Category: Journalism

Manufactured Outrage

There is a manufactured outrage circulating at Purdue University.

Perhaps it was an hysterical personality, rather than actual malice, that started it. The words “White Power” were found on a mirror in the Black Cultural Center. This led to major outrage and a march on the Administration building demanding action against racism.

When it turned out that the words on the mirror were left over from a class in which they were written for some didactic purpose, another outrage conveniently appeared. “[P]olice are investigating an incident in which a racial slur was written on one of the posters left behind by the group,” today’s newspaper reports. It’s being treated as a hate crime “since property was altered or destroyed and the conduct was apparently motivated by bias.”

I’d bet a modest amount – say, lunch at a downtown eatery – that if they find who wrote the stick figure, it will prove to have been a person of color, not some cracker.

I’d bet a larger amount that there will be no criminal prosecution because the posters left behind by the demonstrators were abandoned property. You cannot steal (or vandalize) abandoned property, as the publishers of a “conservative” free paper discovered  on another campus when “liberal” students methodically appropriated and destroyed every copy of one issue. When they put the free paper in the kiosk, they were abandoning it, so the reasoning went. When the demonstrators left their posters behind, they were abandoning them (and violating an anti-littering part of the student code?).

I would not bet you anything that if a white person is identified as the writer, he (or less likely, she) will not be expelled, though there’s no crime. That’s how hysteria a victimology works.

But I would again bet a modest amount that if the writer is found to be a person of color, he or she will not be expelled for the hoax, even though that, too, should be a serious violation of the student code of conduct.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

The French way with words

The local paper Tuesday picked up a Fort Wayne News Sentinel column that made an interesting point about the Culture Wars.

The author, a “conservative with strong libertarian leanings — or a libertarian with strong conservative underpinnings,” noted that despite the rumored moratorium on social issues, he’s not feeling the love as he sees movement on:

• Women in combat.
• Gays in the Boy Scouts.
• Gun control.
• Immigration reform.
• Guaranteed sports access for the handicapped.

That would not be my list. Others would be. But the the author’s point is valid:

But it annoys me no end that most of the commentariat on one side feel perfectly free to browbeat the other side about polluting the body politic with divisive wedge issues — shut up about abortion and traditional marriage! — to the point where even some conservatives cave.

Oh, yes, let’s have a moratorium on social issues, urged then-Gov. Mitch Daniels. At the same time, they go about merrily pursuing their own wedge issues. And they feel absolutely no shame about it. Why should they, when they hardly ever get called on it?

This takes me back to one of my favorite remarks on the bigotry of the bien pensants:

One suspects that the bashing of the religious right amounts to little more than that right-thinking people find the religious right distasteful.  The logic is “We are good, true and beautiful.  But we find you repulsive.  Therefore there must be something very wrong with you.”  The reasoning is impeccable given the first premise, but perhaps the first premise is false.    The French have a witticism: “Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l’attaque, il se defend.”  (This animal is very wicked; when you attack it, it defends itself.)  The religious right did not start the fight.  For more than a quarter century, elite, privileged, sophisticated, and “right-thinking” Americans have exhibited contempt for some fundamental values, and have exhibited even greater contempt for the religious traditionalists who hold them.

David Carlin, Right Thinking About the Religious Right, First Things, November 1994.

1994. Note that. It reminds me of another French saying: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Oppression in America

It’s hard to claim the place of the oppressed when you wield power like this.

So ends a Timothy Dalrymple reflection on the Louie Giglio incident, which he described thus:

An evangelical pastor with a sterling record, who had developed strong relationships with President Obama and particularly his office of faith-based initiatives headed by Joshua DuBois, who had turned his enormously successful Passion conferences against the problem of human trafficking, was just publicly humiliated and shouted out of the public square for professing fairly standard Christian views on human sexuality and the possible redemption of our desires through the transformative power of the gospel of Christ. On the advice of the faith-based office, Giglio was invited to deliver the benediction, the LGBT community raised a hue and cry, and the White House quite obviously (see here and here) pressured him to step aside.

I don’t think I’d ever heard of Louie Giglio until Friday. I’m an ex-evangelical, still a practicing Christian (in the most historic sense), and have ceased trying to keep up with the doings of the evangelical subculture. Still, as in the current kerfuffle, those doings come to my attention often anyway.

But it sounds as if Mr. Giglio is an exemplary and center- to center-left figure, except that he does, or once did, believe that what we do with our genitals matters.

I’m not going to oversell what happened to Giglio. He was going to get to give a very public prayer. Now he’s not going to get to give that very public prayer. That’s not exactly being sent to the Gulag.

But I do think it’s ominous that a guy with so stellar a record was keelhauled for a remark from 20 years ago, as Dalrymple’s links do pretty well confirm, and that mainstream media aren’t eager to let that cat out of the bag:

Here’s how the fourth paragraph of [Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s] report appeared on The New York Times website early yesterday afternoon.

An official with Mr. Obama’s Presidential Inaugural Committee said the committee, which operates separately from the White House, vetted Mr. Giglio. People familiar with internal discussions between administration and committee officials said the White House viewed the selection as a problem for Mr. Obama, and told the panel on Wednesday night to quickly fix it. By Thursday morning, Mr. Giglio said he had withdrawn.

This paragraph was one of the most significant that I read yesterday because it confirmed that the White House had initiated pulling Giglio from the inaugural program. Yet by yesterday evening and in today’ print edition, this part had been removed from Stolberg’s report.

(Denny Burk, another evangelical of whom I’d not heard until this morning.)

What kind of pressure was brought to bear? Well-reasoned?:

ThinkProgress discovered that Giglio had said some nasty things about homosexuality, including that it’s a sin, that it can be cured, and that it’s a “malfunction.”
As you can imagine, Malfunction-Americans weren’t terribly thrilled about yet another anti-gay bigot appearing at yet another Obama inaugural.
In the ensuing uproar, Louie Giglio was suddenly no longer giving the benediction.
…
Louie Giglio is free think gays have a malfunction that he can cure.  And we’re free to tell him to take a hike.  Religious bigots have an awfully hard time dealing with the concept of mutual free speech.  They love the idea that they can say whatever hateful thing they want.  But then they get very upset and confused when someone gives them a piece of their mind in return.
I can’t prove that the White House told Louie Giglio to take a hike.  I’m simply reading tea leaves.  And the tea leaves I’m reading are making me more and more pleased about how the White House has handled this issue.
I wasn’t pleased that Giglio was selected in the first place.  It was a huge oversight, considering past history.  But they fixed things fast, and to our satisfaction.

(John Aravosis) This is a “progressive” version of the right’s incorrigible misrepresentation about Obama’s “you didn’t build that” thought. “Nasty,” “anti-gay bigot,” “religious bigots,” and “hateful” are very broad-brush and very dubious. It is possible to “love the sinner” while hating the sin, and it does not sound to me as if Giglio is a hater in the mold of Fred Phelps.

The silver lining in this – and, yes, it’s an ominous cloud – is the adage that pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. A court recently declined to decree same-sex marriage into his state’s laws precisely because the lobby seeking it is powerful, well-funded, well-connected, and has gained such remarkable cachet in just a few decades that they really don’t need courts carrying water for them any more. They can make their case politically, as they did in several referenda last November.

Perhaps it is something of a paradox that as their political clout grows stronger, the constitutional claims of same-sex marriage advocates become weaker. But if powerlessness is a legitimate variable in judicial decision-making, it is hard to gainsay the view of Judge Jones:

The question of “powerlessness” under an equal protection analysis requires that the group’s chances of democratic success be virtually hopeless, not simply that its path to success is difficult or challenging because of democratic forces. . . . The relevant consideration is the group’s “ability to attract the attention of the lawmakers,” an ability homosexuals cannot seriously be said not to possess.

Of course the advocates of same-sex marriage will continue to press their case in courts of law. They would rather convince five justices of the Supreme Court to impose their agenda on the country than try convincing the country itself.

Yup: “It’s hard to claim the place of the oppressed when you wield power like this.”

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Deer Hunting with Jesus

I learn a lot of things from a lot of places, especially from listening to people I formerly blew off.

A book with a title like Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War was kind of irresistible to someone – well, actually, it was my wife – who for some reason – well, actually, it’s because it was on my wish list – gave it to me for Christmas.

All things considered, I suppose it wasn’t too bad. At least I’ve now gotten a flavor of what’s meant by “Gonzo Journalism.”

Joe Bageant is, I guess, a gonzo journalist. He grew up in Winchester, Virginia – unless that’s one of many facts he made up on the fly – and returned to live there after some decades away:

A raucous, truth-telling look at the white working poor-and why they hate liberalism.

Deer Hunting with Jesus is web columnist Joe Bageant’s report on what he learned when he moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, which-like countless American small towns-is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. By turns brutal, tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of “the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks.”

(From the book’s own description)

“Joe Bageant is the Sartre of Appalachia. His white-hot bourbon-fuelled prose shreds through the lies of our times like a weed-whacker in overdrive. Deer Hunting with Jesus is a deliciously vicious and wickedly funny chronicle of a thinking man’s life in God’s own backwoods.”
—Jeffrey St. Clair, author of Grand Theft Pentagon and co-editor of CounterPunch

I think “white-hot bourbon-fuelled prose” is a euphemism for “reckless advocacy, indifferent to factual accuracy.”

“Dead serious and damn funny…Bageant writes with the ghosts of Hunter S. Thompson, Will Rogers, and Frank Zappa kibitzing over his shoulder…Takes Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, to the next level. “
—Mother Jones

“Informative, infuriating, terrifying, scintillating … Imagine a cross between Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Hunter S. Thompson’s booze-and-dope-fueled meditations on Nixon’s political potency, and C. Wright Mills’s understanding of the durability of the power elite.”
—The American Prospect

What’s the Matter With Kansas, from what I hear, was a full-length “how effing stupid are these people!?” But I heard it from conservatives, who Thomas Frank thinks are the beneficiaries of Kansans’ effing stupidity. So maybe I was misinformed.

I’ve accused Bageant of factual inaccuracies, and I owe specifics, I think.

1. First, he says (Chapter 5, page 180 in mine) his parents met “at a Billy Graham tent revival during the Second World War.” I didn’t, and still don’t, think that Graham was doing tent revivals then, but he’s a couple of years older than I thought, and there’s some smallish chance, from his abbreviated biography at Wikipedia for instance, that he did tent revivals as part of his “other preaching engagements” during college. But I’d be willing to bet a modest amount that it was a tent revival by someone other than Billy Graham, or that it was later than World War II.

2. He riffs in the same chapter (page 186) on the “blood” motif in fundamentalist Protestantism, concluding with a quote from an English Professor:

There is a big leap from the liberation of Exodus, when Jews sprinkled blood on their doorposts, to the salvation proposed by Christians, in which blood is drunk by the community of faith. The Christian community not only lives after death by the blood of their Christ; but they feed on it in life. What can this mean, to drink blood?

Well, to a fundamentalist Protestant, “to drink blood” means precisely nothing. It’s pure symbolism. They reckon they’re supposed to have a communion service now and again to recollect Good Friday. The 6th Chapter of the Gospel According to John, where Christ says repeatedly, even to the point of driving away some of His disciples, that we must eat His body and drink His blood if we want life in us, is maybe the only Chapter in the Bible that they resolutely refuse to read literally (even in the loose sense of “literal” that’s pandemic these days). They have elaborate tapdances around that chapter, but basically they reject it because it sounds too damned Catholic.

Bageant was grasping for bloody imagery, grabbed the first faux scholarly blood quote he could find, and in the process confounded a sacrament in historic Christianity with the lurid locutions of Fundamentalism. Even he should know better than that.

3. In Chapter 7 (page 243),  Bageant writes about Medicare when he clearly means Medicaid. I know enough about both that I’d bet you any amount he’s wrong.

Still, the arc of Bageant’s story is credible. Despite the Medicare whopper, for instance, he “shreds through the lies of our times [about “nonprofit” hospitals] like a weed-whacker in overdrive,” in his chapter An Authorized Place to Die. I just wouldn’t rely on him for any little details, such as “and” and “the.” Read him like a good ole’ boy competing in a Whopper-Telling Contest.

Reading his chapter on guns (Valley of the Gun) was especially timely as the press and Hollywood goad us to “demand a plan” for gun control (i.e., “we must do something, even if it’s oppressive and counterproductive, about evil guns, not about an evil entertainment industry that feeds the imaginations of the unhinged with revenge and other gratuitously violent movies and video games.”):

In 1960 common sense was equally distributed between liberals and conservatives. In those days, even liberal personages such as Democratic senator and vice president Hubert Humphrey said repeatedly that guns had a place in the home because history has shown that governments, even the best of them, have a habit of oppressing people who cannot defend themselves at their own front doors. Imagine any Democrat saying that aloud today.

(Page 132.)

Now that most states have passed laws allowing honest citizens to carry concealed weapons, gun advocates are being proven more right than they ever hoped to be. Joy of joys, it is women – in fact, poor urban women – and the poor in general who benefit most from concealed carry laws. It doesn’t get any better than that when it comes to serving up cold crow to Democratic gun controllers. Large declines in rapes and attacks on women have occurred wherever the laws have been enacted. A study by John R Lott Jr., author of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, found that the urban poor and minorities lived more safely with guns in their pockets or purses: “Not only do urban areas tend to gain in their fight against crime, but reductions in crime rates are greatest precisely in those urban areas that have the highest crime rates, largest and most dense populations, and greatest concentrations of minorities.” …
Most liberal anti-gun advocates do not get off the city bus after working the second shift. Nor do they duck and dodge from streetlight to streetlight at 1 AM while dragging their laundry to the doozy duds, where they sit, usually alone, for an hour or so, fluorescently lit up behind the big plate glass window like so much fresh meat on display, garnished with a promising purse or wallet, before they make the corner-to-corner run for home with their now-fragrant laundered waitress or fast-food uniforms. Barack Obama never did it. Hillary Clinton never did it. Most of white middle-class America doesn’t do it either. The on-the-ground value of the second amendment completely escapes them.

(Pages 146-147.)

And he chronicles many other such blows as well, including “economic conscription.” The poor Scots Irish of places like Winchester make up a disproportionate share of our cannon fodder, by economic necessity. The Democrats are little or no better than the Republicans on feeding them to the coffins in our wars of choice.

Most of the young soldiers were fleeing economically depressed places, or dead-end jobs like the one Lynndie had held at the chicken processing plant, though many deny it or did not even see it in their quick and ready patriotism in useful blindness to the larger national scheme of things. These so-called volunteers are part of the nation’s defense code draft – economic conscription. Money is always the best whip to use on the laboring classes. 1300 a month, a signing bonus, and free room and board sure beats the hell out of yanking guts through a chicken’s ass.

(Page 200.)

Other select quotes:

When our town’s educators decided to hold a conference on the future employment needs of our youth, the keynote speaker was the CEO of a local rendering plant, Valley Protein, a vast stinking facility that cooks down roadkill and renders deep fryer fats into the goop they put in animal feed. He got a standing ovation from the school board and all the Main Street pickle vendors, and not a soul in that Best Western events room thought it was ironic. (Page 29.)

Even if we are one house payment away from homelessness, even if our kids can’t read and our asses are getting so big they have their own ZIP Codes, it’s comforting to know we are at least the best place on earth. There is America, and there is the rest of the world – envious and plotting to bring us down and “steal our freedom.” (Page 83.)

The reality is that our economy now consists of driving 250 million vehicles around the suburbs and mall and eating fried chicken. (Page 110.)

It has been an orgy so glorious and unholy, so mindless that we have now eaten our seed crop in our spiraling consumerism. (Page 112.)

Independent fundamentalist churches are theologically woolly places whose belief systems can accommodate just about any interpretation of the Good Book that a “Preacher Bob” or a “Pastor Donnie” can come up with. (Page 162.)

After a night of political discussion at Royal Lunch, a British relative, a distant continental member of the Bageant clan, called our gang of locals “the most intellectually squalid people I’ve ever met” – and he had chewed qat with Ugandan strongman Idi Amin’s bodyguards. (Page 206-07.)

We live in an age of corporate dominion just as we once lived in an age of domination by royal families, kings, and warlords. (Page 262.)

If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably and often exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in prison unless you try to open the door. (Page 263.)

I guess I’d give it four stars for the story arc, but I can’t give five stars or unequivocal endorsement to a book so riddled with unsettling errors.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.