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 You
Say “Liberal” Media, I Say Trivial Media-Let's Call the Whole
Thing Off!
by Rick Marianetti
I
was 10 years old when my friend Marty Levinson took a summer vacation
trip to New York with his parents. One night they saw West Side
Story and he returned with a recording of the musical. I never
heard anything like it before. From the finger-snapping orchestration
of the prologue to the tragic reprise of “Somewhere”
at the end, Bernstein’s music was a rhythmic and harmonic
revelation, a bridge that would eventually take me past Elvis
and Little Richard to a life-long love of Jazz, Opera, the Classical
tradition, World Music and beyond.
We
talked a lot about music, about girls and baseball, too. We played
football and ping-pong. We had sleep overs and speculated about
the origin and destiny of the universe until three in the morning.
One
day two kids from his class walked past us and yelled “Hey,
Jew boy!” in our direction. My friend told them to drop dead.
I didn’t say anything, but I’ll never forget the look
on his face. I didn’t know what to make of their words because,
other than the fact that his family didn’t put up a Christmas
tree in December, I never thought about his being Jewish any more
than I thought about the color of his hair.
Soon
afterwards I saw some old footage of the Holocaust on television.
At first I thought the trucks were filled with mannequins. Then
the announcer explained they were the bodies of German citizens
who’d been put to death in gas chambers, many of them simply
because they were Jewish. I felt sick to my stomach; I thought
I was going to throw up. And then I cried. The horror of such
an insane social policy was incomprehensible to me. I couldn’t
imagine feeling that way towards another human being that hadn’t
intentionally harmed my family or friends.
Later
I’d see attack dogs and water guns turned on black Americans
demonstrating for the same rights I never had to question in the
little white bread town of Novato I grew up in north of San Francisco.
In the television images broadcast from the south I saw the same
attitude that led to the concentration camps, and my sadness and
confusion turned into anger and disgust. After all, didn’t
three quarters of the world’s population fight over these
issues in World War II? Didn’t the United States sacrifice
400,000 lives to ensure that democracy would prevail?
As
I grew up and went to college, I would soon learn that social
psychosis wasn’t just confined to Germany in the last century.
It’s as if there’s an evil strain of free-floating energy
loose in the world that descends unexpectedly out of nowhere like
a midwestern tornado. Besides the United States in Vietnam, it’s
touched down in places like Rwanda, Central America, Bosnia, Cambodia,
Armenia, and East Timor.
There’s
a consensus that what happened in Germany should never happen
again. Why then isn’t there more outrage over the operatives
from Guatemala and El Salvador trained by the CIA in the finer
points of terrorism and torture at the School of the Americas
in Fort Benning, Georgia? Some say it’s realpolitiks and
that it’s naïve to think the world can be any other
way. I say it’s rationalism, denial, and disassociation on
a mass scale. The revulsion I felt as a kid when confronted with
ignorance and intolerance hasn’t abated with age. That’s
why I found this quote and what it represents quite interesting:
“(They)
are a bunch of aggrieved weirdoes who don’t fit in………
They control many of our institutions, our universities, and our
major media outlets. They all have cushy jobs, they never seem
to get fired or laid off.”
More
racist rant? Not exactly. Just a few choice words from Rush Limbaugh’s
Magnum Opus, THE WAY THINGS OUGHT TO BE.
“They”
are Liberals.
Such
talk would be laughable if it wasn’t for the unrelenting
derision with which liberals are excoriated on nationally syndicated
talk radio 24/7.
I
have an otherwise intelligent acquaintance who actually takes
the time to record Mr. Limbaugh when he doesn’t have immediate
access to a radio so as to never miss a word. He also happens
to be Jewish. One day I suggested to him that every time Rush
or one of the other conservative talk show hosts he listens to
uses the word “Liberal”, replace it with “Jew.”
I then asked him to explain to me how Radio Deutschland, circa
1938, would have sounded any different. The look in his eyes of
a white-tailed deer caught in the headlights suggested irony is
not his strong suit.
Limbaugh’s
knack for unsubstantiated hyperbole isn’t limited to the
sociology of mass media. Take, for example, one of his many bumbling
forays into the environ-mental sciences. He once asserted that
coastal regions wouldn’t flood even if global warming melted
all the frozen water on the surface of the earth. His “reasoning”?
Polar ice caps float in the ocean just like ice in a glass of
water. Therefore, sea levels would remain the same even after
the ice melts.
It
would be nice if the geophysicists who’ve actually studied
the subject could get thirty seconds in edgewise to point out
to Rush and his devoted ditto-heads one small fact he overlooked:
Most polar ice is on land. An Antarctic meltdown would transform
San Francisco’s Great Highway into the Great Aquarium.
While
it’s a safe bet Rush won’t be on the short list of Nobel
Prize nominees in physics or chemistry anytime soon, his uncontested
blathering still manages to reach up to twenty million listeners
daily. Unfortunately, the Fairness Doctrine that once required
broadcasters to devote a minute or two each day to air opposing
views was abolished in 1987.
But
it’s not just his propensity to distill complex issues down
to bumper sticker rhetoric that’s so disturbing; nor is it
the realization of how shockingly uninformed he really is. Beyond
the ignorance lies the same kind of dark, aggressive belligerence
I first saw directed at my friend, the kind of polarizing rhetoric
that terminates in organized gassings, lynchings, and “disappearances”.
Instead of Jews and Afro-Americans, Rush and his cohorts focus
their crosshairs on Liberals, with special emphasis given to environmen-talists,
“femi-Nazis,” gays, and anyone critical of big business,
no matter how valid their arguments.
The
intent is not just to promote the conservative point of view;
it’s to execute a scorched-earth policy honed in on anyone
and anything left of center. Liberals are more than just the bad
gals ‘n guys in black ten-gallon hats; they’re a scourge,
the source of everything that’s wrong with the United States,
Western Civilization, and the world. In the best Orwellian tradition,
hammer away long enough and you bury the original meaning of the
word “Liberal” and replace it with the kind of hateful
connotations associated with “Nigger” or “Kike”
or “Faggot.”
While
talk radio demagogues turn up the contrast knob so high that discussions
are rendered devoid of nuance, informa-tional media crowds out
everything else with trivia and manufactured information.
Local
“news” casts consist of sports, weather, and neighbors
prodded into blabbing live on camera about the latest fire, murder,
or report of a missing child. National news programs are often
glorified carnivals with blow-dried barkers directing viewers
to “Step right up, ladies and gentlemen!” and see the
latest bizarre human-interest story or celebrity sex scandal.
Advertisers discourage adverse content with the unspoken threat
they’ll pull their ads and the revenue they provide. Besides,
cost/benefit budgeting techniques now used to evaluate newsroom
expenditures don’t justify the kind of investigative reporting
on health care or the environment that would require more resources
and thus decrease the bottom line.
The
ideal of an educated citizenry exposed to a spectrum of viewpoints
wide enough to illuminate all sides of an issue is further undermined
by a myriad of corporate-sponsored think tanks, citizen-action
groups, and high-powered public relations firms. This array of
spin specialists manufacture “facts” that have the same
relationship to reality as polyvinyl faux-wood laminated on particleboard
has to cherry finished mahogany. These factoids seep undetected
into news reports, political discussion programs and the one-sided
diatribes of Republican shills like Rush (as exemplified by his
preposterous polar ice cap theory), Gordon Liddy, Oliver North,
Michael Savage, et al.
The
ensuing informational effluent is a far greater threat to the
Flag, Mom, and Apple Pie than those rampaging liberals will ever
be.
I’ve
got nothing against conservatives, and I’m not reluctant
to criticize liberal excess. One can argue the merits of either
side, both of which can be traced back to at least the 18th century
of John Locke and Aaron Burr. The desire for change and concern
for tradition upon which they’re based emerged well before
that, as individuals began to coalesce into complex social organizations.
Both sides comprise an essential part of our humanity, but as
media studies have shown, the relationship between the two is
now seriously out of balance.
In
this milieu it’s hard to see how one could seriously proclaim
that the handful of multinational media conglomerates that produce
most of what we see, hear, and read would relinquish control to
the cabal of “aggrieved weirdoes” Rush insists now run
the Information Machines. But as Germany’s Minister of Propaganda
Joseph Goebbel stated more than half a century ago: “Repeat
a lie often enough and the people will believe it.”
Rick
Marianetti is a free-lance writer living in the USA, the last
superpower standing, spewing out more CO2 per capita than any
country in the world; a brave new world where nanotechno-logy,
quantum computers, and the genome project converge with the evolution
of human intelligence. Rick works out of his San Francisco residence.
“While in awe of the mystery and wonder of being alive, I’m
becoming increasingly more concerned about the longevity of this
hopefully never-ending pageant.” Rick Marianetti welcomes
your comments at wizardlyknight@yahoo.com
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