I had just finished watching All the King's Men (about Huey Long, based on the Robert Penn Warren novel), when I read theyrereal's dairy yesterday Radical nutjob: "The U.S. is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" concerning the suppression of information about the last three years of Martin Luther King's life and the growing radicalization of his message.
I was surprised by how little I knew about that time. Reader's Digest characterized his work for the poor as an "insurrection". Amazing! Meanwhile Time said his speech against Vietnam was a "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." Was my understanding of MLK so far off? And what of that fellow I just saw in a movie, Huey Long? How many of us know about the historical Huey Long? Does anyone remember his stand against Standard Oil, his Share Our Wealth program? And who remembers the heroic Eugene Debs, Mother Jones? The Wobblies?
None of these figures were quiet, or retiring. They were as raucous and divisive as anything on dKos. Yet, for the most part, they're not heard of today. Their ideas live on only in whispers. Why?
The easy answer is to blame it on American anti-intellectualism or maybe just pawn it off on a shoddy public school system. But I believe the more correct answer is that Americans are not supposed to learn these lessons, nor put them together in any meaningful way. The movements and ideas the people above represent (and so many more) are decidedly dangerous to what Bill Moyer describes as the Big Media plantation mentality.
In a speech he gave at the Memphis Media reform conference
http://www.democracynow.org/...
Moyers broadly outlines the depth of Big Media's control, it's cancer like sickness and the danger it represents for Democracy.
For years, the media marketplace for opinions about public policy has been dominated by a highly disciplined, thoroughly networked, ideological "noise machine," to use David Brock’s term. Permeated with slogans concocted by big corporations, their lobbyists, and their think tank subsidiaries, public discourse has effectively changed the meaning of American values. Day after day, the ideals of fairness and liberty and mutual responsibility have been stripped of their essential dignity and meaning in people's lives. Day after day, the egalitarian creed of our Declaration of Independence is trampled underfoot by hired experts and sloganeers, who speak of the "death tax," "the ownership society," "the culture of life," "the liberal assault on God and family," "compassionate conservatism," "weak on terrorism," "the end of history," "the clash of civilizations," "no child left behind." They have even managed to turn the escalation of a failed war into a "surge," as if it were a current of electricity through a wire, instead of blood spurting from the ruptured vein of a soldier.
The Orwellian filigree of a public sphere in which language conceals reality, and the pursuit of personal gain and partisan power, is wrapped in rhetoric that turns truth to lies and lies to truth. So it is that limited government has little to do with the Constitution or local economy anymore. Now it means corporate domination and the shifting of risk from government and business to struggling families and workers. Family values now mean imposing a sectarian definition of the family on everyone else. Religious freedom now means majoritarianism and public benefits for organized religion without any public burdens. And patriotism has come to mean blind support for failed leaders. It's what happens when an interlocking media system filters through commercial values or ideology, the information and moral viewpoints people consume in their daily lives. And by no stretch of the imagination can we say today that the dominant institutions of our media are guardians of democracy.
He notes that most journalists on the plantation have so internalized conventional wisdom that they simply accept that the system is working as it should. "I'm doing a documentary this spring called "Buying the War," and I can't tell you again how many reporters have told me that it just never occurred to them that high officials would manipulate intelligence in order to go to war. Hello?"
So Bill says we have to tell the story for ourselves.
And this is what the plantation owners feared most of all. Over all those decades here in the South, when they used human beings as chattel, and quoted scripture to justify it, property rights over human rights was God's way, they secretly lived in fear that one day -- instead of saying, "Yes, Massa" -- those gaunt, weary, sweat-soaked field hands, bending low over the cotton under the burning sun, would suddenly stand up straight, look around, see their sweltering and stooping kin and say, "This ain't the product of intelligent design. The boss man in the big house has been lying to me. Something is wrong with this system."
This is the moment freedom begins, the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story, and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.
Moyers reminds me of Huey Long, as channeled by Robert Penn Warren: "We're all hicks, to these people. If we want it, we have to take it. And if they try to stop us, we have to take a hammer and nail them to the wall..."
Don't hear much of that kind of rhetoric taught in highschool now days, do we? The Tom Russerts, Chris Matthews, George Wills and Tom Friedmans of the plantation don't like that kind of attitude. An uppity attitude. Kind of signifies a disrespect of your betters, don't you know?
Anne Applebaum and Richard Cohen might be offended by the unseamly manner of our discourse. God knows what Bill O'Reilly might think.
We might be called "radicals"
Or "out of the mainstream"
Or "insurrectionists"
Or "revolutionaries"
Or any of the thousands of other words and images that are always trotted out against people willing to tell their own story. Yet if we keep it up, insisting on the truth, on nothing but the truth and we ferret out the liars, and the cons and the hack games that hurt us, we might actually get something done, for ourselves and our children and our world.
Moyers also has a warning. The internet can be co-opted just like print, radio and television....We've won the first round of the net neutrality battle, but that's short lived.
What happened to radio, happened to television, and then it happened to cable; and, if we are not diligent, it will happen to the Internet. Powerful forces are at work now, determined to create our media future for the benefit of the plantation: investors, advertisers, owners and the parasites that depend on their indulgence, including many in the governing class.
If you want to stay off the plantation, help those who are also off the plantation. Democracy Now, AA, etc. In this regard, a call to action:
In moments of revelry, I imagine all of you returning home to organize a campaign to persuade your local public television station to start airing Democracy Now!
I can't think of a single act more likely to remind people of what public broadcasting should be, or that this media reform conference really means business. We've got to get alternative content out there to people, or this country is going to die of too many lies.
Finally, the words of poet / activist, Marge Piercy:
What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t blame them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.
But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.
Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fundraising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.
It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.
Updated: hat tip to LNK for this Media Reform Diary link