Last night I made the mistake of clicking between the Yanks-Sox slugfest (final: NY, 15-9) to attend to the so-called “debate” between the Democratic rivals, summed up by media critic Danny Schecter as the “most despicable” presentation ever of mediated-politics, or political theatre, or however you want to label the spectacle of two “respectable” pundits, Stephanopoulos and Gibson, engaging in the rehashing of FOXNEWS style slander and innuendo while pretending to be hosting a most solemn and decorous event. Schecter, in fact, accused former Clinton minion Stephanopoulos of lamely attempting to appear “even handed” by basically trotting out a laundry list of “Hannity talking points,” and summarized the proceedings as a whole as “an orchestrated attempt to produce more heat and light.” Well, for either heat or light, I shoulda stuck with the Sox game.
He said this, and much besides, tonight during a Ford Hall Forum address in Boston’s Old South Meeting House, the site that launched the Boston Tea Party,and Schecter’s brash but consistently thoughtful, gloomy and yet often hilarious talk was well worth passing up the second game of the two-game stand in NY. One of the real pleasures of moving up here was discovering that Boston’s Revolutionary-era historic haunts aren’t treated simply as tourist traps, but retain their original, practical value, so that the same halls and pews that heard Samuel and John Adams today reverberate to equally incisive, and equally dissident, voices. Schecter himself began by discussing the Meeting House’s history, describing Boston as the epicenter of a people’s revolution against the forces of invasion and occupation and subtly indicating that America is engaged in something all-too-similar today, albeit playing the redcoat role. Then it was off to a 90 minute rollicking ex tempore romp through his own fascinating biography, which largely served to illustrate his overarching point that it wasn’t so long ago that “the media” enjoyed a degree of license and independence of spirit lacking entirely today, thanks in large part to consolidation and the emphasis on corporate profits that spur radio station owners to talk about their “markets,” not their “communities,” and to devote endless energies to the trivial—weather and sports—and less and less to sensible analysis.
And again, it was difficult to listen without constantly thinking back to last night’s debacle. In Philly’s Constitution Center, I mean, not Yankee Stadium. Obama himself repeated the criticism of countless bloggers, media critics (nicely summed up here as well as on Schecter’s own blog), and, I assume, the vast majority of Americans who, acting out of some perverse sense of civic duty, tuned into the damn thing, at the same time reflecting on Clinton’s obvious debt to Rovian politics:
“They like stirring up controversy and they like playing gotcha games, getting us to attack each other. And I have to say Senator Clinton looked in her element,” Mr. Obama said. “She was taking every opportunity to get a dig in there. You know, that’s all right. That’s her right. That’s her right to kind of twist the knife a little bit…. That was the roll-out of the Republican campaign against me in November. That is what they will do,” Mr. Obama said. “They will try to focus on all these issues that don’t have anything to do with how you pay your bills at the end of the month.”
With a wide smile, and a sarcastic tone, Mr. Obama sought to brush aside criticism about his performance in what he said was the 21st debate of the presidential nominating fight.
“I will tell you, it does not get much more fun than these debates. They are inspiring events,” Mr. Obama quipped. “Last night, I think we set a new record because it took us 45 minutes before we even started talking about a single issue that matters to the American people. It took us 45 minutes!”
Of course, Obama’s playing it safe, as always—ABC hit a new low last night, and that was obvious to pretty much everyone (except David Brooks and Michelle Malkin, neither of whom will ever be accused of objectivity or artful nuance. Brooks, one of the top editorialists at America’s most important paper, actually promotes the geeky sideshow aspect of the campaign: “… issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues”). It would have been refreshing to have heard some really meaningful criticism of the media from Obama right from the outset, but that’s harder to do when you’re the flavor of the week.
Again, though, it was good to see him strive to maintain the high road throughout. Immediately after Clinton added to Stephanopoulos’s downright tedious grueling of Obama-“Do you think the Reverend Wright loves this country? Is he as patriotic as you?” –by dredging up Obama’s spectral relationship with Louis Farrakhan and Hamas—yeah, you read that right—Hillary was hit with a question about her mythical battle with crazed Bosnians. Or Serbians, or Kosovars, or Croats, or whatever. Obama’s response?
“I think what’s important is to make sure that we don’t get so obsessed with gaffes that we lose sight of the fact that this is a defining moment in our history. We are going to be tackling some of the biggest issues that any president has dealt with in the last 40 years. Our economy is teetering not just on the edge of recession, but potentially worse. Our foreign policy is in a shambles. We are involved in two wars. People’s incomes have not gone up, and their costs have. And we’re seeing greater income inequality now than any time since the 1920s. In those circumstances, for us to be obsessed with this — these kinds of errors I think is a mistake.”
The overwhelming difference between the two candidates is obvious nowhere so much as in their responses to the smears being hurled by the corporate media creatures. Clinton takes it a step further, and a genuine step into real absurdity, playing the innuendo game to the hilt (just as she did recently wih her “Obama’s not a Muslim … I mean, as far as I know”); Obama eschews the bait and uses it as a springboard to ask the media why they focus on such stupid shit.
Of course, we were also treated to a downright classic throwback Clintonian spin on the lies the Senator repeatedly told about the Bosnian Caper. The only dignified, accurate response is: I lied. Instead of expressing any genuine remorse, Clinton displayed precisely the same brand of unmitigated disdain for her fellow citizens her husband did with “it depends on what your definition of sex is” when she blew this rococco effluvia out:
Well, Tom, I can tell you that I may be a lot of things, but I’m not dumb. And I wrote about going to Bosnia in my book in 2004. I laid it all out there. And you’re right. On a couple of occasions in the last weeks I just said some things that weren’t in keeping with what I knew to be the case and what I had written about in my book. And, you know, I’m embarrassed by it. I have apologized for it. I’ve said it was a mistake….We both have said things that, you know, turned out not to be accurate. You know, that happens when you’re talking as much as we have talked. But you know, I’m very sorry that I said it. And I have said that, you know, it just didn’t jibe with what I had written about and knew to be the truth.
Grammar says everything. “It didn’t jibe with what was in the book.” It? Huh? Or “with what I knew to be the truth.” Or with “what I knew to be the case.” Clinton dares talk of elitism, while refusing to shoulder anything resembling real responsibility with a torrent of lawyer-speak? A “mistake?” A mistake is what happens when you confuse Sunni’s with Shias and Al-Quaeda’s relationships with each, as McCain is wont to do. When you make up heroic stories about yourself and repeat them until caught, you are not guilty of intellectual error, but of moral fraud. And then the Senator blames on it being “tired,” as though she’d maybe gotten tripped up on some GAO numbers rather than spinning a wholesale grandiose lie out of nothing: “So I will either try to get more sleep, Tom, or, you know, have somebody who, you know, is there as a reminder to me.” What the hell that is supposed to mean I have no idea. New Gingrich maybe?
Do we believe her? Do we even know what she means? Schecter thinks we’re all too gullible. Comparing the state of Soviet citizenry forced to endure deacdes of Pravda and state-controlled broadcasts, with your sharpwitted postmillenial American, Schecter claims that Russians. at least, were in the joke–no one actually took the state-sponsored blather with anything approaching seriousness. The tragedy in America, he suggests, is that a supremely brilliant corporate media has managed to create “the appearance of dissent and debate,” and thus duped us all into believing that the debates, for example, have any bearing on reality whatsoever, when they decidely do not.
In any case, I used to wonder why bother going to hear folks speak when you could probably get whatever they were saying out of their writing. I suppose this was residue left over from my years in academe; if you’ve ever attended an academic conference, and dragged yourself out of bed on a Saturday morning to sit in a classroom room at 8 in the morning listening to an earnest if prematurely aged professor read a paper, word-for-word, on the use of similes in Bishop Hugh Latimer’s Sermon of the Plough (1548)—which in fact I have—you’ll know what I mean. But I’ve found it important, almost essential, to go and listen, because most of the folks I read and admire aren’t looking on the sunny side of life, and much of what they have to say in print is downright gloomy. It’s important, then, to go and see them and to realize that these seemingly dour spirits are enormously vital, hearty, really funny human beings—that they can shake the gloom-and-doom and remind us, in Izzy Stone’s words, that
The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing — for the sheer fun and joy of it — to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.
Danny Schecter–who knew Izzy Stone–confessed tonight to vacillating, day-by-day, between hope and despair, noting that invitation to speak at events like tonight’s served to banished the latter. (Thankfully, he enjoys it, and his joy is contagious). Demonstrating, again, as Carlos Arrendondo did last month, that we all, all of us in this motley, ill-defined, but genuine “movement,” really do feed off one another’s energy. It’s important that tribunes like Schecter are there to address, to inspire and admonish, us; it’s just as important that we are there to keep them heartened. Subscribe to Danny’s daily “News Dissector” blog, read his books, by all means see his documentaries, and contribute, if you can, to MediaChannel, which is forever not waving but drowning. But most of all: show up. It’s not just taking heart; it’s giving blood to the body politic. And we need it.
And so, for Danny, and the legions of bloggers and zinesters and alternapresspeople struggling to free whatever vestiges of truth are buried underneath the daily media scrap heap, happy Friday:
