The front page of the Sunday edition of the Buffalo News prominently read “Minorities – the New Majority.” Now make no mistake, I don’t make a habit of reading that terrible little newspaper; I just happened across it on this occasion. I don’t read it precisely because it doesn’t take much more than one of their headlines to launch me into a diatribe about their thoughtless reporting, bias, or simple bad journalism. Speaking of which…
It’s not at all unusual for the Buffalo News to run a headline like the above, apparently without anyone on staff raising an objection about the obvious contradiction they’d placed top-center on the first page. But what’s altogether more frustrating than that is that exactly that same oxymoronic reference to “minorities” seems commonplace in the media in general, and in much of public discourse.
How powerfully consumed with our culture biases do we have to be that we never pause and think, “Wait, if they constitute a majority of the population, why are we calling them by a term that means exactly the opposite?”? It seems to me that that’s a natural question, but I’d emphasize that even if more people had the common sense to ask it, they still wouldn’t be asking the right question. A better question would be something along the lines of, “Wait a minute: why are we only calling non-white people minorities, if white people are now in the minority?”
If you think about it for a second, you realize that identifying minorities as a collective majority requires separating all of society into exactly two distinct groups: white people, and everybody else. The fact that the hasty editors of news outlets like the Buffalo News don’t bat an eye at such a move goes to show that much of media, and much of the public dialogue throughout white America identifies the default human being as white, and sets everything else in contrast to that.
There is no statistically valid reason for deciding that blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans constitute one group, termed “minorities,” while Caucasians make up a second group, which is not labeled as being in the minority even if its share of the population is substantially under fifty percent. The only reason there is for such a move is an ingrained cultural bias. It’s the sort of well-intentioned, socially liberal racism and shortsightedness that leads people who are reflective, but not self-reflective, to champion causes of social justice and equality, without ever addressing the most crucial racial and cultural problem of all – the social tendency to actually look at one kind of people differently than one looks at absolutely everybody else.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Invisible Moderation
After a week of watching Verizon struggle to reestablish consistent internet service to my home, I’m finally able to blog again, and ideally return to the nice, daily pace I’d effectively established before being abruptly cut out of the loop.
What’s caught my eye tonight, and struck me as worth commenting upon, is this clip from Real Time with Bill Maher.
I came across the video via a Breitbart post, which applauded Maher’s statement that there is one religion in the world that kills you when you disagree with them. I’m not exactly shocked by the commentary, coming from him. Maher’s less than nuanced views on the topic of religion are well established, and should come as a surprise to no one.
I’m sick of the impulse to let outspoken conservatives direct the media narrative, so I’m not interested in responding to Breitbart’s praise for Maher or for the audience that applauded his statement. Obviously, I think Maher is making a tremendous mistake when he singles out Islam as being inherently more violent that other widespread religions, but it is a more particular mistake that is made by both him and Katty Kay of BBC America in the clip when they lament the lack of moderate Muslim voices protesting the extremism that leads Maher to his incisive conclusion.
I don’t understand what the two commenters are looking for when they say that there should be more visible moderate protest to cut against the terrorist extremism that is the topic of discussion. I think they’re forgetting that essential point – that extremism is what everybody's talking about. In the clip, Andrew Sullivan does take care to point out that the violent, fundamentalist impulse exists among a small but very visible minority of the world’s Muslims. It’s easy to understand, though, that campaigns of kidnapping and murder garner a great deal of attention. By contrast, the thing that makes moderate worldviews moderate is the fact that they’re not disturbing and sensational enough to make them particularly interesting topics for the evening news.
When Maher and Kay say that there ought to be more moderates to counter the statements and actions of extremists, what exactly is it that they’re looking for? I fail to see how it is the responsibility of moderate Muslims to answer for the actions of every Muslim terrorist, or how it is even in the power of those moderates to actually obstruct and intercept terrorism. But that capability and duty seems to be exactly what Maher and Kay are asserting belong to all Muslims, and only to them.
The world has not exactly been without Christian-motivated acts of violence and even genocide. I wonder if people who bemoan the lack of moderate Muslim voices have made the same conclusions about Christians during their conflicts as they have of Muslims in the current state of global affairs. Or would they have taken the systematic attacks by the Ku Klux Klan and other white radicals against black targets during the civil rights era as evidence that America was deficient in moderate Caucasians?
It seems to me that for people like Maher and Kay to be satisfied that there is a contingent of moderate Muslims in the Middle East, they would need to first see those individuals attack and destroy extremist organizations, individuals, and infrastructure. But that doesn’t sound moderate. It sounds like a type of extremism that’s grounded in something other than Jihadist thinking. It seems to me that Maher and Kay are despairing not of the lack of Muslims who are not violent, but rather of Muslims whose violence is more palatable to them.
But it seems obvious to me that you can’t conclude that there are no moderates based on the fact that extremists still operate within the same society. The extremists are easy to see, but the moderates, no matter how numerous, are practically invisible.
What’s caught my eye tonight, and struck me as worth commenting upon, is this clip from Real Time with Bill Maher.
I came across the video via a Breitbart post, which applauded Maher’s statement that there is one religion in the world that kills you when you disagree with them. I’m not exactly shocked by the commentary, coming from him. Maher’s less than nuanced views on the topic of religion are well established, and should come as a surprise to no one.
I’m sick of the impulse to let outspoken conservatives direct the media narrative, so I’m not interested in responding to Breitbart’s praise for Maher or for the audience that applauded his statement. Obviously, I think Maher is making a tremendous mistake when he singles out Islam as being inherently more violent that other widespread religions, but it is a more particular mistake that is made by both him and Katty Kay of BBC America in the clip when they lament the lack of moderate Muslim voices protesting the extremism that leads Maher to his incisive conclusion.
I don’t understand what the two commenters are looking for when they say that there should be more visible moderate protest to cut against the terrorist extremism that is the topic of discussion. I think they’re forgetting that essential point – that extremism is what everybody's talking about. In the clip, Andrew Sullivan does take care to point out that the violent, fundamentalist impulse exists among a small but very visible minority of the world’s Muslims. It’s easy to understand, though, that campaigns of kidnapping and murder garner a great deal of attention. By contrast, the thing that makes moderate worldviews moderate is the fact that they’re not disturbing and sensational enough to make them particularly interesting topics for the evening news.
When Maher and Kay say that there ought to be more moderates to counter the statements and actions of extremists, what exactly is it that they’re looking for? I fail to see how it is the responsibility of moderate Muslims to answer for the actions of every Muslim terrorist, or how it is even in the power of those moderates to actually obstruct and intercept terrorism. But that capability and duty seems to be exactly what Maher and Kay are asserting belong to all Muslims, and only to them.
The world has not exactly been without Christian-motivated acts of violence and even genocide. I wonder if people who bemoan the lack of moderate Muslim voices have made the same conclusions about Christians during their conflicts as they have of Muslims in the current state of global affairs. Or would they have taken the systematic attacks by the Ku Klux Klan and other white radicals against black targets during the civil rights era as evidence that America was deficient in moderate Caucasians?
It seems to me that for people like Maher and Kay to be satisfied that there is a contingent of moderate Muslims in the Middle East, they would need to first see those individuals attack and destroy extremist organizations, individuals, and infrastructure. But that doesn’t sound moderate. It sounds like a type of extremism that’s grounded in something other than Jihadist thinking. It seems to me that Maher and Kay are despairing not of the lack of Muslims who are not violent, but rather of Muslims whose violence is more palatable to them.
But it seems obvious to me that you can’t conclude that there are no moderates based on the fact that extremists still operate within the same society. The extremists are easy to see, but the moderates, no matter how numerous, are practically invisible.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Good Timing, I Guess
I think it’s fascinating that Farley Granger’s death got so much media attention. I’ll confess that I had no idea who the man was, though seeing as I was born in 1985, that shouldn’t be read as an attempt to impugn his significance in the history of film. It’s not that I find the ubiquity of reports of his death to be interesting because I don’t think they’re deserved. I’m just surprised that he wasn’t overlooked in the way that so many other deceased celebrities have been in recent years.
The reason I feel this is worth blogging about is that I think it says something remarkable about marketing and public relations. It goes to show that even in death a person’s public image is not immune to the random influence of fortuitous coincidence. Remember when David Carradine died in the summer of 2009, followed that same month by Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, who died on the same day? I’ll be you do. And the popular media was on quite a death kick for a while in response.
Remember also in 2009 not hearing about Ricardo Montalban and Henry Gibson passing on? That’s because Montalban’s death came in January when there were other things to focus on, like the Obama inauguration, and Gibson waited until autumn to leave the mortal coil, long after the media’s deathwatch ended. It’s not as though either of those men was especially iconic, at least as compared to Fawcett and Jackson. But they were both better actors than David Carradine, and they were both more visible to people born after the seventies than was Farah Fawcett. You may not even known Henry Gibson by name, but I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that his face triggers an acid flashback of filmological memories. And that being the case, I’m sure his role in the history of cinema was roughly as notable as Farley Granger.
I think Granger’s immediate legacy benefited a great deal from his death coming right on the heels of that of Elizabeth Taylor, whose passing nobody could have possibly ignored. There’s a tendency for the news to pick up on a narrative and follow it for a while, cherry-picking the news in order to mold it into that shape. The “Summer of the Shark” is a prime example that I will always remember. In this case, I think that after Taylor’s death, the media was looking for a sequel, and Granger benefitted by way of the pure luck of dying. It’s kind of unsettling to know that it can work that way, and it may be rather cynical to think of it as roughly the same as the effect of adjacent magazine advertisements on one another. But that’s the way of things, and while I’d like to see a breaking point in the media’s construction of narratives, when it comes to the marketing and public relations aspect of this story, I’m comfortable with taking it as a purely instructive tale.
The reason I feel this is worth blogging about is that I think it says something remarkable about marketing and public relations. It goes to show that even in death a person’s public image is not immune to the random influence of fortuitous coincidence. Remember when David Carradine died in the summer of 2009, followed that same month by Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, who died on the same day? I’ll be you do. And the popular media was on quite a death kick for a while in response.
Remember also in 2009 not hearing about Ricardo Montalban and Henry Gibson passing on? That’s because Montalban’s death came in January when there were other things to focus on, like the Obama inauguration, and Gibson waited until autumn to leave the mortal coil, long after the media’s deathwatch ended. It’s not as though either of those men was especially iconic, at least as compared to Fawcett and Jackson. But they were both better actors than David Carradine, and they were both more visible to people born after the seventies than was Farah Fawcett. You may not even known Henry Gibson by name, but I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that his face triggers an acid flashback of filmological memories. And that being the case, I’m sure his role in the history of cinema was roughly as notable as Farley Granger.
I think Granger’s immediate legacy benefited a great deal from his death coming right on the heels of that of Elizabeth Taylor, whose passing nobody could have possibly ignored. There’s a tendency for the news to pick up on a narrative and follow it for a while, cherry-picking the news in order to mold it into that shape. The “Summer of the Shark” is a prime example that I will always remember. In this case, I think that after Taylor’s death, the media was looking for a sequel, and Granger benefitted by way of the pure luck of dying. It’s kind of unsettling to know that it can work that way, and it may be rather cynical to think of it as roughly the same as the effect of adjacent magazine advertisements on one another. But that’s the way of things, and while I’d like to see a breaking point in the media’s construction of narratives, when it comes to the marketing and public relations aspect of this story, I’m comfortable with taking it as a purely instructive tale.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Always Black and White?
There was a remarkable lead story at Salon today detailing the ten most segregated urban areas in the country, according to the newly released census data. When I got the third item on the list, each of which were accompanied by impressive maps of the demographics, I was strongly reminded of a breaking point for which I’ve been waiting a long time, and am likely to go on waiting.
That third place on the list was Cincinnati, its map showing small enclaves of red depicting areas of black majority surrounded completely by a light, faded blue, indicating areas of slight white majority, with a far more vibrant blue extending out from there in every direction. The moment I looked at it, I had the clear sense that I was looking at a perfect visual representation of the social class distribution in a modern urban area.
I could go on for pages and pages, and respond to several of the academic quotations given in the article, and I may do so if, for instance, nothing else catches my attention tomorrow as this has today. But my main point is simple enough. I think we need to stop talking about segregation and related issues as issues pertaining to white and black. It’s more appropriate and more useful to describe it as a problem of rich and poor.
To talk about this topic in terms of actions and attitudes of black people and white people just reinforces the idea of some separateness of the two groups that applies across the board on the basis of nothing other than skin color. That idea is precisely the underpinning of racism, and even if it’s well intentioned, even if the purpose of speaking in those terms is to criticize the white majority, it gives the impression that race itself is the problem. But if race is the problem, it can’t be fixed. If poverty is the problem, there’s work that can be done.
Even if one hundred percent of the white population in a given region is virulently racist, not all of them contribute to the ongoing segregation of that area. Some of them are just too poor to move, as much as they might want to get away from the blacks that have become their neighbors. And while that racism would have to be addressed on its own terms, there are poor whites who live amongst black majorities, and so cannot be said to be culpable for the segregation of their region. But the discussion of the topic always seems to refer to black ingress and “white flight.”
I strongly disapprove of that term. How did it ever come about that we saw the underpinning of segregation as “white flight” and not “rich flight”? It’s not really racism that causes segregation, so much as it is the divergence of social classes that lays the groundwork for both racism and segregation as collateral effects. Poverty is the problem, and segregation is a symptom. To talk about segregation in terms of black and white only serves to pit the two sides against each other in places where they are actually coexisting, despite segregation. We can beat racism and yet not have the slightest effect on segregation if only all those who are poor now are kept poor, with blacks comprising the majority of the impoverished, incapable, along with their poor, white neighbors, of moving to places of affluence. But we can beat racism, at least among the lower classes if we understand that we’re in this together, that it’s not black against white, but poor against a system that makes poverty practically inescapable.
Buffalo happened to come in at number six on the list, which further makes it clear to me that I have just the right opinion of this place. There is so much racism here, coming from all sides. And I think that realistically the segregation that puts us in this ignoble top ten upholds all the racism more than the other way around. What is needed is for whites to understand that their neighborhood isn’t poor because of all the blacks who live there, but rather all the blacks live there because their neighborhood is poor. And the blacks need to better understand that if any identifiable person is holding them down, the white cashier or plumber isn’t him. If there must be an enemy his color is not white or black, but gold or silver.
It seems that racists and academics must reach roughly the same breaking point, and understand that we’ve been fighting the wrong enemy. We need to properly identify our social class first, and stop thinking of black and white as somehow more different than rich and poor. Much of the academic commentary in the Salon article suggested to me that scholars on the topic have a harmful preconception of segregation as a problem related only to color and not to class, but none more so than this line from Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa, talking about St. Louis: “What we conventionally think of as white flight is now black flight as well. The city itself is just emptying out and the predominant area of African-American settlement is in St. Louis County."
No doubt for Gordon and for most people considering this topic, it’s always black and white, and so it’s just natural to talk about the two groups as separate entities, and it doesn’t occur to them that if there’s black flight and white flight, maybe they’re both following the same impulse, not demonstrating two different behaviors determined by their colors.
If there was no racism, there could still be segregation. If there was no segregation, there could still be segregation. The poor and the rich will always live apart, and people are kept unequal. If we’re going to start addressing that, we need to stop drawing false lines of demarcation among ourselves, which blur the line that should be clearest and most important. I pray for that breaking point.
That third place on the list was Cincinnati, its map showing small enclaves of red depicting areas of black majority surrounded completely by a light, faded blue, indicating areas of slight white majority, with a far more vibrant blue extending out from there in every direction. The moment I looked at it, I had the clear sense that I was looking at a perfect visual representation of the social class distribution in a modern urban area.
I could go on for pages and pages, and respond to several of the academic quotations given in the article, and I may do so if, for instance, nothing else catches my attention tomorrow as this has today. But my main point is simple enough. I think we need to stop talking about segregation and related issues as issues pertaining to white and black. It’s more appropriate and more useful to describe it as a problem of rich and poor.
To talk about this topic in terms of actions and attitudes of black people and white people just reinforces the idea of some separateness of the two groups that applies across the board on the basis of nothing other than skin color. That idea is precisely the underpinning of racism, and even if it’s well intentioned, even if the purpose of speaking in those terms is to criticize the white majority, it gives the impression that race itself is the problem. But if race is the problem, it can’t be fixed. If poverty is the problem, there’s work that can be done.
Even if one hundred percent of the white population in a given region is virulently racist, not all of them contribute to the ongoing segregation of that area. Some of them are just too poor to move, as much as they might want to get away from the blacks that have become their neighbors. And while that racism would have to be addressed on its own terms, there are poor whites who live amongst black majorities, and so cannot be said to be culpable for the segregation of their region. But the discussion of the topic always seems to refer to black ingress and “white flight.”
I strongly disapprove of that term. How did it ever come about that we saw the underpinning of segregation as “white flight” and not “rich flight”? It’s not really racism that causes segregation, so much as it is the divergence of social classes that lays the groundwork for both racism and segregation as collateral effects. Poverty is the problem, and segregation is a symptom. To talk about segregation in terms of black and white only serves to pit the two sides against each other in places where they are actually coexisting, despite segregation. We can beat racism and yet not have the slightest effect on segregation if only all those who are poor now are kept poor, with blacks comprising the majority of the impoverished, incapable, along with their poor, white neighbors, of moving to places of affluence. But we can beat racism, at least among the lower classes if we understand that we’re in this together, that it’s not black against white, but poor against a system that makes poverty practically inescapable.
Buffalo happened to come in at number six on the list, which further makes it clear to me that I have just the right opinion of this place. There is so much racism here, coming from all sides. And I think that realistically the segregation that puts us in this ignoble top ten upholds all the racism more than the other way around. What is needed is for whites to understand that their neighborhood isn’t poor because of all the blacks who live there, but rather all the blacks live there because their neighborhood is poor. And the blacks need to better understand that if any identifiable person is holding them down, the white cashier or plumber isn’t him. If there must be an enemy his color is not white or black, but gold or silver.
It seems that racists and academics must reach roughly the same breaking point, and understand that we’ve been fighting the wrong enemy. We need to properly identify our social class first, and stop thinking of black and white as somehow more different than rich and poor. Much of the academic commentary in the Salon article suggested to me that scholars on the topic have a harmful preconception of segregation as a problem related only to color and not to class, but none more so than this line from Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa, talking about St. Louis: “What we conventionally think of as white flight is now black flight as well. The city itself is just emptying out and the predominant area of African-American settlement is in St. Louis County."
No doubt for Gordon and for most people considering this topic, it’s always black and white, and so it’s just natural to talk about the two groups as separate entities, and it doesn’t occur to them that if there’s black flight and white flight, maybe they’re both following the same impulse, not demonstrating two different behaviors determined by their colors.
If there was no racism, there could still be segregation. If there was no segregation, there could still be segregation. The poor and the rich will always live apart, and people are kept unequal. If we’re going to start addressing that, we need to stop drawing false lines of demarcation among ourselves, which blur the line that should be clearest and most important. I pray for that breaking point.
Monday, March 28, 2011
It's Personal
I feel somehow very detached from myself right now. I can't seem to make myself take an interest in politics, or foreign affairs, or pop culture. It's as if I trend towards self-obsession as a way of overcompensating for the feeling of uprooted identity. I specifically didn't want this blog to be of a personal nature, but I do want to keep to a habit of updating it daily. It can be hard to reconcile those two things.
I feel that the groundwork for whatever is respectable in my intellect is my tendency to take myself quite seriously. I am constantly thinking, in large part because there isn't much that I let pass casually. I am a good essayist because I like to draw out the deeper significance of my ordinary life. At least, I like to do so when my life is less than painfully ordinary. Even the central idea of this blog grew out of looking at one way that I engage with my own life and applying it to social, cultural, and political issues.
But if I lose sight of the idea of personal breaking points, I will lose sight of the broader application of the same. So sometimes I have to take a moment with nothing else to do but comment on myself.
I need to change my habits. It's appalling how much time I waste when I don't have the imposed rigor of numerous deadlines. Some of it is just me being idle or blowing off steam because of the stress of my own insecurities. But I'd say that the lion's share of wasted time actually goes to me trying to do the right thing, the responsible thing.
I don't know how many times I have to acknowledge the fact that the better means of freelancing is to promote myself broadly and let clients come to me, before I begin to steadfastly heed my own advice and stop casting out vastly many very narrow nets. I get so caught up with the immediate goals that I spend entire days trying to win over a sequence of individuals when I could be building a better personal brand.
The bitter irony of it is that in the effort to be successful at my work in the short term, I limit my long-term marketing potential at the same time that I pull myself away from the awareness of why I'm doing this for a living in the first place. All this time spent looking for new clients could be better put to creative use. There's so many stories in my mind that crave expression, and so many puzzles that need to unraveled with good language.
And that brings to mind the other irony of this situation: That I have poor practices when it comes to marketing myself, but would make none of the same errors of excessive caution or shortsightedness in dealing with marketing for someone else. It's one of the strangest things about the human condition - the impossible need to see yourself from the outside.
I've got to hit a breaking point very soon. It could be the improvement of my self-promotion, or just a wholesale casting off of all the needless things that devour the time that could be put to better professional or creative use. Or it could be any of numerous other breaking points that seem to be looming on the horizons of a multitude of possible worlds. I just know that my current way of doing things can't sustain itself for much longer. God, just give me some time. Give me some time for the untapped energy of all these wasted hours to build up pressure and burst out of me like fireworks in my mind. I'm pretty good, and I can be better. Adaptation for me is not the process of transforming, but the process of reaching the moment in which I am transformed.
I feel that the groundwork for whatever is respectable in my intellect is my tendency to take myself quite seriously. I am constantly thinking, in large part because there isn't much that I let pass casually. I am a good essayist because I like to draw out the deeper significance of my ordinary life. At least, I like to do so when my life is less than painfully ordinary. Even the central idea of this blog grew out of looking at one way that I engage with my own life and applying it to social, cultural, and political issues.
But if I lose sight of the idea of personal breaking points, I will lose sight of the broader application of the same. So sometimes I have to take a moment with nothing else to do but comment on myself.
I need to change my habits. It's appalling how much time I waste when I don't have the imposed rigor of numerous deadlines. Some of it is just me being idle or blowing off steam because of the stress of my own insecurities. But I'd say that the lion's share of wasted time actually goes to me trying to do the right thing, the responsible thing.
I don't know how many times I have to acknowledge the fact that the better means of freelancing is to promote myself broadly and let clients come to me, before I begin to steadfastly heed my own advice and stop casting out vastly many very narrow nets. I get so caught up with the immediate goals that I spend entire days trying to win over a sequence of individuals when I could be building a better personal brand.
The bitter irony of it is that in the effort to be successful at my work in the short term, I limit my long-term marketing potential at the same time that I pull myself away from the awareness of why I'm doing this for a living in the first place. All this time spent looking for new clients could be better put to creative use. There's so many stories in my mind that crave expression, and so many puzzles that need to unraveled with good language.
And that brings to mind the other irony of this situation: That I have poor practices when it comes to marketing myself, but would make none of the same errors of excessive caution or shortsightedness in dealing with marketing for someone else. It's one of the strangest things about the human condition - the impossible need to see yourself from the outside.
I've got to hit a breaking point very soon. It could be the improvement of my self-promotion, or just a wholesale casting off of all the needless things that devour the time that could be put to better professional or creative use. Or it could be any of numerous other breaking points that seem to be looming on the horizons of a multitude of possible worlds. I just know that my current way of doing things can't sustain itself for much longer. God, just give me some time. Give me some time for the untapped energy of all these wasted hours to build up pressure and burst out of me like fireworks in my mind. I'm pretty good, and I can be better. Adaptation for me is not the process of transforming, but the process of reaching the moment in which I am transformed.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Common Thoughts
I don’t think people give enough respect to the thin, weak boundaries of their ideological convictions. I actually take notice of, and am alarmed by, the ideas that I entertain, which have the potential to push me in either of two directions – towards a more extreme, less rational extension of the political views I already hold, or towards an eventual reversal of my closely held beliefs. If we don’t live our lives in a self-imposed vacuum, our ideas certainly are capable of dramatic, almost inconceivable change. Just look at Arianna Huffington for a prime example. It just happens that most of us don’t notice the turnaround until it’s already happened. As romantic as the notion of epiphany is, it’s not the way things usually go. Most of the things we come to believe are grounded in a gradual accumulation of evidence and, hopefully, logical analysis.
I remember being twenty years old, working in a gas station over my summer break from college, and finding myself deep in thought while stocking the walk-in cooler one night, actually praying to God to not let me become an anarchist. My own political engagement, my own earnest considerations of where I stood seemed to be pushing me that way, even though I knew that anarchism, however well-intentioned, is stupid. My genuine concern was therefore grounded in the threat that if I didn’t go on reminding myself of the glaring flaws of that view, of its neglect for the numerous salutary effects of living in a civilized society, the appeal that stood beside that foolishness could overtake my mind.
On quite the other hand, I’ve worried about the potential for getting conservative as I get old ever since I heard the famous, now clichéd, Winston Churchill quote about a young man who isn’t liberal having no heart and an old man who isn’t conservative having no head. But the threat of late-onset conservativism really took on a dimension of terror after I read Rabbit Redux, and saw that John Updike’s character, in whom I had seen so much of myself, for good or ill, had become belligerently conservative as he emerged from his twenties.
The effect of fiction is bad enough, but would not resonate at length if I did not observe warning signs portending wrong thinking in my own mind, as well. Sometimes I’ll entertain what I think is a typically conservative thought, and then I’ll consider that really what is in my mind is not an ideological statement, it’s an observation. But it’s the sort of observation that it is easy to imagine dominates the senses of a right-wing person. It is the groundwork of an objectionable ideology, but the presence of that actual ideology depends on building an interpretation onto that foundation of observation.
Rational assessment of observable facts and arguable solutions is the thing that has held extremist liberal mindsets at bay, and if I retain an active mind, that will be what keeps me from conservativism, as well. Thinking about this has led me to a very interesting thought: Liberals and conservatives may very often have the very same idea about a particular subject. The thing that differentiates the two is the way each interprets his own observational thought, or even his own emotion. From my liberal standpoint, I would venture to guess that it’s often a matter of degree, with the liberal giving a greater amount of consideration to the topic, as opposed to, say, stopping short with an easy answer.
It worries me when I find myself thinking, “I can’t stand seeing all these recent immigrants in all these same positions of employment.” The thought passes through me as if it was not my own, and then my mind reels, and the first thought to follow upon it is, “holy shit, I’m betraying everything that I respect in myself.” And then I have to wonder why that is, when it seemed to me for a moment that I was just observing an obviously true state of affairs. Then I realize that I had imposed emotional content onto that observation, and that it reflected badly on me. But in the next second, I start to relax as I reassure myself that I hadn’t directed my despisal at the working class immigrants themselves, but at the circumstances surrounding them and me in kind. My comment hadn’t dislodged any of the beliefs that I hold and consider laudable – such as that everyone, regardless of race or national origin, deserves an opportunity to work.
But the fact remains that I think it’s terrible that I sometimes see white-owned, corporate chain establishments staffed entirely by very recent Indian immigrants. I don’t like that virtually all of my produce is picked and packaged by Mexican migrant workers. I know that conservatives object to these things, too. But they take the easy route of blaming the individuals who had the audacity to try to better their lives. They acknowledge what’s happening, and they acknowledge their own frustrations that things are bad, and that perhaps they themselves are out of work, but they stop there, and don’t give a deeper consideration of what’s wrong.
Every time I buy a cup of coffee from an Asian immigrant laboring for a Western company, I think about the fact that there had no doubt been dozens of applicants for that persons job from white, native Buffalonians, and that the job went to the immigrant. In several places, the job went to the immigrant in every god damn case. And it’s not because they’re coming here to take our jobs. It’s not because they’re invading us in droves and robbing the white man of what should be his. It’s because of the white men who set the hiring policy at these places, knowing that they can comfortably pay a substantially lower wage to a recent immigrant. I look at these things and I experience what I think must be a conservative’s anger. But thank God that I have a liberal’s mind, because I have no right to be angry at another person who is as lowly as I. My anger is for the system that disregards one group in order to thoroughly exploit another.
I don’t think we partisans recognize often enough that we’re living in the same world. We’re facing the same problems. And if my experiences are not anomalous, we are even having some of the same thoughts. We just need to do a better job of understanding what we’re all thinking, what we’re all feeling. And if we focus on that common ground, those of us who have thought through the facts, observations, and theoretical solutions can better explain that the issue is deeper than you realize – deeper than the conservative notion at which it’s easier to arrive.
I remember being twenty years old, working in a gas station over my summer break from college, and finding myself deep in thought while stocking the walk-in cooler one night, actually praying to God to not let me become an anarchist. My own political engagement, my own earnest considerations of where I stood seemed to be pushing me that way, even though I knew that anarchism, however well-intentioned, is stupid. My genuine concern was therefore grounded in the threat that if I didn’t go on reminding myself of the glaring flaws of that view, of its neglect for the numerous salutary effects of living in a civilized society, the appeal that stood beside that foolishness could overtake my mind.
On quite the other hand, I’ve worried about the potential for getting conservative as I get old ever since I heard the famous, now clichéd, Winston Churchill quote about a young man who isn’t liberal having no heart and an old man who isn’t conservative having no head. But the threat of late-onset conservativism really took on a dimension of terror after I read Rabbit Redux, and saw that John Updike’s character, in whom I had seen so much of myself, for good or ill, had become belligerently conservative as he emerged from his twenties.
The effect of fiction is bad enough, but would not resonate at length if I did not observe warning signs portending wrong thinking in my own mind, as well. Sometimes I’ll entertain what I think is a typically conservative thought, and then I’ll consider that really what is in my mind is not an ideological statement, it’s an observation. But it’s the sort of observation that it is easy to imagine dominates the senses of a right-wing person. It is the groundwork of an objectionable ideology, but the presence of that actual ideology depends on building an interpretation onto that foundation of observation.
Rational assessment of observable facts and arguable solutions is the thing that has held extremist liberal mindsets at bay, and if I retain an active mind, that will be what keeps me from conservativism, as well. Thinking about this has led me to a very interesting thought: Liberals and conservatives may very often have the very same idea about a particular subject. The thing that differentiates the two is the way each interprets his own observational thought, or even his own emotion. From my liberal standpoint, I would venture to guess that it’s often a matter of degree, with the liberal giving a greater amount of consideration to the topic, as opposed to, say, stopping short with an easy answer.
It worries me when I find myself thinking, “I can’t stand seeing all these recent immigrants in all these same positions of employment.” The thought passes through me as if it was not my own, and then my mind reels, and the first thought to follow upon it is, “holy shit, I’m betraying everything that I respect in myself.” And then I have to wonder why that is, when it seemed to me for a moment that I was just observing an obviously true state of affairs. Then I realize that I had imposed emotional content onto that observation, and that it reflected badly on me. But in the next second, I start to relax as I reassure myself that I hadn’t directed my despisal at the working class immigrants themselves, but at the circumstances surrounding them and me in kind. My comment hadn’t dislodged any of the beliefs that I hold and consider laudable – such as that everyone, regardless of race or national origin, deserves an opportunity to work.
But the fact remains that I think it’s terrible that I sometimes see white-owned, corporate chain establishments staffed entirely by very recent Indian immigrants. I don’t like that virtually all of my produce is picked and packaged by Mexican migrant workers. I know that conservatives object to these things, too. But they take the easy route of blaming the individuals who had the audacity to try to better their lives. They acknowledge what’s happening, and they acknowledge their own frustrations that things are bad, and that perhaps they themselves are out of work, but they stop there, and don’t give a deeper consideration of what’s wrong.
Every time I buy a cup of coffee from an Asian immigrant laboring for a Western company, I think about the fact that there had no doubt been dozens of applicants for that persons job from white, native Buffalonians, and that the job went to the immigrant. In several places, the job went to the immigrant in every god damn case. And it’s not because they’re coming here to take our jobs. It’s not because they’re invading us in droves and robbing the white man of what should be his. It’s because of the white men who set the hiring policy at these places, knowing that they can comfortably pay a substantially lower wage to a recent immigrant. I look at these things and I experience what I think must be a conservative’s anger. But thank God that I have a liberal’s mind, because I have no right to be angry at another person who is as lowly as I. My anger is for the system that disregards one group in order to thoroughly exploit another.
I don’t think we partisans recognize often enough that we’re living in the same world. We’re facing the same problems. And if my experiences are not anomalous, we are even having some of the same thoughts. We just need to do a better job of understanding what we’re all thinking, what we’re all feeling. And if we focus on that common ground, those of us who have thought through the facts, observations, and theoretical solutions can better explain that the issue is deeper than you realize – deeper than the conservative notion at which it’s easier to arrive.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Bias in Favor of Bias
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship have an article at Salon today, in which they claim that when conservatives deride NPR as liberal, they mean something much different from the idea that NPR is equal and opposite to Fox News and conservative talk radio.
My own opinion is that NPR is the most reliable source of good reporting left to the American public. And it's certainly far from perfect, but evidently not as far from it as most media consumers want it to be. I deeply appreciate that Moyers and Winship parenthetically note that liberal partisans as well as conservatives are given to criticism of the outlet when it doesn't serve their ends. I encounter entirely too many liberals who take their stand on each piece of news not because they arrived at the liberal view based on an internal coherence of their ideals, but because tribalism picks their side for them.
The best of us are concerned with truth over and above all else, and it is my firm belief that the truth upholds a more characteristically liberal viewpoint. But the best liberals will reevaluate their own views when that is not the case.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of contributors to the public discourse, representing all social and ideological camps, do not hold themselves to that standard. They look for the news that supports their presumptions, and surround themselves with the people who cheer lead the same, not the people who provide them with the most information.
At its best, NPR is of the latter class, but it is disregarded by most conservatives and by some liberals as not upholding their ideas about how the news should be filtered, focused, and distorted.
Moyers and Winship say further:
That's exactly right. But worse than the fact that that's what is happening is the fact that that seems to be exactly what we want. Or at the least, the ubiquity of ideological journalism has made overwhelming segments of the population blind to the fact that there even is an alternative. It is apparently reflexive for people, conservatives and liberals alike, to class every media outlet, story, and personality as being politically on one side or the other. The notion of unbiased journalism seems to be viewed as some sort of mythological creature that has no purpose for the reality in which we presently live. The powerful irony of that is that unbiased journalism is the only thing that can keep us living in reality.
Unbiased, or at least only lightly biased journalism is not a myth, but it does seem to be facing extinction, and practically every one of us is guilty of encroaching on its habitat and destroying the food source that comes, oddly enough, of us consuming it. We've slowly built to the broad acceptance as normal of media that takes a clear side. I see no reason to believe that the omnipresence of bias will fade by the same mechanism. We've got to realize collectively that we've been going down the wrong road, and indeed, we have to actively remind ourselves of the fact that there even is another road. It's going to take a breaking point in the collective action of media consumers to snap us back to the reality in which reality is still something worth reporting on.
Please help us get there. Turn off talk radio, and give your support only to the news reporters that give you more facts than opinions. Remind everyone you know that we don't have to be pointing at one side of the fence or the other in order to be pointing at something worthwhile.
They mean it's not accountable to their worldview as conservatives and partisans. They mean it reflects too great a regard for evidence and is too open to reporting different points of views of the same event or idea or issue. Reporting that by its very fact-driven nature often fails to confirm their ideological underpinnings, their way of seeing things (which is why some liberals and Democrats also become irate with NPR).
My own opinion is that NPR is the most reliable source of good reporting left to the American public. And it's certainly far from perfect, but evidently not as far from it as most media consumers want it to be. I deeply appreciate that Moyers and Winship parenthetically note that liberal partisans as well as conservatives are given to criticism of the outlet when it doesn't serve their ends. I encounter entirely too many liberals who take their stand on each piece of news not because they arrived at the liberal view based on an internal coherence of their ideals, but because tribalism picks their side for them.
The best of us are concerned with truth over and above all else, and it is my firm belief that the truth upholds a more characteristically liberal viewpoint. But the best liberals will reevaluate their own views when that is not the case.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of contributors to the public discourse, representing all social and ideological camps, do not hold themselves to that standard. They look for the news that supports their presumptions, and surround themselves with the people who cheer lead the same, not the people who provide them with the most information.
At its best, NPR is of the latter class, but it is disregarded by most conservatives and by some liberals as not upholding their ideas about how the news should be filtered, focused, and distorted.
Moyers and Winship say further:
If "liberal" were the counterpoint to "conservative," NPR would be the mirror of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and James O’Keefe, including the use of their techniques as well as content. Clearly it isn’t. To charge otherwise is a phony gambit aimed at nothing less than quashing the public’s access to non-ideological journalism, narrowing viewpoints to all but one.
That's exactly right. But worse than the fact that that's what is happening is the fact that that seems to be exactly what we want. Or at the least, the ubiquity of ideological journalism has made overwhelming segments of the population blind to the fact that there even is an alternative. It is apparently reflexive for people, conservatives and liberals alike, to class every media outlet, story, and personality as being politically on one side or the other. The notion of unbiased journalism seems to be viewed as some sort of mythological creature that has no purpose for the reality in which we presently live. The powerful irony of that is that unbiased journalism is the only thing that can keep us living in reality.
Unbiased, or at least only lightly biased journalism is not a myth, but it does seem to be facing extinction, and practically every one of us is guilty of encroaching on its habitat and destroying the food source that comes, oddly enough, of us consuming it. We've slowly built to the broad acceptance as normal of media that takes a clear side. I see no reason to believe that the omnipresence of bias will fade by the same mechanism. We've got to realize collectively that we've been going down the wrong road, and indeed, we have to actively remind ourselves of the fact that there even is another road. It's going to take a breaking point in the collective action of media consumers to snap us back to the reality in which reality is still something worth reporting on.
Please help us get there. Turn off talk radio, and give your support only to the news reporters that give you more facts than opinions. Remind everyone you know that we don't have to be pointing at one side of the fence or the other in order to be pointing at something worthwhile.
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