Read Death of the Liberal Class Online
Authors: Chris Hedges
Tags: #Political Culture, #Political Ideologies, #General, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science, #Liberalism
Death of the Liberal Class (23 page)
At this point the crowd, restless and uneasy, began to mutter protests. There was a shout of “No!”
And when we are attacked, we will, like our allies Putin and Sharon, lash out with greater fury. The circle of violence is a death spiral; no one escapes. We are spinning at a speed that we may not be able to halt. As we revel in our military prowess—the sophistication of our military hardware and technology, for this is what most of the press coverage consisted of in Iraq—we lose sight of the fact that just because we have the capacity to wage war it does not give us the right to wage war. This capacity has doomed empires in the past.“Modern western civilization may perish,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr warned, “because it falsely worshipped technology as a final good.”The real injustices—the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, the brutal and corrupt dictatorships we fund in the Middle East—will mean that we will not rid the extremists who hate us with bombs. Indeed, we will swell their ranks.
There was now a chorus of whistles and hoots.
“Once you master a people by force,” I said, “you depend on force for control. In your isolation you begin to make mistakes.”
“Where were you on September 11?” a man yelled.
“Fear engenders cruelty,” I said. “Cruelty . . . fear, insanity, and then paralysis.”
There were more hoots and jeers.
“Who wants to listen to this jerk?” someone cried out.
“In the center of Dante’s circle,” I said, “the damned remained motionless.”
Horn blasts were unleashed.
“We have blundered into a nation we know little about and are caught between bitter rivalries and competing ethnic groups and leaders we do not understand,” I continued:
We are trying to transplant a modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized, among other things, by the division of Earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship, in a land where the belief in a secular civil government is an alien creed. Iraq was a cesspool for the British when they occupied it in 1917. It will be a cesspool for us, as well.
“God bless America!” a woman cried.
I continued: “The curfews, the armed clashes with angry crowds that leave scores of Iraqi dead, the military governor, the Christian Evangelical groups who are being allowed to follow on the heels of our occupying troops to try and teach Muslims about Jesus, the occupation of the oilfields.”
The microphone went dead. I stood looking out at the angry crowd, the wind whipping down the hillside. There were some people standing in the front. One woman was weeping. The crowd grew more agitated and several people rose to sing “God Bless America.”
“Who wants to listen to this jerk?” a woman shouted.
I had to cut short my address and was removed by security before the awarding of the diplomas. The event dominated the broadcasts of the trash-talk right-wing commentators, from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News analysts. Clips of me being heckled and jeered, taken from home videos, were played repeatedly on the cable shows. The
Wall Street Journal
published an editorial denouncing me as an elitist and a pacifist and condemned my talk. The local paper, the
Rockford Register Star
, reported my address with the headline “SPEAKER DISRUPTS RC GRADUATION.”
Wall Street Journal
published an editorial denouncing me as an elitist and a pacifist and condemned my talk. The local paper, the
Rockford Register Star
, reported my address with the headline “SPEAKER DISRUPTS RC GRADUATION.”
War, and especially war in the Middle East, were not abstractions to me. I spoke out of a reality few Americans understood. But my editors at the
New York Times
were furious. I had crossed the line once too often. I had dared to feel, to make a judgment, and to think independently. I was called into the
Times
offices at 229 West 43rd Street by an assistant managing editor, Bill Schmidt, and given a written reprimand for “public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper’s impartiality.” The procedure meant that, under the rules established with the Newspaper Guild of New York, the next time I spoke out against the war I could be fired.
New York Times
were furious. I had crossed the line once too often. I had dared to feel, to make a judgment, and to think independently. I was called into the
Times
offices at 229 West 43rd Street by an assistant managing editor, Bill Schmidt, and given a written reprimand for “public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper’s impartiality.” The procedure meant that, under the rules established with the Newspaper Guild of New York, the next time I spoke out against the war I could be fired.
If I had repeated the mythic narrative of America—the narrative embraced by the power elite and the liberal institutions that serve them—the talk would not have attracted notice. If I had told the graduates that America was a great and noble country, that we were spreading democracy and virtue throughout the world, that globalism was empowering and enriching the world’s poor, and that American soldiers were sacrificing their lives for our freedom and security, none of it would have been deemed controversial or political. The public statements of support for the invasion of Iraq by fellow reporter John Burns did not see him ousted from the paper. The approved mythic narrative is “neutral” and “apolitical” because it serves the empowered classes. Those who honor these myths remain valued members of the liberal class. Those who do not are banished.
The media are as plagued by the same mediocrity, corporatism, and careerism as the academy, the unions, the arts, the Democratic Party, and religious institutions. The media, like the academy, hold up the false ideals of impartiality and objectivity to mask their complicity with power. They posit the absurd idea that knowledge and understanding are attainable exclusively through vision, that we should all be mere spectators of life. This pernicious reduction of the public to the role of spectators denies the media, and the public they serve, a political role. As John Dewey has pointed out, public opinion is not formed when individuals possess correct representations of the government, even if such representations were possible. It is formed through discourse and discussion. But the reduction of the media and the public to the role of passive spectators cuts off the possibility of a conversation.
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Truth and news are not the same, as James W. Carey wrote. News is a signal that something is happening. It provides, in Carey’s words, “degenerate photographs or a pseudo-reality of stereotypes. News can approximate truth only when reality is reducible to a statistical table: sports scores, stock exchange reports, births, deaths, marriages, accidents, court decisions, elections, economic transactions such as foreign trade and balance of payments.”
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22
“The divorce of truth from discourse and action—the instrumentalization of communication—has not merely increased the incidence of propaganda,” Carey wrote. It has also “disrupted the very notion of truth, and therefore the sense by which we take our bearings in the world is destroyed.”
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Journalists, however, unlike academics, have to intersect with the public. They write and speak to be understood. And for this reason they are more powerful and more closely monitored and controlled than other writers and speakers. The commercial media, as C. Wright Mills pointed out, are essential tools for conformity. They impart to the public a sense of self. Media tell members of the public who they are. They tell them what their aspirations should be. They promise to help them achieve these aspirations. They offer a variety of techniques, advice, and schemes that promise eventual success.
The commercial media, as Wright notes, also help citizens feel as if they are successful and have met these aspirations, even if they have not. They tend to neglect reality (they don’t run stories about how life is hard, fame and fortune elusive, hopes disappointed) and instead celebrate idealized identities—those that, in a commodity culture, revolve around the acquisition of status, money, fame, and power, or at least the illusion of these things. The media, in other words, assist the commercial culture in “need creation,” prompting consumers to want things they don’t need or have never really considered wanting. And catering to these needs, largely implanted by advertisers and the corporate culture, is a very profitable business. A major part of the commercial media revolves around selling consumers images and techniques to “actualize” themselves, or offering seductive forms of escape through entertainment and spectacle. News is filtered into the mix, but actual news is not the predominant concern of the commercial media.
Pick up any daily newspaper. At most, fifteen percent of the content in its pages is devoted to news. The rest is devoted to ways to feel or become a success. “This,” Mills wrote, “is probably the basic psychological formula of the mass media today. But, as a formula, it is not attuned to the development of the human being. It is a formula of a pseudo-world which the media invent and sustain.”
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Those who work inside commercial media outlets are acutely aware of the manipulation, even as the media publicly laud themselves for courage, honesty, and independence. This does not mean there is never any good journalism, just as the corruption within the academy does not preclude good scholarship. It means that myriad internal pressures, hidden from public view but faced every day by workers in the media world, make the production of good journalism and good scholarship very difficult. Reporters who persist in raising inconvenient questions, like academics who practice moral and independent scholarship, do not usually advance within liberal institutions.
“I’d written an article about Colgate-Palmolive having gone through a process to rebrand a type of toothpaste that they had bought in Asia that was named Darkie,” remembered former
New York Times
reporter Doug McGill, who spent a decade at the paper:
New York Times
reporter Doug McGill, who spent a decade at the paper:
Proctor & Gamble had bought this company, Hazel and Holly, which made the Darkie toothpaste. It was the best-selling toothpaste in Asia. The problem was that the brand mascot was a blackfaced minstrel. It was plastered over the toothpaste boxes. They obviously could not sell this in America, so they tried to find a name and an image that did not completely replace Darkie. It was too valuable as a brand, a name, and an image, but of course they wanted to erase the racist overtones. They eventually came up with Darlie. Instead of a minstrel in blackface, they used a silhouette of a Victorian dandy that looked a lot like the original Darkie. The story ran on the front page of the business section. The morning that the piece appeared in the paper, I got a telephone call. I was sitting at my desk in the business section. It was the head P.R. guy for Proctor & Gamble. I noticed the phone connection was scratchy. I asked him where he was calling from. He said, “I’m in a limousine. I’m going to the airport with Mr. Mark,” meaning Ruben Mark, who was the CEO of the company. “I just want to let you know we really liked the article that you published. We like working with you as a journalist. As long as you keep writing stories like that, we would be very happy to work with you. Mr. Mark was wondering if you might be open for lunch some time.” Then he proceeded to give me Ruben Mark’s home telephone number. I said, “OK, well, thanks a lot, talk to you later,” and I hung up the phone.
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“This was one of the first stories I had written for the business section,” McGill remembered. “I had never heard anything quite so direct, the quid pro quo laid out so baldly: ‘If you keep writing good stories, you will keep getting access to the CEO plus perks like lunches and home telephone numbers for future stories.’ This is a signal example of what underpins a lot of big-time mainstream journalism.
“I wrote a story in 1983, while working as a reporter for the
New York Times,
about a proposed telephone rate hike in New York State,” McGill went on:
New York Times,
about a proposed telephone rate hike in New York State,” McGill went on:
The story had great interest in the New York area because it meant a rise in rates for New York customers. I was a metro reporter. I didn’t know anything about rate hikes or telephone companies. I was smart enough to ask questions and write down answers. I had a street sense of accuracy and fairness, enough to get a story written. I got the information from the telephone company. I knew enough to call the people who were against the rate hike who were the consumer advocates. I got what they thought about the rate hike. Then I called the phone company to get their response to the critics of the rate hike. It was formulaic. It was the standard he-said-she-said formula. The
Times
published it on the front page of the paper. That night I was walking with the news editor to Grand Central Station. The editor asked jokingly: “Did you really understand the story you wrote today?” “Not a word of it,” I said. And we both had a big laugh.But inside, I didn’t feel so good. It was a kind of arrogance. I was painting by numbers. I had written the story by calling up legislators who were sponsoring the proposal, and then calling up citizens’ groups who were raising hell about it, and then getting back to the legislators for their reaction. I then stitched all the quotes together under a grand-sounding theme, and voilà! I’d been dutifully “objective” and gathered both sides of the story and made a “fair and balanced” front-page story for the
New York Times
. The point is, if anything unfair or truly nefarious was being done by the legislators, lobbyists, or citizens’ groups in the process of getting this rate hike passed, I would have been blithely unaware of it. The principal actors in this story could have driven a bribe or a lie or a loophole or a simple unfairness right under my nose, and I wouldn’t have suspected a thing. The he-said-she-said formula was all I needed to get on page one.
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