Theron's Nineteenth

by Theron Dash

Morgan is supposed to be the literary one so why did I get stuck with book reviews?

For two reasons: I'm not reviewing the books. I haven't read them. I'm reviewing a review of the books, and then I'm reviewing the fact that another book was written. With me so far? Since I'm the brother in charge of unsubstantiated raving, these tasks fall to me.

First case: Ted Widmer's review of Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? and Herbert J. Gans' Democracy and the News in the New York Times Book Review that has been in the pile since mid March and is damn lucky to have been read this soon.

I've got no problem with the review or the books. I just want to answer a couple of questions Widmer brings up. He agrees with Alterman that the image of the liberal media, while a great fund raising tool, is so clearly not true as to be either dishonest or delusional. Maybe it was true, they say, like twenty years ago. But it isn't anymore, and Alterman suggests a lot of the reason has to do with Richard Mellon Scaife and the millions he put into extreme right wing think tanks, foundations and media.

Widmer then suggests Alterman didn't spend enough time answering a key question: "why is it that liberals fare badly on live radio and television?" Fair enough, I'll answer that one.

The first answer would be, how would you know they don't? They are seldom seen or heard. But let's say they do "fare badly." It's perfectly reasonable that they would fare badly.

Why? Because they are reasonable. The people who do well on television shout and spit. They are dismissive, vituperative, utterly shameless. They are the studio wrestlers of discourse. They are the car salesmen of ideas. One big bargain lie after another.

People are so busy, right? They need something short, like a slogan, repeated endlessly. Something familiar, like sex and violence, used to sell everything on TV and always used to sell newspapers. Sexy newscasters can make anything seem frivilous. As for violence, hey, you won't be seeing any reporter embedded in negotiations--the problem with them is that if there are big explosions, they've failed.

The media is divided, somewhat along class lines, into the Endless Business Report and Political Survivor. The corporate interests talk to each other, gull the unwary to feather their nests with self-serving stock tips and advice. The interests of working people and the poor are not so sumptuously served. No, it's circuses for them, and they love it. Entertainment value is the only value. What else can you say about a country that puts "Stupid White Men" on the top of the best-seller list, only to be toppled by "The Savage Nation"?

But it's all part of the same deal. Keep people stupid. Smart people figure out that the commercials aren't true. That's bad for America, my friends. If they got beyond being viscerally simple-minded, they might figure out that buying the right stuff doesn't make them happy, it just makes them work harder and longer and get deeper in debt.

So we can't have thought. We can't waste time producing evidence for our assertions, or actually try to work our way through difficult issues to find a solution. So we make sure to make fun of anybody with a vocabulary and thoughts to go with it. We demean anybody who isn't mean, laugh at any expression of empathy. No, sad situations are great entertainment, little stories of pain and suffering to make us feel better.

Laugh at those bleeding hearts! Those weepy eyed kids who want to save the world! And we won't listen to them because...because they're talking therapyspeak, they're talking hard words, they know all this history about Iraq, they're so...boring.

There are well-intentioned "liberal" "intellectual" people in this country who drone on and on, who can't speak five words without six of them being jargon, who have never met a circumlocution in passive voice they didn't like. But there are also people of liberal imagination who are trenchant, witty and eloquent. You don't see or hear them first of all because they might say something contrary to the interests of our sponsor, and second, they are too damn reasonable, they don't get people mad, frothing at the mouth and calling in, convincing sponsors that billions of people are watching and listening, and eager to stuff into their mouths anything they sell.

Later in the review, Widner writes: "These are all fair critiques. The problem is that Gans, like the rest of us, has no workable idea about what to do next."

Yeah, well I do. That is, I have ideas, and lots of people do. The rub is that word "workable." What's workable? An idea on how to balance the unbalanced right, that will get the approval of the unbalanced right media? The folks who will cry and repeat and repeat and repeat because that's what they do best, "It'll never work!"

Want liberal commentators? Why don't some of those supposed "limo liberals" in Hollywood and wherever else they are pony up some of their millions and do just what Scaife did? Put some power into liberal think tanks, foundations and media. Finance a next generation, and get off the stage.

As for fostering more democracy and the news, the whole political landscape can be transformed, probably state by state, with laws that require public financing of campaigns, that begin making rules that encourage, that mandate, substantive political discussion among and on behalf of candidates for office. No more thirty second campaign spots-if you can't talk on an issue for five minutes, what good are you? There are creative ways of accomplishing this, if you're honest about what the problems are.

The truth is that people with lots of money don't want more democracy, because the power would shift to people who don't have lots of money, since there are usually more of them, thanks to the control of public policy by people who do have money.

So that's those books. Now a book so new it's probably not out yet, called Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age by Bill McKibben. A piece of it appeared in Harper's. The book is apparently about genetic engineering. My question is WHY? WHY BILL MCKIBBEN ARE YOU WASTING YOUR TIME WRITING ABOUT GENETIC ENGINEERING?

It wasn't so long ago that Bill McKibben was seen on C-Span talking about the climate crisis as the greatest thread to humanity and the world of our age. The consequences could very well be mass extinctions, which would include the human animal. Because of all this, McKibben said, raising awareness of climate change and making sure we do something about it "is the first morally compulsory, urgent issue since the Civil Rights movement."

So-HELLO, BILL? I've got a question---if the climate crisis is such an overwhelming threat that it must be urgently addressed-why are you worried now about genetic engineering? Significant alterations of humanity through genetic engineering is years away-and if global heating is so urgent, GENETIC ENGINEERING AIN'T GONNA MATTER. Unless you’re worried about genetically engineered amoeba. Artifically altered cockroaches. Bioengineered lice.

This has been the problem with environmentalists for at least a decade. There are all these fiefdoms now, all with their issue, their fundraising, their foundations, their turf. And there is no sense of setting priorities.

HEY: THE PRIORITY IS THE SURVIVAL OF LIFE. The issue of global heating and the climate crisis is a meta-issue anyway: it leads to most of the other issues in environment and energy, as well as political and environmental justice. (Including, eventually, bioengineering, especially in the food supply.) It is not only the single most crucial issue---it is a made to order organizing principle.

Peace, there’s another meta-issue. Can’t have it without human dignity, self-determination, non-interference, justice, freedom, peaceful conflict resolution, shared costs, shared sacrifices and shared interests through permanent cooperation.

World Peace. Climate Crisis. That's enough of an agenda for us to handle, thank you all very much.

Skip the War, Pass Me the Hypospray

by Phineas Dash

The war is everywhere but it's not the most important story unfolding, at least in terms of our ultimate fate in this century.

The crisis that will threaten our polities, our societies and our existence in the coming decades will make this war and the wars that follow irrelevant, or simply contributing factors.

The unfolding story of consequence is the disease currently called SARS, about which little is known except that it is spreading quickly and is often fatal.

It will be a story repeated in one way or another for the rest of this decade and this half of the century. For awhile, not many people will notice this, because the stories will seem unrelated. But eventually there will be a generally acknowledged crisis and it will be called a public health crisis.

It will certainly test what is called the public health system, which is not a system at all, at least in the United States. But though it will resonate with the public by being designated a public health problem, even that won't be exhaustively accurate.

Another way of analyzing it would be as an environmental crisis. If and when this becomes a consensus explanation, or even a media-accepted Big Story, it's going to shake the planet.

We would learn that many more illnesses that the public was allowed to realize are caused by environmental factors: air and water pollution; the interactions of chemicals in everything we consume or touch; diseases in food caused by lack of screening or by additives and alterations; the changing climate of global heating; and all of these combined with overcrowded cities, sick buildings and air travel that spreads pathogens rapidly around the world.

Some information will emerge but a lot won't, partly because we don't know very much. It will all stay "mysterious." Of course, we have the computer power to begin to put data together and maybe have a fighting chance of figuring it out. But it will take a big effort, and would likely result in big changes in how we live. Some people---like the people making big money from the way we live now---aren't going to like that.

We will feel utterly betrayed, because the companies that make money making and using these chemicals and biological agents, using genetic manipulation, causing the pollution, etc. have made damn sure nobody is forthrightly studying these factors and their interactions, with anything like the appropriate resources and level of concern.

We will feel betrayed, that is, if we ever find out. We probably won't. We'll follow the news reports about mystifying diseases that kill quickly and dramatically (and never suspect the ones that have relatively minor or transitory symptoms and perhaps cumulatively fatal effects) and in the end we'll never know what hit us.

A public health crisis will eventually get dramatic enough for reporters to be embedded in hospitals and research labs. We'll learn about as much from them concerning how we got in this fix as we learn from reporters embedded in a particular tank division. Maybe we'll watch ourselves die off on TV.

This will be happening as poor people in backward countries are running out of water. Non-poor people in advanced countries will be paying for their water at rates we would now regard as fantastically high. But then, look at the gas pump and remember 1977. That lack of water in places with lots of people will add to the public health crisis everywhere.

But let's not worry about this now. We are embedded in TVland, wielding weapons of mass distraction. Let them drink oil.