Is the Gaze White?

Rush Limbaugh has assumed room temperature.  For years I've looked forward to using that term on his decease; it was one he used to be dismissive of the deaths of people he disapproved of.  (I learned while looking it up that it was also used by R. Emmett Tyrrell, another cigar-sucking, arch-rightist provocateur.)  I considered writing more on the topic, and maybe I will later.

But for now I want to discuss another media personality, generally regarded as a sort of anti-Limbaugh.  Dick Cavett became well-known as a more cultured, intellectual kind of talk-show host years before Limbaugh won notoriety. I watched his show in those days, and while I appreciated the range of people it featured, I was usually left unsatisfied.  I think some of this was due to the limits of spoken versus written discourse, but I also think it was due to Cavett's limitations.

This video, from 1972, confirmed my suspicions.

Jones is tremendously tactful with Cavett, resulting in a sort of jujitsu where Cavett keeps throwing himself in the dirt.  He knows that the conversation isn't going as he expected it to, but he keeps wading into the fray and falling on his face over and over.  Cavett saw himself as a liberal, superior to gross rednecks like Lester Maddox, but like many white liberals he assumed a chumminess with black people that he hadn't earned.  He fully expected Jones to agree with him that Ellen Holly's objections to Anthony Quinn's proposal to play a Haitian were merely "silly."  It's a safe bet that Cavett caricatured her letter, as liberals love to do to this day, but I should see if I can find it.  It doesn't appear that Quinn ever made that film in any case.

Anyway, Jones declines Cavett's invitation to play a round of "Ain't It Awful?", and throws several curveballs that leave Cavett confused.  He keeps insisting on nuance, for heaven's sake!  He might have pointed out -- he seems to hint at it, at least -- that a Hollywood historical epic costs a lot of money, and in 1972 there were few if any black stars that bankable.  Sidney Poitier, perhaps?  It's also hard for me to believe that a Hollywood script about a Haitian emperor in 1972 would have been any good at all; I wonder if Holly's script was ever produced.

Jones also mentions his own desire to play Beethoven, which gets a nervous laugh from the audience and silence from Cavett.  The points Jones mentions wouldn't be such obstacles: his hair (a wig could fix that), and as for his skin color, we now have a hit Broadway play, Hamilton, which plays with such casting issues very freely.  After that Cavett returns to insulting Ellen Holly, which Jones brushes aside more firmly.  I wonder if Cavett could watch this clip now without cringing.

He hadn't learned any better by 1985, when this interview with Richard Pryor aired.

It's the same damn thing all over again.  Pryor just sits there, staring steadily at Cavett, until the latter realizes how nonsensical he sounds; then tries again and again, he just won't let it go.  It's not just the question he's asking -- can white writers write for black performers? -- but the larger assumption that white people can expect to define black people in the arts and elsewhere.  Borrowing Laura Mulvey's speculations about the male gaze in film, the audience for Hollywood films -- which, remember, not only played to non-white customers in the multiracial US but were marketed around the world -- was assumed to be white.  In these clips, Dick Cavett finds black people gazing back at him, and he finds it very disorienting.

We've come a long way since then, though we haven't arrived.  I'm not sure what the ideal should be, but for me it includes a variety of Mulveyan gazes, with women looking back at men, people of color looking back at whites, and the rest of the world looking back at the United States - but also looking at themselves, unconcerned about how they might look to men, whites, America.  There's nothing wrong per se with the male gaze, the white gaze, the USAn gaze, only with the assumption that any of these is objective and should be the norm.

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.

Rollin' and Tumblin'

Last night my Tabloid Friend on Facebook linked to a Limbaugh clip referring to Dennis Kucinich, or rather to Kucinich's wife: "Really? She's a babe? I don't notice babes anymore, I have one."

So one of TF's friends commented: "You mean the wife-whore he bought a couple years ago, who's half his age?"

You see, this is how liberals show their moral superiority to the likes of Limbaugh: by aping his style. I commented to that effect, and the first commenter replied, "Sorry Duncan Yo-Yo, that's how I roll. Diff is, I'm telling the truth, and he lies. So if you don't like it, blow it out your ass."

The trouble is, that's how Limbaugh rolls, too: both the misogyny and the claim to be telling the truth. (Is "how I roll" a Limbaugh trope? Katha Pollitt wrote in a recent blog post that Limbaugh's apologists among "media insiders think it’s naïve and boring to complain: that’s just the way Rush rolls.")

Tabloid Friend also linked to a Kevin Drum piece which lamented the left's failure to take Limbaugh seriously. Drum quoted Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler, who wrote that "We liberals have been too lazy, too feckless, too ditto-headed to insist that big news orgs challenge Limbaugh." Why should the big news orgs challenge Limbaugh? He belongs to the same part of the political spectrum as the corporations that own the big news orgs, so it's hardly surprising that they welcomed him when he was in the ascendant: Ted Koppel invited him on Nightline, and:

But Limbaugh is taken seriously by "serious" media--in addition to Nightline, he's been an "expert" on such chat shows as Charlie Rose and Meet the Press. The New York Times (10/15/92) and Newsweek (1/24/94) have published his writings. A U.S. News & World Report piece (8/16/93) by Steven Roberts declared, "The information Mr. Limbaugh provides is generally accurate."

He's also taken seriously as a political figure. A National Review cover story (9/6/93) declared him the "Leader of the Opposition." Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who recently officiated at Limbaugh's wedding, says he tapes Limbaugh's radio show and listens to it as he works out (USA Today, 5/13/94).

... CBS News, the platform from which [Edward R.] Murrow denounced Joe McCarthy, has been seeking to hire Limbaugh as a political commentator.

There was a newsletter, the Flush Rush Quarterly, which combined reasoned rebuttals of Limbaugh with childish attacks, like the riddle: "What's the difference between Rush Limbaugh and a whale?" Answer: "Fifty pounds and a sports jacket." Haw haw haw! The newsletter's founder and editor, Brian Keliher admitted he'd "forsaken the moral high ground."

"I feel badly when we make the weight jokes. But Rush does it constantly," he says. "When people read this they think we're really putting the guy in his place."

The he-does-it-too excuse is embarrassing. What he says about his readers, unfortunately, is true: a lot of liberals think it's as hilarious and clever to make fat jokes about Limbaugh as conservatives (and not a few liberals) think it is to make fat jokes about Michael Moore. This proves liberals' moral superiority to conservatives.

Still, I have to give President Obama credit: his supportive telephone call to Sandra Fluke was a good thing to do. He should try doing the right thing more often.

This Town Needs an Enema!

Okay, so some anonymous artiste has come up with this image of Barack Obama as the Joker. Apparently it was first sighted as far back as April, but it's caught on since then, posters have been made, and some liberals are whining about it. Consequently rightbloggers are crowing that turnabout is fair play, and liberals and the left (indistinguishable from that far to the right) were, like, mean to George W. Bush in the day, calling him all kinds of bad names, so suck on this, libs!

That's American political discourse for you. I think it's an insult to socialists to call Obama -- center-rightist that he is -- a socialist, but I also hope that socialists have thicker skins than to worry about it.

My first thought when I heard about this was: Well, cool. Since this sort of thing is okay according to the Voice of the Republican Party and others when the target is a sitting Democratic President, then a proper response would be to apply the same makeup to various prominent Republicans. Maybe with the word "fascism" emblazoned below them. I mean, they won't mind, will they? They certainly aren't going to complain like a bunch of wussy liberals, are they? I'm just learning to work with Photoshop, so I have my work cut out for me. But a few minutes with Google showed me that great minds think alike. For example, that one up there on the, well, Right.


Or this one.


















Or the lovely lady on the right.












Or this one. No one seems to have applied the makeup to a picture of Dick Cheney yet, but he's an obvious choice.

But enough of this trivia, when there are more important political issues to discuss, like the death of Michael Jackson, or what's going to happen to Kate and Jon?



P.S. August 16, 2009. I just found this one, and this blog post which adds a few more to the pics I found. (Still none of Cheney, though -- is the Dark Lord hunting down and shooting in the face anyone who defiles his image?) I don't agree with the blogger's take on this foofooraw, but all that hard work deserves acknowledgement.


P.P.S. March 12, 2010: And still, the only image of Cheney as Joker I can find is this one, which is pretty poor stuff.