threats to American security have resulted in an ignorance of the magnitude and roots of the problem.

In this context, in memory of those who died and lost their homes and other possessions, it is worth thinking carefully about how our political leaders, media, and society have remembered the tragedy.

Security after New Orleans: What Time Tells Us

Poignant images of poor New Orleans residents retreating from the deluge touched a nation and a world, raising troublesome questions about security and the cyclical issue of poverty in the United States. For some older Americans, these images evoked an earlier security panic—the Great Depression. We heard talk about New Deals: both the rediscovery of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s and the promise of George W. Bush’s. Beneath the surface of apparent similarity, however, the two deals and the insecurity they promised to relieve were fundamentally different. Bush’s affinity for the New Deal does not run deep, and this is not the first time that he and his predecessors have used its keywords to support policies that undermine its spirit of securing freedom for all Americans.

Roosevelt’s deal was new by comparison to the security and freedom doctrine that came before him. His predecessor Herbert Hoover responded to a condition of national insecurity with ineffective solutions of rugged individualism and minimalist government. Roosevelt argued for a more activist federal government, not to expand government-for-government’s-sake, but because the Depression had shown that individuals could no longer be held completely responsible for their own security. In a time when small shopkeepers, entrepreneurs and farmers were fast disappearing, Roosevelt identified the primary threat to security as the market free of public interest. He promoted a vision of Abraham Lincoln’s government of, by, and for the people as a citizen’s vehicle for dealing with the inevitable and sometimes catastrophic whims of nature, markets and businesses. He maintained this mature vision of security even in the throes of World War II, emphasizing the equal importance of military and social security. For Roosevelt, the social and economic aspects of security were so critical to American freedom that he went so far as to call for an Economic Bill of Rights to supplement the already existing political Bill of Rights.

At the heart of Roosevelt’s New Deal was his argument that freedom could not be viewed as a natural state individually embraced through work or willingly denied through sloth when 1/3 of the American nation was ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed. In fact, Roosevelt viewed such poverty as a threat to the nation’s political, social and military security.

The poverty laid bare by Hurricane Katrina demonstrates that obtrusive conditions confronted during the Depression do in fact persist today, in terms of housing, education, healthcare, leisure, political access. Bush’s response to this has been far from “new.” Like Hoover, Reagan, and his own father before him, Bush continues to promote self-discipline and private cures, includig voluntarism, as solutions to large-scale security problems. In this decades-old argument, the federal government should cut all but verbal support for those living in insecure economic conditions, leaving the relief work to good Samaritans who represent the best of the American spirit. But the private sphere of charities could not deal with the magnitude of the security fallout in New Orleans.

The media unwittingly promoted this voluntarist line, telling the New Orleans story almost exclusively through the melodramatic frames of individual heroism and natural disaster. Largely absent from this coverage was an analysis of how Bush and his predecessors’ attempts to repeal the (old) New Deal directly contributed to the un-natural disaster that was Katrina. Katrina was a necessary cause for New Orleans, but it was not sufficient. By relentlessly trimming the “fat” of FDR’s legacy from the federal budget—including income supports, transportation, and public works such as levee repair—the Bush administration has left behind a skeleton security state unable to withstand any significant threat.

In the wake of the hurricane, Bush promised support for minority-owned small businesses but failed to specify how education, public health, and other key resources would be permanently secured for vulnerable citizens. On the contrary, he and some Republicans argued that reconstruction could be financed by trimming more "fat" (part of the plan to promote freedom and prosperity for all). Additional cuts only aggravate the insecurity of poor Americans. Besides, why reconstruct if only to abandon citizens to insecurity again?

George W. Bush staked his reputation on security and has said repeatedly that his number one duty is to protect U.S. citizens. But security has many meanings and demands. The deep floodwaters of New Orleans revealed just how shallow Bush's understanding of security really was. A year later, the president and the media have made little effort to face the deep responsibilities of national security.

"Bye Bye Public Option?" Dangerously Misleading Headlines.

2009-08-17T21:20:00.007+02:00

"Frames are principles of selection, emphasis and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters."
(Gitlin 1980: 6)

So I awoke to Facebook link-posts this morning to news that "The White House Appears to Drop 'Public Option,'" or even "'Public Option' Proposal Dead". Sure enough my mailing of political headlines from Slate Magazine reconfirmed the supposedly irrevocable: Obama had given in to the astroturf mobs and Rightwing Rumor Bombers. "Bye-Bye Public Option," Daniel Politi wrote in Slate. Looking further into those articles, I realized that this was a dangerously misleading frame/interpretation/emphasis of some comments made by Administration officials.

The most widely circulated article about the alleged Obama dropping of the Obama healthcare hot potato was by the AP. "Bowing to Republican pressure and an uneasy public," the AP wrote, "President Obama's administration signaled Sunday it is ready to abandon the idea of giving Americans the option of government-run insurance as part of a new health care system." Okay, "ready to abandon." That's strong stuff, considering all the Town Hall hoopla of the last week.

Still not getting to the real kernel that allowed this defeatist inference, the article frames the public-option as a "liberal" (real universally positive label) initiative, the dropping of which could allow Obama the option of compromising with "GOP" (not "conservative or right-wing) lawmakers: "Such a concession probably would enrage Obama's liberal supporters but could deliver a much-needed victory on a top domestic priority opposed by GOP lawmakers."

This liberal/GOP frame makes it look like noone but a "liberal" (whatever that is) could be for the program. But the real evidence or statements from which this inference were made came half-way down the page. The dead public option claim is based first on a comment by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who is paraphrased to have "said that government alternative to private health insurance is 'not the essential element' of the administration's health care overhaul. The White House would be open to co-ops, she said, a sign that Democrats want a compromise so they can declare a victory." They took "not the essential element" and inferred that the "public-option" was dead for Obama and everyone else?

They finally get to Obama's Press Secretary and Obama himself. Yet they say Press Secretary Robert Gibbs "refused to say a public option was a make-or-break choice." It's a powerful interpretation, one might say biased, to then headline these comments that the public option is "dead" or that Obama "appears ready to drop" it. It's big, big news. But it's a dangerous hyperbole.

Here's what Gibbs said: "What I am saying is the bottom line for this for the president is, what we have to have is choice and competition in the insurance market."

The story also frames Obama as having back pedalled the day before at a townhall meeting in Colorado. "Obama appeared to hedge his bets," they said before the following quote:

"All I'm saying is, though, that the public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of health care reform....This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it."

Well, it may be fair to assume Obama has opened the debateable options, but interpret that he has abandoned the public option, or that it's "dead"? That's a very political, biased framing of the statements.

It's also dangerous because many people may have the impression that the fake grassroots disrupters (astroturfers) at town hall meetings were actually representative of the majority of Americans. Some public opinion scholars would suggest there could be a bandwagon and a spiral of silence effect based on those representations. People often don't want to feel like they're a small opposed minority and so they keep quiet, thinking they're outnumbered. Or they want to be part of the majority, so they hop on the wagon. Then there's the problem of all the Death Panel and other Rumor Bombs and the difficult-to-guage effect they've had. (Also note how some of these defeatist frames have a visual frame that symbolizes Obama as weary, wiping the tired sweat from his brow) Framing Obama as having caved into opponents here invites a perception that the Rumor Bombs and the thugs at town hall's were right all along.

But now tonight, I read just the opposite, as if Obama is responding to the media framing snowjob of this morning. "Obama Still Favors Public Health Plan," says CNN tonight. Even the Heritage Foundation Blog notes that the administration is trying to correct this wrong impression about the President's position. They also claim the Administration says Sebelius "misspoke": "An anonymous administration official told that Sebelius “misspoke” and White House health reform communications director Linda Douglass released a statement explaining:

"Nothing has changed. The president has always said that what is essential is that health-insurance reform must lower costs, ensure that there are affordable options for all Americans and it must increase choice and competition in the health-insurance market. He believes the public option is the best way to achieve those goals.”

Obama's comments Saturday (perhaps even Sebelius's yesterday) were probably a trial ballon (testing the waters) or misspoken, or a combination thereof. But even so, there is nothing in them to warrant the leap that Obama was ready to give up on the public option. Framing matters. It can also be viral and function like a rumor bomb. Who knows what damage has been done. Tomorrow's frames will surely tell the story.

Album Review: Steve Earle's Tribute to Townes VanZandt

2009-05-11T14:29:00.003+02:00

Steve Earle

Townes

by Jayson Harsin

A distinctively Earle-stamped tribute to one of the greatest American songwriters of all time. Read on

May Day: To the Folks Who Brought Us the Weekend!

2009-04-29T14:30:00.003+02:00

[I wrote this a few years ago for this blog, and now I re-post it every year. If you like it, please digg it or yahoo buzz, etc.]

I used to think "May Day" was a distress signal uniquely reserved for hapless pilots and captains. In fact, it wasn't until graduate school while taking an American rhetorical history course that I learned about the Haymarket Riots/Massacre and that Labor Day for many people around the world (International Workers Day), except for Americans, is May 1, in memory of those who died in Chicago on May 3 and 4, 1886 and in celebration of the humanist accomplishments of the international labor movement.

On May 1, labor unions had organized a strike there for the eight-hour day, better working conditions ("The Jungle" is hard to beat on this), for an ideal of international proportions: that one's labor and the person from whom it issues must be respected. For some people such respect meant that laborers deserved certain rights of negotiation and safety to avoid a new feudalism in the age of mass production.

On May3, they organized a strike at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Co., where a fight broke out on the picket line; police intervened, killing two workers and wounding several others. Workers across the city were enraged. Anarchists then distributed flyers for a labor rally at Haymarket Square the following day. Reports vary in this highly politicized event, but many note that people listened peacefully to anarchist leader August Spies's address. Then apparently someone threw a bomb over the crowd, which landed on the police line killing a police officer and wounding other policeman who died later. Policeman fired into the crowd killing a number of people (there are no uncontested counts). Eight German immigrants associated with anarchism were rounded up and convicted on no evidence. The motive was that they were anarchists. Seven of them were sentenced to death. One committed suicide. One's sentence was commuted to life in prison. And five were hanged publicly.

The trial produced some of the most eloquent criticisms of American industrial society and its political butresses. Some, such as George Engel's, even provide an explanation/argument for how one came to be a socialist/anarchist. Here is an excerpt from George Englel's address to the jury, which I recommend reading in its entirety by clicking on this link.

[...]On the occasion of my arrival at Philadelphia, on the 8th of January, 1873, my heart swelled with joy in the hope and in the belief that in the future I would live
AMONG FREE MEN,
and in a free country. I made up my mind to become a good citizen of this country, and congratulated myself on having left Germany, and landed in this glorious republic. And I believe my past history will bear witness that I have ever striven to be a good citizen of this country. This is the first occasion of my standing before an American court, and on this occasion it is murder of which I am accused. And for what reasons do I stand here? For what reasons am I accused of murder? The same that caused me to leave Germany-
THE POVERTY-THE MISERY
of the working classes.
And here, too, in this "free republic," in the richest country of the world, there are numerous proletarians for whom no table is set; who, as outcasts of society, stray joylessly through life. I have seen human beings gather their daily food from the garbage heaps of the streets, to quiet therewith their knawing hunger.
I have read of occurrences in the daily papers which proves to me that here, too, in this great "free land," people are doomed to die of starvation. This brought me to reflection, and to the question: What are the peculiar causes that could bring about such a condition of society? I then began to give our political institutions more attention than formerly. [...]

"I came to the opinion that as long as workingmen are economically enslaved they cannot be politically free. [...]
Of what does my crime consist?
That I have labored to bring about a system of society by which it is impossible for one to hoard millions, through the improvements in machinery, while the great masses sink to degradation and misery. As water and air are free to all, so should the inventions of scientific men be applied for the benefit of all. The statute laws we have are
IN OPPOSITION TO THE LAWS OF NATURE,
in that they rob the great masses of their rights "to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
I am too much a man of feeling not to battle against the societary conditions of today. Every considerate person must combat a system which makes it possible for the individual to rake and hoard millions in a few years, while, on the other side, thousands become tramps and beggars.
Is it to be wondered at that under such circumstances men arise, who strive and struggle to create other conditions,
WHERE THE HUMANE HUMANITY SHALL TAKE PRECEDENCE
over all other considerations? [...]

As this article demonstrates, the radical democratic history of May Day has been coopted in a few places in the world (in an attempt to rob it of its radical history as a resource for current politics), namely the U.S. Like other rights and practices many people hold to be sacred today, the eight-hour day was the result of social struggle and bloodshed (I'm just testifying about it; don't try this at home) by those considered "extremists."

In that same graduate school class where I learned about the history of May Day, a Polish student who had grown up in the last days of the Soviet Empire told an interesting story. Apparently on May Day, a Polish TV news correspondent was sent to Chicago to report on May Day. He went to the site of the Hay Market, where a monument to the police had been constructed then vandalized. (Only in 2004 was one constructed to acknowledge the workers who died there too. The politics of memorializing this event is quite a story in itself--see "Haymarket Square in the Aftermath"). The Polish reporter went around Chicago asking citizens if they knew that May Day was an international holiday in memory of the Haymarket riots and massacre. No one knew what he was talking about. He responded on their Communist state-run TV broadcast, "This is how capitalism perpetuates itself. Citizens here are robbed of their own history and live in a dreamworld." You don't have to like the Soviet Union to find truth in his observation. (and please, neo-liberals, don't be so cynical as to characterize this memorial as an extreme argument for state ownership of property;it's rather about some redistribution for equal opportunity and the basis for participation in civic life, and limitation of the most powerful who set the terms for the labor market)

The testimony of Engel and others at their fateful trial is also a causal argument about what desperate human beings will do when they suffer political exclusion to work out conflict peacefully. The fact that this event is largely a ghost in American history speaks to how unwilling some people are to look at the ugliness of our history (not that forgetting isn't best in some situations from a certain point of view), the struggles of citizen against citizen because such knowledge is threatening to myths of nation and its tenuous coherence. It's also threatening to those whose interests invested in criminalizing critiques of a consumer society that is killing our planet, not just its people. Part of the reason why it may continue is the suppression of other knowledges of the past and critiques of the present. Just as many wounded laborers were afraid to go to the hospital for fear of being arrested when police opened fire on the crowd on May 4, 1886 (after the bomb exploded) , so today one faces being branded an extremist, a radical, a revolutionary, merely for remembering this past.

Today (yesterday for some people reading this) is May Day. Today, let us remember these people who brought us the weekend.

The Economic Crisis and Religious Dictates Against Usury

2009-04-12T00:32:00.004+02:00

As I'm preparing a talk on the current economic crisis from the perspective of a history of American popular understandings of democracy and its relationship to economic regulation, I ran across the following article. My own research leaves me amazed at how so many Americans claim to be religious, yet their support of recent economic policies stands in conflict with their religious dictates. The Torah, the Koran, and the Bible all ban usury, and have passages that have been interpreted as obliging redistribution of resources. Why don't people know about their own religions? Certain interests and their selective readings have for various reasons won out recently. Is there chance that will change in the near future?

March 28, 2009

On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced sweeping changes in the nation's finance rules, specifically targeting the derivative financial products that led to the credit crisis, mortgage crisis, banking crisis, and the crisis in the American automobile industry.. Predictably, some conservatives have responded that such policies would lead to "socialism," or a similar compromise of the free-enterprise American dream.

In fact, such regulations are as old as the Ten Commandments, and as American as apple pie: they are nothing more than an update of the ancient prohibitions on usury, or the unfair charging of interest. And while today, "usury" has a whiff of the antiquarian about it (or worse, one of antisemitism), if we look closely at what usury laws were meant to do, I think we'll discover that they are much more relevant, and worthy, than we might suppose.

Western civilization's original usury laws are found in the Bible: the Torah contains several prohibitions against lending money at interest, and the New Testament several condemnations of it. Deuteronomy 23:20-21 is representative: "Thou shalt not lend upon interest to thy brother: interest of money, interest of victuals, interest of any thing that is lent upon interest. Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon interest; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon interest; that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all that thou puttest thy hand unto, in the land whither thou goest in to possess it."

I will return to the distinction between Israelite and foreigner below, but first, however, I want to explore rationales for the usury prohibition in the first place. In the Deuteronomy passage above, the reason is somewhat generic: interest is forbidden, like many other ritual and ethical acts, "so that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all that thou puttest thy hand unto."

In Leviticus 25:35-37, however, a more specific reason is given: "And if thy brother be waxen poor, and his means fail with thee; then thou shalt uphold him: as a stranger and a settler shall he live with thee. Take thou no interest of him or increase; but fear thy God; that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him thy money upon interest, nor give him thy victuals for increase."

Here, at least two reasons are given: first, the ethical value of caring for the poor, and second, "that thy brother may live with thee." If one were to charge interest, the text suggests, the bonds of society would collapse; rich and poor could not live together. Later commentators developed these dual rationales. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, said that usury is both morally wrong and an improper form of "double-charging," because money is a means of commerce, not a thing in itself.

"That thy brother may live with me," in other words, is a prudential argument, not a moral/ethical one. The concern here is not only that usury is immoral -- it takes advantage of the weak -- but also that civil society itself would be compromised if usury were allowed. This, not ethnocentrism, is why lending to foreigners was allowed; the concern was with the economic health and civil cohesion of Israelite society, which would are not threatened by lending to outsiders. But if usury multiplied risk and magnified inequity within the community of Israel, chaos would result.

Notice, too, that these twin rationales extend the purview of usury law far beyond the narrow contemporary meaning of charging excessive interest. Today, all states have usury statutes that cap the rate of interest for loans. But the Biblical and exegetical usury statutes are broader: they are aimed at the moral turpitude, societal inequity, and economic instability inherent in making money from money.

Translated into today's economic realities, this has indeed come to pass. Wealthy institutions have lured poor people into unsustainable and unstable credit arrangements, and indeed, the basic cords of our society have begun to fray. As we have seen in the excesses of executive compensation, we have lost the moral compass which once tied pay to some notions of actual work and fairness, rather than to the made-up prices of economic bubbles. Indeed, our current crisis is exactly the economic, societal, and ethical chaos which the usury laws sought to prevent.

Today's derivatives market, for example, is precisely about "making money from money" -- but taken to new and ludicrous extremes. The credit default swaps which were largely responsible for sinking insurance giant A.I.G. were essentially bets about whether certain debts would be paid or defaulted-upon. Now, as it happened, debtors defaulted in such numbers that they brought down the house. But this derivative security should never have been legal in the first place. It is a bet on making money from money; or rather, a bet on making money from lending money at a near-usurious rate of interest, and thus a usurious attempt to make money from making money from making money. As the Bible itself knew, bubbles pop.

The anti-usury value does not and should not depend on the percentage rate of interest. It is a wider prohibition, both ethical and prudential, against making money from money. Of course, it cannot be taken too literally, either; credit is what makes our economy run, as we have now learned the hard way. But in principle, anti-usury values are fundamental to the American experience, and more needed now than ever.

To ban or heavily regulate usurious derivative securities is not socialism. It's the Bible.

Jay Michaelson --from the Huffington Post

NATO Protests and Repressive Tolerance: State Containment of Free Speech

2009-04-09T00:04:00.007+02:00

The tactics of French police directed by the State to thwart the rights of freedom of expression in Strasbourg this week for NATO meetings are a troubling but sobering sign of a recent trend of ever more repressive tolerance in Western liberal democracies, by which I refer to the phenomenon of increasing state caricature of rights to free speech by cordoning it off, thwarting its circulation, which amounts, in effect, to freedom to speak to the wall.

French police literally shut down the entire city and quarantined the protestors. While 40,000 to 50,000 protestors were expected, according to the AP wire, only about half of that estimate were counted on site. There is evidence that the reduced presence is due to police harassment, detainment, containment and arrests of hundreds of protesters. One wonders what tactics were used to reduce the numbers further. The AP Wire writes,

"On thursday night in Strasbourg police detained at least 300 people and forced demonstrators back into a tent camp on the edge of the city."

Was the city effectively closed by police order to deprive the protestors of an audience and to create less of a media spectacle ? In other words, did the state attempt to stifle free political speech?

While there is also a trend of violence among fringe protestors, it is no wonder that violence broke out in Strasbourg given police provocations and the frustration born of this quarantine.

21 March Le Monde: "The mayor of Strasbourg didn't really have a say in the deployment of security forces in the city [for the NATO summit]. It was the French and German governments, in consultation with NATO and the U.S., which decided on the security measures and put them in place." The article continues, "The inhabitants of Strasbourg have the impression of witnessing their city under seige: no parking, transportation by bicycle encouraged, buses rerouted, and public services temporarily closed." Many businesses closed as the result of the policy.

Another independent account states that all bridges were closed and the protestors had no way out. IN other words, they were brutally, strategically quarantined. Why?

A Le Monde journalist Arnaud Leparmentier spoke of how he was allowed, ironically, to be seated two rows behind Obama for the press conference. Police, the journalist said, tightly blocked entrance to the conference, yet no one ever checked his bag, which he noted could have of course contained a bomb, hypothetically. Why the double standard?

Yesterday, Wednesday July 9 I was approaching the Invalides metro, the common site of a great many protests in Paris, to find Tamils, of which there are estimated to be 60,000 refugees in France," protesting the Sri Lankan governments offensive against Tamil rebels. I was shocked to see hundreds of them boxed in like cattle in an approximately 20x10 yards square area. Many were seated on the ground, while others stood and chanted. I witnessed no violence whatsoever. Some police mocked the protesters, while others attempted to block any contact the protesters could have with an audience of passersby. One man leaned over a makeshift fence to offer leaflets to anyone who wished to have them. Several people including myself approached him out of curiosity. Immediately, the police rushed over and took his leaflets, telling him he could not pass them out. Why, I don't know, unless French foreign policy includes silencing protests such as this.

Outside the 2004 Republican nominating convention in New York, protesters were confined to what was euphemistically called a "free speech zone," which protesters referred to as a cage. What is free about free speech in these situations? Is this what founders of Western constitutions had in mind when they spoke of liberty and equality, sacred rights of political assembly and freedom of expression. These are tactics more akin to fascist control of protest, provoking violence, then meeting it with disproportionate force. But most of all they have media effects.

There are few spectacular media images such as the fire hoses being turned on children in the Civil Rights movement. The spectacular images are of the lunatic black block, precisely the undermining of the protest organizers' strategies. None of the stories I read when I googled "Strasbourg," "NATO," and "protests" attempted to discuss why and what is was protesters were protesting. Instead we got tried and true frames that media business values commonly dictate. Conflict and violence. But this frame was lent by the State attempt to control speech. Why these measures? In the same way that states have learned from their mistakes in control (or lack thereof) in war situations, from Vietnam to Algeria. So they've learned ways to defuse the power of protests.

What this means is that the old strategies for effective change via consciousness raising in marches are largely co opted today. They must find other ways of addressing audiences and circulating messages in the way they intend.

more pictures here

2009-03-06T00:18:00.002+01:00

"Why should the overthrow of the existing order be of vital necessity for people who own, or can hope to own, good clothes, a well-stocked larder, a TV set, a car, a house and so on, all within the existing order?" Herbert Marcuse once pointedly asked before the cornucopia of postwar Western affluence that made talk of revolutionary consciousness seem more and more lunatic even to champions of left traditions. His answer was a complex theorization of consumer society's exploitation of individuals' creative capacities coopted by organizational culture, office space, and well-paying-enough industrial work. The consumer society underwritten by the state and widespread ideologies of liberal freedom result in a condition of consuming objects as a substitute for unconstrained human creativity.

Marcuse further objects:"Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear-that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls."

How one develops a consciousness of these repressive forces and one's complicity with them is a more difficult question yet. But Marcuse, like others, seemed to think that art and the occasional crises of everyday life, led by the ironic enlightened position of a band of "outcasts and outsiders" held the possibility of revolutionary change and liberation from this sad state of affairs.

In the spirit of Marcuse, as well as other eminent theorists—such as Henri Lefebvre and the Situationists—of everyday life, freedom and exploitation under consumer capitalism, Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road is a dramatic critique of alienation and cooptation of creative, free activity in liberal democratic consumer societies. While Revolutionary Road has the actors, production qualities, and several narrative tendencies of Hollywood dramas, it is vintage Sam Mendes: a critique of historical gender roles, deadening routines, lost dreams and values, and the uncompromisingly conformist American suburbs, which are themselves captive of a larger cultural psychosis.

Kate Winslett and Leonardo DiCaprio: the great reunion. This was part of the marketing campaign in reference to the epochal Titanic, now over a decade old. which starred this same duo. Both actors have matured since then across art and offbeat Hollywood films, from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, to Gangs of New York, and Total Eclipse. Now under the direction of Sam Mendes, Winslett and DiCaprio reunite for a markedly Mendesesque tour de force. Like the Oscar-winning American Beauty, Mendes's follow up identifies with the misfits in the suburbs to make a larger critical statement about the iron cage of American culture, the golden bars of its complacency, and the danger of breaking out—indeed, of the very dream of breaking out.

Such a critical stance toward American culture places the film in a venerable artistic tradition that is The American Dream. The film is saturated with the tropes of American Dream literature. The readers of that depressing tradition immediately recall Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt;Eugene O'Neill's Long Days Journey Into Night; Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman; J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye; and John Updike's Rabbit, Run, among others. One thinks of the sociological complements in The Organization Man, The Status Seekers, The Image, The Theory of The Leisure Class, and One-Dimensional Man.There's the dream of actor-stardom and the alcoholic lifestyle depicted by some of them, the obsession with "phoniness" required for mobility, and deviance met by ruthless punishment by the status quo present in all of them.

Winslett and DiCaprio play a slightly offbeat couple, April and Frank Wheeler, from the fundamental opening scene where they meet at a party, apparently part of the theater crowd. Winslett becomes a failed actress-become-housewife; Frank a stifled-creative type-become-sales-department-support staffer. Like the American Dream literature, Revolutionary Road shows the American cultural mercilessness toward those who do not conform, who live at the end of the decidedly un-revolutionary road, and start out into the woods to blaze their own trail. That divergence makes all the difference, but the difference is a tragic one.

However, this film is not just about America, any more than Max Weber's iron cage is only about German modernity, or Foucault's Discipline and Punish is about contemporary France. The condition is somewhat representative of the individual living in all Western liberal democratic consumer societies, despite their comparative nuances. That condition is one that paradoxically celebrates the freedom of the individual to do and say what he/she wants within a social structure that embraces some form of consumer capitalism, where "feeling" the elan vitale is reduced to the commonality of having a spouse, a house in the ‘burbs, a relatively new car, children, a "good" job (white collar), and the dream of having more--of all of this, and with no other goal than the inherent cultural good of having all this. Somehow, it leaves a few stragglers "empty." Where there is power, there is also resistance, said the philosopher Foucault.

Again and again, Frank talks about wanting to really "feel alive." He hasn't been able, for various reasons, to find himself, but within him a creative impulse is banging to be let out. In much of the West, one might refer to it with some repugnance as "artsy," or "irresponsible," unrealistic, and whimsical, as does the realtor-neighbor, a middle-aged 50s predecessor of American Beauty's Annette Benning's character played adeptly by Kathy Bates). But Frank wants out, and partly blames his wife and kids (though she is the repository of outward blame) for "forcing" him into the classic 50s breadwinner role.

Frank's entire office (somtimes like the playful reflections of the film Office Space and TV series The Office--what does it tell us that our culture is producing these "minor" responses) is characterized by people who find their jobs meaningless yet essential to the institutional setting. Frank goes on hating his job, and April starts to hate him and her boring suburban-housewife life. She once had other dreams, and their lack of fulfillment, like his, obtrudes on their relationship. Their marriage on the brink, April wistfully rummages through a box of old photos, as if to magically escape the suffocating outside reality by slipping into the portal of a picture world. Alas, she alights upon a photo of Frank, fresh from the allied battlefront in France, a postcardesque shot with his comrade and the Eiffel Tower as backdrop. "You always talked about how Paris was the one place you've been where you'd like to go back," she cries, like a condemned criminal supplicating her jurors. "We always thought we were better than this," she says in a moment of poignant truth, "but the fact is we aren't; we're just like them." On that provocative note, they resolve that this is their chance to flee the coop. They will sell the house and car, take the kids and their seven grand in savings, and move to Paris where she will find a dreamy high-paid job as a secretary for NATO (clearly pre-DeGaulle) while Frank will discover his creative being within. It's as if April's American suburban alienation will be overcome through a new workplace alienation that will somehow be liberated by the surrounding French culture. There's also no sense that Frank will be taking care of the kids while April's pecking away on the French office typewriter. In this sense, the plan does seem naively escapist.

The neighbors and the officemates unsurprisingly find the plan "whimsical" and "unrealistic," but more for giving up Franks' job and the shamefulness of being supported by his wife, in France of all places. The couple is resolved, however, that they're above these drones.

The brutal recalcitrance of cultural power proves too much for this escape plan when April announces that she's pregnant. This news combined with a tempting offer for promotion to some sort of salesman for the pioneering new office computer business and the haunting memory of his patently mediocre salesman father are enough to spawn Frank's rationalizations that "We can be happy here." April's rational arguments to the contrary are to no avail, which results in her realization that she no longer loves Frank. In Mendes' unhappy hands, this can not end well. The unwanted baby, the unwanted promotion, the unwanted future leaves few escape routes for this 1950s housewife. And there's every indication that Frank's new job, bigger salary and house will eventually result in the same emptiness. As in American Beauty, Mendes (and this time screenwriter Justin Haythe) make their exaggerated point through a culminating death. Unsympathetic viewers will surely find it overly dramatic, but then this is part of the depressing and suicidal American Dream tradition represented by Miller’s Willy Loman. Why depart from a venerable tradition?

Power/resistance are also paired with sanity/insanity. The Shakespearean idiot savant in the film is played by the neighbors the Givings' "insane" son John, a Ph.D. in mathematics being treated for depression with shock treatment. "Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness," he says with no little foreshadowing, "but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness." That about says it. In Mendes's view, the price of even questioning this system is precarious mentally. The personal is cultural, for that mental health is partly conditioned in relation to how the community and its institutions treat the individual. John the fool appears again to comment on Frank's cold feet, again quite lucidly: "You want to play house you got to have a job. You want to play nice house, very sweet house, you got to have a job you don't like." While Frank recognized John as a sage on John's first visit, he is now pushed to the brink of violence, telling John, like the chorus of his society, he is insane and should go back to the "loony bin."

When April dies, the neighbors speak of how Frank now spends any second away from work with his children. At first glance this could strike the viewer as magnanimous. On the other hand, it can be read as not just rising to the occasion of exemplary caring single parent; but rather as escape from the emptiness of work and the empty culture of consumption, with its alcoholic, rock n' roll, and adulterous props. It's one form of rebellion the culture will permit.

Mendes is superb at sketching the cultural pressure to conform, to act pleased to be part of the group, the organization, and at the costs that await those who resist it all. One could say that he is as merciless in his critique of this culture as the culture can be merciless in its treatment of misfits (which here doesn't even consist in a visual refusal of norms, as, say, Punk style would later). What Mendes (unlike the best sociologists, novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers) still hasn't been able to do, is go beyond describing social reproduction and focus on what produces these misfits. Why are the Wheelers seen to be exceptional? Why do they feel different? Why do they have desires that push them to question and want something else--symbolized by the imagined otherness of Paris? Mendes leaves us with few clues besides a child's inability to identify with parents at what the psychologist Erik Erikson once called the "formal operational" thinking level of teenagers (Frank's near disgust for his "old man's" submission to an empty job and life). April is even more of a mystery, with her pipedream of becoming a star actress. Is it too many movies and too much press about the glamorous life of stars, making her a Madame Bovary of the American 1950s?

Perhaps there is a particular contradiction in the U.S., with its time-honored clichés of freedom, opportunity, rags-to-riches, and self-made men--already mentioned in its literature, film, and sociology. But finally, is this not a fate that faces millions in America and out, if they be so bold to face it? What one can do with a life is the existential question. What one can do here and now, is the more historical, sociological, and cultural one. After all, we can not all be adored actors, film critics and media professors, and actors, film critics and media professors must also sometimes find their systemic obligations and routines--well, somewhat empty. What one can be once one questions the structures within which one is is almost as terrifying a situation as what one is without questioning the structures within which one can be.

Film Review: Waltz with Bashir: Responsible Dreams

2009-02-03T11:48:00.002+01:00

On Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir

"We were the Nazis."

BY JAYSON HARSIN

[D]ream-images are often rapidly forgotten although they are known to have been vivid, whereas, among those that are retained in the memory, there are many that are very shadowy and unmeaning. Besides, in the waking state one is wont to forget rather easily things that have happened only once, and to remember more readily things which occur repeatedly." — Sigmund Freud
Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman's Cannes-nominated Waltz with Bashir (2008) is a cinematic standout for many reasons. Genre-wise, it is a unique sort of animated, fictional docu-psycho-autobiography. It also features a well-crafted plot of mystery, anticipation, and discovery (which will not be completely spoiled here) with a first-rate soundtrack that is an important character in itself. Most of all, the film is a brave grappling with the responsibility for genocide from the point of view of an individual, an Israeli veteran thinking under the weight of the Holocaust.1

Waltz with Bashir's opening is a remarkable one — twenty-six wild dogs bounding down the street, frothing at the mouth, trampling everything in their path, but also passing some humans by and fixing on a particular target to tree. It is disturbing, moving, and also a kind of symbolic foreshadowing.

That opening flows into the primary scene triggering the entire plot, a conversation between two Israeli military veterans. One, Boaz, is tormented by nightmares about these dogs, which he relates to his service at the time of the Sabra and Chatila massacres of the 1982 Lebanese war and his own responsibility therein. The nightmares have driven him into psychotherapy. Nervously puffing his cigarette, slamming his drink, and tapping his foot, he asks his friend "Ari Folman," the focal character of the film and a successful filmmaker, if he isn't haunted by the war and the massacres. Strangely, Folman doesn't remember anything at all about this gloomy chapter of human history. The problem is he was supposedly there, or at least very near. Why do the dogs pass him by and go after Boaz? Why don't they pursue Folman? The rest of the film involves the filmmaker-veteran's attempt to recover his memory of what happened, where he was, what he saw, what he did. Continue

Rumor Bombs Away: Gaza, France2, etc

2009-01-25T12:43:00.003+01:00

Both sides in this recent disturbing waste of human life, Gaza, used rumor bombs in a public relations war. One of the highlights was a France2 (major public broadcasting network) unwitting use of footage of Gaza carnage. The only probably was it was from 2005. Where did they get it? From the internet, of course. More here.

The Last Model Standing is France

2009-01-15T12:44:00.002+01:00

From Newsweek's International edition: "French-style intervention is gaining the upper hand as other economic models lose credibility..."

Click on title for more.

Rumor Bomb Strikes Again: NY Times Publishes Fake Letter Criticizing Caroline Kennedy

2008-12-23T09:19:00.002+01:00

NY Times publishes fake letter from Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë criticising Kennedy
The New York Times was forced to apologise on Monday after it published a fake letter, purportedly from the mayor of Paris, criticising Caroline Kennedy's bid for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat as "not very democratic".

Last Updated: 11:33PM GMT 22 Dec 2008

Caroline Kennedy wants to take over Hillary Clinton's old seat in the Senate Photo: AP
"What title has Ms Kennedy to pretend to Hillary Clinton's seat?" the letter in Monday's edition of the newspaper said. "We French can only see a dynastic move of the vanishing Kennedy clan in the very country of the Bill of Rights. It is both surprising and appalling."
In an note from the editor posted Monday on its website, the newspaper said the letter signed by Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë should not have been published because it violated the paper's standards and procedures.
"We have already expressed our regrets to Mr Delanoë's office and we are now doing the same to you, our readers," the Times said.
News of the hoax was first reported by France-Amerique, which published a story on its website on Monday. Jean-Cosme Delaloye, the Editor-in-chief of the French language monthly, which is based in New York City, said an employee read the letter in the New York Times on Monday morning and was sceptical.
"When we read the letter it just sounded very surprising, the choice of words sounded very surprising," he told The Associated Press. "When we called Paris to verify the information ... they were very surprised."
Virginie Christnacht, head of Mr Delanoë's press office in Paris, said the letter was a fake.
"We have asked the New York Times for a denial and an apology," she said. "Clearly, this was never sent by Bertrand Delanoë."
The Times blamed the mistake on a failure to verify the authenticity of a letter that arrived by email.
"In this case, our staff sent an edited version of the letter to the sender of the email and did not hear back," the paper said. "At that point, we should have contacted Mr Delanoë's office to verify that he had, in fact, written to us. We did not do that. Without that verification, the letter should never have been printed."

Obama Links to Blagojevich: Liberal Tabloid Frenzy

2008-12-14T12:34:00.003+01:00

When I say "tabloid" I'm of course talking about that liberal rag, the New York Times. In their time-honored manner of bashing Republicans with groundless associations while saluting each time a Democrat wipes his/her ass, they now feed the intrigue mill with "association" talk about Republican high priest Rahm Emanuel, Obama Chief of Staff,and Obama himself (really a Republican is socialist trappings, everyone knows).
"Had Contact"? ooh, you mean like how I'm responsible for the phone calls made by the Apple Corporation because I had contact with their customer service dept. yesterday? That sounds right. When will these liberal attack dogs take a break and stick to the "facts"?

Emanuel Had Contact With Governor’s Office on Senate Seat
By HELENE COOPER and JACKIE CALMES
Published: December 13, 2008

CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, communicated with the office of Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois about potential candidates for Mr. Obama’s Senate seat and provided a list of names, according to two Obama associates briefed on the matter.
Read on here.

The Rumor Bomb in Flow

2008-12-12T15:29:00.001+01:00

“[T]he information bomb’ [is] associated with the new weaponry of information and communications technologies. Thus, in the very near future… it will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed ‘the integral accident’ that is the continuation of politics by other means.” —Paul Virilio

While rumors are a timeless phenomenon, popular and academic voices note something changing. Like the Matrix, Baudrillard’s hyperreality, and David Lynch’s owls in Twin Peaks, things are at best not what they seem; at worst, perpetually disorienting. Henry Jenkins’s “convergence culture” has become a keyword for our present conjuncture where new and old media content, production and consumption, collide in fascinating new ways. Though gatekeeping practices in news and cultural production have weakened, creating new production opportunities, rumor rises to new levels of importance in a postmodern political context.

Despite the digital divide, the cases of rumor exploding into public scandal are fairly global. They have prompted suicides, imprisonments, stock plunges, resignations and government investigations . For example, on Friday October 3, on CNN’s “Citizen journalism” site a post appeared stating that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had had a heart attack. Apple stock plunged immediately, though the rumor was debunked an hour later, leaving suspicions it was planted by a short-seller after quick gains. But rumors have assumed a very special role in professionalized politics, where communication experts shrewdly read the new convergence culture and use rumor to try to steer political discourse via inter-media agendas. Click here for the rest of the article.

Bush: "I fucked everything up the best I could"

2008-12-02T03:54:00.002+01:00

I'm Really Gonna Miss Systematically Destroying This Place
BY GEORGE W. BUSH
DECEMBER 1, 2008 | The Onion ISSUE 44•49
http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/im_really_gonna_miss

Oh, America. Eight years went by so fast, didn't they? I feel like I hardly got to know you and methodically undermine everything you once stood for. But I guess all good things must come to an end, and even though you know I would love to stick around for another year or four—maybe privatize Social Security or get us into Iran—I'm afraid it's time to go. But before I leave, let me say, from the bottom of my heart: I can't think of another country I would've rather led to the brink of collapse.

Boy, oh boy, if these Oval Office walls could talk. Seems like it was only yesterday that I started my first term despite having actually lost to Al Gore by more than a half million votes. Hmm. We were all so young and peaceful then. Gosh, gas was still under $2 a gallon! On my watch it peaked at more than twice that. Never getting it up to $6 or ideally $7.50 will be one of my few regrets when I leave office.

It's just gonna be so hard packing up my things and heading off into the sunset come January. I wish I could go on forever giving massive and disastrous tax cuts to the wealthy, taking the country from a surplus to a deficit—nearly $500 billion this year, likely to pass $1 trillion next year, fingers crossed—and just generally doing irreparable damage to the very underpinnings of our economy, but, well, I'm afraid the Constitution says I can't. And not even I can overrule the Constitution. Though Lord knows I tried! Initiating blanket wiretaps without warrants, suspending habeas corpus for prisoners in Guantanamo, infiltrating an unknown number of nonviolent civilian antiwar groups without permission… such wonderful memories. I'm going to cherish them forever.

My fellow Americans, I only hope that every time you have your civil liberties encroached upon by the Patriot Act, you'll think of me.

Everywhere I look brings back memories. The Blue Room is where Laura and I put up our first White House Christmas tree. Down the hall, in the East Room, is where I concocted my favorite signing statement to circumvent the anti-torture guidelines of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, and—ooh!—right across the way is where Cheney and I decided to use the death of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and the nation's subsequent fear of another attack as an excuse to carry out our long-standing plan to invade Iraq. I should really get a picture before I leave.

Speaking of pictures, whenever I look at the dusty old newspaper photos of those tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib or the crumpled ruins of that bridge in Minnesota, I can hold my head up high knowing that I truly fucked this nation—physically and symbolically—beyond repair. I only wish I had the time to destroy a couple more major American cities.

And Cheney, I almost forgot about Cheney. What a guy, huh? I can't believe that in a few short weeks he's never going to talk to me again. The stories I could tell you about what went on in some of those back rooms—well, you wouldn't believe me if I declassified the memos. I don't know, maybe in 20 years, when the economy has rebounded and the people displaced by Katrina have rebuilt their lives from scratch with almost no federal assistance, Cheney and I can meet up again in the Rose Garden and reminisce over the good old days, when it seemed like there was no part of this great country we couldn't ruin forever.

What am I going to do once I'm no longer president? I've gotten so used to waking up every day, playing fetch with the dogs on the White House lawn, and then spending a lazy afternoon shredding every last bit of our good will abroad in a mind-boggling display of diplomatic incompetence.

The worst part about leaving is knowing I can never screw up anything this big again. Don't get me wrong, I'm only 62. I could still bankrupt an oil company, or become the next MLB commissioner and ruin baseball. But I'll never get the opportunity to fuck up on this massive of a scale again. Even if you put me back in charge for another term, I could only take the U.S. from a rapidly declining world power to not a world power at all. I don't mean to gloat, but I think it's safe to say that no one can ever unseat the American empire like I unseated the American empire.

Still, I have to admit, sometimes I think I could've dismantled so much more. The very fact that the environment still exists, that a mere 4,000 troops have died in Iraq, that there is still the slightest glimmer of hope for the future left in this nation—it's easy to feel like maybe I didn't do my job. But no, no, there's no use having any regret. I fucked everything up the best I could and that's good enough for me.

You know, I've got a few weeks left. I could still illegally fire some U.S. attorneys for political reasons, or finally get rid of that pesky separation between church and state. Or maybe I could just bomb a place. Like Russia. But this time, I would really savor it.

As long as I live, America, I'll never forget irreparably ruining you. Unless we all die in a nuclear war or calamitous environmental disaster brought on by my neglect. Either way, I'll see you all in heaven!

Stumbleupon: More like Stumble Loop?

2008-11-30T14:32:00.007+01:00

Rigged! Rig-diculous! Bullshit!
So, like the legions of new bloggers, I've turned to the "social bookmarking" and other new technological services in the ATTENTION ECONOMY. Unless you just swoon at the sound of your own voice (or the sight of your own words, er blog), then you're doing this to address people. Good thing there are all these helping tech-hands for you.

I am really disappointed in Stumbleupon. I've read that it is essential for those attention-deficients like us. Yet when I spent about an hour on it this morning, filling out profile stuff, and then stumbling, I noticed that the order of stumble appearance is rigged. I clicked stumble and then ran into the first ridiculous site "When I was little I thought I had the power to change stop lights," and then the next was simply a page advertising all the different social bookmarking services. This was followed by "How to tick people off." I was amazed that none of these sites seemed to clearly correspond to the interests I had checked, which were supposed to streamline my "stumbles" on to particular sites. The only reason for this, I hypothesize, is that some of these sites create hundreds (thousands?) of stumbleupon entries as new identities and/or they build a massive "friends" network to favorably review them, which builds their appearance power. Strange algorithms for stumbling. What is worse is that these same three sites appeared again and again, when I'd hit "stumble." These same sites appeared twice out of 12 clicks, half of the clicks took me back to these same sites.

So I tried my other stumble ID, for my other blog (as far as I can tell, one can have but one blog per stumble identity). Lo and behold the same experience as before! I give stumble a big thumbs down, or perhaps more fitting: an erect middle finger!

This is the age we live in. The blog is a fantastic new technology, potentially democratic, which reverses older media relationships of production and consumption. But the fact that one produce something, regardless of quality of product, hardly guarantees any attention at all. This dynamic, unfortunately, is much more like older media and the "free market" outside. Attention to products and sales have very little if anything to do with quality of the product. It has everything to do with advertising, at which bigger companies with bigger budgets (time included) have a colossal advantage.

True, the internet attention economy is not just about having an advertising budget. But the point is that the product has little to do with the attention it gets. All of the networking, "friends", multiple profiles with the same blog listed on many of these new attention-getting services--what kind of culture is it promoting? Who are we caught up in this, as we tweet from our cell phones, "I am just leaving the office. God did that blow!" ? Reality TV and voyeurism? The fetish of being the object of a voyueur? Tabloidization of the internet?
Oh, I know, you'll just tell me I have sour grapes for having a couple of hundred registered followers on my blog, the majority probably cool hunters and other bloggers trying to leave comments to direct my readers to their blog...
Your thoughts?

Obama 2.0 Continued: Feeling Accessible

2008-11-22T16:33:00.012+01:00

Obama's team has built an excitingly accessible transition site: change.gov.
Access. This site symbolizes democratic access and community.

First it is simple, a two column structure with nine tabs line the header:home, newsroom, blog, learn, agenda, America Moment, America Serves, Jobs, About. On the home/arrival page, you find yourself staring at and being stared at by Obama, who is poised to address you thanks to Youtube. The newsroom, or press releases from Obama, actually appears on the home page, below the video.

The blog encourages you to "Watch Your Weekly Address now," and true to the participatory genre and thus expectations of blogs, it asks the visitor to "then send us your questions or ideas about how to fix the economy." It sounds right, except you can't post comments. And cynics who have tried to write legislators in the past, will be wary of the sincerity of the suggestion. It will probably be considered like focus group and survey information in order to craft more scientifically messages to mass and niche markets--I mean, uh, voters.

By clicking "Learn" you can get a slick biography of Obama and Biden, the information about the transition, information about the administration and the inauguration.

Next is "Agenda," which gives the new administration's statements on issues from civil rights to Veterans affairs. It seems surprisingly extensive.

Agenda is followed by "America Moment." This one has two "drop-down" menu links to "sharing your story" and "sharing your vision." When you click on "sharing your story," you get "We're counting on citizens from every walk of life to get involved. Share your experiences and your ideas -- tell us what you'd like the Obama-Biden administration to do and where you'd like the country to go." You are then prompted to complete an information form, where your email and zip code are obligatory. Access or surveillance and data-mining to make you feel participatory and active while you're being studied to have your opinion managed. The "share your vision" option is similar. The prompt is "Start right now. Share your vision for what America can be, where President-Elect Obama should lead this country. Where should we start together?"

"America Serves" continues the theme of getting citizens involved. Apparently, the new administration plans to start several "service organizations" that will offer tax breaks for service. Is this more Reaganesque "voluntarism" and cousin to "faith-based initiatives," or is this a brand new world. Here are some listed:

a Classroom Corps to help underserved schools
a Health Corps to serve in the nation's clinics and hospitals
a Clean Energy Corps to achieve the goal of energy independence
a Veterans Corps to support the Americans who serve by standing in harm's way

A "Jobs" tag invites applications to work in the new administration. Strangely, you enter a lot of information for being contacted, but there's no option to upload a CV or describe your competences. Instead, they ask you to list your current position and employer, in addition to commonly mandatory personal information.

Under the last top line tag, you find "About" where they give you a form to "contact" them. They also have an "Accesibilty" link that encompasses many of the points I"m making here: "Commitment to Accessibility: The Obama Administration has a comprehensive agenda to empower individuals with disabilities in order to equalize opportunities for all Americans."

A "Privacy Policy" swears that the administration will not share your information with anyone beyond its staff. That's good to hear. At least they won't be selling the information to other people who want to manage our opinions. (Okay, I'm joking about being cynical. Actually I can't wait to see whether this goes in a more accesible form that produces results other than feelings of participation)

There are also three main categories in the center area, and a sidebar with links to events and the agenda. In the center area, three tabs appear as a menu: "Your weekly Adddress," "Inside the Transition," and "How to Help."

The first tab is groundbreaking in itself, the announcement of a tech upgrade of the old weekly radio president's address. The second helps acquaint the public with the transition team and Obama's goals, via youtube videos of the team in action. It's important that Obama's team calls itself a "team." It's more cooperative as a metaphor, and less bureaucratic than "committee" or "group." "Team work" is a widely used phrase for cooperation and the individual working with others for a good that transcends each person. Of course, other connotations of "team" also suggests there could be a fierce competition, and the browser is invited to identify with this winning team.

"How to help" partly signifies what an inauguration tries to enact, a dedication of cooperative effort between elective executive and the people he represents: "Yes we can." It also signifies a political tactic especially in wide use among political campaign strategists of both major parties:you want to make voters feel like they matter, like they can do something that matters. Very important in a society where very few people feel like they have any effect on government--alienation. During the campaign, parties shifted from trying to use sites to convey information about candidates and the option to donate to giving them information that would equip them to mobilize voters. Now it gives options help with problems such as the California fires. At the bottom left, "It’s Your America: Share Your Ideas The story of the campaign and this historic moment has been your story. Share your story and your ideas, and be part of bringing positive lasting change to this country."
Similar messages stressing your agency and your consubstantiation with government appear on pages such as the "Agenda" page of issues (see left).

How accessible Obama and his team really is another question. The key for belief effects is to create the form of access. Practice will be the judge, provided that one has access to the evaluation of the accessibility! These are some new developments mixed with old uses. Compare, for example, this Obama site with the current whitehouse.gov. Like a lot of sites that really don't want to deal with a lot of email from visitors, they place a tiny "contact" link in the page's footer. There are a fair number of photos, but no videos (at least as I'm looking at it now). It will be interesting to see how, if at all, the whitehouse.gov page changes after the inauguration.