A Slight Detour

I had a couple of ideas for posts today, which I still hope to get to, but I got sidetracked when my liberal law professor friend shared this on Facebook.

"Love it," she commented.  Not too surprisingly, I didn't, and told her so as directly as I could without descending to rhetorical homophobia.

My main point was that if Maddow's that smart, why she's so dumb?  She may well be more intelligent than those boys, but that only brings to mind Molly Ivins' deathless epithet, "smarter than a box of rocks."  (Or, to borrow Mim Udovich's evaluation of Camille Paglia, I think it's safe to say she's smarter than mayonnaise.)  She's a militarist jingo, and even on gay issues she doesn't bother to inform herself.  I wrote her off entirely when she shilled for Obama at Netroots Nation in 2010.  No doubt she did so entirely voluntarily.  (You cannot hope to bribe or twist / Thank God! the lib'rul journalist / But seeing what the woman'll do / Unbribed, there's no occasion to.)  But it discredits her as a professional journalist.

Plenty of right-wingers have college degrees.  Ronald Reagan got his bachelor's in economics and sociology.  As an undergraduate Bill O'Reilly was an honors student in history, and got an MA in broadcast journalism at Boston University.  I could go on, but why bother?

I could also point to Gore Vidal, who never went to college at all: he went from Philips Exeter Academy into the Navy, and then became a professional writer.  After prep school he educated himself.  And how about I.F. Stone, who started his own newspaper after he graduated from high school?  Oh, he did go back to college and earned a bachelor's degree (in Classical Languages) after he retired at the age of 63, but his real work was done without a BA.  He was worth a dozen government shills like Maddow.

My friend admitted that Maddow rants, but declared that Maddow didn't annoy her the way Limbaugh does.  Of course: and Limbaugh doesn't annoy a right-wing listener the way Maddow does.  My friend is a partisan, for all she denies it.  She said that at least Maddow hasn't shut herself off from learning, as she claimed Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh have; but that's not obvious to me.  She kept insisting that Maddow was smarter than the others -- that box of rocks again -- and that she detected no intelligence in them.  It's odd, but I've learned not to trust the subjective judgments of partisans very much.  It must be because I'm an ignorant college dropout who has shut himself off from learning.

I mentioned in passing my own lack of a BA, though of course my friend knew about that already.  "It didn't refer to you," she protested.  "You're not a newscaster." Well, yes it did refer to me, actually, even though she didn't have me in mind when she linked to it, because I am a dropout.  Remember the running gag in Joseph Heller's Catch-22, where the World War II aerial gunner Yossarian refuses to go on any more bombing missions?  "They're trying to kill me," he explains when pressed.  "They're trying to kill everybody," another gunner yells indignantly.  "What different does that make?" Yossarian counters.  The meme is just a smear of anyone who doesn't have a college degree, on the assumption that they are necessarily dumber than a Stanford alum and Oxonian like Rachel Maddow.  The existence of equally dishonest and irrational conservatives with degrees is ignored.  And since so many equally dishonest and irrational liberals also have degrees -- which was rubbed in my face many times this past election season -- it follows that the deciding factor is not a BA.  The meme, and my friend's love for it, is offensive, but more important, it's stupid.  It's a contemptible exercise in class snobbery.  And I hate being reminded that intelligent, highly-educated people can be that stupid and vicious.

Oh yeah, the headline of that meme refers to the importance of education, doesn't it?  I think that education is important and that everyone should have access to it.  But I'm also aware of its limitations, and the threat that educated people pose to the rulers of any society.  The more schooled people are, the more likely they are to identify with the ruling elites and their view of the world, however: Noam Chomsky likes to point out that people with more years of schooling were more likely than people with less schooling to support the Vietnam War, and to accept the US government line that we were defending South Vietnam against Communist aggression.  A major purpose of higher education is to acculturate students to elite values and perspectives, though this purpose took a hit after World War II when large numbers of non-elites used the GI Bill to go to college; many of those non-elites clung to their working-class, non-Anglo-Saxon perspective, so they've been under attack ever since.  But I admit, I begin to question the value of a college education when I see so many college graduates show themselves basically unaffected by it.

P.S. It's probably relevant to mention also the recent, much-touted poll which showed that while NPR listeners were better-informed than Fox News viewers, they still were nothing to write home about: NPR regulars correctly answered 38 percent of questions they were asked about US politics, compared to 25 percent for Fox fans.  Previous studies, before Fox News even existed, showed that the more people relied on broadcast news, the less they knew.  I'm sure all the CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS anchors were properly educated -- oops, no, Walter Cronkite was a college dropout, but Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, and Chet Huntley graduated.  David Brinkley and Harry Reasoner went to college but I can't find whether they graduated; perhaps they were anti-education moles in the media.

The Facts of the Case

Today one of my liberal Facebook friends linked to a blog post about Rick Santorum's stupidity while he was still running for the Republican presidential nomination. I can't cast the first stone at another blogger for not being timely, and anyway, that's not really what I noticed in the post.

Senator Santorum, you'll recall, claimed in public that only one university in California offered courses in U.S. history. Rachel Maddow, fearless defendrix of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, exposed Santorum's ignorance for all to see. Santorum then explained that what he "should have said was that none of the UC campuses teach a survey course in Western Civilization." This also isn't true, and after enjoying a hearty laugh at Republican Stoopid, the blogger expresses his bafflement about it:

I really don't get this. If you're Rick Santorum and you're issuing an apology like this, you have to know it's going to make it to the air and be fact-checked. Don't you turn to an intern or someone and say, "Hey, before I send this out, call up the University of California and make sure they don't offer courses in Western Civilization so I don't look like an idiot again"? And there were people who wanted this man to have the job where you get to order a nuclear attack.

He has a point.

The friend who linked this post commented "Don't let those silly 'facts' get in the way", and a commenter chimed in: "in the GOP emotions trump facts." I argued that in politics emotions trump facts, and that Democrats are no more interested in facts than Republicans are. My friend chided me for saying that there's no difference between the parties, which of course was not what I said (and which tends to support my position rather than his). And one difference is that if you're a Republican and you say something that isn't true, Rachel Maddow and other Obama fans will be all over your case; if you're President Obama and you say something that isn't true, Ms. Maddow will maintain a discreet silence about it, and the President won't "look like an idiot." After all, there's an election campaign going on, loose lips sink ships, we all have to do our part in the war effort.

For example, last week the President told Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone that his administration had cracked down on medical-marijuana dispensaries "because it’s against federal law. I can’t nullify congressional law. I can’t ask the Justice Department to say, 'Ignore completely a federal law that’s on the books' . . . ". Glenn Greenwald promptly pointed out that "as Jon Walker conclusively documents, the law vests the Executive Branch with precisely the discretion he falsely claims he does not have to decide how drugs are classified." I can't find that Ms. Maddow has pounced on this absurd falsehood. Neither have the Republicans, though.

But I'll stick with education. Last week during a story on protests over student debt in the US, Democracy Now! ran a clip of a speech by Obama in which he said, "We can’t price the middle class out of a college education, not at a time when most new jobs in America will require more than a high school diploma."

This is one of the President's favorite themes, repeated over several years, but it too is false. Even on its face it's suspect: if there are all those shiny new jobs out that which require college degrees, why are there so many recent college graduates who can't find work, and certainly not the kind of work they went into debt for? Alexander Cockburn did a good piece on the subject of the "Knowledge Economy" in March, pointing out that most jobs in America, including "new" ones (of which there just aren't very many, as each month's job report reminds us), do not require even a bachelor's degree. The late Gerald Bracey criticized Obama repeatedly on this point, in February 2009 for example (emphasis mine):

Obama said, "Right now, three quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma, and yet just over half of our citizens have that level of education." Scary, huh? Not really. This statistic was a favorite of ex secretary of education of education Margaret Spellings, about whom we can all express a sigh of relief that the operative word is, "ex."

If you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics stats on job projections, it is almost true (but not really) that what Obama said is right. But there are two hugely compromising factors that make this statistic much less fearsome that it first appears:

1. The definition of "more than a high school diploma" is a weasel phrase, an incredibly slippery statistic. It does not mean a B. A., an Associates Degree, nor even a year of on-the-job training. The BLS projects that the overwhelming majority of jobs to be created between now and 2016 will require "short term on the job training." That's one week to three months.

2. The "fastest-growing occupations" account for very few jobs. For every systems engineer, we need about 15 sales people on the floor at Wal-Mart (and we have three newly minted scientists and engineers for every new job in those fields). The huge job numbers in this country are accounted for by retail sales, janitors, maids, food workers, waiters, truck drivers, home care assistants (low paid folk who come to take care those of us who are getting up in years), and similar low-trained, low-paid occupations. Note that I did not say these people are "low-skilled." As Barbara Ehrenreich showed after she spent two years working in "low-skilled" jobs, there really is no such thing (see her Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America).

The sentences I put into boldface are the key: "more than a high school diploma" includes one week to three months of "short-term on-the-job training."

So, either the President is ignorant or he's lying, but what he's saying is misleading, to put it kindly. Bracey says that Obama "accepted the same garbage that the propagandists, fear mongers such as Lou Gerstner, Bill Gates, Roy Romer, Bob Wise, Craig Barrett and many others--God help us, Arne Duncan?--have been spewing for years." Whatever the reason, Obama has no reason to worry about looking like an idiot, no matter how many lies he tells. If a Republican utters a palpable untruth, Rachel Maddow will criticize it publicly; if a Democrat does it, Maddow will find something else to talk about, like Teh Ex-Gey. Even the Republicans don't seem to be interested in exposing falsehoods like this; they're more interested in Obama's birth certificate. Republican media will claim that a Democrat is lying, but of course it's hit-or-miss whether they'll be be right about it.

This goes back to Noam Chomsky's dictum, shared with Martin Luther King Jr., that it takes no courage to attack the crimes and lies of your official enemies; what is harder, and often dangerous (though much less so in the US), is attacking the crimes and lies of your own side and its friends. But as Chomsky also suggests, it is precisely the people who attack official enemies exclusively who will crow about their courage in Speaking Truth to Power, while attacking the troublemakers who criticize the home team as cowards, drug-addled nuts, and traitors.

O Ye of Too Much Faith

I'm disliking Rachel Maddow more and more. I've had doubts about her for a long time, because of her willful ignorance about the breadth of the political spectrum -- she obviously got off more on having Martha Stewart as a guest than Naomi Klein -- and I pretty much wrote her off when she shilled for President Obama at Netroots Nation in 2010. You can't be a bold independent journalist and an overt partisan for one party and one President.

More recently she published a book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, in which she "traces how U.S. national intelligence agencies have taken over duties that were once assigned to the military, and how this shift has increased the public disconnect from the consequences of war." Band of Thebes kvelled over the book, mentioning Maddow's own close ties to the military -- her father was a Vietnam vet, "and she might have joined up herself, were it not for that LGBT ban." Glenn Greenwald praised it, and David Swanson did a good takedown of it, pointing out among other things that "Missing is the fact that U.S. wars kill people other than U.S. troops." (Glenn Greenwald's interview with Maddow confirms this: she just doesn't want to think about the effects of our invasions on our victims, she refuses to imagine how anyone could want to hurt America.)

Now she's done a story on what she calls "Praying the Gay Away," which is full of factual errors and illogic. Factual errors include her deliberate confusion of religious bigotry and scientific bigotry: you can see her stumble over a transition from praying to therapy, trying to make them equivalent by sheer dogged insistence. She ties what she sees as a "mainstreaming" of ex-gay pseudotherapy to the 2001 publication of Robert L. Spitzer's study purporting to show that some gays can change their sexual orientation through therapy -- a study which Spitzer recently repudiated. This ignores just how mainstream antigay bigotry is, long before Spitzer's study was published. Newsweek did a cover story on the ex-gay movement in 1998, featuring John Paulk, who was caught in a Washington D.C. gay bar two years later. The sex researchers William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson claimed in a 1979 book that they had changed some people's sexual orientation; Time took them seriously; it now appears that these claims were false, even fabricated. (It's worth noticing that Masters wrote repeatedly of heterosexuals being "recruited" to homosexuality.)

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Sure, decades worth of history don't fit easily into a nine-minute segment, but you can often tell whether a commentator actually knows the whole story; listening to Maddow, I don't think she does. But when you know you have the truth, and that you're superior to all those wingnuts, who needs factual accuracy?

(Compare Maddow's tone in the video clip to her characterization of antiwar activists in Drift, quoted by Swanson: "advocates of ending war show up in a brief reference to 'student activists and peaceniks,' and a characterization of publications favoring peace as those advertising 'Oriental herbs, futons, prefab geodesic homes, all-cotton drawstring pants, send-a-crystal-to-a-friend, and the magic of Feldenkrais’s Awareness Through Movement seminars.'" Ironically, Maddow's caricature of opponents of war sounds a lot like certain caricatures of lesbians.)

If there has been a change in "ex-gay" hucksterism over the past few decades, it's that the movement has increasingly stressed therapy over prayer, dusting off discredited psychiatric theories from the 1940s and 1950s such as Close-Binding and Intimate Mother / Distant or Absent Father, and/or Confused Gender Identity. Evidently they don't expect to convince anyone anymore that homosexuality is a sin; they now present it as a sickness.

This leads to certain difficulties, some of which could be exploited by their critics: the mental-illness model is, or at least used to be, denounced by conservative Christians as a denial of human sinfulness, since it rejects judgment of the mentally ill in favor of compassionate medical care. If I'm gay because my mother held me too close, then it's not my fault. In the medical model, homosexuality isn't a "lifestyle choice," or a choice of any kind; it's beyond our control. This suggests to me that many antigay Christians aren't all that comfortable with fulminations against Sodomites, and want to take a different, less hostile tack, if only to make themselves feel better. (On the other hand, doublethink is a treasured Christian tradition, so it's entirely practicable to froth about the sin of Sodom and weep salt tears of compassion for our blighted lives, just as gay people have turned the mental-illness concept of "homophobia" into a moral judgment of tremendous harshness.) People who want to attack the ex-gay movement should try pointing out its abandonment of religion for secular medicine.

On the other hand, the idea that gay people suffer from gender identity confusion is compatible with current allegedly pro-gay theories which hold that we are biologically feminized males and masculinized women. Except that when we say it, it's a good thing -- or rather, it's supposed to be, but many gay people still adopt the tactic of wailing that no one would choose a lifestyle that causes us to be hated, discriminated against, etc., which sounds like it's not such a good thing after all. This, I've argued before, is why so many gay people become infuriated at the claim that homosexuality is a Choice: they hate being gay, they hate being different, and can only come to an uneasy accommodation with their condition by blaming it on their genes. They really agree with the bigots: If we weren't born gay, we can change, and if we can change, we must change.

Maddow argues that Spitzer's 2001 study gave the ex-gay movement support for their agenda. This only makes sense if you're unaware, as she evidently is, that the ex-gay movement is decades older than that, dating back to the 70s at least. She knows that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used to list homosexuality as a disorder, but she blames that on religion, without any evidence. But antigay Christians didn't need Spitzer, or Masters and Johnson, or Freud for that matter: they just latched onto anything that might make their case look respectable, just as many gay people seize on scientifically invalid research that can be used to support the claim that we are born this way. What matters is the conclusion, not the evidence.

It never seems to occur to people like Maddow to question whether the status of gay people should be decided by psychiatrists or other mental health professionals. After all, the DSM is subject to regular review and change. How did homosexuality change overnight from a dread illness to a neutral condition? Even though the American Psychiatric Association no longer considered homosexuality to be a disease, it still considered it valid for therapists to treat us and even try to change us, until the past few years. Why should gay people -- or anyone -- trust the APA at all? The Gay Liberation movement rejected any claims to authority over us by professionals, and I still think that was the right attitude.

Even if sexual orientation could be changed, no one would be obligated to do so. One's religious affiliation can be changed, after all, yet people are allowed to remain in the sect they choose, or to change to another one if they wish. Whenever I hear the rhetoric of people "struggling with same-sex attractions," I always want to ask, "What if I'm not struggling with those attractions? What if I embrace them?"

Maddow's performance in the video clip is more of a rant than a reasoned exposition; as she says at the beginning, "I've been looking forward to doing this story for a long time." If that were so, she should have prepared better. But lack of preparation combined with pomposity and truculence seems to be her style, rather like the unlamented Keith Olbermann. In the end she interviews Gabriel Arana, an ex-ex-gay who reported Robert Spitzer's retraction of his study. In an article at The American Prospect, Arana writes that when Spitzer's study was published,

With few voices to challenge the testimonials, reporters transmitted them as revelation. Newsweek ran a sympathetic cover story on change therapy, and national and regional papers published ex-gays’ accounts. My mother might not have so easily found information about ex-gay therapy had the Christian right not planted this stake in the culture war.

This is highly misleading, and a typical distortion of our history. In 2001 there were many voices that could have "challenged the testimonials." The straight media simply weren't interested in listening to them, let alone reporting them.  That's not surprising; what is surprising is that most gay people weren't interested in listening to them. The ineffectiveness of change therapy had been known for decades at that time, and the sex scandals that plagued the ex-gay ministries had been reported all along, mainly in the gay press because the straight media weren't interested. Arana's whole article is equally disingenuous, and while I sympathize with his struggle and suffering, he really needs to inform himself -- and his readers -- better. When he was in "therapy" with a change therapist, from 1998, he blamed his parents for his homosexuality; now he blames his therapist. When do we start taking responsibility for our own lives?

"What Is Truth?" Said Jesting Pilate

Another fun tidbit: FAIR has a blog post by Peter Hart about Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes fussing over new polling data which showed that a majority even of Republicans believe that there is "too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations." Fifty-three percent of Republicans believe this, compared to 91 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of Independents, or 77 percent of all respondents. (I find it significant that 80 percent of Independents agree, since the Independents are the mythic Center that Democrats like Obama are always trying to placate by moving to the right.)

I've written about this before myself:

Now, the White House is obsessed with the opinion polls. It is not possible that Obama and his people don't know what most Americans think and want. For that matter, the Republicans must know it too. So, when Obama sold out a public option in his health-insurance bill, when he put the deficit rather than jobs front and center, when he put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block, when he extended and escalated US military adventures, he knew that if public opinion meant anything, he was chopping away at his chances of re-election with every budget cut. Yet he avowedly defied his base. Maybe he believes and hopes that he can spend his way into a second term; and maybe he can.

(To clarify: I know that although professional politicians watch the polls, they don't let them guide policy or practice. My point is that you can't claim they aren't aware of them.) The difference between me and those MSNBC stalwarts is that they thought that these poll results reflected a new development, even though (as FAIR showed) similarly large majorities of Americans have said the same thing for decades.

HAYES: What's amazing to me is how unresponsive Republican state level officials are and how much they're responsive to all of their ideological priors, all of the interests that they promised fealty to before they got into office, and how little trimming of the sails they've done.

True, but what about the Democrats, who, as I pointed out above, must have the same polling data? As the FAIR blogger pointed out, "the first question to ask is whether you really believe politicians are actually sensitive to public opinion at all--read about Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics for another take." The only connection between the Democrats and "populist" Americans came later, when Maddow said: "But I think right now, if they [Democratic politicians] were calculating the domestic political cost of ending the Afghanistan war, there would be none. I do not think that the Republican Party has either the credibility or the energy on foreign policy to resist Democratic White House if they wanted to end the Afghanistan war sooner." Of course, Obama has no intention of ending the war in Afghanistan until he's damn good and ready, political cost or no -- he has no Bush-era Status of Forces Agreement to push him, as he did in Iraq.

So anyway, another good commentary from FAIR. What prompted me to write this post was a comment below the post, from someone who wrote:

Perhaps if we demand that a requirement be made into law that news broadcasts and public political meet a minimum threshold of honesty we might see things change. They manage to do this in Canada and yet here Fox News was able to win a lawsuit by claiming they had no legal requirement to tell the truth. Demand Honesty.

He included a couple of links to online petitions which he had evidently started. (The one on Facebook has 4 likes so far!) I was disappointed, because I was looking for evidence that they "manage to do this in Canada." Judging by right-wing Canadian politicians' ability to be voted into office, I am skeptical.

But the real question is, what would a law look like which required "that news broadcasts and public political [sic] meet a minimum threshold of honesty"? Who would decide what is honest and what isn't? I wouldn't trust any government to make that decision. Much as I dislike Fox News, I'm glad they won the right to lie; "We Fought in Court for Our Right to Lie to You" should replace "Fair and Balanced" as their tagline. The alternative would be that the government can decide that any news outlet wasn't meeting "a minimum threshold of honesty" if it published information -- about the economy, say, or about American war crimes -- the government disliked. Before anyone advocates such a law, they should imagine it being enforced by the Bush administration, though I'm sure Obama would love it just as well. In the real world it would replace journalism with government and corporate propaganda. Indeed, the corporate media already "meet a minimum threshold of honesty," with the stress on "minimum."

The problem, as far as I can see, is that too many Americans don't "demand honesty." There are plenty of alternative media in the US. Nobody is required to listen to the corporate media; just about everybody complains about them; but they refuse to look at the alternatives. When I ask people about this, they say things like "Gee, I know I should, but I just don't have time ... Someday I'm really going to inform myself better ... Someday ..." Yet they do have time to watch reality TV shows and hour upon hours of professional or college sports; I think that reveals their real priorities.

Myself, I don't have time to watch the corporate media; most of my news-reading time is taken up with alternatives: FAIR, Democracy Now!, my community radio station, and a lot of places on the web, which I read critically. And I've noticed that once you begin to inform yourself, you can read behind what the corporate media say, so that even if you must watch CNN or read the New York Times, you can spot their distortions. That is your responsibility as a citizen: to think for yourself. If you want the media and the government to decide for you what is true, you might as well just listen to Rush Limbaugh; he at least openly claims to think (or something) for his audience. No free citizen should abdicate the responsibility of thinking to anyone, government, corporation, or individual, but that is what the commenter was advocating: let the government determine a "minimum threshold of honesty" — and come to think of it, we already have that, a minimum — so that we can just sit back and let ourselves be filled with government-approved truth. Yummy! Why, we could even have a Department of Truth! Then we could finally trust the media; they wouldn't dare step out of line.

A law like the one that commenter wants would make a difference, though: it would wipe out alternative media, or at best drive them underground. Right now you have alternatives to the corporate media, who distort the news in directions agreeable to their corporate owners. But if the government can require the media to tell the "truth" as determined by the government, who do you think would be shut down? Not the New York Times for dutifully passing along Obama's claims about Iran's nuclear weapons, you can be sure of that. More likely it would be little magazines and websites who shoot his claims full of holes. If the commenter doesn't like the First Amendment, which forbids government interference with the press, he can always move somewhere more to his liking, like Canada or France or -- what the hell, why not? -- Iran.

Crony Capitalism at Home

Naomi Klein has finally appeared on Rachel Maddow's show. Which, we're all sure, had nothing at all to do (via) with some bloggers' pointing out that, despite her relevant knowledge and visibility, Klein had never appeared there. She did appear on Keith Olbermann's program, back when she was touring to promote The Shock Doctrine -- but not since, not during the economic crisis when it would have been reasonable and sensible to invite her. It's not as if she had nothing to say about it.

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So, better late than never, Rachel! One would hardly guess from this clip what an Obama groupie you are. Try to do better in the future.