Pause

I hate the hiccups, and I have them now. And I got really annoyed when I first got them, and then, after a couple of minutes, I realized that I have not had the hiccups since I smoked my last cigarette, almost two years ago. I used to get them at least three times per week. So my annoyance has abated, and I am sort of relishing each hiccup, the first diaphragm spasms I have had in over a decade that have nothing to do with Phillip Morris. :-) Sorry if this is an over-share.

The Politics and Economics of Self-Pity

I have a serious beef with Fox News. Fox News profits on convincing viewers that they (1) are politically powerless or in some other way victimized; (2) nonetheless are among the majority of the nation; and (3) are better informed than the people in power, or just fundamentally better than others (“those people”). The top story on its Web page as I type is exemplary: “Most Say Ground Zero Mosque Is Wrong.” “Most” = majority of Americans; “Ground Zero” = victimized; “Mosque” = those people; “Wrong” = value judgment. The goal is to make people who are not victims feel victimized, instilling fear and outrage. The tactic is to highlight differences from “the norm”—differences that often are embodied by minority groups—make those differences seem malevolent, and galvanize viewers against them.

What I find so distasteful about this sort of journalism is that its mission is to engender fear of other Americans and simultaneously to feed off of that fear. Don’t get me wrong; I believe that a healthy dose of mistrust is good for the political system. However, fearing your neighbor because he is different and despising him because you feel slighted by his simple existence is not the spirit that drives us to achieve as a nation, and we are facing some big problems. Fox News milks these problems, creating mistrust around them by focusing on every possible downside, assuming that “those people” passing laws have the worst intentions, and using sarcasm and blunt buzz words and phrases to put an accessible, dumbed-down gloss over complex issues. For instance, take food stamps, one of the so-called entitlement programs that Fox News lands on time and again as a symbol of “big government.” Last week, the House returned from recess to trim the food-stamp program to its pre-stimulus size in order to save jobs, which would seem right in line with what Fox News consistently preaches. But the sound bites were counterintuitively discontent, criticizing democratic leadership for the move as kowtowing to teacher unions and disadvantaging the poor. So wait. Do you want the food stamp program trimmed or don’t you? My explanation for this interest-shifting is that Fox News’s true political agenda is not based on policy, but rather to create a divide among Americans along political lines. In this way, half of the people in the country take comfort in being called “normal” by Fox News, wallowing in their perceived political powerlessness and suspecting the worst of the people around them.

Venting my frustration on this topic to my mother, she pointed out that Fox News is identical to The Daily Show in the way it engages its audiences, a spot-on observation. The difference, however, is that the Daily Show does not constitute the entirety of the “liberal media.” CBS, ABC, NBC, NPR, PBS, CNN, the BBC, The New York Times, Financial Times, Economist, and a multitude of other newspapers provide information with different perspectives, spanning the gamut from local to international. Perhaps more importantly, they also represent different interests: Viacom, Cablevision, Disney, TimeWarner, Hearst Corporation, Tribune, Gannett, and nonprofit organizations—a competitive market for information and viewership. The Daily Show fits into this market as a half-hour political satire, the television equivalent of an op-ed, and while it certainly has a substantial following, it is miniscule in the face of the dozens of outlets that do not share its format or approach.

On the other hand, Fox News bills itself as the “fair and balanced” counterpoint to the “liberal media,” and its derisive, gossipy, sarcastic, chip-on-the-shoulder, “us”-versus-“those-people” approach is its rule, rather than the exception. The outlet is nothing but op-ed. And it works! Fox News is the most watched basic cable channel and the most trusted television news source in the United States. It is the flagship of what must be deduced to be the non-liberal media, which include predominantly the New York Post and Premiere Radio network (Rush Limbaugh, et al.). All three are either owned by or derive primary content from a single corporate entity: News Corporation. As a general rule, if News Corp. does not own it, then Fox News calls it part of the “liberal media,” regardless of where its reporting trends on the political spectrum. This is not a competitive market.

Fox News may have perfected the art of feeding off people’s quest for normalcy and catharsis in blaming others for their problems, but it is by no means the first or even most pervasive institution to do so. Country music, the sonorous equivalent of macaroni and cheese, thrives on prosaic strains of normalcy and discontent. Alan Jackson’s “Hardhat and a Hammer” touts the virtue of being an “average Joe” doing manual labor for “average pay,” stating that there is “nothing wrong with” socioeconomic ho-hum-ness. “God bless the workin’ man.” Currently, this song is among the genre’s top twenty, and something like one-third of all American adults listen to country music on a weekly basis.

Actually, there is a lot wrong with ho-hum-ness. That is why people who invent things or excel in their fields are rewarded with big incomes and/or revered titles. That is why we, as a nation, provide environments for people to excel, such as public universities, the Lawrence Livermore labs, and NASA. Mediocrity is not what we revere in Benjamin Franklin or Mohammed Ali, not what put us on the moon, and not why we decorate soldiers. Krull has been working regularly from 8:30 a.m. to well past midnight for the past several weeks, but because he wears a tie rather than a hardhat, I’d bet Jackson’s prayer for the workingman would not extend to him. In response, Krull would simply cite the epithet of how the world needs ditch-diggers, too. And what’s funny is that Jackson would probably say that is what his song ultimately is trying to validate.

But Jackson’s goal is to validate, not to motivate. The aim is to make money by making people feel comfortable in their perceived average existences, encouraging them to give the finger to those who are different or who might challenge them—in this case, all of those who aren’t among the hammer-wielding average Joes, who don’t necessarily share the view that blue-collar workers are the “kind of glue that sticks this world together,” who might think that there is something wrong with not aspiring to more than mediocrity.

Country music, like Fox News’s tactics, also rests upon the shoulders of American diversity. The genre is built on blues, folk, gospel, swing, and jazz. The sappy sentimentality about blue-collar normalcy is communicated through the medium of a couple centuries worth of ethnic musical traditions, mashed up and distilled into something so marketable and American that it is synonymous with Budweiser. It is really a crystalline allegory for America itself, a nation of immigrants coming together to form some new, palatable “normal.”

A sage friend recently wrote a blog post that she titled “We’re the SAME,” suggesting that different personality types may stem from different approaches aimed at satisfying a common, deep-seated desire for approval and love. The existence of such a common desire makes a lot of sense when considering the success of Fox News and country music. That desire would encourage people to come together around sources of approval. Fox News and country music provide that for millions of people every day by validating some fictional ideal of a banal American existence and pointing fingers at those among us who in some way deviate from the ideal or challenge its validation. Their success requires that people forget that, while we all are different, what makes us American is that our system recognizes that, ultimately, we are all the same.

Which brings me to Perry v. Schwarzenegger. The topic of gay marriage cannot help but be political, but this opinion is so beautiful because it coolly stands in the face of politics, avoids making value judgments as to the rightness or wrongness of the way people feel about homosexuality, and extrapolates from the Constitution some of the most fundamentally American tenets: you don’t get to legislate by exploiting people’s fear of “those people;” this is America, and Americans are guaranteed equal liberty; our differences make us better as a whole.

To me, the statements in Perry v. Schwarzenegger just feel right. I get very uncomfortable when I am presented with a sardonic, buzz-wordy, glossed-up and dumbed-down take on events. It makes me feel like I am being led toward a conclusion at which I otherwise may not arrive had I all of the information at the presenters’ disposal. I get infuriated when I am presented with perspectives that only make sense by taking a negative view of some nebulous category of “those people.” We are ALL “those people” to someone else. I am a male of pure European descent, born in small-town U.S.A., who went to public school from K-12 with the same 150 people, who all looked just like me—by no small stretch of the imagination, that demographic could represent the “normal” Fox News viewer. However, I am super-educated and of Jewish heritage, born to educated professionals who exposed me to diversity through travel at an early age and encouraged me to achieve some measure of my potential as a professional—I am “those people” to Alan Jackson’s blue-collar workingmen. I am homosexual, which makes me “those people” against whom Californians passed Proposition 8.

Fox News is uniting us against ourselves, the political equivalent of an auto-immunodeficiency virus. Illustratively, the commentators’ stance on Perry v. Schwarzenegger is that the judge should not have ruled as he did (that Prop 8 unconstitutionally denies fundamental rights) and instead should have deferred to the political process, whose trends over the last several decades indicate that gay marriage eventually would be legalized over the course of time anyway. This relies on an assumption that the abrogation of that fundamental right is no urgent matter—it’s “those people’s” problem. Never mind that the judge is as conservative as the day is long, appointed by G.H.W. Bush, the commentators landed on the fact that the judge is gay, arguing that by protecting that fundamental right against the will of “the people,” the gay judge is really the problem because he created strife that could have been avoided by not rocking the boat. How are we supposed to face our problems meaningfully if we believe that the “others” among us are really the problem? This is the same question that we have addressed time and again for hundreds of years. Fox News engages in irrational fear mongering at the expense of the disadvantaged. Have we learned nothing from Joe McCarthy or Mary Walcott?

Fundamentally, my problem with Fox News is that it exploits people’s desire for approval by disapproving of almost every minority or stereotyped group: single mothers, gays, Muslims, “urban” teenagers, “activist” judges, black voters, the overweight, the elderly, fancy city folk, etc. Sometimes, they even use one frequently singled-out group as a platform from which to deride another. Take the segment in which a commentator Twitter-harasses the religious leader trying to build the Lower Manhattan mosque by threatening to build a gay bar for Muslims next door, proposing a menu of 72 virgin cocktails, making fun of mujahideen and Islam’s intolerance of alcohol and homosexuality. Do I need to point out America’s own history of intolerance in these two areas? Instead of considering the gravity of religious views and the potential that we might share a history of common values, he labeled it “Muslim” and made fun of it. But to what end? What policy does this advance? The answer is that there is no constructive result to be achieved from such programming. The goal is simply the destruction of a trust that we are one people, indivisible. These ploys equate the respect that viewers seek with disrespect for others, and that is fundamentally un-American, no matter how many red, white & blue logos and tickers you place on the screen.