Operatic Justice

To my surprise and pleasure, our local public radio affiliate reversed its decision to remove the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts that have aired every Saturday afternoon for many years.  It turned out there was more support for the Met than had at first appeared, and station management had to back down.  Not too surprisingly, they weren't happy at having lost this battle, and I'm sure it was totally coincidental that an IU Music School alum and former music director and "director of new media," whatever that means, for the local station, wrote a letter to the editors of an online magazine "for people in public media" to denounce the reversal.

The reversal may have been a victory for classical-music lovers of Bloomington, but I see it as a serious setback to the station and new evidence that WFIU is being held captive by a small group of listeners who put their own interests over the station’s public-service mission ...

Bloomington is a well-educated, mostly affluent, highly connected college town. But WFIU broadcasts to a large swath of southern Indiana, with translators extending its reach to largely rural communities such as French Lick. Many of these communities are, or are in the process of becoming, news deserts, with limited local news coverage, lower broadband penetration and less access to online news. Over-the-air broadcast still really matters to these communities.

Even if we ignore the metrics-based, hard-business case that calls for WFIU to introduce more news coverage to its broadcast service and focus solely on its public-service mission, the station management’s decision to devote more of the weekend schedule to news and information was the right one.

In principle this sounded reasonable enough, until I remembered that the programming changes had little or nothing to do with "news and information": rather, they involved replacing the opera with mostly game-show programming -- middle-brow game-show programming, to be sure, but still hardly the noble mission the writer tried to make it seem to be.  If the station management wanted to go by a "metrics-based, hard business" criterion, why not add some sports programming?  Why not a hip-hop program?  (That would probably have caused strokes among the largely geriatric Met fans, creating some openings on the Community Advisory Board.)  I'm sure there was no ventriloquism from the Bloomington affiliate's management to the Director of Technology of the Investigative News Network in Columbus Ohio; this is just a matter of number-crunching technocrats thinking alike, and control-obsessed managers outraged that the rabble dared to challenge their decisions, and won.  The divide between his pious pretensions and the actual new programming was a giveaway of the extent of management's distance from the ethos of public media.

My Right Wing Acquaintance Number One, one of the classical-music mavens who led the opposition the change, was furious.  He linked to the letter on Facebook, and fumed:

This is outrageous. If the Saturday programming had actually been "news" instead of the pop cultural swill that it was, it would not have been so bad. Dinner Party Download? Really?!!! How in the world does that suport [sic] the educational mission of Indiana University?

The link set off some discussion in comments, and in answer to one of his friends who hadn't bothered to look for the letter-writer's biographical information -- listed not only as a note but in the body of the letter -- RWA1 wrote that the writer

was once a music student and WFIU techno person who has gone full time into a variety of media consulting. I think he has been seduced by the dark side of IT and techno people and forgotten his roots. That clown posse seems to be determined to dismantle western civilization brick by brick until all we have left is ragged shreds of "light classics" barely covering an emaciated torso of half-educated "wits" and chattering news mavens. Public radio forsooth! For this we are to be paying taxes when there are hundreds of channels of half-wit entertainment and political chatter? Fie!

That's a mind running on autopilot.  I called RWA1 out a week or so ago for this kind of frothing, quoting one of his own rants back at him: "Apocalyptic hysteria is always cropping up, but the conspiracy fantasies are really getting out of hand with the internet."  As you can see, RWA1 is fine with apocalyptic hysteria and conspiracy theorizing when he's the one doing it.  (But who isn't?)  So we have a "clown posse" on the "dark side" seducing innocent music-school graduates into "dismant[ing] western civilization brick by brick," etc.  I considered posting an allusion to authentic frontier gibberish to the comments, perhaps modifying it to something like "authentic right-wing gibberish," but I realized that such sniping, while fun, wasn't really what I wanted to do.  This time.

As I ruminated on this while out for a walk, though, I tried to figure out where the gap between reality and fantasy lay here.  In general, the kind of people RWA1 was attacking don't see themselves as trying (or wanting) to dismantle western civilization.  The letter writer began his polemic, predictably enough, by professing his love for classical music, and I believe him.  He probably doesn't see Western art music as RWA1 does; when he attended the Jacobs School, it was probably as a performer -- and classically trained musicians see their music very differently than their audiences do.

But then I remembered that many people on the American political right do hate "Western civilization."  If they profess allegiance to it, they're generally coming from a position of profound historical and cultural ignorance, preferring edifying myths about both history and culture.  Remember the Right's ebullient contempt for "old Europe" when European governments didn't fall eagerly into line with Bush/Cheney's war on terror?  Lawrence W. Levine showed in The Opening of the American Mind (Beacon, 1996) that educated, elite Americans have always been ambivalent about Western civilization, and often tried to cast America as a new, independent cultural force in the world.  And there's always been a strong streak of philistinism in American society, combined with a vague feeling that art is good for you, like sunshine.  You don't have to understand it, or think about it -- thinking is dangerous, and probably leftist -- but just being exposed to it builds strong bones.  (But hey, it can also cause cancer.)

In particular I thought of the Right's campaign against the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Though its public-relations arms focused on scandalous avant-garde work like Andre Serrano's "Piss Christ" (whose title alone could cause the veins in Republican foreheads to throb painfully) or exhibits of Robert Mapplethorpe's photography, a lot of public support for the arts goes to local-level arts education.  Shakespeare, for example.  Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation in 1996 that

The Bard's popularity is not entirely due to his own fabulousness, after all: A rather elaborate network of educational and community resources has ensured that hundreds of thousands of students in secondary school are introduced to the plays in an exciting, intelligent way.  Around the country, though these programs -- the teacher-training projects of Massachusetts's Shakespeare & Company and the Folger Shakespeare Library, which also runs a celebrated monthlong summer Teaching Shakespeare Institute; the school performances of Washington's Shakespeare Theatre -- are struggling under federal and state cutbacks, including major slashings at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education.

These federal agencies are held in horror, of course, by canon defenders, who fought long and hard and apparently successfully to delegitimize them in the public eye.  Defund the left -- remember that slogan -- by defunding education?  Talk about destroying the village in order to save it!  But who points out that Lynne Cheney and other canon conservatives are depriving students of the ability to appreciate the very literature they claim to care about?  [reprinted in Katha Pollitt, Subject to Debate (The Modern Library, 2001), 101].

But the ginned-up hysteria (NSFW!) over Mapplethorpe's "Man in Polyester Suit" (ditto!) was really just cover (see, I've got my own conspiracy theories, but this one is a fairly open one) for a general attack on the Commons, on public institutions and services generally.  The Right doesn't care whether American public schools are failing: they oppose public education altogether.  The Right doesn't care if public broadcasting is too "liberal": it opposes public broadcasting altogether, though right-wingers have been happy to use PBS when it gave them a podium.  (Much as RWA1 is willing to put up with NPR's fantasized liberalism in order to get his taxpayer-subsidized opera fix.)  Ratings-obsessed managers and consultants would probably have gained a foothold in public radio stations in any case, but the Right's successful campaign to cut support for public broadcasting -- thus throwing it on the mercy of corporate "donors" -- helped them to legitimize their perspective.

So RWA1 is experiencing the backwash of his party's war on the Commons, much as the Tea Party's corporate sugar daddies are worrying now about their beneficiaries' shutdown of the US government: they are perfectly happy to attack the government, as long as it doesn't hurt their business.  Since they are inextricably tied to and dependent on government services in myriad ways, there is no way a failure of the government could fail to hurt them; but it never occurred to them that their creatures would ungratefully injure the Libertarian billionaires who helped them get started.  Attacking public broadcasting was bound to affect the cultural products that people like RWA1 value, but No One Could Have Foreseen that.  Elitists always imagine that they'll be taken care of, and usually they are.  They enjoy siccing the mob on competing elitists, because it never occurs to them that the pitchforks and torches might someday appear outside their doors.

Down the Primrose Path

Roy Edroso has another interesting RightWing-watch post at alicublog today, about J. R. Dunn, a rightblogger who blames the excesses and prominence of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter (and their ilk) on liberals.

...the third major class of response, that of embracing the stereotype, of taking it on as a kind of costume, and even pushing it farther than the left themselves. I knew a noted spokesman for one of the major conservative media organizations who used to appear at public lectures with two heavy-set young men standing at either side of the lectern wearing camo fatigues and sunglasses, thus turning himself from conservative spokesman into Benito Mussolini. This same kind of behavior can be found at all levels of the movement from comment threads all the way to the top. Rush indulges in it all too often. Ann Coulter has made a career of it. While definitely a crowd-pleaser, it is, in the end, self-defeating. These stereotypes were constructed by the left for a reason -- to manipulate the public at large, ignorant of political subtleties and unfamiliar with doctrine, into certain visceral reactions to conservatives and their ideas. They were created to destroy conservatives. Why play along with them?

I dunno, maybe because it's fun?  Or, as Edroso proposes, because it sells?  If either Limbaugh or Coulter were to, you know, moderate their shtick, their audiences would dry up.  And it's what they know how to do.  (The Left has had its own clowns, after all; and while I might agree that the Right and the corporate media enjoyed using them as bugaboos to alarm the marks, I don't think they were "constructed by the" right, not even for a reason.)

Roy supplies another quotation from the same posting:

Calling Sandra Fluke a "slut" merely generated sympathy for her. Turning her into a clown uncertain what to do with a condom if one was handed to her would have shut the whole campaign down in short order. (How about the Facebook "Sandra Fluke Condom Support Group"?)

This sort of thing is always handy when someone on the right (my own RWA1 for example) tries to paint himself as a reasonable, sensible, moderate kind of conservative as opposed to all those crazy extremists who are hurting the cause.  Just when you start to sympathize with them a little, they let slip that they're just as bigoted and irrational as the clowns they're denouncing; they just want to keep their wack under cover, for PR purposes.

But then, in comments, the discussion took an interesting turn from the liberal-Democratic side.  Someone wrote:

Its a good example of how conservatives think contraception is ONLY for slutty women to use, and only for the purpose of not getting preggers. They are completely ignorant of its other uses and benefits, like preventing disease, treating cysts, fibroids, etc. etc. and so on. To them, anyone using a contraceptive can only be a: SLUT!!!11!

This is a good example of how liberals let the Right frame the debate.  So what if contraception has other uses?   Right-wing males in general, and the Roman Catholic hierarchy in particular, don't care about that.  The Church is quite willing to let women die in the service of doctrine.  But this commenter seems to equate "contraception" with the Pill.  There are other methods of contraception, like the IUD, the condom, the diaphragm, that don't necessarily prevent disease and have no effect on cysts, fibroids, "etc. etc. and so on."  She also seems to agree (or at least concedes) that "anyone using a contraceptive" for its primary purpose, i.e. preventing conception, "can only be a: SLUT!!!11!"

Another commenter answered her:

I continue to believe that one of the biggest missed opportunities in L'Affair Fluke was the - repeated - failure of anyone in the debate who had a megaphone to point out that the majority of all the "sluts" who use contraception are, in fact, married women.

Yeah, exactly.  I've written about this myself in the past.  The pay-no-attention-to-the-dick-behind-the-curtain approach doesn't work anyhow.  The right-wing males on the committee before which Fluke testified, aren't particularly concerned with women's health (eeuuw, ladyparts!), and neither is their constituency.  Remember the flap over the Susan G. Komen Foundation's decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood?  They were willing to cut off the breast cancer screenings that PP also provides because PP, among other services, provides abortions.  (Also contraceptives, but I don't know if that was a factor.  No matter, it would have also been affected.)  Even women who weren't interested in having an abortion would have lost access to cancer screening.  But who (in the "pro-life" movement, anyway) cares about women dying of breast cancer?  What about the innocent babies?

Of course the corporate media loved the fuss over Sandra Fluke, since the corporate media are mostly owned and run by straight or straight-identified males and reflects their attitudes and hangups; they also prefer spectacle and personalities to issues.  Outside that echo chamber, there was some useful discussion, but it's interesting that the first commenter I quoted fell back on the Right's framing of the subject.  The Right, contrary to J. R. Dunn, is very good at manipulating the public discussion, and manipulating the mainstream into debating issues on their terms.  Most often liberals let them do it.  Instead of arguing that a woman should not have to have a fibroid tumor to have contraception covered by her insurance policy, liberals let Limbaugh frame the debate: Was Sandra Fluke a slut or not?  No, they chorused, she's a nice girl.  And I don't doubt that she is. But even girls who aren't nice -- yes, even "sluts" -- should be covered by their insurance, whether they have cysts or not.

The same thing happened during the controversy over Todd Akin's and Richard Mourdock's remarks about rape later in the year: liberal feminists and their male allies let the debate be about the definition of rape, instead of whether a woman should be able to get an abortion even if she wasn't raped.  Too many feminists -- again, forgetting that most women who seek abortions are married and already mothers -- focused on whether draconian laws restricting abortion should have a rape exception.  Thus they were willing to sell out women who hadn't been raped by letting the Right divert the debate from women's reproductive autonomy to rape.  It is, of course, possible to cover both issues, but as it turned out, Akin and Mourdock managed to channel the controversy into just one channel, and as it turned out, one in which they were more vulnerable.  (Both lost their election campaigns.)  In the process, the question of abortion and women's choices was left untouched, in favor of the forced-birthers' stance.  And it confirmed once again that liberals don't possess the steely rationalism and dedication to reality that they like to imagine they do.  They are, in fact, easily distracted from the central issues in the issues they take on.  In the short run they may win small victories -- Akin and Mourdock were defeated -- but in the long run, I don't think either rape victims or women's access to abortion was helped at all.