The Freedom to Have the Correct Opinion

A friend, I'll call her A, who worked with me in the dishroom when she was a student, and who now is semi-employed in the public library of her home city,  reported on Facebook today that she "just found the eighth religious propaganda pamphlet hidden away on her library's shelves this week. She hates it when people not only decide to preach to those who perhaps do not want to hear it, but also to litter all over library shelves."  (She generally posts about herself in the third person.)  We got into a little dispute, she and I and some of her other friends.

I don't object to A's annoyance over the material, nor to her removing and disposing of the pamphlets.  As a library employee she's entitled and probably expected to do so.  I did object to her use of the term "littering" (which in later comments she confirmed that she meant) and her complaint about those who "decide to preach to those who perhaps do not want to hear it". 

"Litter" is certainly the wrong word.  I like Wikipedia's definition:

Litter consists of waste products that have been disposed [of] improperly, without consent, in an inappropriate location. Litter can also be used as a verb. To litter means to throw (often man-made) objects onto the ground and leave them as opposed to disposing of them properly.

But Merriam-Webster's definition 4a will do as well: "trash, wastepaper, or garbage lying scattered about."

Those religious tracts were not dropped carelessly in the library stacks instead of being "disposed of properly."  They weren't even "scattered about."  Someone left them there deliberately and probably placed them with some care.  Whatever one thinks of their contents, and I'd probably agree with my friend about that, they aren't litter.  A was using the word to express her dislike for their content: compare this article from the Bloomington newspaper, which shows people using the same word about matter that was also placed deliberately and carefully.

As the discussion proceeded, some commenters argued that the library has the right to decide what is on its shelves.  One declared that a library "is a fragile ecosystem and should be treated as such."  This is difficult, though I think the "fragile ecosystem" claim is patent bullshit: libraries are tougher than that.  My initial response was that I'd like to put atheist tracts in the hymnal racks of churches -- but no church may be responsible for the tracts A found; they may have been distributed by a free-lancer, as it were.  But I'm not sure how outrageous it is that someone should leave pamphlets around the shelves of a library.  In practice it would present problems, as the stacks were piled with material from competing viewpoints, so it makes sense for library policy and practice to forbid it.  But I don't believe that A would have been as offended if she found pamphlets expressing views more congenial to her: on young women's health issues, gay and lesbian youth, riot grrl politics, and the like.  She might have collected and moved them, but I don't think she'd have been as indignant.  She might even have moved them to a place in the library where such outside material can be put for people to pick up.

But I was more concerned with her general assumption that she nor other people should have to encounter material that offends them in a library.  A lot of people object to public preaching and missionary work, and that's admittedly a problematic case of freedom of religion, which has been much debated over the years.  So has the question of public political speech that is offensive to many people.  But these situations tend to be double-edged: the people who want to eliminate from their sight public speech and text that offends them, generally don't even think about who might be offended by publicly visible material that they agree with, but which offends others whose sensibilities they don't care to shield.

The matter of being preached to is something I've thought about before.  In the first post I noticed that some secularists posted about their desire to deface religious billboards; in the second I noticed that liberal Christians and secularists threw hissyfits about seeing expressions of the beliefs of their more devout Facebook friends.  (I'm sure those liberal Christians and secularists post a lot of their opinions, on politics and religion and other matters, without worrying about whether all their friends agree with it or want to be preached to by them.)  I certainly share and sympathize with their fatigue, but I also recognize that being exposed to beliefs and statements I abhor is the direct result of living in a society which safeguards freedom of speech.  I can only insist on my right to express my opinion because I grant others their right to do the same.  I also insist on my right to talk back to people who express opinions that offend me (while acknowledging their right to talk back to me), and that really bothers many people from all over the opinion spectrum.  Whether they be Tea Party Republicans, Obama Democrats, fundamentalist Christians, liberal Zionists, New Atheists, or really of any affiliation, they believe that "debate" means that they state their opinions boldly and no one may disagree with them.  They often accuse me of being surprised when other people are bothered by what I say, but I insist they're projecting.  I am not surprised when people disagree with me, even vehemently; I answer them back, and that pisses them off even more.

In my comments I hinted that I was concerned about A's intolerance of views she disliked, and one of her other friends accused me of crying "censorship."  I snapped back that I hadn't said anything about censorship, but I admit it was on my mind.  Would I really trust A not to impose censorship if she could?  Frankly, I wouldn't.  I remember a young woman who told a gay student group meeting that when she found a right-wing newsletter left for free distribution in the Student Union, she collected the whole pile and threw it in the trash.  Or tried to; at this remove in time I don't recall if she complained that someone stopped her.  The thing is, that newsletter was in a location of the Union that was intended for distribution of handouts for all kinds of organizations.  Wouldn't she have screamed bloody murder if someone had thrown out the gay group's handouts?  Of course she would.  (Something much milder: when A was working in the dining hall, she had to be told not to set up her laptop to play music while she worked.  That other people might not want to hear the music she liked not only didn't occur to her, I'm not sure it ever sunk into her head as a consideration she had to respect.)

Some years later numerous earnest young gay people tried to shut down the blog of a right-wing, fundamentalist Christian, antigay business professor; they failed, because the University stuck by the First Amendment, but they continued to insist that it was wrong for people to be exposed to "hurtful" opinions.  There was also some talk about prospective students needing to see that the University is supportive of its gay students and "diversity" in general, or they wouldn't come to IU.  I rather doubt that any school anywhere is uniformly supportive of all minorities, but IU has a lot of official material online declaring itself pro-diversity in general and pro-GLBT in particular.  A blog, even a professor's blog, doesn't negate that.  If I were an incoming freshman now, I don't know how I'd feel, but I think that at that age I recognized that it important to me that the University wouldn't shut down views that some people disliked.  I knew from early on that I was a dissident and annoyed other people with my opinions.

In fact, these events made me wary about speaking up in public around the university; when I started this blog, a few years before I retired, I was nervous at first about using my own name, and of course I put it on a service unconnected to the university.  I quickly got bolder again, but any attempt to silence unpopular opinions has a chilling effect.  Before I started blogging, other gay people occasion tried on more than one occasion to remove me from Speakers Bureau, or to get the student newspaper to drop the opinion columns I wrote from time to time.  Some such efforts came from raw undergraduates, but others came from people with positions in the University bureaucracy.  This never had much effect on me, but it made me aware that I can't trust my fellow queers to respect diversity of opinion in their own community.  So I have personal reasons, as well as principled ones, for my strict views on freedom of speech, press and religion.

This common self-centered inability to see or care that one's own views might offend others, or that they have the same right to be offended as oneself has, is extremely widespread.  In my part of the opinion spectrum it's rationalized with such notions as that "hate speech" or "stereotyping" or "demeaning images" aren't protected under the First Amendment; but in fact they are, and it's my opinion that they should be.  The First Amendment guarantees your right to be offended.  In other societies you may be "protected" from ideas or texts that hurt your feelings -- but you might just as easily be silenced, to "protect" the delicate feelings of others.

Exactly where to draw the boundaries is another question, difficult and impossible to settle finally.  I concede the library's power to keep uncatalogued material off its shelves, but only as long as it welcomes an offensive range of opinions and positions into its official collection.  I was bothered, not by A's removal of the pamphlets, but by her self-righteousness about it.  As she replied to me, she was entitled to be annoyed by them; I agreed, but I was also entitled to disagree with her.

Cultural Capitalism

This turned up on Facebook today, and I liked it, because I'm one of those autodidacts who isn't always sure how to pronounce certain words because I only encountered them in reading, and sounded them out.  (My mother taught me phonics, and insisted that I sound out unfamiliar words, so if I mispronounce one of your pet words, blame her.)

But almost immediately I began to wonder whose mispronunciations do deserve scorn, which led me to reconsider whether and why we phonetic readers deserve "admiration."  (Aw, shucks, ma'am, I'm just doing my job.)  Do we deserve admiration because we're struggling to rise above our lowly, deprived origins?

This tweet was appropriated on Facebook to illustrate the concept of cultural capital, "non-financial social assets that promote social mobility beyond economic means" as Wikipedia defines it.  It's associated with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (who wrote a fair amount about language use as an aspect of cultural capital), and it's a useful idea, but as invoked here it makes me uneasy.  

Whose "admiration" is involved here?  I'm not interested in being patronized by people who imagine themselves better than I am by reason of class origins or prestigious schooling, and I don't think most phonetic mispronouncers are.  (Awwww, how cute!  He's trying his best, but he still gets it wrong.  Too bad he didn't have my advantages.)  Remember that one of the most famous targets of scorn for mispronunciation is Yale-schooled, born-with-a-silver-foot-in-his-mouth, George W. Bush, because of his tendency to pronounce "nuclear" as "nukular."  I once had an informative exchange with my liberal law-professor friend on that issue.  She insisted that "nukular" is not a regional variation -- she claimed that she's never heard any other Texan pronounce it that way -- but some sort of individual aberration specific to Dubya.  Even if she's right, why does she (and many other people) get so angry about it?  If it's a speech impediment, it's not something Bush does on purpose, so it's wrong to make a moral issue out of it.  But even if he deliberately chose to mispronounce the word (which I don't) believe, what does it really matter?  I've observed before that liberal Democrats seem more obsessed with, and angry about, Bush's deficiencies as a speaker than they are about his actions that really hurt large numbers of people, and probably because they never really objected to his actions. (That's shown by how quickly they accepted the same actions when Obama adopted them.)

I don't think Ms. Fateman meant to imply that people should be scorned for their pronunciation of certain words.  It a well-noticed limitation of Twitter's format that it doesn't convey nuance or complexity.  But her tweet, and the way it was invoked on Facebook, reminded me how thoroughly entangled questions of status are with trivial (but clearly high significant) matters like the pronunciation of words.

Divide and Conquer

This morning I came across some more debate about Michelle Obama's recent encounter with a gay-rights protester at a Democratic Party fundraiser.  (Significantly, this apparently lone protester was turned into "gay rights protesters," plural, in this report.  We dissidents are scary!  One of us looks like a crowd!  Poor Michelle, shouted down by an angry mob of radicals waving pitchforks and torches!)  Obama faced the protestor down, threatening to walk; the protestor was shouted down and removed by the others present.  Ian Welsh commented:

To step back to Michele Obama, and her being heckled by an activist.  Mrs. Obama was raising money for the Democratic party.  She has her profile because of her husband, whose adjunct she was acting as.  The idea that you shouldn’t be rude to her because she’s the “first lady” is ludicrous: she’s not some nice, uninvolved lady, she is a participant in the political process, and one who will be very rich for the rest of her life because she married Barack Obama.

In another, shorter post, Welsh linked to a post by gay Democratic blogger (and sometime Democratic Party fundraiser and campaign worker) John Aravosis, who after initial uncertainty became less critical of the protester.

Now that I know that this fundraiser was at the home of a lesbian couple, the protest – a gay protest – becomes a lot more relevant ...

The only reason to do a protest is to move the ball forward on issues you care about.  I was initially worried that this protest didn’t do that.

Despite this, Aravosis is still only "in the undecided column."  He does, however, link to and quote an opinion piece on CNN.com by ESPN writer LZ Granderson, a gay African-American man defending protester Ellen Sturtz.

Heckling the first lady wasn't fair because she isn't responsible for policy. But the incident sent a message to those who are responsible: We are people, not pawns.

The discussion in comments under Aravosis's post is worth reading; much of it is intelligent and informed.  Several commenters, however, complained that Ellen Sturtz's protest was "ill-timed." This is funny to anyone who remembers the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s (or any other protest movement, I suspect), which was often accused of the same offense.  African-Americans were told to wait patiently for white racists and their enablers to change their minds by themselves; Martin Luther King Jr.'s letter from jail in Birmingham, Alabama, is among other things a reply to such well-meaning white moderates.  No protest, or debate, or disagreement is timely in the minds of the powerful and their hangers-on. 

Aravosis admitted that Sturtz's protest was justified by the outcome: it got a lot of media attention and sparked some discussion of her issue, about which most Americans probably knew little.  Including gay Americans, it seems.  I don't understand why he's still "undecided."  The cycle of abuse rolls on.

Please, Sir, May I Have Another Question?: An Object Lesson

Now that I've read Steven Maras's Objectivity in Journalism (Polity Press, 2013), I still don't know what objectivity in journalism is.  But neither does he, nor apparently can anyone else make up their minds on a definition.  I suspect, and the book largely confirms, that "objectivity" is one of what I call totem words: words that connote something good, to be waved around like a flag to show that one is one of the Good Guys.  (Other examples are "meritocracy," "democracy," "freedom," "equality," and so on.)

Objectivity in Journalism is part of a series on "Key Concepts in Journalism," but I wonder about its intended audience.  I'd guess journalism students, probably undergraduates, but I can't imagine them getting much from Maras's treatment.  He covers a wide range of concerns, such as the history of the concept of objectivity, its different definitions and rationales, and its variations in different countries (most of the examples come from the United States and to a lesser extent England).  This is valuable and well done but he tends to rush along so that nothing really gets discussed.  I wondered if he simply meant his readers to read the material he quotes and references, some of which sounds quite interesting, and that would probably be a good idea because Maras himself seems to have no opinions of his own.  Maybe he is just trying to provide an example of objectivity in action, merely reporting the views of his sources, but that doesn't work very well, and actually undermines the case for objectivity he seems to want to make.

As the word is used, "objectivity" can indicate an ideal for journalists to aspire to, a goal for them to try to reach, or an actual achievement of modern professional journalists.  Not only do different writers disagree which it is, the same writers tend to equivocate, using it in one sense here, and in another sense there. Even those who see it as an ideal or a goal are not sure what it entails.  Some writers pile up defining components -- accuracy, freedom from bias, balance, impartiality, impersonality -- which may or not be desirable, but I'm not sure they add up to objectivity, except perhaps by postulation.  (As so often with definitions, the discussants are not sure whether the meaning of a concept is inherent in the word, and so can be discovered by somehow unpacking it, or whether it's a more or less empty container in which anything can be stored.  In practice it works out to be some of both, so that one reads one's own ideas into the word, and gets them back endowed with its authority.)

So, for instance, Maras quotes the philosopher Judith Lichtenberg, who,

[i]n her essay ‘In Defense of Objectivity’, ... focuses on a particular confusion in critiques of objectivity: ‘We are told by some that journalism isn’t objective; by others that it cannot be objective; and by still others that it shouldn’t be objective’. Objectivity is thus impossible on the one hand, and undesirable on the other. Both propositions cannot be correct [103].

Erm, well, I don't think so, especially since it appears to be different writers who raise these different objections.  The case against objectivity may not be coherent, but individual authors may not be contradicting themselves; but then as Maras shows, the case for objectivity is just as confused.  We are told by some that journalism is objective, for example, but that it shouldn't be. Even so, it isn't confused to say that X is impossible, but would be undesirable even if it weren't.

Advocates of journalistic objectivity disagree among themselves over what they're advocating.  Does objectivity mean no more than "passive" reporting of whatever a source says, an approach often derogated as mere stenography?  The possibility of a human agent, however well trained, simply recording whatever happens in front of him, has been taken apart so often and so thoroughly that it's hard to be believe anyone still takes it seriously.  But some do.  Notoriously, in January 2012 the New York Times public editor (or ombudman) Arthur J. Brisbane asked (via) for "reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about ... And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair?  Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?"  This set off a wave of debate in the media, much of it highly critical, and Maras discusses it too, mainly summarizing some of the reaction and using it to introduce "many of the themes of this chapter: enhanced feedback, transparency in deliberation, the problematic nature of consistent and total objectivity" (174).  Here he begs the question, assuming that "consistent and total objectivity" consists of stenography, parroting the assertions of "newsmakers."  (Analogously, Chris Hayes assumed that a standardized test is an accurate and "objective" measure of academic merit.)

Brisbane asserted that "Op-Ed columnists have the freedom to call out what they think are lies" (173), but as FAIR pointed out, this isn't true: "During the 2000 presidential election season, [Paul] Krugman said the Times 'barred him from using the word "lying"' when writing about George W. Bush (Washington Post, 1/22/03)."  FAIR went on to suggest that "sports reporters would [not] be so baffled by the idea that facts matter"; if a professional basketball player were falsify his game stats, for example, sportswriters wouldn't let the misrepresentations stand.

I would point out that "newsmakers" aren't always American politicians or corporate elites.  When foreign newsmakers like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Saddam Hussein, or Osama Bin Laden make statements of fact that aren't factual, American media feel no obligation to let them go unchallenged.  (And not only foreigners: today I passed in front of a TV tuned to CNN, which was quoting an analyzing an online chat with American NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: the commentator didn't seem to give any credence at all to Snowden's statements.  ("Mr. Snowden is trying for humor here," she sniffed.  Is that objectivity?)  If Iranian or Iraqi media quoted them without comment and justified themselves on the grounds of "objectivity," I doubt American journalists would agree.  Such media elsewhere in the world would be dismissed as supine state media functioning as conduits for propaganda -- which seems unfair, since such behavior is defended in the New York Times as appropriate for American media; but if the shoe fits ... (And yet, state media around the world make obeisance to the ideal of objectivity; see Maras's quotation of Xinhua News Agency on page 202. Surely they wouldn't say it if they didn't mean it!)  Brisbane's attitude toward "facts" also seems odd: far from the tough-minded devotion to sacred facts journalists like to claim, Brisbane seems to regard facts as slippery and difficult to establish.  But though the latter position is probably more defensible, it would also require journalists to be more scrupulous about what they accept as facts.

Maras devotes several pages to the BBC's emergence as a major player in British news coverage during the General Strike of 1926, which disabled the print media.

Seizing the opportunity, the BBC Director-General John Reigh and the BBC Chairman prior to the incorporation (and Vice-Chairman afterwards), Lord Gainford, defined an alternative path, and maintained press freedom by committing to impartiality. Impartiality, activated as a principle to get around political and commercial sensitivities, arose in the context of the general strike as a way to ensure the Government applied to censorship pressure; but it also meant, in the view of some researchers, that the BBC censored itself by refusing to report anything which might help the strikers [217].

I imagine Pravda had that much "press freedom" and "impartiality."

Even if impartiality was compromised in this way – or as Tracey puts it, defined constitutionally rather than politically ... – at least the information was objective and factual: ‘a conscious decision was made to distinguish between agency copy and government copy; and many of the items broadcast were accurate reports of verifiable events’ [218].

Again, any supine state media could make the same boast.  I can't detect any irony in Maras's discussion here; he seems to be working with a definition of "objective" that means basically stenography of government sources.  In which case objectivity is certainly possible, but is it desirable?

Maras uses Brisbane's query to kick off his chapter "Is objectivity changing in an era of 24/7 news?" -- a question to which his answer appears to be "Yes."  He gives sympathetic space to journalists who argue that because of Bosnia, it's time to abandon outmoded twentieth-century objectivity and return to yellow journalism of the "Huns Kill Babies!" (and the closely related"Kuwaiti incubators") variety.  This goes with the time-honored belief that it's okay to be rational about trivial matters, but when things get serious one must run around in circles screaming in panic: "We've got to do something!"  Again, the question is begged whether the media ever were particularly objective, even by their own confused standards.

For example, CNN's Christiane Amanpour:

I have come to believe that objectivity means giving all sides a fair hearing, but not treating all sides equally. Once you treat all sides the same in a case like Bosnia, you are drawing a moral equivalence between victim and aggressor. And from there it is a short distance to becoming an accessory to all manners of evil; in Bosnia’s case, genocide. So objectivity must go hand in hand with morality [quoted by Maras, 74].

"Treating all sides equally" is not the same as "And then former BBC reporter (later Member of Parliament) Martin Bell:

In proposing an alternative journalism – one that is both balanced and principled – I am not so much calling for a change as describing one that has already taken place. It had to. How else, for instance, were we to report on genocide? Were we to observe it from afar, pass by on the other side, and declare that it was none of our business? It was all our business, perhaps especially ours because we were the independent witnesses. And if genocide would not move us, nothing would move us, and what would that then say of us? [quoted by Maras, 126-7].

I'd begin by asking about criteria for genocide.  The numbers of people killed in Bosnia, though large, didn't approach in scale the numbers of people killed in other massacres that didn't disturb Western observers nearly as much: Suharto's killing of from 500,000 to 2 million of his fellow Indonesians, Suharto's 1975 invasion of East Timor, US/UN sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s which killed around a million Iraqis ("we think the price is worth it," the American Secretary of State told television viewers) followed by vast numbers of deaths in Bush's 2003 invasion, the war against Latin American Indians by US-supported military dictatorships in the 1980s, and so on.  These killings not only didn't get much attention in mainstream media (except for the 1965 Indonesian massacres, which were celebrated), they were either approved and supported by or directly carried out by the US and its clients.  Even when they are acknowledged, perhaps as tragic blunders by well-meaning humanitarians, they are still minimized.

Then I'd ask what what these "caring" journalists  propose to do to stop or prevent the genocides they've discovered.  In Bosnia, the NATO invasion increased the number of atrocities, and this is not unusual.  So did the NATO invasion of Libya, which was also justified by touting the plight of Libyans under Qadafy's brutal heel, though it killed unknown numbers of civilians and replaced Qadafy with squabbling warlords not noticeably concerned about human rights.  We're now seeing pious concern about government atrocities (which are real, I'm not denying that) in Syria with calls to arm the rebels or create a no-fly-zone, which worked so well in Libya if all you want to do is remove a tyrant and kill more innocent people.

The next question would be what all this has to do with "objectivity."  If Amanpour or Bell want me to believe that Western media coverage of these atrocities was governed by objectivity, however defined, rather than compliance with state policy and interests, they need to do more than wave around the word "genocide."  They should also have some accountability for the results of their crusades.

Maras goes on to discuss "warbloggers" as a new phenomenon and a hopeful corrective to misguided objectivity.  I gather he's never heard of journalists like Edward R. Murrow or William Shirer, who worked from war zones seventy years ago; or Richard Dudman, who wrote of his experience as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia forty years ago.  (Murrow also recorded material for broadcast while flying with Allied bombing missions.)  He doesn't mention embedded journalists during the US invasion of Afghanistan, which especially is relevant to his subject.  (Nor does he mention Judith Miller, whose mendacious advocacy of Bush's war for the New York Times eventually got her into trouble -- but only after the damage was done.)  He writes, "In 2004, the network [Al-Jazeera] was accused of cooperating with insurgents [184]."  Couldn’t embedded American journalists be accused of cooperating with invaders and aggressors?  (Non-embedded journalists sometimes "became targets of US forces.")  One defender of embedding wrote, "One reporter was seen holding a blood-plasma bag during a battlefield transfusion. Not to've done so would've been barbaric; yet that was not watching and reporting with detached objectivity."  That's a straw-man idea of what journalistic objectivity means, and probably a false objection -- how would holding a blood-plasma bag interfere with observing and reporting? -- but even if you buy it, it's an argument against embedding journalists with combat troops.

"Objectivity is changing in the era of 24/7 news and on-line journalism in numerous ways," Maras concludes that chapter, though on his own showing, objectivity has been changing ever since it was first invoked as a journalistic ideal. Earlier he discusses empiricist theories that "assume the reporter to be a tabula rasa or blank slate of knowledge" (87), and quotes a writer who argues that "What objectivity requires is an active mind that uses its mental powers in ways that reduce the distortions of reports caused by wishful thinking, bad reasoning, petty feelings and personal interests" (100).  I agree with the latter view, and it occurred to me that though this kind of "naive empiricism" has been debunked many times, there are people who talk as though they believe that human beings are naturally objective, that we would naturally (instinctually?) see the Truth if only the world (our parents, "Society") didn't put blinders on us, of bias, superstition, ignorance and the like.  I think that's obviously false, and that distortions of perspective arise naturally and inevitably from the fact that we are bodies occupying space and so can't see from everywhere at once.  Though many anti-blank slate thinkers admit all this, once they'd done so they tend to minimize or ignore how difficult it is to see past our limitations.

This shows up, for example, in the admission (which Maras also makes) that reporters are not objective, any more than they are rational or know the truth by instinct: they must undergo training and constantly monitor themselves to produce professional work.  It would seem, then, that it is the result that is "objective."  But it's still not clear what "objective" means in that context, and the many meanings the word has in use don't help.  Anyone who wants to use it should first specify the meaning he or she has in mind, and then it becomes possible to ask whether they are living up to their own standard.  It seem appears to me that the word "objective" itself gets in the way.

Reality Kicks Sand in the Face of Satire Once Again

When I started up my browser just now, I found this message underneath the Google search box on the home page:

Security and privacy are not optional. Stand with a broad coalition to demand that the NSA stop watching us.

Watching "us"?  What do you mean, "us"?  Google, Facebook and other big computer-related companies have, it's true, had user data seized by the Feds.  But that's partly because they were watching us, collecting data to sell to advertisers, or for their own use.  What I find most depressing, though, is that it's probably going to help to have these big, rich, powerful companies on the side of ordinary citizens in the coming struggle to make the government back down.  Obama will listen to big corporations; he won't listen to us.  But if and when that battle is won, the next one will be to get some control over corporations, which as Noam Chomsky has always warned, are totalitarian organizations without even as much accountability as government has.  They're at least as big a threat to American freedom as Big Government, because they aren't limited by the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.  When you step onto private property (and much of not most of what used to be public space is now privately owned), or get a job with a private business, you leave your civil liberties behind you.

Perros Cruzados; or, Just as American as Everyone Else

I thought I'd see how the fuss over Sebastien de la Cruz was shaping up a day later.  Turns out he was invited to sing the National Anthem again, at another NBA game, and got an encouraging Tweet from President Obama.  (Ambiguity Alert: a link to a related post under the HuffPost story about de la Cruz, titled "The Evolution of Race Control," was not about what I first thought: it turned out to be a Road & Track piece about the management of timing and scoring at the Indianapolis Speedway.)

Some of the rhetoric celebrating Sebastien de la Cruz was, as I feared, just the flip side of the rhetoric attacking him.  In this story, for example, the word "CHAMP" has been superimposed on the freeze-frame of the video of his "encore" performance.  Well, no, he's not a champ.  He's a talented kid, not a champion.  The writer goes on to report that not only is the kid a native born Amurrican citizen, he's a native of San Antonio.  Yeah, cool, but the only reason this information matters is to counter the lies of the racists, but it risks conceding their assumption that a foreigner shouldn't be singing Our National Anthem.  Being a native of anywhere is a historical accident, not an achievement.

The writer then notes that one of the racist tweeters (an African-American from her Twitter avatar) "has since disabled her Twitter account, ostensibly because of her public shaming.  I suspect this writer meant "probably."  Did Tia Ermana Jordan say "Disabling my account Bcuz U R all shaming me"?  If so, she'd probably be telling the truth, so her excuse wouldn't be "ostensible."  "Ostensibly" means that she said one thing, say, "Disabling my account bcuz I'm bored with it," but had another true reason.  Has she even given a reason, or is the account just MIA?

"He's not Mexican, he's American!" Even if he were Mexican, why shouldn't a Mexican sing the Star Spangled Banner? "He's a native San Antonian!" So? We need to dwell less on where people were born and more on the kind of people they are. (By which standard, Sebastien would still rate higher than the racists who attacked him from the anonymous safety of Twitter.)

Sebastien's father "performed a long tour of duty with the United States Navy, protecting the country he calls home and place where he chose to raise his child."  Again, "performed" is not the best word for the job here, but more important, the US Navy hasn't protected the US in my lifetime: all our wars since the end of World War II have been wars of aggression.  Besides, a good many undocumented immigrants have served in the US military, and died there for that matter.  Maybe Sebastien's champions should question whether being an undocumented immigrant is a sign of moral or existential inferiority, instead of letting racists set the terms of the discussion.

At the end of the article, the reader is invited to "Share If You Applaud Sebastien's Temperance."  What is this, the WCTU?  Did Sebastien take the Pledge?  "Temperance" is actually one of the better word choices here, but given the writer's general style, it must be accidental.

I love my Mexican friends, but I always feel uneasy when they talk about La Raza.  That isn't an innocent concept in Mexico either, with its complicated history of racism and oppression. Mexicans are ambivalent about being mestizos, "mixed."  I've often noticed that in most clasical Mexican cinema, all the main cast are "Castilian"-looking; Indios are visible in the crowd scenes, as extras, but rarely get speaking parts except as Indios, not Mexicanos.  That's not what Mexico really looks like.  "Puro Mexicano" is as screwed-up a notion as "100% American." Mexicans, like USAns, are mongrels, and Viva the mongrels of this world.

My Racist Friend

I went to work on the previous post before I read about this:



An eleven-year-old boy sings the national anthem at a professional basketball game, and sings it quite well.  (A bit shaky on the high notes, but many adults do worse.)  Watching the video creeped me out in numerous ways: the use of children to sell jingoism, and the militarization of American sport (though who cares, I know), the pomposity of the announcer which is part of attempt to elevate sport to cosmic levels of significance.

I wouldn't have seen the video if not for the reaction of many Americans to the boy: Twitter apparently exploded with expressions of rage that a "Mexican" was allowed to breathe on our sacred bloodthirsty-doggerel-set-to-the-tune-of-a-drinking-song.  (More of their frenzy is collected here.)  It's reminiscent, among other shining hours, of the widespread reactions to the discovery that some important characters in The Hunger Games were, like, black.  It's also a reminder that adult nativist bigots don't discriminate between adults and children in their attacks.

It quickly emerged that Sebastien De La Cruz is a native-born American citizen, and his father served in the US Navy.  You don't have to listen very closely to recognize that he sings the words with an American accent.  He responded to his critics on TV with poise and remarkable articulateness for a boy his age.  (You can see his original performance and his rebuttal on the same page that showed some of the racist tweets.)  One commenter on Youtube wailed, "It's horrible that a TEN year old child has to come on television to defend himself against racist tweets."  I think it's great that a ten (or eleven, or twelve -- the numbers vary, as does the spelling of his first name) year old child got to go on television and demonstrate his intelligence and fundamental decency compared to the cowardly scum who attacked him from the anonymous safety of the Internet.  I'm also impressed that he didn't use the typical liberal response to bigotry, Oh, how can you say such awful things? I have to go kill myself now, I'm too pure to live in this world.  I hope Sebastien De La Cruz goes far.

Of course, it wouldn't matter in the least if the boy were "just a Mexican," as he put it, or even if he were an "illegal immigrant."  (Remember, racists don't really distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants: they regard all immigrants as illegal.)   Nor would it matter if he were a Mexican visitor invited to sing at the NBA finals in the heavily Mexican-American town of San Antonio because of his talent and fame as a child mariachi singer.  Many foreigners foolishly believe that American ideals of freedom, equality, and welcome to the world's huddled masses are actually meant to be honored and practiced here, rather than pissed on by our Morlock masses.

I'm in a somewhat better mood now than I was when I began writing this post this afternoon.  I passed these links along on Facebook, signing off my post with "Remember, Christian racists, I'll see you in Hell."  This was partly out of general exasperation with the racist garbage in which my country marinates, much of which some of my Facebook friends happily share on their timelines, but I confess that it was partly because I learned earlier today (on Facebook, natch) that one of my racist former friends died yesterday.  (Former, because she defriended me a couple of years ago after I called her on her anti-immigrant racism. I believe there was some antigay bigotry in the mix too.)  She was a year younger than I am, and we went to the same school from second grade on.  I remember her as a nice kid, but all I know of her as an adult was her racist diatribes against illegals and against any charity for the survivors of the 2010 Haitian earthquake; like many bigots, she opposed universal health care in America because she thought it might help illegal immigrants.  And of course she also loved to post inspirational Christian memes, with no sign of cognitive dissonance.  I didn't mention any of this in the comments on her passing on Facebook, of course; it wasn't the time or place for it.  This blog is.

We all die, and it's disturbing when someone younger than I am bites the dust.  I didn't realize at first the connection between my anger at the bigots who denigrated Sebastien De La Cruz and my anger at my former friend. And at mortality, I guess.  My anger wasn't inappropriate in the least, but I was seething more than I usually would.  It was interesting to realize how furious I was, and to try to sort out why.  She's not the only Christian racist I'll see in Hell, if there is a Hell, but my subconscious evidently made the connection.

Maybe I should add for clarity that I don't believe in Hell -- I'm an atheist, duh -- and even if I had the power, I would not condemn anyone to eternal punishment.  Punishment doesn't fix anything.  (But remember, in saying "I'll see you in Hell" I'm starting from the notion of the Christian Hell, and if it exists, I as an atheist and a homosexual will surely go there.  The only problem is that the Christian racists might not, but if it works out that way, I certainly wouldn't want to spend eternity with them anyhow.)   If I were constructing an afterlife, it would be an environment where no one could hurt anyone else, which would be punishment for those who want to hurt others.  Imagine all the racists in a post-mortem state, with lots of the racial others they hate all around them, and unable to do anything to exclude them, marginalize them, or make them suffer for their difference.  (That could be a kind of Purgatory, I suppose.)  I don't think such a condition is possible, but it is the only kind of afterlife I could endorse.  The closest to such a concept I've seen is Kore-eda Hirokazu's film After Life, which rejects both Heaven and Hell in favor of something I could live with -- for myself and others.