Just as I was blogging about hate [this is government jargon] speech having the ability to become inflammatory and harmful (something some libertarians don’t seem able to understand), along comes a GOP operative to provide the requisite moronic example – he compared a gorilla to Michelle Obama.
Frankly, this isn’t only bigotry, it’s an example of such oral incontinence the man shouldn’t be let outside without Pampers around his mouth.
Animal imagery is an important clue to racist tendencies in a speech. Calling someone a “bitch” is fairly generic, but thinking up specific animal comparisons that have clearly racist histories to them is inflammatory and offensive. How do people not get that?
And by the way, why do these terms always seem to come out of people who don’t particularly look like the flower of the human species themselves?
I feel personally offended by this. Not having Scandinavian features and a bustless, hipless physique doesn’t make you ugly. That’s cultural conditioning. You don’t have to subscribe to the Michelle-is-Jackie-we’re-all-back-in-Camelot-whoopdeedoo being peddled, but what is this ugly reference?
And then I noticed in the blogosphere recently a few references to Jewish people that also use animal imagery – parasites, vipers.
With women, it”s bitch, dog, and body parts – but that’s almost standard.
We don’t want to recognize the faces of other people. Reducing them to bodies, body parts, animals, animality…is a way of doing that.
Very troubling.
Words are powerful. We can’t use freedom in essentially cowardly and self-destructive ways without causing a reaction. People remember attacks like this for a very long time. They don’t forget them. I recall reacting to some of the language about Jerry Falwell at his death. I loathed many of Falwell’s Christian Zionist positions. But the language used about him was so venomous and degrading, I felt the critics lost their own self-respect and dignity when they wallowed in it. [The piece is “God’s Son, Falwell’s Mother and the Rest of Us ‘Ho’s”- at Dissident Voice, 2006].
And then people ask what a middle-class, privileged black women has to be angry about… How about – not being able to escape this sort of thing even when your husband is in the White House?
Criticize the Obamas as savagely as you want for their policies. Leave their children, their bodies, their private lives alone. Same with the Palins.
Author Archives: Lila
Flight AND Fight..
My latest piece at Lew Rockwell, answers some questions readers had asked me about leaving the US:
“My last piece, “Time to Run,” provoked a lot of reaction, almost all of it positive, but some negative.
The readers who liked it wanted advice on where to run. That’s a tall order and I’ll come back to them in another piece.
Those who didn’t like it brandished a few arguments that ought to have a stake driven right through them immediately.
Here goes, point by point.
1. Running away doesn’t help
1. Actually, running away is often the best response to a bad situation.
Speaking practically, when a dump truck turns into your drive, mows down your rhododendrons and heads toward you, do you stand your ground yelling Sicilian imprecations at the driver until he rolls over you too? Or do you leap aside nimbly, take a photo, and call a lawyer? You have as much chance getting through to the poisonous shills in DC with constitutional arguments, as you have charming a rabid pit bull with Shakespeare.
Speaking theoretically, your body and brain are hardwired to either put up or shut up, a “fight or flight” response built into the structure of the autonomic nervous system. That is the physiological term for what you think of as your “lizard brain.” Fight or flight is the either/or response that helped your ancestors survive. It’s not the best way to tackle complex problems, but when it gets down to basic survival, it’s a handy guide.
And how do you know when your survival is at stake?
Check your gut response…..”
Read the rest at Lew Rockwell.
[I will be posting reader email on my blog and will respond there, since my email is often compromised]
A Red and Blue Two-Part Lobotomy
“California is broke. Good. They deserve it. It’s not as if bankruptcy were an act of God, like getting hit on the head by a giant meteor. It was deliberate stupidity. Spend more than you make, and you end up on the street. I’m supposed to feel sorry for that? I’ve known roundworms with better sense. As I understand it, the Democrats refuse to cut spending and the Republicans refuse to raise taxes. See? A lobotomy in two-part harmony. Sounds like the whole country.”
Media theorist Debord and the Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord and the Society of the Spectacle
(Lila: Apologies. Looking through my archives, I came across this broken link and just fixed it. The source is Douglas Kellner, “Media Spectacle”).
The concept of the “society of the the spectacle” developed by French theorist Guy Debord and his comrades in the Situationist International has had major impact on a variety of contemporary theories of society and culture.[1] For Debord, spectacle “unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena” (Debord 1967: #10). Debord’s conception, first developed in the 1960s, continues to circulate through the Internet and other academic and subcultural sites today. It describes a media and consumer society, organized around the production and consumption of images, commodities, and staged events.
Building on this concept, I argue that media spectacles are those phenomena of media culture which embody contemporary society’s basic values, serve to enculturate individuals into its way of life, and dramatize its controversies and struggles, as well as its modes of conflict resolution. They include media extravaganzas, sports events, political happenings, and those attention-grabbing occurrences that we call news — a phenomena that itself has been subjected to the logic of spectacle and tabloidization in the era of the media sensationalism, political scandal and contestation, seemingly unending cultural war, and the new phenomenon of Terror War. Thus, while Debord presents a rather generalized and abstract notion of spectacle, I engage specific examples of media spectacle and how they are produced, constructed, circulated, and function in the present era.
As we enter a new millennium, the media are becoming more technologically dazzling and are playing an ever-escalating role in everyday life. Under the influence of a multimedia image culture, seductive spectacles fascinate the denizens of the media and consumer society and involve them in the semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, and consumption, which deeply influence thought and action. In Debord’s words: “When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior. The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs (#18). According to Debord, sight, “the most abstract, the most mystified sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present day society” (bid).
Experience and everyday life are thus shaped and mediated by the spectacles of media culture and the consumer society. For Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization; it is a “permanent opium war” (#44) which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life — recovering the full range of their human powers through creative practice. Debord’s concept of the spectacle is integrally connected to the concept of separation and passivity, for in submissively consuming spectacles, one is estranged from actively producing one’s life. Capitalist society separates workers from the products of their labor, art from life, and consumption from human needs and self-directing activity, as individuals inertly observe the spectacles of social life from within the privacy of their homes (#25 and #26). The Situationist project, by contrast, involved an overcoming of all forms of separation, in which individuals would directly produce their own life and modes of self-activity and collective practice.
The correlative to the spectacle for Debord is thus the spectator, the reactive viewer and consumer of a social system predicated on submission, conformity, and the cultivation of marketable difference. The concept of the spectacle therefore involves a distinction between passivity and activity and consumption and production, condemning lifeless consumption of spectacle as an alienation from human potentiality for creativity and imagination. The spectacular society spreads its wares mainly through the cultural mechanisms of leisure and consumption, services and entertainment, ruled by the dictates of advertising and a commercialized media culture. This structural shift to a society of the spectacle involves a commodification of previously non-colonized sectors of social life and the extension of bureaucratic control to the realms of leisure, desire, and everyday life. Parallel to the Frankfurt School conception of a “totally administered” or “one-dimensional” society (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972; Marcuse 1964), Debord states that “The spectacle is the moment when the consumption has attained the total occupation of social life” (#42). Here exploitation is raised to a psychological level; basic physical privation is augmented by “enriched privation” of pseudo-needs; alienation is generalized, made comfortable, and alienated consumption becomes “a duty supplementary to alienated production” (#42).
Since Debord’s theorization of the society of the spectacle in the 1960s and 1970s, spectacle culture has expanded in every area of life. In the culture of the spectacle, commercial enterprises have to be entertaining to prosper and as Michael J. Wolf (1999) argues, in an “entertainment economy,” business and fun fuse, so that the E-factor is becoming major aspect of business.[2] Via the “entertainmentization” of the economy, television, film, theme parks, video games, casinos, and so forth become major sectors of the national economy. In the U.S., the entertainment industry is now a $480 billion industry, and consumers spend more on having fun than on clothes or health care (Wolf 1999: 4).[3]In a competitive business world, the “fun factor” can give one business the edge over another. Hence, corporations seek to be more entertaining in their commercials, their business environment, their commercial spaces, and their web sites. Budweiser ads, for instance, feature talking frogs who tell us nothing about the beer, but who catch the viewers’ attention, while Taco Bell deploys a talking dog, and Pepsi uses Star Wars characters. Buying, shopping, and diningoutare coded as an “experience,” as businesses adopt a theme-park style. Places like the Hard Rock Cafe and the House of Blues are not renowned for their food, after all; people go there for the ambience, to buy clothing, and to view music and media memorabilia. It is no longer good enough just to have a web site, ithasto be an interactive spectacle, featuring not only products to buy, but music and videos to download, games to play, prizes to win, travel information, and “links to other cool sites.”To succeed in theultracompetitive global marketplace, corporations need to circulate their image and brand name so business and advertising combine in the promotion of corporations as media spectacles. Endless promotion circulates the McDonald’s Golden Arches, Nike’s Swoosh, or the logos of Apple, Intel, or Microsoft. In the brand wars between commodities, corporations need to make their logos or “trademarks” a familiar signpost in contemporary culture. Corporations place their logos on their products, in ads, in the spaces of everyday life, and in the midst of media spectacles like important sports events, TV shows, movie product placement, and wherever they can catch consumer eyeballs, to impress their brand name on a potential buyer. Consequently, advertising, marketing, public relations and promotion are an essential part of commodity spectacle in the global marketplace.Celebrity too is manufactured and managed in the world of media spectacle. Celebrities are the icons of media culture, the gods and goddesses of everyday life. To become a celebrity requires recognition as a star player in the field of media spectacle, be it sports, entertainment, or politics. Celebrities have their handlers and image managers to make sure that their celebrities continue to be seen and positively perceived by publics. Just as with corporate brand names, celebrities become brands to sell their Madonna, Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, or Jennifer Lopez product and image. In a media culture, however, celebrities are always prey to scandal and thus must have at their disposal an entire public relations apparatus to manage their spectacle fortunes, to make sure their clients not only maintain high visibility but keep projecting a positive image. Of course, within limits, “bad” and transgressions can also sell and so media spectacle always contains celebrity dramas that attract public attention and can even define an entire period, as when the O.J. Simpson murder trials and Bill Clinton sex scandals dominated the media in the mid and late 1990s.
Christopher Dawson on Hostility to Religion (Comment added)
“Behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture.”
— Christopher Dawson
My Comment:
As I’ve written, I am an agnostic and a skeptic….not so much about God, as about language. Which means, I read Dawson or Voegelin, with as much attention (or inattention) as I read Marx. The latter does not seem any more “scientific” than the former to me. Indeed, the only thing that makes something a religion is the hostility to opposition that adheres to it. [correction: this is an overstatement. It should read “one of the things that make something a religion.”] From that point of view, most of those who believe themselves to be actively hostile to “god” and “religion” are actually devout believers – their temperament is exactly like the rabid fundamentalists they denounce.
I, on the other hand, believe myself to be a Christian agnostic and a Christian skeptic.
How can I subscribe to such a contradiction in terms? [For those unfamiliar with theology, there are many leading theologians who are quite skeptical or even unbelieving in “god”].
For me, it is not a question of lacking faith in God. That is quite a simple-minded kind of contrarianism.
My heresy is a little deeper. I lack faith in language. I have no faith in words as a fixed repository of meaning.
As for “god” – the conventions and symbols one grows up with can never really be uprooted and it seems wiser and truer to accept them as equally the outgrowth of the mind as logic or empiricism. If I must confess disbelief in “god,” then I must confess it equally in “man,” “truth,” “justice” or “logic,” “you” or “me.”
What naive empiricists never realize is that what endows facts with their “factuality” is the “mind.” There is no escaping that.
Not do we have to go from naive empiricism to naive idealism, i.e., we don’t have to leap from “just the facts, ma’am” to “Just my opinion.”
Instead, we continually adjust our thoughts and subjective experience to the hard edges of facts so-called, to the limitations of objective experience. We do that through the refinement of our language. We continually reflect the tension of existence in a conditional, fractured, and fluctuating reality through language that expresses the contradiction and paradoxes inherent in our existence as mind-body.
In that spirit, I have no problem with affirming:
Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium…..
Nietzsche On the Individual and the Tribe
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
More Web Abuse
OK. A new one. Shortly after my blog posts on antisemitism, the gunman, and racist language, I get an email in my inbox saying I’m subscribed to Pak Alert.
I didn’t pay any mind and didn’t click on it, thinking it was spam. Then I googled Pak Alert, which seems to be a news group. Glancing through it, I see it has the Protocols of the Elders of Zion listed….and some antisemitic language that I didn’t bother to read through since it was clear what it was.
I deleted the mail, thinking it was spam.
But then I got to thinking about how I got the mail. So I went and and checked and sure enough, someone had subscribed me to the group. That’s abuse, and I reported it twice to Google.
Wondering if someone wanted to create an embarrassing record to “prove” I was anti-Semitic, since I’d subscribed to the group.
Now, how did that happen? Did they get my password or can you just add an email without permission? No idea. I don’t frequent chat groups.
Tomorrow, I’m going through and making note of some of the things that have happened since I started writing for the web. It runs the gamut from name-calling to hacking, spamming, stalking, provocation, libel, threats, delinking articles, plagiarism, copyright infringement, personal harassment, forgery, invasion of privacy, sending out private email to public groups…….
Not complaining, merely observing the follies of my fellow men.
And wondering if they’re worth it.
The Neurolinguistic Programming of Reality
“An excellent example of globalist
redefinition of a common term
is the use of the word “state” in place of “country”
. When the media and leaders
refer to a country like Iran as a “state”
this has the same or similar effect as the
British globalists referring to the United States
as “the colonies”, which is off-handed at best.
This type of redefinition of terms is
designed to belittle the conception of a
supposed and/or perceived enemy by making
them appear less important and smaller in perspective
to the aggressors. Most soldiers would be
more willing to attack a “rogue state” than an “enemy
country”. The actual usage of this type of
terminology actually creates a mass perception
that the said country has already been assimilated
into the globalist empire and is simply acting out of
turn and is deserving of punitive damage whether
compensatory or offensive or both.
However, the true modus operandi
of the globalists is essentially Hegelian
in nature. Time and time again as a
species we can observe the workings of “thesis,
antitheses and synthesis”.An excellent example would be the attacks on
the World Trade Center of 2001.
Thesis: “terrorists are a continual threat
to our liberty”. Antitheses: the
attack on the World Trade Center. Synthesis:
the Patriot Acts and Office of Homeland
Security, also known as: the loss of liberty
in the name of security…….There are many conclusions to be drawn when
looking at the cycle of empires, but one
stands clearly: ruling is a science, and it
involves coercion whether via induced
suffering, psychological
torture and/or destabilization….”
— Max Mitchell, “Foundations of War:
Terminology of the New World.”
Palins Fight Back Against Letterman’s Lewd Jokes About Daughter
From New York Daily News:
“Concerning Letterman’s comments about my young daughter (and I doubt he’d ever dare make such comments about anyone else’s daughter): ‘Laughter incited by sexually-perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl is not only disgusting, but it reminds us some Hollywood/NY entertainers have a long way to go in understanding what the rest of America understands — that acceptance of inappropriate sexual comments about an underage girl, who could be anyone’s daughter, contributes to the atrociously high rate of sexual exploitation of minors by older men who use and abuse others.’ ”
Todd Palin added: “Any ‘jokes’ about raping my 14-year-old are despicable. Alaskans know it and I believe the rest of the world knows it, too.”
My Comment
Not being much of a fan of Governor Palin’s, I think I can say that my outrage over the way she’s been treated by the media is probably pretty objective. So I’m glad to see her rip David Letterman on his tasteless (to put it mildly) comments. Missing from the column is another Letterman joke – about Sarah Palin’s look – that of a “slutty flight attendant.”
Perhaps next time, some one should “joke” about Letterman’s own looks. How about a “pedophilic bank teller”? Sounds shocking when it’s done to a man, doesn’t it?
Update:
This is quote from Bernhardt’s “funny” routine about Palin from October, which I blogged here (October 2). I’m posting it again to show how the anti-Palin “jokes” go far beyond what would have been said about any other candidate without provoking censure or outrage. That’s only the beginning of the routine. I took out the last part which went something like “one of my big black brothers here in New York will rape you” – that’s not a mistake – she really said that. I took it off because in the context of the elections, you never know whom it might set off. It manages to be offensive to Christians, black men, females, and Jews (yes, if I were Jewish, I’d be really unhappy to have Sarah speak for the Old Testament, a fine book that doesn’t need her in-ter-pre-tay- shun).
Now the election is over, I think it’s not irresponsible to post it in paraphrase in the context of proving that there’s a history of this sort of invective against Sarah Palin. Recall that the New Yorker cover of Obama as a terrorist (as stupid an editorial choice as I’ve ever seen) and the cartoon about killing the chimp both were widely considered incitatory – and rightly so.
But when it comes to a white, Protestant woman with fundamentalist beliefs, from a small town, who is pro-life, she doesn’t deserve any consideration whatever…
If this isn’t sexual, racial, and class-based discrimination, what is?
The woman is running for high office, and she’s a slut because she happens to be attractive? That doesn’t affect her job performance? That doesn’t affect how others see her and her work?
Phooey. Something really stinks in the way people think about these things here in the US.
Sorry. No intention to go all nationalist. But actually, Indian female politicians are treated more equitably.* No wonder the US hasn’t had a female president.
Now you got Uncle Women, like Sarah Palin, who jumps on the sh*t and points her fingers at other women. Turncoat bitch! Don’t you f*ckin’ reference Old Testament, b*tch! You stay with your new Goyish crappy shiksa funky bullsh*t! Don’t you touch my Old Testament, you b*tch! Because we have left it open for interpre-ta-tion! It is no longer taken literally! You whore in your f*ckin’ cheap New Vision cheap-ass plastic glasses and your [sneering voice] hair up. A Tina Fey-Megan Mullally broke down bullshit moment.” (rest of the comment censored)
*On second thoughts, I remember some of the language used about Sonia Gandhi, which was also racial. I wrote a piece about it on the net, “The New Post-Colonial Racism.” But it wasn’t misogynistic…
88-year old Gunman In Shoot-Out Inside Holocaust Memorial Museum
“An 88-year-old gunman with a violent and virulently anti-Semitic past opened fire with a rifle inside the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday, fatally wounding a security guard before being shot himself by other officers, authorities said.
The assailant was hospitalized in critical condition, leaving behind a sprawling investigation by federal and local law enforcement and expressions of shock from the Israeli government and a prominent Muslim organization…….
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said von Brunn’s Web site has long been listed as a hate site.”
My Comment
It’s interesting how shootings in recent years have had some connection to the Holocaust (one heroic victim at Virginia Tech was a Holocaust survivor and a Holocaust survivor fell victim to the Mumbai attacks).
Von Brunn, according to reports, thinks “Jews control the Federal Reserve” and the banking system and are basically evil. He has a long-standing relationship with Willis Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby, a white supremacist and anti-Semite.
His is also one of many people who question President Obama’s birth certificate, a group that’s apparently been christened the “birther” movement by many of our liberal-left pundits. At TPM Cafe, Joshua Marshall hastens to let us know that your ordinary, garden “birther” (I first thought they meant some kind of natural child-bearing advocate) is only a harmless wing-nut, but alas, not Von Braun.
Note:
It seems very clear from his previous arrests, writings and statements, that Von Brunn is NOT harmless. While I certainly think the federal government isn’t above milking every bit of lawless behavior to impose further controls, the fact is bigotry does increase during times of stress. And the most recent “hate crimes” legislation, does, in my estimate, try to deal with a broad range of victims – including anti-Christian bigotry in its language.
That’s a decided improvement.
I’ve been looking over some sites and postings that I’d consider antisemitic (this applies to other forms of racism or bigotry) and here are some thoughts:
1. Noting the ethnicity/religion of someone (especially if it’s germane to the story) is not racism/antisemitism/bigotry
2. Drawing an ineluctable connection between the ethnicity/religion and the behavior is racism/antisemitism/bigotry (the operative word is ineluctable).
Of course, in ordinary life, people do generalize about other races, even if it’s only in their own minds. In a stressful situation that might be understandable. (You get hit by a car and the driver, from a different race, ignores your plight and speeds off…you react by saying, “all so-and-so always act like this…”).
This sort of reaction is a momentary generalization or simplification of the kind that the brain is actually biologically prone to make (creating a binary of us versus them). The feeling crosses over and becomes racist when the reactive element in the response is deliberately cultivated and sustained through willfully ignoring all other factors, explanations, and theories.
Here’s what I mean.
It’s one thing to observe that there’s a high proportion of Jewish people working in finance and banking. There is. To deny that is to be out of touch with reality. The danger in trying to pretend this reality isn’t so deny reality is an obvious one. Uninformed people will then assume that every other part of what you’re saying is equally untrue and out of touch with reality. And they will assume every other thing they believe from appearances alone is true, even when in those cases, appearances are deceiving.
Now, if you are not a bigot, after that preliminary observation, several other things will (or should) occur to you. The first is that Jewish people are well-represented in practically all intellectually oriented professions. This itself should dilute the strength of any argument tending in an anti-Semitic direction.
Perhaps the dominance of Jewish people in banking could then be attributed to other factors – historical and cultural, rather than to “Jewishness.”
Now, I realize I am on tricky grounds here, because sensibilities have become so over wrought that any misstatement can be construed as intentionally offensive. So, let me first say, if I do make a misstep, it’s not intentional and will be glad to restate my position, if someone points out why it might be offensive.
More later..
Meanwhile, Jeremiah Wright has gotten into hot water for saying “the Jews” have kept him from Obama.
And, the thought police (in this case Newsweek) is after Oprah as well. Turns out the Queen of Talk is sympathetic to the anti-vaccine folks – the ones who think that vaccines are often about big pharma’s profts more than about your health. The article also criticized Oprah on other grounds, but methinks that’s the crux of the matter. The feds might have an interest in nixing any possible joining of forces between left-oriented alternative medicine advocates and right-oriented ones, in advance of selling swine flu vaccine to the public.
A swine flu pandemic also makes a convenient pretext to control the movement of people between countries.
Of course, it could all be coincidental, and I could just be another “wingnut” on the loose….
But so far, the wing-nuts are winning the credibility contest.