June 05, 2004
On Language, Politics and Blogs : A week after THE WEEK
by Liza Sabater
Two interesting things happened at last week's panel on censorship that had me pondering the importance of these events:
Take a paycheck, lose your freedom of speech
At one point, Monica Crowley, a Republican wonkette, complained about how the lack of uniform standards was affecting her choice of words on her radio show. The following are from Jeff Jarvis' notes, The Week on Indecency, at Buzzmachine.
Monica Crowley complains about the lack of uniform standards. She used to be for the rules until she got her own radio show. "Everything is so subjective." She stopped herself from saying "bitch" yesterday.
During this exchange, John Gibson did his best to make her agree with him that banning the 7 deadly words would be "good for America". This is where it got interesting. The woman wavered. Sensing ambivalence Maher moved in to counter Gibson with a "would it be better to restrict or not restrict at all". To which Ms Crowley wavered even more. And then it happened --the Aha! moment. Ms. Crowley took a stand, albeit a wobbly one, and sided with Maher, agreeing that, indeed, no restrictions at all were better.
That's when Maher quipped :
Maher: "What she's saying is that the definition of a liberal is a conservative who's just been censored, if I may paraphrase that."
This particular exchange made me think that, after all was said and done, the fact that nobody talked about Internet media (ie: blogs) as alternatives forums for banned speech, it made blogging the elephant in the room. What I got from this forum was a lot of frustration from these famous people. They're getting paid for doing what a lot of bloggers do for free on a daily basis : Take a look at what's happening around the world and heave comments into the world, hoping to get someone's attention. The difference though is that there is virtually no censorship on the web. I say virtually because, of course, a "cease and desist" letter from a big company to your web host can shut down your site in a second. But blogging is a lot like stand up comedy : Anything goes in this format. So it is flexible and mutable and all the more slippery when you try to rope it in and control it.
A case in point : I'd been chewing on this after the forum and then Christian posts Blogger gets the final say, in which he describes how Briggs Nisbet, who started writing a column for the The New York Times is using her blog to reply to her critics. The blog is the forum where she can defend her position in her own voice and without anybody's editorial approval.
Another case in point : Mark Cuban used his blog to show how a reported distorted answers to an email interview! (see : The best thing about a blog - Blog Maverick - The Mark Cuban Weblog - www.blogmaverick.com). Jason Calacanis (owner of Weblogs Inc., where Cuban's blog is hosted) said at the NYC Bloggers meet a month ago that Cuban now will not answer questions directly to reporters without posting them first on his blog. It's the only way for him to ensure control of his part of the story FIRST.
Evil doesn't have a face but Fascism does
The other moment happened on my way out. I went up to Mr. Gibson and told him about how back in the 60's it would have been indecent for my father and mother to not only walk down a street together but marry and have children; what with my mother being white and my father black. To which the man immediately riposted : "What has that got to do with a list a words". To which I said, "Everything. The same kind of thinking that created the Jim Crowe laws is the same one that clamors for limits on civil rights." He of course dismissed it with a "We need to protect American from words like cocksucker and motherfucker on broadcast TV and if a limit to the free speech is needed, then so be it".
At the moment I was standing in front of Mr. Gibson, the word I was looking for did not come up. This person is not evil --it would give him too much credit. This man was more of a parrot, a lemming following the "moral majority" rule book on how to take with him as many over the cliff as possible. That is what fascism, in all its glory and stupidity, is all about. This is the kind that sits with your mom for a nice cup of tea, hangs out with the guys over pizzas and beers, donates time and money to charity events and volunteers at the PTA --All for the good of the poor, victimized American that cannot be unfairly inconvenienced with a turned off TV and must be then "protected" by chopping away at the constitution because we can.
Take them all over the cliff because you can. Unfair? Who cares. The will to morality has to be brutal and ruthless if we want to save the world from deviants, the immoral, the unpatriotic, the unwashed. Mr. Gibson's "American does not need ..." made it clear that those who wanted to preserve the constitution as is were not American, were unpatriotic: "You are not American because you want the unfettered, unchecked, uncensored right to free speech".
Not a moment too soon did I happened upon two great articles about this new brand of American fascism. In American Journalism Review : Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics, Lakoff gives exposes the brand of paternalism that finds in the language of parenting the tools needed for selling their brand of politics:
Well, the progressive worldview is modeled on a nurturant parent family. Briefly, it assumes that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that. Children are born good; parents can make them better. Nurturing involves empathy, and the responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible. On a larger scale, specific policies follow, such as governmental protection in form of a social safety net and government regulation, universal education (to ensure competence, fairness), civil liberties and equal treatment (fairness and freedom), accountability (derived from trust), public service (from responsibility), open government (from open communication), and the promotion of an economy that benefits all and functions to promote these values, which are traditional progressive values in American politics.
The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.
So, project this onto the nation and you see that to the right wing, the good citizens are the disciplined ones those who have already become wealthy or at least self-reliant and those who are on the way. Social programs, meanwhile, "spoil" people by giving them things they haven't earned and keeping them dependent. The government is there only to protect the nation, maintain order, administer justice (punishment), and to provide for the promotion and orderly conduct of business. In this way, disciplined people become self-reliant. Wealth is a measure of discipline. Taxes beyond the minimum needed for such government take away from the good, disciplined people rewards that they have earned and spend it on those who have not earned it.
Then I stumbled upon Orcinus' Jingoes and the fascist impulse. It is an interesting match to the previous article because Orcinus' focus is on how fascism is also an impulse, a kind of survival instinct of the powerful when their losing control. Stricter measures in government are put in place by encouraging suppression through citizenship; the most common practice being censorship. In other words, speech, in all its permutations, becomes a tool of punishment and control:
Americans labor under the delusion that fascism "can't happen here" because of the nation's history as an open, democratic society.
This is a peculiar blind spot, because in fact fascism is only possible as an outgrowth -- a metastasis, if you will -- of democracy. Historically, fascism has only taken root in democracies when they stumble. It seems not to occur to Americans that if their democracy stumbles, the dark face of fascism awaits to take its place.
[...]
It's important to understand as well that fascist dictatorships are top-down in hierarchy but rely on substantive popular support. They are dictatorships which are carried out not only under threat of state punishment, but with the open embrace of average citizens, and the full participation of many enthusiasts (who are all, of course, deeply persuaded of their own civic virtue).
So the kind of suppression that indicates a fascist impulse appears not only from the top -- with administration officials impugning the patriotism of their critics, and conservative talk-show hosts and pundits ranting at length about the treason of liberals. It also appears in local libraries, city councils, local police forces. And, of course, school districts.
Which brings us to ...
The elephant in the room : Blogs
By this short list of articles you'd think that blogs are changing the (media) world overnight:
To Their Surprise, Bloggers Are Force for Change in Big Media
Matt Rosenberg on Bill Cosby & Blogging on National Review Online
American Journalism Review : The Expanding Blogosphere
Overnight? They are not. Many bloggers are doing for free (or close to free) exactly what op-ed columnists do for a living. The practice is "old". What's the difference then? It's not just that some blogs are getting numbers similar to publications such as The New York Times . It's the fact that the technology of blogs --comments, trackbacks, rss-- allow for memes to spread like wildfire. Once they reach Blogdex, MeFi, Slashdot or BoingBoing, big media interns cannot NOT report back to their editors.
It's not just the content that is of importance. We need to start looking at more closely is how the use of the technology of blogs is destabilizing the mainstream protocol and production of big media; transforming blog posts into unexpected eruptions of counter-media. Comments, trackbacks, links, googleable titles, webfeeds & syndication are creating fluid networks that are empowering in the short run but potentially powerful when their spheres of influence are aggregated. When Jeff Jarvis talks about giving politicians a blog, it's not just the blog we need to think about. We need to also look at the strategic use of the blog, the forging of online alliances and the craft and technologies of language. All of these make for not just successful blogs but blogs as successfully disruptive media.
Then again, I don't think politicos need more channels to power ... but that's another story.
Free speech and the right to indecency will be alive and well on the web thanks to the blogosphere. I wonder though, if TV, radio, newspapers will become gated communities while the web grows wild and free? Will we end up having two kinds of "free" speech? That's what remains to be seen.
Posted by Liza Sabater in Blogs, Censorship, Empire, Language, Media, Politics, Social Networks
Permalink |
Comments (0)
| TrackBack (1) | Technorati Cosmos
Trackbacks
Trackback for this post:http://www.culturekitchen.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/833
The following blogs make reference to this post :
» On Language, Politics and Blogs : A week after THE WEEK from Radio Free Blogistan
Two interesting things happened at last week's panel on censorship that had me pondering the importance of these events: Take a paycheck, lose your freedom of speech At one point, Monica Crowley, a Republican wonkette, complained about how the lack of... [More...]
Found inJune 7, 2004 06:28 PM
