Reply #120: Maybe you should not write when you are tired.

[McCamy Taylor]

1) I am glad you brought up prosecutions. The Bush administration prosecuted the executives of one particular phone company, Qwest, because they refused to go along with warrantless wiretapping and then they had the nerve to attempt to make a higher bid for a property, MCI that Verizon, which did wiretap, wanted to buy. It is in my journal. The Bush administration has a history of using the DOJ for political purposes like these. Individual reporters will go to jail from time to time so that the administration can threaten the press in its efforts to silence whistle blowers. If the whistle blowers know that they will get named, they are less likely to speak out about the crimes committed by the Bush administration. However, reporters who work for the administration, like Bob Novak, can commit treason and no one cares.

2) My basic point can not be that Hillary is losing the election because of sexism, because I have never conceded that either candidate is winning or losing. We are midway through the nomination process, and Obama holds a delegate lead that is about 5% of the total delegates assigned, if I do the math in my head. (If anyone has a calculator, please correct me if I am wrong). We still have primaries to do and we still have super delegates to assign. I have been a Democrat for a long time, and I know what super delegates are for. They exist just in case someone says or does something really atrocious between now and the convention. The current system was created after 1972, so that we would never have another McGovern. The GOP desperately wants us to have another McGovern this time. That is the only chance their own roadkill of a candidate has of winning.

Note that the press is right up on the front lines declaring that the concept of super delegates being used to help pick the most electable candidates is somehow illegitimate. This from people like the guys at MSNBC, Tom Brokaw and Chris Matthews who repeatedly told Republicans to hold their noses and get behind John McCain so that they would not have their own Chicago '68 or their own McGovern. The press thought that having party elders tell Republicans whom to vote for was kosher but not Democrats. When there is a difference between what members of the press are telling Republicans and Democrats, beware. This is all in my journals, btw. I document several different nights of election coverage at MSNBC.

Neither candidate is winning. I could do a journal to demonstrate the way that the press has created the myth of the Obama win. Maybe I will. It would be an interesting exercise.

3) Do you have a personal problem with Cash, Weber, de Tocqueville? I can see how the first two might be unsettling to people on the political right wing, but this is Democratic Underground. I have written a journal recommending The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and if I haven't recommended The Mind of the South I do so now. Those two, plus Angela Davis's Women Race and Class and Leonardo Boff's St. Francis A Model for Human Liberation are some of the best written, truest books about real human history that you will ever read. And anything by Roland Barthes is worth reading.

4) Who writes the things we read? Another human being. Unless you live in China and it is written by a committee. Or maybe by the RNC if it is political propaganda or by an ad agency if it is commercial propaganda. There is always someone there, holding the pen or typing at the keyboard. The author may attempt to hide himself behind multiple layers of objectivity, but these are all fictions. As Larry McMurtry observed, something has to keep an author interested in his work. There is some content or character or theme that resonates for the human being who is doing the writing, otherwise he loses interest and moves on to something else.

You are correct in one respect. It is difficult for anyone to critique themselves. When I write "I am a realist" I do not mean "I consider myself a practitioner of the style known as realism" because I do not believe that realism exists. It is a fiction. My realist is something on the scale of optimism and pessimism, more towards the pessimism side in this matter but not all the way there, because I know that people have the power to change. In most matters, I am an optimist, so it is painful to admit that I think women will continue to be oppressed even after I am dead. However, I think back to several social critics of my youth (I can not remember their names now) who predicted that we would have Black presidents long before we would have female presidents because sexism was so firmly rooted in our country's traditions and I think Damn, they were right!

There is one way in which your charge is misguided. Everything that is written is opinion. There are no facts. All is relative. The closest thing to truth is autobiography, because when an author says "I feel...." or "I believe...." at least a part of that person really does feel or believe or wants t give the impression of feeling or believing. Perhaps I could have been more accurate if I had written

"As I look back at this journal, it has occurred to me that I have just constructed a template for the Freeper moles to use so that they can more effectively slime Hillary in ways that will resonate with regular Democratic Underground posters. Using these common sexist myths to frame their charges, they can construct threads will ring true to Obama posters who will not necessarily recognize that they are responding to age old sexist stereotypes when they feel that little thrill of recognition. I could delete this journal in order to avoid giving aid to the enemy of truthful, fair discourse, however, it is probably more important to give a name to these sexist myths so that people who want to see them more clearly can put a name to them and identify them more easily."

That was what was going through my mind. I could have written all of that. Maybe it would have been more accurate to write that.

However, to exclude the first person pronoun simply because it is the first person pronoun---that is a lie and it turns nonfiction (which is already a kind of fiction) into an even greater lie.

5) There is no "evil" in my world except that some acts are "evil", number one being labeling other people as evil or unnecessary. My world is not so little, either. Here are some of the people who inhabit the same universe that I do. As you can imagine, I was tickled pink when I found this, because I was getting tired of people calling me a crackpot conspiracy theorist. Now, you can call Noam Chomsky a crackpot conspiracy theorist. Go ahead if it makes you feel good. We have freedom of expression in America.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufac_Consent_Prop_Model.html

Manufacturing Consent
by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.
In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance.
A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (I) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (~) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.
The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable. In assessing the newsworthiness of the U.S. government's urgent claims of a shipment of MIGs to Nicaragua on November 5, I984, the media do not stop to ponder the bias that is inherent in the priority assigned to government-supplied raw material, or the possibility that the government might be manipulating the news, imposing its own agenda, and deliberately diverting attention from other material. It requires a macro, alongside a micro- (story-by-story), view of media operations, to see the pattern of manipulation and systematic bias.