Mike Rowe is an entertainer who puts out podcasts and has a Youtube video of one with a message for an America divided by the recent Presidential election. Mr. Rowe tells a short story titled ~Oh brother which has gotten a lot of buzz. Odds are you may not have run across it in liberal news channels, but it’s being well received in conservative and/or pro-Trump circles.
Mr. Rowe is apparently not impressed by Democratic efforts to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump and has put out a cautionary tale with some… inventive retelling of history. His implicit message is to sit down, shut up, accept the election — and if you don’t, well you’re just like… you’ll see. The story, as he tells it, is this:
It’s a tale of a turbulent Thanksgiving where political strife between two brothers disrupts the holiday. (Rowe is playing hard to the cliché here.) Both are actors; Ed is the more successful of the two, with a world famous reputation. He’s a staunch Republican and supporter of the Republican candidate who has just won the election.
His brother John is also an actor — and a Democrat. Rowe describes him as once smug about his candidate, who he and all the pundits and polls had expected to win, and is now angry over the loss to someone he warns is a tyrant. There’s a scene, John stomps out of the house after declaring the electoral college should be scrapped, and Ed tries to restore some calm for his other guests.
Rowe suggests an additional possible reason for John’s intemperate behavior is because he’s far less famous than Ed and quite jealous of his success.
Rowe goes on to note Ed is largely forgotten today, while his little brother is famous, or perhaps infamous. And that’s because a few months after that Thanksgiving dinner fiasco, John gave the performance of his life in Ford’s Theater when he assassinated President Lincoln.
Yeah, that’s the big reveal, which Rowe slides into, in a folksy, more in sorrow than in anger kind of way.
Bless his heart.
Now Rowe does have enough things right to seem plausible at first — until you look deeper. Lincoln was a Republican, John may have been a Democrat — but those parties have largely swapped sides these days, and in 1864, the situation was even more complex. The country was in the middle of the Civil War after all, with the suspension of habeus corpus, martial law, and other constraints. There were peace and war factions, pro and anti slavery factions, and so on.
The party of civil rights, voting rights, and affirmative action is not the Republican party of today, and especially not the party of Trump. The line about Democrats being the party of slavery is historically true, but contemporary slander. It’s the Republicans who have been pursuing the Southern Strategy and pushing for state’s rights.
John Wilkes Booth may not have been quite as famous as his brother Edwin at the time, but he was by no means the failure Rowe implies. The fact that he and his brothers and sisters were the illegitimate offspring of their father Junius Brutus Booth may have been the big factor in his quest for recognition.
John also toured the U.S., was famous for his acting — and was not the only actor in the family; his brother Junius also appeared on stage and the three of them did a historic one night only performance of Julius Caesar that was widely acclaimed. John had a long-standing aversion to Lincoln, despised abolitionists, and was a strong supporter of the south and slavery.
By 1864 John and Edwin had been arguing to the point where Edwin told him he was no longer welcome at his home. The tale of things coming to a head over Thanksgiving dinner is a little too good to be true, barring any source Rowe can produce to back it up — but it fits into the modern stereotype of political strife during the holiday. It should be noted that while Thanksgiving had been celebrated on an ad hoc basis in the U.S. it didn’t become an official federal holiday until a proclamation by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Rowe’s evocation of the holiday as a family tradition at the time is a bit dubious, to say the least.
The wikipedia entry on Mike Rowe is a little ambiguous about his political preferences, but the job he does here is pretty one-sided. He portrays Edwin as the Reasonable Republican, a man of accomplishment, and supporter of a just cause, while he conflates John with the modern conservative stereotype of Democrats, by turns smug, angry, unreasonable, and jealous. This is part and parcel of the character assassination conservatives have been doing to liberals for decades now.
While Rowe is ‘surprised’ that people seem to think he’s comparing Donald Trump to Lincoln (wink wink — nudge nudge), the parallels are pretty damn thin. Lincoln was running for reelection in the middle of a Civil War, he had a track record of service in government — AND he won his election by a landslide, “with malice towards none and charity towards all”.
As opposed to Donald Trump, who has charity for no one, enough malice for a legion of bigots, and nearly 3 million fewer votes.
Rowe has produced a slick piece of propaganda to delegitimize protests about a minority president with a host of serious shortcomings, a radical agenda, and an even more radical Congress behind him. The condescension is palpable.
I’m not going to link to the video or his Facebook page. No point in giving him any more page clicks than he already has. (You should be able to find it if you really want to see it.) I’m only writing this up because this is the kind of thing that gets shared and emailed while going under the radar. It’s why it’s harder and harder to get respect as a Democrat and/or a Liberal; this kind of thing is out there in the information networks of the Right, and if you don’t know about it, you can be taken unawares when you find minds poisoned against you.
It’s about telling stories and crafting narratives. The Right has built a vast media machine and a habitat for breeding and propagating this kind of stuff. The left needs to develop comparable story skills and resources to take back control of the narrative — or propagandists like Rowe will continue to work quietly, relentlessly, undermining us.
Chauncey deVega writing at Salon, has some cautionary words on what we’re in for with Donald Trump as president. He’s a master at dominating the media and strategic distraction. He lies without compunction. He tells wonderful stories too good to be true. As deVega puts it,
...Those who oppose Donald Trump and the threat to American democracy he represents would be wise to manage their energy and selectively choose their battles. This may involve a disturbing revelation: You cannot shame the shameless. By implication, you cannot shame Donald Trump or his hard-core supporters.
Trump’s presidency will feature (seemingly) childish pronouncements on Twitter, a concerted campaign of lying and disinformation by his spokespeople and the right-wing news media, and threats of violence and intimidation from his supporters. This is an effort by the “Great Leader” to condition the public to his moods with the goal of creating a condition of fear, anxiety, confusion and vulnerability. Such a strategy is also a feature of authoritarian regimes.
Rowe’s little story is one more brick in the wall Trump and the oligarchs are building around us, day by day. Friends don’t let friends drink the KoolAid.