Reading Mark Steyn's
latest column in the Republican propaganda organ
National Review, a few thoughts crossed my mind. The first was fairly standard - that Steyn, a classic right-wing shill with a column in the increasingly unreadable
MacLean's, is an idiot. His arguments are always low on facts and heavy on hypocrisy, but that's par for the course when it comes to your average conservative diatribe.
The second thought concerns his whole argument, against government-funded health care. Once you get past the usual fearmongering about a massive "U.S. health bureaucracy", you get one of the more nonsensical statements I've seen lately about the issue:
When President Obama tells you he’s “reforming” health care to “control costs,” the point to remember is that the only way to “control costs” in health care is to have less of it. In a government system, the doctor, the nurse, the janitor, and the Assistant Deputy Associate Director of Cost-Control System Management all have to be paid every Friday, so the sole means of “controlling costs” is to restrict the patient’s access to treatment.
Leave aside for a moment the fact that the current, privatized United States health system costs far more than any of its equivalents in the industrialized world while delivering far less. American health care is completely dominated by insurance companies that make all their profits by
denying people coverage. The profit motive is the reason why Americans with health insurance are constantly told they have "pre-existing conditions" not covered by the company. A public health care system would be infinitely superior to a private one for the simple reason that its aim is not to profit at the expense of other peoples' lives; it's aim is to
provide health services for the population - taking care of people, helping them when they're sick. As Democratic politicians love to point out (without doing anything about it), health care should be a right, not a privilege. A health care system whose entire motive lies in denying people health care is a sick joke, or at least it should be.
But this brings me to the last thought I had while reading the column, and it addresses a far larger issue. Often, when I talk about American politics with my family, they'll tell me something along the lines of "who cares? That's in America." And in a way, they have a point. I spend hours and hours each day reading about American news, politics, and media. Part of that is because it's just so much more fucked up in general than Canadian politics; it's hard to believe that an entity like the modern Republican party, dominated by wingnuts, Jesus freaks, venture capitalists, torture apologists and chickenhawks, can be one of the two major political parties in what is (for now) the world's lone superpower. It would seem like a perfectly plausible argument for someone to tell me that I shouldn't worry what the right-wing noise machine is saying on any given day. As a Canadian progressive, why the hell should I care what wingnuts like Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity and the rest of the Faux News crew have to rant about?
The problem, of course, is that while I don't take these guys seriously - I watch it knowing perfectly well that it's propaganda - many, many people in the United States do. And it's not just rednecks and wealthy conservatives; the mainstream media sees these demogogues as worthy contributers to the national discussion. Arianna Huffington, in her book
Right Is Wrong, identified one of the main faults of corporate cable news: they always assume that there are only two sides to every issue, a liberal (Democratic) and conservative (Republican) view, and that the truth always lies somewhere in the middle. CNN is the prime culprit here when it comes to television, but it equally applies to establishment rags like the
New York Times or the
Washington Post. And it's immensely destructive when it comes to an issue where the right/left paradigm does not apply. Take the issue of global warming. Typically, a news segment on the issue might have one person who says global warming is real, and another who says it's a hoax or the science isn't advanced enough for us to know for sure. Since global warming
is real, providing such a false balance leaves the viewer disoriented and unsure what the truth really is.
I saw a particularly putrid example of this phenomenon last night on CNN during a discussion about Gitmo detainees. Campbell Brown assured us we would hear from "two very different perspectives", which was fairly spot-on: it featured a face-off between Liz Cheney repeating her father's standard talking points (the detainees were Evil Terrorists, "the worst of the worst", too dangerous to try in American courts for some reason, and repeating the
debunked lie that 15% of them had "returned to the battlefield), and Joan Walsh, arguing that Guantanamo only served as a recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda (sharing the opinions of U.S. military commanders). I have my disagreements with Walsh - she's one of those liberals that sometimes
cheers on imperialist war when it's carried out by a Democratic president - but I have to give her props this week, not only for her performance on the side of "truth" on CNN against Liz Cheney, but also for her bravura
verbal ass-kicking of Bill O'Reilly on the issue of Dr. Tiller's murder.
Anyway, the problem was that CNN was offering - as Huffington described it - "equal times for lies." You have Liz Cheney lying her ass off, defending torture and extraordinary rendition, Joan Walsh offering a reasonable rebuttal actually based on
fact, and then you have Campbell Brown weighing in before the commercial break with a typically CNN sitting-on-the-fence moment: "well, you both have interesting arguments, let's see if afterwards we can come to some kind of agreement." Panels like this make a mockery of the journalistic ideal. Theoretically, a journalist is supposed to sort through facts to arrive at the truth. Brown lets two sides talk - one of which is consciously lying and distorting the truth - and then leaves it to the viewer to decide which side is right, a complete abdication of her supposed responsibility as a journalist.
And this brings us back to the larger issue - the power of the right-wing propaganda machine. As stupid as conservatives are when it comes to actual policy, I'll give them this: they are
brilliant when it comes to getting their message out. As George Lakoff summarizes in his book
The Political Mind, Republicans have always been masters of framing issues in ways that skew towards their own agenda; hence, Democrats are accused of being "soft on terror" or "weak on national security". And Democrats always buy right into that framing, adopting right-wing policies to prove how "tough" they are and by extension looking all the weaker, as opposed to if they stood up for principle and said they were "strong on liberty" or something like that. In any typical media event, the Right always sets the agenda and the "Left" responds, and in this way, they allow the Right to effectively control the news cycle.
By presenting the lunatic fringe as the Respectable Right (although there's really not much difference these days), the media keeps a seat at the table for the forces of reaction. Of course, we shouldn't be surprised by this. The conservative movement is insanely well-funded by wealthy patrons. The corporate news media - both its owners and its advertisers - have an interest in presenting the news in a way that does not interfere with their own privileges, and so will always give time to a political movement that stands up for the interests of the American oligarchy. An educated population would be able to see through these lies. But guess what? Most people don't know that much about the news. They form their opinions based on very superficial impressions of what goes on in the world, and in that arena, it's hard to beat the right-wing noise machine.
So the problem is that the disinformation and lies purveyed by Wingnut TV and Hate Radio reach an audience of largely uneducated Americans, which the Right preys upon by exploiting basic fears and prejudices (Immigrants! Gays! Blacks! Evil Muslim Terrorists!), as well as wedge issues like abortion, in order to get them to vote against their own interests. Once in power, the Right leads the forces of imperialism and rapacious capitalism, lowering the standard of living for workers, trashing the environment, and engaging in endless war with a never-ending supply of unfortunate civilians slaughtered by U.S. airstrikes at wedding parties. In short, they're ruining the world for my generation and each one after it.
It's tempting to point the finger at the Wingnut segment of the U.S. population: the dumbass, xenophobic, God-fearing, gay-hating, gun-loving hillbillies who watch Fox News and think that a millionaire blowhard like Bill O'Reilly, a Republican-talking-point robot like Sean Hannity, or a racist, sexist 300-pound Oxycontin addict, with a few failed marriages under his belt, who claims to be the paragon of "moral values", have their best interests at heart. These are the Americans who have barely any concept of the world outside their borders, who have no idea that every country in the developed world besides theirs have some form of universal health care, who think that wanting their country to bomb brown people on the other side of their world somehow makes them "tough"...at some level, you have to blame them for their own stupidity and gullibility. It takes all sorts to make up a society, and you will always have those undereducated buffoons who ascribe to what Matt Taibbi referred to as "
the peasant mentality."
However, I still can't let myself adopt the attitude of my brother, who suggested the other day, "who cares about a bunch of hillbillies?" The thing is, those hillbillies are actually an ever-shrinking minority in the U.S., and they support Republican politicians mainly because they lack the education to see how they're being misled. The majority of the American electorate voted for Obama, and even if most of them can't see past his celebrity-facade to see that he is a tool of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex (like all recent presidents), we can at the very least accept that they wanted some form of "change". Call me an optimist, but I prefer to believe that most people want very reasonable things from their politicians. The mass media today, meanwhile, serves to spin the policies and distract the populace so that they think they really do live in the greatest country on earth. To ascribe the policies of the United States governments to the voters is true on some level - there is some truth to the old adage that you get the government you deserve - but to take a society in which the ruling class systematically lies and distorts its way through the media every day, and blame its failings on the people who are fooled, is to some extent blaming the victims.
It's no coincidence that the United States is both the most religious country in the developed world and the one with the weakest labour movement. The American ruling elite has worked its whole history to maintain its privileges, to demonize supporters of labour unions as dangerous "socialists", to divide the working class by appealing to racial prejudices, and to distract the people from the faults of this world by pointing them to a fantasy afterlife in another. There's only one way to change that: by educating the people to the point where they can develop a sense of class consciousness.
The Globe and Mail is reporting that Quebec billionaire Pierre Karl Péladeau has plans to create a new, right-leaning 24-hour cable news channel in Canada modeled on the success of Fox News south of the border. I shouldn’t have to explain how serious this is, or how dangerous. But it’s my blog, so I will.
