In local news yours truly has once again contracted, that's right, the plague.(Insert Firesign Theater Reference here.) There has been an awful respiratory virus going around all fall and since my sister works at a daycare she gets first crack at all the hottest new versions. Then she shares them with the rest of us. Everyone I know has been sick as hell. Most people seem to have it for weeks off and on. So that's fun.
The election is next week. Do you know where your polling place is? I do. I hope you do friends.
Obama seems ahead in all the polls, but as I am increasingly reminded in my statistics courses that doesn't really mean a damn thing. Pollsters also predicted the landslide election of FDR's opponent Alf Landon in the 1936 election. As we should all remember from high school American History, Landen disappeared into obscurity while FDR went on to lead the nation for longer than any other president ever. That massive polling screw up has become notorious in the world of survey research. As Napoleon said, "Fame is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."
Nevertheless I pray that our next president has more sane and sustainable ideas about America's place in the world than the man we have been saddled with for 8 years.
Last week I led the UC Undergraduate Geography club to a screening of the new Oliver Stone movie 'W'. Before anyone gets offended that an academic student group had a field trip to a blatantly leftist propaganda piece, let me just say it was not my idea. Anyways I thought the movie was a bit lacking. I already think Bush is a doddering nitwit who represents damn near everything wrong with my country: religious fundamentalists being courted in national politics, total and blatant disregard of anything that might be considered environmental sanity, lame-ass rhetorical dodging of things the rest of the world takes for granted like the Kyoto protocol, and a general muscle-brained bullying approach to foreign policy. Oh yeah and I think the war sucks too, and always has. (One of my first real acts of political protest was painting 'Imperialism Sucks' on the rusty tailgate of my battered '85 F150 about the time we were set to invade Iraq.) I didn't really need Oliver Stone to convince me of any of those things.
And really what does Stone contribute to the Habermasian public political sphere? He makes a two dimensional caricature out of a world leader. Bush is consistently shown talking with his mouth full, chewing with his mouth open, and in one scene he is talking to Laura about his career while wiping his ass. I don't give the man much credit in the way of intellectual faculties, but he can't be as absolutely simpleminded as Stone makes him out to be. Obviously the film is a caricature, but I feel like America has enough of that sort of thing floating around all ready. I am reminded of Michael Moore's last movie that I saw, Fahrenheit 9/11. That may have been the highest grossing 'documentary' of all time ($120 million in the US alone) but it was more emotional than rational and presented little in the way of thoughtful information. Moore was really popular among my friends at art school, but not many of them read very much. I came out of the theater feeling dumber and frustrated that this was what passed for intelligent political discussion.
I have recently become aware that Republican stereotypes about goofy liberals who have too much money and no connection to reality may be grounded in some real observations. I went to California once and it really scared the crap outta me. I thought the rich neighborhoods in Cincinnati were la-la land. We ain't got shit on Silicon Valley.
All of this thinking and writing has been prompted by my only activity thus far this morning: I woke up early, drove my scooter to campus, parked my bookbag at a computer in the library, and headed for the Men's for a nice healthy b.m. What should I find on the back of the toilet in the handicap stall - but the October 2008 edition of NewsMax magazine.
Take one look at that cover and tell me this isn't objective intelligent journalism!Previously I had only heard of NewsMax from Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. I grew up in the shadow of Rush Limbaugh, as he was a sort of God to many of the rabidly conservative blue-collar parents of my childhood friends. But I had never before actually seen this particular magazine. So I sat myself down on the porcelain throne and perused for a good half hour. I noticed some interesting things. My more political friends from the history department would have no doubt felt obligated to be enraged by the half-baked articles NewsMax presents as actual news. But I tried to be more objective. I was genuinely interested in what these people had to say and how it appealed so much to to so many Americans.
My observations were as follows:
NewsMax seemed forlorn about the prospect of electing another GOP candidate in '08 and the magazine was obviously on the defensive about McCain's campaign. They conceded that Barrack Obama was probably going to win, but they made a real effort to discredit him with several pieces nonetheless.
Most of the attacks on Obama centered around his lack of experience in politics. One article detailed how he had overplayed the extent to which he was responsible for organizing public housing tenants to demand asbestos removal from their buildings in his early years in Chicago. Frustrated locals who worked on the campaign lent quotes to the article, and were quoted in a way that made it appear that they had done most of the real work and resented Obama taking the credit.
Although the magazine appeared - like ol' George W. hisself - to have admitted finally to the reality of global warming, they were still backpedaling on its deadly consequences. A small piece argued that the increasing severity of storms - e.g. Hurricanes Katrina and Ike - has no real connection to global warming. NewsMax dug up some scientist from Colorado State University who was arguing that storms have natural cycles and that the rash of freak storms we have seen lately is all part of this. Sound familiar? It reminds me a lot of my introduction to the global warming debate, circa 1994, which was in an article from The Farmer's Almanac, that argued that the planet had natural warming and cooling cycles and the preposterous amounts of pollution we were creating had no bearing on weather patterns. I distinctly remember this rationale being accepted by many people until recently. C'mon Republicans how long can we drag out feet about this crap? When Washington D.C. is underwater because the Atlantic ocean has risen ten feet after Antarctica melted off will it be real then?
Several of the articles I read spoke to a fear among conservatives that the Judeo-Christian values America was founded upon were being swept away by a rising tide of secular humanism. This seemed to really stick in the craw of the editors of NewsMax. They cited a journalist who identified himself as a Jew, but who admitted that really Christian values were the moral underpinnings of our great nation. (Personally I can't imagine any of the many Jews I know saying such a thing. I don't know where they find Jesus-loving-Jews and global-warming-denying climatologists. They must have to look really hard.) The decline of religious morals was presented in a way that suggested a clear relationship between American strength and being a godfearing country. There was a direct quote to the effect that 'without Christianity how will we strong enough to fight global terrorism?' Personally I see no logic in such a line of thinking whatsoever, unless one buys into the totally B.S., vaguely racist, and totally ethnocentric Huntington thesis/Clash of Civilizations theory - which essentially sweeps aside all postcolonial arguments to return to the intellectual framework of The Crusades. Somewhat of a step backward, I think. To those who produce NewsMax John McCain clearly represents an avatar of the traditional Christian-based values that conservativism has aligned itself with.
One of the articles I saw was about how the baby boomers were soon to be swept off political centerstage by my generation - whom the magazine gave some catchy bombastic nickname. Reportedly these young people are more international, more interracial, not opposed to gay marriage, and more likely to travel abroad, get their news from the internet, and see the US as having greater responsibilities as a world power than we have recently owned up to. We are also materialistic and self-centered, although we may be more likely to have less material wealth but greater happiness than our parents when farther along in life. NewsMax basically wrote that the future will be frighteningly more liberal. Oh yeah, and young people will be totally disinterested in the religious issues that the right has used to pander to voters for the last two decades.
Another article about the US in 2050 reminded nervous whites that they will no longer be the majority at that time, as the Hispanic population continues to rise dramatically. An article elsewhere reported that while draconian measures have recently cut illegal immigration by a whopping 11% (hot damn!), the long-term projection is that illegal immigration will continue at unprecedented levels. (No Shit!) I got the drift that the magazine's demographic is somewhat uncomfortable with the prospect of white America no longer having a clear demographic majority, but that they really really don't want to look racist by voicing such concerns. I know my family winces at the same thought, and I know from personal experience that this reaction is mostly racism and xenophobia. A separate article detailed how several cities were putting initiatives on the ballot this year for new higher taxes that would raise money for crime-fighting anti-gang measures. So, from these two observations I hypothesize that NewsMax is printed for people who are afraid of Hispanics and of poor urbanites, who are in turn usually Black people. At the back of the magazine was an ad for a company that sells baseball caps embroidered with the logo of the US Border Patrol. Apparently they have become national heroes on the order of 9/11 firemen, bravely defending our land against the incursion of desecrating hordes of brown people. (I think that might be a partial quote from one of Bill the Butcher's anti-Irish rants in Gangs of New York.) God help us. Needless to say the man pictured wearing the US Border Patrol hat in the ad was a smiling blond white guy.
And most interestingly I noticed that all of the ads in the magazine were for products for old people. There was one for a company that installs those plastic walk-in shower inserts that let old people take baths without slipping. There was another for a lift-chair like device that deposits old people in their bathtubs for the same purpose. One ad was for some vitamins or supplements that were supposed to provide renewed youth. There was an ad for an online company that picks single stocks for would-be small-time investors. (I have heard repeatedly that this is a terrible way to invest money, and that mutual funds, C.D.s and the like are much safer. I also know this was a hobby of some of the Rush Limbaugh fans I knew in childhood. They identified with conservative interests in part because they naively thought they had a shot at making it big on the stock market.) Then there was an ad for a retirement community. I don't know any young people personally that would read NewsMax but I know they are out there. I have glimpsed their world briefly in underclassman courses at UC. But as Mark Twain noted a century and a half ago, Cincinnati is always behind the times. Does all this mean that these ideas and political issues are reaching the end of their lifespan, just as the target demographic of NewsMax apparently is?
So then who are the readers of NewsMax? It seems they are white, old, religious, somewhat embarrassedly xenophobic, devoutly Christian, and generally nervous about the future.
Father of the atomic bomb J. Neils Bohr once said something to the effect that, "while you can't depend on being able to change people's minds, you can count on them to die."
I love my grandparents, but I wont miss their ideas having the power to define my world.
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