Fine whine
Leftist scribes snatch despair from the jaws of opportunity
by Dan Kennedy
by Dan Kennedy
Stein was expounding on technology's limits. "We're going to have to change the world pretty substantially for these technologies to be valuable to people in a fundamental and long-term way," he said.
Uh, oh. It just so happens that a year and a half ago Stein told the New York Times that he was an admirer of the Shining Path, the Peruvian Maoist guerrilla group widely believed responsible for killing some 25,000 people. In other words, there's a pretty good chance that Stein's idea of desirable change isn't the same as yours or mine.
I wanted to confront Stein, but I knew I had to be careful. During a panel discussion the night before, Salim Muwakkil, a columnist for In These Times and the Chicago Sun-Times, was railing about the mainstream media, "where the troops of white supremacy are stationed. That's where we have to attack." A member of the audience demanded to know, given Muwakkil's status as a former top official of the Nation of Islam, whether "white supremacy" was code for "Jewish ownership of the media."
Okay, okay. The question was crudely worded and unnecessarily hostile, but Muwakkil could have at least given the guy an answer. But no. Instead, after the audience finished hissing and booing, two of Muwakkil's fellow panelists denounced his inquisitor. Muwakkil's sole response: "I rest my case."
Not wanting to give Stein a similar way out, I decided to make an end run: I asked him whether the Times's emphasis on his admiration for the Shining Path was "an example of the way mainstream media marginalize non-mainstream views."
Bull's-eye.
Why yes, Stein replied. But, he added, it didn't bother him all that much. After all, he does admire the Shining Path and its jailed leader, Abimael Guzmán. "On the one hand," he said benignly, "it marginalizes what we do at Voyager. On the other, I don't mind Voyager to be known as a company that makes money to publish, and not as a company that publishes to make money."
A few people looked at me askance. For a moment, I felt like someone who'd just farted during a Buddhist meditation service. And later, when Stein buttonholed me in the lobby to look at my name tag, I couldn't help but wonder whether he knows any guerrillas personally.
No joke
The Media & Democracy Congress, sponsored by the Institute for Alternative Journalism, was supposed to serve as a forum for developing strategies to counter the power of the mainstream media, now controlled by a handful of major corporations involved in everything from theme parks (ABC/Disney) to cable TV (most notably Time Warner/Turner/TCI) to nuclear power (CBS/Westinghouse and NBC/General Electric).
Liberal and leftist journalists working for alternative media are usually isolated from one another, and no doubt a lot of good will come out of this opportunity to get to know colleagues and activists from progressive organizations. Even if empty phrases such as "enable," "coalesce," "diversity," and "decentralized grassroots collaboration" did transform much of the discussion into mind-numbing irrelevance.
Indeed, what stood out was the oppressive seriousness of it all. I couldn't help but think how much fun P.J. O'Rourke would have had with this earnest, humorless crowd -- and not just for its embrace of people like Stein, who from his own comfortable affluence declares his solidarity with a butcher whose view of human rights is approximately the same as that of Pol Pot, or Henry Kissinger.
For one thing, there were the demographics. Although a smattering of young people was on hand, this was primarily a reunion of veterans from the 1960s and earlier, buffeted by several decades' worth of defeats. Graying heads outnumbered nose rings by a substantial margin. Quipped David Hallick, of Social Policy magazine, who is fairly young: "I don't think we've ever had an editorial meeting where we haven't had a debate about the Roosevelt Administration."
For another, very much related, thing, the tone of the conference was focused less on solutions than it was on whining and complaining about the power and influence of the Right and the abject helplessness of the Left. To be sure, this wasn't a universal theme. But it was dominant enough that the few optimists who spoke out usually prefaced their remarks by saying how struck they were by the pessimism of the majority. The opening-night speaker, Texas populist Jim Hightower, predicted, "This is going to be more fun than eating ice cream naked. And before this week is over, that's a distinct possibility."
It wasn't.
You'd think the Left would see this as a time of tremendous opportunity. Sure, conservatives control Congress and most of the media, and Bill Clinton is doing a pretty good impersonation of a moderate Republican. But the Internet has given those with an alternative view unprecedented power to get their message out. And Pat Buchanan's hateful campaign has had the bizarre effect of advancing issues that only progressives are in a position to deal with seriously, such as economic insecurity, a money-corrupted political system, and the pernicious effect of corporate-sponsored trade agreements such as NAFTA and GATT.
Certainly some progressives get it, including David Corn, Washington editor of the Nation, and Joel Rogers, a founder of the New Party. Yet the dominant mood of the congress was despair.
Typical was author/activist Loretta Ross, whose gloom is so deep that it seems to have left her disconnected from reality. She groused that right-wingers "publicly minimize their differences so they can present a united juggernaut," a statement completely oblivious to the historic split now taking place between the economic conservatives and the social conservatives within the Republican Party. At one point she even complained that it's difficult for the Left to reach out to the young when "22- and 23-year-olds have never known any president but Ronald Reagan." Say what?
Another speaker, Jeff Cohen, the head of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), was more grounded in the moment, but just as pessimistic. His complaint: that monopoly media organizations, working in league with conservatives, have succeeded in skewing the national conversation to the right, through think tanks, cable networks such as Pat Robertson's, op-ed pages, and talking-head shows such as CNN's Crossfire, promoted as a liberal-versus-conservative forum but in reality a debate between ultraconservatives and moderate centrists.
Cohen's pique can be excused: he just got passed over for the "liberal" seat recently vacated by Michael Kinsley. Besides, Cohen is right. Conservatives do dominate mainstream media, from the influential editorial page of the Wall Street Journal to The McLaughlin Group. Rupert Murdoch recently announced that he intends to create a conservative alternative to the supposedly liberal CNN, leading Cohen to joke that Murdoch's version of Crossfire will likely pit David Duke against that left-winger Lamar Alexander.
But the obsession of Cohen and other leftist critics with the perfidy of the mainstream media has blinded them to the opportunities presented by the Information Age. Indeed, what little optimism there was at the congress came mainly from the ever-ebullient Hightower and from what might be called the Cyberleft: people such as author Howard Rheingold, journalist Brock Meeks, and entrepreneur Omar Wasow, who runs a progressive cyberstation called New York Online.
"I think we're moving into an era where it's never been easier for an independent voice to be heard," Wasow said during a panel on "Technology and Democracy." For the hardcore, obsessed with their exclusion from, say, the opinion columns of the New York Times, that was bad enough. But then Wasow committed outright apostasy by criticizing proposals such as government-mandated universal e-mail service, saying that would destroy initiatives like AT&T's offer to give its customers free Internet access. Scattered moaning could be heard; a woman behind me murmured, "Oh, God, AT&T," as though invoking its very name was all the explanation needed.
Meeks is a good example of what a technologically adept progressive can accomplish. Two years ago he started CyberWire Dispatch , a free electronic newsletter that has been one of the most reliable sources of information on, among other things, religious-right efforts to ban "indecency" on the Internet ("Don't Quote Me," News, July 21, 1995). Now he's covering the presidential campaign for Pat Buchanan's Web site, a revelation that reached a wider audience when it was picked up by ABC's Nightline.
I ran into Meeks in a hallway and asked him what he made of the proceedings. "You hear a lot of whining," he replied, laughing and shaking his head. "I just want to stand up and say, `Stop the whining.' Why doesn't everybody stop complaining and just go fucking do it? It just gets me, because it's not that hard."
Alien nation
Herbert Chao Gunther had had enough. "I find myself embarrassed," said Gunther, who conducts public-relations and advertising campaigns for a variety of progressive causes, and who'd been drafted to participate in a panel on "Visions for a Democratic Future." He continued: "It isn't about who owns the media, it's about who wins. The reason we fail to win is because we're alienated from the core values of what this country is about. Pat Buchanan has taken our issues because he's not embarrassed to be patriotic. We act as if we were in a permanent state of adolescent rebellion. We frame things in ways that are bizarre, alien to a majority of Americans."
It was a message that needed to be heard, but Gunther's fellow panelists didn't want to hear it.
Author Urvashi Vaid, former director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, dismissed Gunther with a sneer. "I think it's the difference between people who do focus groups and people who organize," she said.
Nation columnist Katha Pollitt added she was tired of progressives being told they should embrace mainstream phenomena that are hostile to their values -- "like religion, or Clinton" -- so they can fit in. "I see the Left as constantly trying to portray itself as more normal than it really is," she said, making it clear that "normal" was not something to aspire to.
Well, maybe. But Jim Hightower shows how much more a populist with a sense of humor can do than a grim leftist obsessed with ideological nitpicking.
Last fall Hightower's radio talk show was canceled shortly after his network, ABC, was bought by Disney. But Hightower, a former editor of the Texas Observer and former Texas agriculture commissioner, has no intention of going away. He writes a column for AlterNet, the Institute for Alternative Journalism's wire service. He's starting up a newsletter. And in perhaps the perfect example of how information technology makes it possible to fight back, he now distributes his radio commentaries in RealAudio over the World-Wide Web.
Hightower compares the plight of the progressive movement to that of the populists in the 1870s and '80s. Excluded from the mainstream, they started up their own newspapers, magazines, and speakers' bureau to take on the entrenched interests of the day.
"Did they just fall over and whine and wring their hands?" he asks. "Not at all. There's an old Slavic proverb: you can fight the gods and still have fun."
Progressives who feel overwhelmed by the forces of reaction might take another Hightower proverb to heart: "No building is too tall for a small dog to lift his leg on."