no supper tonight

Defaming “the media” is a national bloodsport played at with equal ferocity by pundits both right and left, who see “it,” respectively, as a) a firehose spewing a morally toxic mix of sewage and liberal propaganda into the nation’s living rooms or b) a platform for neocons and their moonshine-guzzling disciples to justify their insatiable bloodlust.  The first appraisal comes from the Right, which tends to focus on mainstream media’s entertainment arm; the latter is typical of the liberal critique, based on the left’s increasing sense that mainstream news bureaus are regime flunkies. Seeing as how I pretty much agree with both analyses, I’m left wondering at my own obsession with what is a universally despised, if equally inescapable, cultural institution: ”the media,” by all accounts, is [sic] likely to be found skulking around the same seedy dives and bordellos as are harlots, attorneys, and political consultants. Is that someplace I want to be? Well, on a summer Saturday night, maybe; but here it is Christmas Eve, and maybe I’m more in the mood for Bedford Falls.

Agreeable as it is, a good deal of this criticism misses the mark; it’s not wrong, but wrongheaded. Not that the media aren’t a herd of stupid, recalcitrant beasts in need more stick than carrot, and a great knotty stick wielded with a lot of vigor and little remorse; oh, they are, they are all that, and worse! But the partisan attacks on both sides obscure the real issue.

On the left, decrying FOX News as the rather obvious bit of state apparatus that it is always good for much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and keeps Keith Olberman employed to boot. But the left’s mild interest can’t match the Right’s obsession: Google the phrase “liberal media”–in quotes no less–and your results ring up an impressive 2,240,000 citations. Google “conservative media,” and you’ll have but a paltry 199,000 citations in your basket.In other words, the witchhunters on the right are having a hell of a lot more fun screaming about how offended they are than are so-called liberals. 

But there’s a reason for this imbalance. While the left bemoans the mainstream media’s seeming thralldom to the Kristol cabal, from the perspective of the Right, “the media” are allied with far more nefarious forces than a bunch of federal bureaucrats (however creepy they might be in a cheneyesque sort of way). To the Right, something infinitely more sinister is afoot, something sulfurous, hooved and tailed. And limpwristed. And hook-nosed in a Mel Gibsonish, Borat kinda way. To cite just just one example, William Donahue, President of the Catholic League (and a very regular and warmly received guest on  … Bill O’Reilly’s show), explains: “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, okay? And I’m not afraid to say it. … Hollywood likes anal sex.”

That’s what I love about Bill Donahue, by the way. He’s an honest guy, and he’s willing to say whatever’s on his mind, no matter how immediately and obviously totally freaking batshit it may be. Of course, there are plenty of foks who agree with him, so maybe there is a case to be made that Spiderman III is  nothing but a virus for  innoculating a subconscious hatred for anything smacking of popery and a coincidental desire to commit the sin of sodom.  Me, I dunno; I ordinarily waddle away from a theatre filled with little besides that gassiness that comes of supersized cola drinks and too much popcorn saturated with some unholy chemical mockery of cow’s butter.  The very last thing on my mind after “Napoleon Dynamite” is a vigorous bout of sex, doglike or otherwise; and I’m hard put to remember the last movie I saw that even referenced Catholicism, much less had me murmuring “gol-lee … Catholics really do suck, don’t they?” In short, to be honest,  if I were a Secular Jew bent on sending audiences tearing out of theatres in a homicidal frenzy of anti-Catholic rage crossed with feverish lust for animalistic debauchery, I ‘d want to be somewhat more blatant in getting the message across. Or I’d hire Passolini. No, better–Russ Meyer!

For Donahue’s Protestant doppelganger Pat Robertson, the media is one wing of an unholy triumvirate bent on nothing short of mass murder; Robertson replaces “Jews” with “the liberal media,” but the queers and the catholic-hatas remain an integral part of the genocidal cabal : “Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It’s no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.”

Yeah. That’s right, Reverend. On the one hand, Dachau; on the other, “Will & Grace.” 

Interestingly enough, Donahue concluded his remarks by telling Joe Scarborough, on MSNBC, that “The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost.”  Which makes you wonder why he’s on the damn TV once a week whining about something or another. Like Chocolate Jesus.

He’s wrong, of course; otherwise, please explain Amy Winehouse. And why I can’t log onto the Net without running smack into Kevin Federline, whose popularity the ostensible “winners,” forces of respectability like Pope Benedict and Bill Bennet, can only envy from afar.

Nah. The”culture wars” are over all right. But “their side,” by which Donahue means those of who us who tuck in at night without checking carefully for the queer in the closet or the jew under the bed, didn’t, umm, lose.  Those of our Islamist brothers who are fond of critiquing our fun-loving ways and targeting our novelists for assassination are right about one thing: we Americans are nothing if not a grunting herd of pleasure-loving whores who seek out–or rather, are led to, and en masse–and relish every imaginable form of deviance, celebrating even as we tsk-tsk. Otherwise, explain Paris Hilton. All the Right can do now is to prosecute an ongoing rear-guard action, which doesn’t mean that any number of perfectly good lives don’t have all manner of  havoc wreaked upon by them by institutionalized codes regulating our pleasures. Still, “Defense of Marriage” acts, the appointment of antiabortion justices, the ten commandments nailed to the courthouse wall: these endeavors are best compared to the joke that is the long-lost “war on drugs.” The culture war is over, and the children of the enlightenment have won; now we are free to wallow in our gains, free to  follow the bewitching saga of Britney in all its lurid graphic glory, free to grind to the inspiring strains of Fifty-Cent, free to choose from literally hundreds of TV channels each night and listen to the sounds of gunshots ricochet round the room on our quadrophonic home theatre system, and earning the same stern Miltonic dictum that our English forbears did: “License they mean, when they cry liberty.” In any case, the barn door’s been open and it ain’t gonna shut.

And yet … at the same time we are far and away the most religious culture in the first world. How have we managed to pull off this neat trick? If the all-pervasive, omnipresent “media” with its unshakeable influence is either “liberal” or “conservative,” then why are we still locked in a national red-state/blue-state death grip when it comes to culture war issues and party politics?

The answer is simple enough. Mainstream media plays both sides off against the middle. Like every other industry in America, it’s amoral. A trollop; a woman no better than she should have been. FOX News brings you Sean Hannity and that great modern moral arbiter, Bill O’Reilly, bearing aloft the Loofah of Righteous Indignation and  damning the “liberal media” with endless breathy gusto, while the FOX entertainment channel delivers “Temptation Island.”  Simple.

Viacom doesn’t give a damn how you feel about abortion. The News Company doesn’t want to know your views on flag burning. Disney, wholly devoted to a cheerful brand of egalitarianism requiring only that Walt’s minions separate everyone on the planet from her euros and rubles and dinars and many, many dollars, isn’t interested one way or the other when it comes to your fondness for rum, sodomy, or the lash–or for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph for that matter. And neither, for the most part, do their shareholders at Citibank and Morgan Stanley care.  Fifty years ago folks paid good money to see Ingmar Bergman smiling beatifically beneath her wimple; thirty years after,  they paid to see her daughter defiled by the diabolically perverse Dennis Hopper; today–well, you know all about the jaded tastes of today’s audiences. It’s the same studios responding to contemporary appetites and cultural pressures.  On the aesthetic side, the studios and entertainment networks know how to respond to the essentially diffferent categories of viewers–so that given a potential critical mass audience, we can look forward to relishing endless sequels to “Big Momma’s House” as well as to Keira Knightly and the brothers Fiennes flouncing around in period garb and mangling the Classics of English Literature.

Likewise, their compatriots on the newsy side have mastered the art of being all things to everyone in the ideological sphere. While “The Smothers Brothers” and “Laugh-In” and “All in the Family” did for TV what Lenny Bruce had done on the club circuit and American culture shrugged off its temporary veneer of modesty and decency and most of all respect for almost any kind of moral authority, the media simultaneously found themselves with the technological wherewithal to assume a hitherto undreamt of level of power and infuence–and, infinitely more important, with the prospect of making shitloads of money.  Making moolah on this scale, it was understood, required keeping audiences amused, and, like the local papers, the newsrooms became ancillaries of the marketing department. Got a demographic of critical mass (understood in terms of aggregate spending power)? We’ll create a news bureau catering to precisely that sample: and on the eight day, God created Glenn Beck.

And eventually, of course, the entertainment arm of the mainstream media learned that there was money to be made off comedies in which gay people were a lot like everyone else, except funnier, you know, like black people and fat people; and in reality TV, where nearly naked youngsters bubbling over with delightful nubility were packed into communal living arrangements so that they could pair off on camera to the delighted tsk-tsking of middle America. And in dramas in which teenagers got pregnant and had babies and middle aged moms got pregnant and had abortions. And sold weed on HBO. And it was all ok in the end.

In the movie  The Corporation, an executive suggests that critiquing big business from a moral perspective misses the point: the corporation, he explains, is as amoral and focused as a shark; and, like a shark, it can only do what is in its nature. Hollywood is not a think tank comprising gay academics from Cambridge. It is a not a secretive cabal of bitter sexually twisted Jews. It’s a corporation. It’s there to slake your thirst and take your silver. You want a Shirley Temple, or you wanna double bourbon straight up–it’s your dime. Bergman/Crosby or Bergman/Hopper? Just push “Play.”

However…. 

…there is no money to be made in preaching economic populism. In criticizing capitalism. In even attempting to introduce a rational discussion of socialism.  Which is why the “the media” will roast or boast most anything these days, but certain shibboleths remain firmly in place. Which is why we can say that the left won the culture war, but lost the media,  because, just like the “liberal” political class, it has for all practical purposes surrendered the economic battlefield to the Right.

OF COURSE the media is “conservative.” It couldn’t be more conservative. Because all this culture war shit renders the elephant in the room, the whole goddamn military-industrial-entertainment-banking-brokering-and-most-of-all-buying complex–invisible. That’s the shibboleth: capitalism. Gay or straight, Ted Haggard or Jenna Jameson, Planned Parenthood or The Legion of Decency; Barack or McCain, Hillary or even Huckabee–it doesn’t matter, because ultimately it’s tacitly understood that they’re all essentially on the same side.  They are all content providers. We are all consumers.  

Both the right and left critiques, based as they are on 1) culture war issues and 2) two-party electoral politics, miss the essentially conservative nature of mainstream media: as a profit-making machine, existing, at its core, to generate profits for shareholders, who’d just as soon invest in industrial boilers or soap, it can’t for the most part  even acknowledge the possibilities of  economic dissent. That’s the underlying issue: truly neither “right” nor “left” when it comes to god, gays, and guns, and dope and violence and televangelism and all manner of lewdness, the mainstream media are nonetheless as far right an institution as possible in that they can’t even remotely address the possibility of an economic alternative to capitalism. Yeah, sure, Noam Chomsky has a wide range of books in print. So does Ward Churchill. So: when was the last time you saw an editorial by either in the New York Times, or saw them interviewed on CNN? How many in-depth discussions of the latest decisions rendered by Congress in regard to FCC regulations–or rather, deregulation–do you recall listening to on broadcast news media? You can go on national TV and describe in detail your mad love affair with your goat–”I ask you, Oprah–how can something that feels so right be wrong?”–or break down in grateful tears retelling the story of How You Found Jesus, or how He Found You, or however the hell the story goes–but you can’t bite the hand that feeds the media. Which isn’t to say the media doesn’t engage in self-criticism–oh, it does, and it positively loves grovelling in the dust, loves kicking itself for falling in love with big-time scammer James Frey or allowing the excesses of Stephen Glass to pass unnoticed, since these misadventures provide media spokespeople the opportunity to ramble on about the media’s noble calling, the people’s trust, the highest ethical standards, and similar horseshit.  

There’s the downside, the bugbear under the mattress atop which allegedly “liberal” and “conservative” media pundits enact their ongoing sadomasochistic rites of love, Eric Alterman and Bernard Goldberg going at it with cuffs and whips to the whistles and groans of an adoring, onanistic audience, themselves little but components of the selfsame media they both claim to decry.

There is of course an upside. Thanks in large part to the Net but also to very small but devoted cadres of publishers, filmmakers, writers, graphic artists, rappers, comics, zinesters, and correspondents, “the media”–less a monolith than a crazy quilt comprising the arts, journalism, sports, advertising, publishing, MP3s, event promotion, etc. etc. etc.–can be positively benign, especially out towards the edges. Out there where Chomsky and Churchill are interviewed, and by critical thinkers themselves, where where new privatization schemes hatched by the FCC are analysed in serious depth. Where James Frey’s horrific prose and Britney’s gold-plated privates are not considered subjects that grownups discuss, not because they are  indecent, but because they’re fucking stupid. Of course, that these shoots and buds tend to come from the non-profit, or at least cooperatively run, publicly-supported branches of “the media” should come as no surprise.  These are the only outlets with the integrity required to imagine, simply imagine, alternatives to dog-eat-dog capitalism, and I don’t mean “integrity” in any high-falutin-moral sense; I mean it quite literally, in that they are of a piece, and aren’t dependent upon the whims of their advertisers–or, equally important, government funding (see the joke that is NPR) when it comes to content.

This is a good as time as any to stop cheating yourself. It’s no easy thing to walk away from the malls and greens and superhighways and chain-saloons and all the other daily degradations that make up so large a part of life in this perishing republic; I know that, and too well. It’s a daily, hell, an hourly battle, and it’s freaking exhausting. But the online universe is a different matter, and maybe here, fully in control of your mouse, you really can play the part of a grown-up, and a Citizen, a Decider here in the heart of the Empire, a role pretty much denied you elsewhere in this infantilized culture where you are treated as a sack of childish appetites, endless appetites for food and sex and styles and drugs and travel and cozy-comfort and most of all for amusement, for entertainment, for anything to keep Silence and Boredom and those moments when you are confronted with nothing … but … yourself, moments that are more and more rare; hell, with your Blackberry and iPod and cellphone and laptop, moments that need never even arise!–the true triumph of the Simulacrum: Media uber alles. “Know thyself,” said Socrates; “What is self?,” sneers the media, mimicking Pontius Pilate, asking only that you remain in its amniotic embrace, so that self withers away, out of the cradle and endlessly mediated and all that’s left ultimately is a looking-glass reflection of mass-produced “culture,  focus-group tested to ensure, maximun satisfaction, and priced so that all may partake. But yes, online, you’re still free to unearth many an unpleasant truth, as well as to sup at springs of inspiration, and the new american samizdat, the thriving underground, or simply slightly-below-surface, online press, is always just a click away. 

Or you can chat. And shop! And update your MySpace page! And look at funny cat videos! And leave the whole process of government and citizenry and culture to the “experts.” Which is  a pretty far cry from what Jefferson had in mind when he made such a big goddamn deal about “freedom of the press.” 

But who really needs democracy when you have American Idol?          

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