Ed Batista

Martin Luther King Day

Today is the 21st celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and once again I'm marking it by watching King's "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered on August 28th, 1963.  (American Rhetoric's outstanding page includes a transcript and streaming audio, as well as the YouTube video below.)

If you're looking for a way to reflect on King's legacy, I encourage you to take 18 minutes out of your day and watch the whole thing; it always chokes me up a bit and makes me feel both proud and ashamed to be an American.  On a related note, I recently read Debra Dickerson's The End of Blackness, and it's far and away the most thought-provoking book I've encountered on the subject of race in America.  I hope to talk further about why I found it so compelling in the near future, but for now this brief mention will have to do.

Debord, Stewart, Colbert

In an astute assessment of Stephen Colbert's White House Correspondents  Association performance (Parts One, Two and Three on YouTube), Salon's Michael Scherer identifies Colbert and his contemporary and mentor Jon Stewart as the latest (and most politically influential) public figures in a lineage that stretches back to the French situationist Guy Debord:

Obviously, Colbert is not the first ironic warrior to train his sights on the powerful. What the insurgent culture jammers at Adbusters did for Madison Avenue, and the Barbie Liberation Organization did for children's toys, and Seinfeld did for the sitcom, and the Onion did for the small-town newspaper, Jon Stewart discovered he could do for television news. Now Colbert, Stewart's spawn, has taken on the right-wing message machine.

In the late 1960s, the Situationists in France called such ironic mockery "détournement," a word that roughly translates to "abduction" or "embezzlement." It was considered a revolutionary act, helping to channel the frustration of the Paris student riots of 1968. They co-opted and altered famous paintings, newspapers, books and documentary films, seeking subversive ideas in the found objects of popular culture. "Plagiarism is necessary," wrote Guy Debord, the famed Situationist, referring to his strategy of mockery and semiotic inversion. "Progress demands it. Staying close to an author's phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas."

This analysis explains perfectly why Stewart and now Colbert have had such a significant impact on our political culture (and it also explains why I'm so annoyed by Stewart's shrugging, "Hey, I'm just a comedian" disclaimers).

As Scherer makes clear, Stewart essentially plagiarized the network news, and now Colbert's doing the same  with talk-show pundits.  They're taking an established cultural form and turning it against itself.  And this plagiarism primarily serves to highlight the fundamental falsehood of the original.  It's an intensely political act that can also be side-splittingly funny (although Colbert's White House Correspondents performance was over-long and poorly paced), but the humor can't be separated from the underlying critique.  If Stewart really were just a comedian, he wouldn't be nearly as funny.

But Scherer's Salon piece doesn't follow through on the implications of invoking Debord, and it's worth taking a longer look at the man's profoundly unfunny ideas.  Like many radical critics of contemporary society, Debord never came up with an alternative vision that could be implemented.  And his pessimistic worldview was surely influenced by the depression and personal problems that led to his suicide in 1994.  But these factors don't eliminate the analytical brilliance of many of his insights.  From 1967's Society of the Spectacle:

1. In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles...

6. Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society's unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life...

9. In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.

This says a lot to me about Stewart and Colbert's success and influence.  Stewart was not a news anchor, of course, just as Colbert was not a pundit, but decades of immersion in the ultimate society of the spectacle have taught us that even "real" news anchors and pundits are acting out roles, and so Stewart and Colbert had license to do the same.  And their actual message, well-understood by their audiences, is in direct opposition to what they appear to be saying.  The true is a moment of the false.  So by taking on these roles, Stewart and Colbert have become them.

No matter how much Stewart demurs, he is now a "real" anchor and Colbert is clearly on his way to becoming a "real" pundit.  Some critics--and even Stewart himself--like to use the fact that an increasing number of people rely on Stewart's "Daily Show" as their primary source of news as an example of cultural decline.  I think that's true, but it's not because people are stupid, which is the subtext of that argument; it's because people are smart.  They're sufficiently smart and media-savvy to know that A) Stewart is an incisive political commentator, and B) the "real" broadcasts and talk shows are not only boring and patronizing, they're also at least part bullshit--they're spectacles.

Debord would probably see Stewart and Colbert's success as yet another spectacle, and I understand that logic.  Stewart and Colbert aren't working on radical journals to circulate among a few dozen of their similarly disaffected friends.  They're reaching millions of people through television and mass-market books and having a significant impact on the culture at large (and presumably making millions of dollars in the process.)  They are, in fact, spectacles themselves.

If you inherently distrust the spectacle, as Debord did, this is probably a recipe for despair.  Stewart and Colbert have embraced Debord's critical methods, but their successful use of those methods means that they've also embraced the apparatus of the spectacle.  That success has come because of--not despite--their highly critical and politicized perspective, but the society of the spectacle has no trouble absorbing that critique, because it does nothing to challenge the spectacle itself.

Fair enough, but I can't help but take a more optimistic perspective.  (Not that it's hard to have a sunnier worldview than Debord's.)  Yes, we're all deeply embedded in the society of the spectacle, and that's never going to change.  But Stewart and Colbert's success in employing the apparatus of the spectacle to mount substantive challenges to established political and media hierarchies suggests that the spectacle itself is inherently neutral.  There's no tautology that will inevitably lead the society of the spectacle back into the dark heart of fascism--in fact, the spectacle can be an effective anti-fascist tool.

The spectacle is also, quite obviously, a source of great satisfaction and an object of intense fascination.  We love spectacles; that's what makes them so successful.  And if, as I do, you accept the idea that spectacles can be employed for salutary purposes as well as malign ones, then the issue boils down to one's view on consumer capitalism (which, I'd argue, will always triumph over competing worldviews largely because of its superior ability to create compelling spectacles.)

Does consumer capitalism fundamentally respond to and fill--or manufacture and exploit--our individual desires?  If you believe the latter, then you're back in the boat with Debord; consumer capitalism's mastery of the spectacle has turned us all into sheep waiting to be fleeced.  If you believe the former, then life's not perfect, but it's a lot rosier; for better and for worse, we get the society/politics/culture we deserve.

I'm not naive about the influence of advertising or other tools at capitalism's command, but I'm firmly in the former camp.  And so even though I disagree with a number of Stewart and Colbert's positions (and even though Stewart's disingenuous denials of political influence drive me nuts), I'm thrilled by their existence and success.

By putting Debord's critical methods into practice on some of the biggest stages our society has to offer, Stewart and Colbert are casting a harsh spotlight on the extent to which the object of their ridicule--not just news broadcasts and talk-show pundits, but our entire political and media culture--relies on insincerity, on falsehoods, and on the gullibility of the audience.  In contrast, Stewart and Colbert are saying to their audience, "We're smart enough to know how smart you are, and together we're all going to have a laugh at those idiots' expense."

This thrills me primarily because my foundational belief is that people should be free to make choices for themselves, and if you believe that people are smart and not stupid, it's a short step from there to respecting their freedom.  (That actually puts me at odds with any number of liberal supporters and conservative critics of Stewart and Colbert, but that's a post for another day.)

Many thanks to Michael Scherer for framing this discussion around Guy Debord.  I've been intrigued by Stewart and Colbert and the success of their form of political discourse for some time now without being able to fully understand why, and seeing them as Debord's spiritual descendants is a brilliant insight.

tags: guy debord jon stewart stephen colbert michael scherer salon white house correspondents

Andrew Sullivan at Time

Andrew Sullivan moved to Time last week, and it's interesting that  what once would have seemed like a major event almost escaped my notice entirely.  Sullivan did more than any other single writer to get me reading blogs, not just because he was so early to the game or because 9/11 and the War on Terror gave his writing a uniquely compelling context, but because (as I wrote last February), he "blazed a path for people like myself who don't feel particularly well-represented by the reigning ideologies on the Right or the Left."

When Sullivan temporarily retired from blogging last year,
I missed him, but it wasn't difficult to fill that void.  Perhaps not suprisingly, Sullivan couldn't stay away from blogging, but I never got back into the habit of reading him--partly because I was simply tired of the shrillness of the blogosphere's political discourse and found myself more fulfilled by reading and writing on other topics, and partly because I felt that Sullivan himself had become somewhat shrill in response to his critics.  (While I'd praised him as "a sassy, snarky writer with a keen bullshit detector," I suppose the line between snarky and shrill is finer than I once thought.)

But reminded of his presence by the move to Time, I've added him back to my Bloglines subscriptions--I'm curious to see if I stick with it.

On a related note:  This is a win-win for both Sullivan and Time--he's freed from the headaches of maintaining his site while sacrificing relatively little (so far) in the way of branding, and they get the attention and traffic that come with a bigfoot blogger.  But I also sense that missed opportunities in the past have brought Sullivan and Time together today, and they're hoping to make up for lost time.

For example, a number of serious political bloggers who followed in Sullivan's footsteps have turned their sites into sustainable and freestanding destinations: Daily Kos, Instapundit, Eschaton, Michelle Malkin, and PowerLine, to name just a few that get more than twice Sullivan's daily traffic, according to the TTLB rankings.

And plenty of media & news sites are far more popular than Time.com, according to Alexa.  As of today, Time is a respectable #1,087 in Alexa's traffic rankings, but the BBC Online is #22, CNN is #26, the New York Times is #72, the Washington Post is #196, USA Today is #240, Forbes is #270, Fox News is #290, Reuters is #291, and the Wall Street Journal is #399.

Those are perhaps unfair comparisons, but I think its fair to say that neither Time nor Sullivan took full advantage of their respective opportunities (Time as the leading pre-Web newsweekly, Sullivan as the first political blogger with a national profile), and that perhaps this union will be a fresh start for both of them.

tags: blogging journalism andrew sullivan time time magazine

Listening to Teddy Roosevelt

Speaking in 1919, the last year of his life, Teddy Roosevelt actually has a very timely message:

I prefer to work with moderate, with rational conservatives, provided only that they do in good faith strive forward toward the light.  But when they halt and turn their backs to the light, sit with the [?] and the seats of reaction, then I must part company with them.  We the people cannot turn back.  Our aim must be steady, wise progress.  It would be well if our people would study the history of a sister republic.

All the woes of France for a century and a quarter have been due to the folly of her people in splitting into the two camps of unreasonable conservatism and unreasonable radicalism.  Had free revolutionary France listened to men like Turgot and backed them up, all would have gone well.  But the beneficiaries of privilege, the Bourbon reactionaries, the short-sighted ultra-conservatives turned down Turgot, and then found that instead of him they had obtained Robespierre.  They gained twenty years freedom from all restraint and reform at the cost of the whirlwind of the Red Terror, and in their turn the unbridled extremists of the Terror induced a blind reaction.  And so with convulsion and oscillation from one extreme to another, with alternations of violent radicalism and violent Bourbonism, the French people went through misery...

May we profit from the experiences of our brother republicans across the water, and go forward steadily avoiding all wild extremes, and may our ultra-conservatives remember that the rule of the Bourbons brought on the Revolution, and may our would-be revolutionaries remember that no Bourbon was ever such a dangerous enemy of the people and their freedom as the professed friend of both, Robespierre.

There is no danger of a revolution in this country, but there is grave discontent and unrest, and in order to remove them there is need of all the wisdom and probity...we have at our command.

Friends, our task as Americans is to strive for social and industrial justice achieved through the genuine rule of the people.  This is our end, our purpose. The methods for achieving the end are merely expedients, to be finally accepted or rejected according as actual experience shows that they worked well or ill.

But in our heart, we must have this lofty purpose and we must strive for it in all earnestness and sincerity, or our work will come to nothing. In order to succeed, we need leaders of inspired idealism, leaders to whom are granted great visions, who dream greatly and strive to make their dreams come true, who can kindle the people with the fire from their own burning souls.

The leader for the time being, whoever he may be, is but an instrument to be used until broken and then to be cast aside.  And if he is worth his salt, he will care no more when he is broken than a soldier cares when he is sent where his life is forfeit in order that the victory may be won.  In the long fight for righteousness, the watchword for all of us is "Spend and be spent."

Many thanks to the Department of Special Collections at the Donald C. Davidson Library, UC Santa Barbara, who have made available more than 5,000 early recordings through their Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project, and thanks to Jody Rosen who pointed me in this direction in Slate's 2005 year-end cultural roundup.

tags: teddy roosevelt

Martin Luther King Day

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday--he would have been 77 yesterday--and no doubt it'll be the source of much back-patting by some over how far we've come and much hand-wringing by others over how far we've yet to go.  I'm of both minds simultaneously, so you'll have to look elsewhere for definitive Deep Thoughts on progress and/or injustice.

I'm simply marking the day by listening to King's I Have a Dream speech (streaming MP3, as well as a transcript), delivered on August 28th, 1963, in front of the Lincoln Monument in Washington, DC.  Nearly forty-three years later...it leaves me inspired by how far we've come and shamed by how far we've yet to go.

(Thanks to American Rhetoric for making this and hundreds of other historic speeches available.)

Indian Casinos Gambling with Workers' Rights

According to a Peter Byrne article in Salon, the United Auburn Indian Community is getting away with sexual harassment and worse at their Thunder Valley Casino, located near Sacramento:

In a civil lawsuit filed in 2005 with the Placer County Superior Court, [Cheryl] Dalton, [her daughter Elizabeth] Ward and five other women -- all former employees of Thunder Valley Casino -- allege gender and age discrimination, sexual harassment, wrongful termination, and violation of state and federal labor codes by casino management. A casino hostess, Sundi Lyons, claims she was raped by one of the Thunder Valley managers.

The casino and tribe responded in a legal brief that the case should be dismissed because the tribe is immune from civil lawsuits and its "sovereign immunity extends to the casino because it is legally inseparable from the tribe."

Placer County Superior Court Commissioner Margaret Wells agreed with the tribe and threw out the womens' suit on November 15, 2005, but they're currently appealing the decision to the 3rd Appellate District.

As the Jack Abramoff scandal is amply demonstrating, Indian casinos occupy a particularly dark corner of an already sleazy business.  I've long been troubled by several aspects of Indian gaming, such as the creation of fictitious "tribes" out of spurious bloodline claims, the fact that casinos generate vast wealth--often for Las Vegas-based corporations--while failing to pay for the economic burdens they impose on surrounding communities, and particularly the freedom from environmental regulations that allow tribes to build massive entertainment complexes in totally inappropriate areas.

But Byrne's article highlights yet another serious problem with this industry: the thousands of people employed by Indian casinos (75% of whom are not Native American, according to Byrne) do not enjoy the same rights and benefits that protect other workers in the U.S.:

Most workers in the country are guaranteed a minimum wage and pay for overtime, breaks and some amount of sick leave. They also enjoy protection against sexual harassment and discrimination based on age, race or gender. But because California casinos are owned by sovereign nations, these laws don't apply. The tribes are supposed to come up with their own laws that carry the same weight as state and federal ones, but there's no enforcement, and little evidence that any such laws exist.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that casinos have brought economic relief to people who've been suffering for centuries.  But failing to recognize the dark side of the Indian gaming industry means turning a blind eye to corruption, sexual assault and harassment, and countless other misdeeds  And in light of the Abramoff scandals, it seems likely that a great deal of the profits these casinos generate are being siphoned off by crooked lobbyists and other parasites, not being used to lift  Native Americans out of poverty.  This system is broken, and it needs to be fixed.

tags: indian gaming indian casinos peter byrne thunder valley

Doc Searls Closes Syndicate

Doc Searls' closing keynote at Syndicate was an inspiring talk.  It was a natural extension of the ideas he first laid out in "Saving the Net," the Nov. 16 article in Linux Journal that Doc called the longest and most important piece he's ever posted online.  I've interspersed my headers with direct quotes and slide text from Doc's presentation to try to render the hour-long talk as a reasonably concise blog post--it's still long, so follow the jump:

Doc Searls on Saving the Net

When Doc Searls says its the longest and most important piece he's ever posted online, you should probably read it.  The bottom line?  The Internet as we know and love it (i.e. the scene of constant innovation because A) it's a dumb network with intelligence at the margins, not a smart network controlled from the center, and B) minimal government regulation) is in serious danger of being destroyed by those who view it as a transport mechanism and who are determined to extract their share of rents for carriage (i.e. the telcos and the cable companies, with strong support from "content providers" like the MPAA and Nanny-state regulators).  Some choice quotes:

[W]e acknowledge the necessity of the transport metaphor; but also its insufficiency.

Of course, at its base level the Net is a system of pipes and packets. But it's not only packets, or "content" or anything for that matter). Understanding the Net only in transport terms is like understanding civilization in terms of electrical service or human beings only in terms of atoms and molecules. We miss the larger context.

That context is best understood as a place. When we speak of the Net as a "place" or a "space" or a "world" or a "commons" or a "market" with "locations" and "addresses" and "sites" that we "build", we are framing the Net as a place.

Most significantly, the Net is a marketplace. In fact, the Net is the largest, most open, most free and most productive marketplace the world has ever known. The fact that it's not physical doesn't make it one bit less real. In fact, the virtuality of the Net is what makes it stretch to worldwide dimensions while remaining local to every desktop, every point-of-sale device, every ATM machine. It is in this world-wide marketplace that free people, free enterprise, free cultures and free societies are just beginning to flourish. It is here that democratic governance is finally connected, efficiently, to the governed.

As a place, the Net has always been independent of the carriage on which it relies, which is one reason it also encourages and rewards independence. The independence of the Net and its inhabitants is precisely what accounts for countless new businesses and improved old ones.

We need to stress the fact that the primary "end" in the Net's end-to-end architecture is the individual. The Net's success is due far more to the freedoms enjoyed by individuals than to the advantages enjoyed by large companies whose existence predates the Net.

We need to make clear that the Net is the best public place ever created for private enterprise, and that the success of the Net owes infinitely more to personal initiative than to the mesh of pipes in the ground beneath it.

Pop and Politics

From Chris Anderson's latest post:

Here's my take on what the Long Tail is doing to pop culture. Rather than the scary fragmentation of our society into a nation of disconnected people doing their own thing, I think we're reforming into thousands of cultural tribes, connected less by geographic proximity and workplace chatter than by shared interests. Whether we think of it this way or not, each of us belongs to many different tribes simultaneously...

As a result, we can now treat culture not as one big blanket but as the superposition of many interwoven threads, each of which is individually addressable and and connects different groups of people simultaneously.

In short, we're seeing a shift from mass culture to massively parallel culture.

This is challenging enough for the various pop culture industries, where the investment, production and marketing machinery that's been built around the concept of "hits" will have to be re-tooled to serve a much broader range of niche audiences.

But it's an even tougher proposition in the zero-sum world of political advocacy, where there's typically one big winner, and everyone else in the tail--whether it's the # 2 candidate or the last write-in ballot--comes up empty.  We may have "reformed into thousands of cultural tribes," but in politics it still takes 50% + 1 to win it all.

However, it would be a mistake for advocates to ignore the implications of the changing cultural landscape and continue to think only in terms of mass audiences, because our fragmented cultural identities--Anderson's "interwoven threads"--are a more accurate reflection of who we are than the "big blanket" Red State/Blue State divide would suggest, a point nicely illustrated by the University of Michigan maps that contrast the 2004 election results by state and by county.

You still need a "hit" to win politically, but you're going to get there through a shifting coalition of tribes making common cause.  They won't identify with the "big blanket," be it the party, the candidate, or your organization, but with the "interwoven thread"--the issue of the day, the specific call to action--that temporarily connects them.  And you'll have to re-assemble that coalition after every victory--or come up with a better one after every defeat--because it won't be built to last.

long tail

The Politics of Software

I've appreciated Bobby Clark's well-reasoned series of posts at ProgressNow (see Parts One and Two) on the Convio/Alliance for Marriage (AFM) controversy, and I think he has some valuable things to say in Part Three as well, but he ultimately sidesteps the issue of whether a boycott of Convio is called for or not (even as he criticizes DailyKos for endorsing one.)  While Clark initially says, "this isn't as simple as I'd like to think that it is," suggesting that a boycott is too crude a tool to resolve such a complex issue, he concludes by saying, "I hope I live to see the day when my dream of equality becomes real. In the meantime, we're all left to choose a side. Even businesses," suggesting that a boycott just might be the right thing to do.

The always-thoughtful Jon Stahl weighs in on the comments following my last post on the subject: