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When most people hear “NPR,” they think Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg, Robert Siegel, and for some on the far right, all that is wrong with the mainstream liberal media. But beneath the veneer of the "Minnesota nice," a simmering battle has been waged, and in the balance hangs NPR’s future and perhaps even its soul—as either a nonpartisan defender of in-depth journalism or a target of the partisan sniping of the sound-bite era. David Margolick explores how NPR’s management managed to squander the advantages of the national dole, deep-pocketed donors, a roster of top-notch reporters, and the loyalty of legions of devoted Click and Clack fans—and whether it can recover from the annus horribilis of 2011.
"The deeper question, I think, is why it appeals so much to so many Americans that conservatives constantly say things that they don’t really mean."
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Having the license to say crazy stuff, without getting called on it, prevents serious debate and allows people to conceal any crazy stuff that really do believe, by hiding it in plain sight, as it were. It’s really true, I suspect, that when most conservatives say that they don’t buy this global warming junk science, what they really mean to do is, simply, signal ‘I’m in favor of capitalism’. If you are a conservative, talking to conservatives, and you say you think the scientists might be right, your audience is going to hear you refusing to send an ‘I’m in favor of capitalsim’ signal. Needless to say, this means conservatives can’t have reasonable discussions of global warming unless they are free from worries about what they are signalling, as opposed to saying. Which they never are, at least if they are politicians.
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It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that what Free and Cantril found is that when Americans say Big Things about American politics, whose consequences they aren’t really prepared to affirm, in practice, they say conservative things. Whereas when you find out what they really want, in practice, they are liberals. When Americans dream about something ideal, politically, that they kind of know they aren’t going to get, they dream a conservative dream. Since conservatism is, officially, an anti-utopian philosophy, this creates the odd situation of collective dreams of anti-utopian utopianism. But people are funny that way.
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Beck has published nine books since 2008, only two of which have been packaged as fiction. As a long-time critic, I feel I know a thing or two about dramatic narrative, that I know how to assess the motivations undergirding an authorial voice. I turned to his two novels for clues to what is going on inside that thickset head. Perhaps the novels will reveal the man, I thought, as they do Proust or James. Perhaps through the same alchemy by which real people – Soros, Obama, Wilson – become characters in made-up plots on Beck’s TV show, the novels will uncover something real, something authentic about Glenn Beck.
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Every day this week, Beck has implored viewers to follow him to Glennbeck.com. “It’s imperative,” he says, “that we find each other again.” And now, as all Beck watchers must, I contemplate the threshold of my interest — and whether it will stand the test of $4.95 a month. My answer is already plain to me. I knew it when I heard Beck announce the location of his first post-Fox remote broadcast: No, not Disneyland, and not Magicland, but another kind of nihilistic wonder: Auschwitz. He’s going there to figure out, he says, “how this happened.” All of a sudden I grow weary. I believe I have finally reached the barbed-wire border of my own curiosity. If his breakdown happens, I will not see it. The mouse, if you want it, is in your house now.
"Neiwert goes on to note that the idea of "Cultural Marxism" has already filtered into much more mainstream conservative circles in this country. In particular, Republican dirty trickster Andrew Breitbart has become a major vector for the idea of "Cultural Marxism" and the supposed iniquity of the Frankfurt School."
"Even more remarkably, in the past week, the question of whether a carefully planned assassination attempt on a member of the United States Congress might have had anything to do with politics has been mocked into oblivion. Well, let’s see. The dominant theme of Loughner’s ravings was suspicion of the government. He apparently didn’t believe in paper money and thought only gold has value. He believed the government was responsible for Sept. 11. And so on. This is not a random collection of nutty opinions. There is a theme to it, and it is not simply that the guy was crazy."
"The tea party and the loudest, most strident voices of anti-abortion politics love to flirt with the idea of armed revolution. This is, for the most part, just adolescent foolishness -- a kind of fantasy play-acting that can be summed up in a single word:
Wolveriiiiiines!
By pretending to believe that America is on the verge of collapse into a totalitarian tyranny, they can pretend to themselves that they are the vanguard of a courageous resistance. The Red Dawn fantasy isn't all that different from any other childhood fantasy about what if there were dragons? And what if I was brave and good and strong? And what if I slew the dragon and everybody cheered for me because I was brave and good and strong and I slew the dragon? Wouldn't that be cool?"
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But what of those who are caught up in this fantasy who are not unhinged? What of the millions of tea-partiers or decriers of the abortion "Holocaust" with their signs calling for "refreshing" blood and "second amendment remedies"? What are we to make of their fabricated fears of imminent tyranny and their ridiculous pose of revolutionary vigilance?
I continue to believe that when you encounter someone who is saying something that they know is not true, there is great power in saying as much. When someone says that they believe health care reform will lead to socialist tyranny, simply tell them that, "No, you do not believe that. It is not true and you know it is not true." When they say that "abortion is murder and America is a blood-stained, murderous country," simply say, "No, you do not believe that. It is not true and you know it is not true." You will not need to raise your voice. Truth doesn't require amplification to dispel falsehood. The falsehood wasn't ever really there in the first place.
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At the core of their pretense is that fantasy I described above: "What if I was brave and good and strong ... wouldn't that be cool?" The attraction of this fantasy is the fear, or the knowledge, that the fantasist is not brave or good or strong. Liberating them from this fantasy, then, should involve giving them the opportunity to acquire or develop those characteristics in reality rather than in fantasy. It should involve inviting them to be brave and good and strong and pointing to the myriad real-world opportunities to exhibit or develop those traits.
There are few dragons here in the real world, but there are wounds that need binding, messes that need cleaning, houses that need building, children that need mentoring, elders that need respecting, stories that need telling, projects that need volunteers. With all the real problems of the real world, who has time for slaying imaginary dragons? Get them involved in reality and the fantasy can't compete.
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"The way things are now, my parents seriously wonder whether they ever want to attend another public political meeting. Talking to them yesterday afternoon, I didn’t have anything encouraging or reassuring to say."
by Matthew Cheney. Personal reflections on gun-control from left perspective.
Connection to the fairness doctrine.
by Stirling Newberry "Thus, what lust was to the Victorian, rage is to our own age: the hidden demon that is both worshipped, and feared.
The right wing sanctifies this rage, by combining it with reactionary intent. The right wing allows revolutionary violence in favor of a reactionary order. "
"What the Right wants to feel is tough.
What they feel is weak and afraid.
For the most part, with the Right, we’re dealing with people who have built their identities around the way things used to be. In their hearts they live in a world that is already long gone, if it ever existed, an idealized America in which they are happy, secure, and the point. Their America exists as expressions of themselves as good, decent, noble, heroic, and successful people. It’s a country whose existence is denied to them every time they take an unblinkered look at the world as it really is. They hate it. What is there frightens them. They want “their” country back. And there’s nothing they can do to get it back, because you can’t save something that was never really there."
"It’s said that the past is another country, but that’s not a metaphor to the Right. They believe that country’s there and they can get to it.
It’s not childish to believe that there were things that were better when you were young and it would be a good thing if we could get those things or at least some of those things back. It’s childish to believe that because things were better for you when you were a kid they must have been better for everybody else. It’s infantile to believe that all those things that were better for you can be gotten back and the way to bring them back is whine and complain and scream and blame others and vote for orange-skinned weepers who promise they can get them all back at you at no cost and with no sacrifice.
The Right honestly seems to believe that the country is a thing like a toy that has been unfairly taken away from them."
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