When I was young I imagined a just and improvable world even though Bobby Kennedy was murdered in middle of the season of my innocence. Then Dr. King was murdered and my optimism was shaken by the first sorrows of a believer. The election of Richard Nixon was a crushing cultural moment and I wept in our suburban living room in Delmar, New York. I was only 13 when Nixon beat Humphrey. I remember being inconsolable.
Because I am not a conspiracy theorist I’ve never believed in a concerted effort to destroy progressive values in the United States. I think JFK was killed by a chinless psychopath. Was the FBI involved? Yes, to the extent they covered up their own failures to keep tabs on Oswald. Was there CIA collusion? No. But it makes a good movie.
What I do know about the war on progressive values is that it sustains itself on religious intolerance. The insistence by a sizable majority of Republican voters that President Obama is a Muslim is not a matter of there being an insufficiency of biographical material about the Obamas, but rather an adopted fundamentalist Christian canard that once properly fitted excuses hatred.
As a 13 year old I’d have thought this makes sense–the bigoted and aggressive behavior of southern whites and the predatory and imperial war machinery that brought us Viet Nam were ubiquitous.
So its as an older man that I feel the disappointment because there’s a truth drought now. I have taken heart from the occupy movement and the evident dismay at the rightward tilt that so many people are sharing. But I’m sickened by the lack of accountability in the public square, particularly in the fifth estate–public lies are not sufficiently scrutinized, or scrutinized at all.
I’ve never seen a politician lie as much as Mitt Romney. To paraphrase the poet Robert Bly, he lies about the time the sun comes up. He lies about everything from the president’s record on the economy to his own positions. He lies in a kind of giggling fit. In the past, flagrant lying was called to account.
Better analysis than mine abounds, and the genealogy of the corporate consolidation of the media and the cancerous growth of tabloid journalism both in print and on television are well documented. I remember arguing with a media studies professor almost twenty years ago because I said Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death was unassailable in its thesis that a video-centric culture has overtaken a print literate society and accordingly critical thinking is in danger in the US. The film professor was caught up in the sexy ardor that many people felt for Picket Fences and she saw me as reactionary. Fox News was then in its infancy.
So I go back and forth between overt panic over the state of our nation’s affairs and a sense of cautious hope. This is like seasickness but without the ship. On a ship they bring you consommé and toast.
Planet of the Blind 