My view on the Occupy Movement as of right now

A family member recently asked me about my view on the Occupy Movement. I thought about it for a few days and realized that I could write 20K words about it in an attempt to explain my views, but that this would take much more time than I have in the midst of a new job, the book project, the Holidays, etc. So, I will let far more knowledgeable and eloquent people speak on my behalf, and call upon one extremely flawed counter-example for contrast.

Here is my view on the Occupy Movement as of right now:

When the un-repressed play the "I'm being repressed!" card

Jon Stewart had a great show on a few weeks ago that provides yet another example of a group with plenty of political, economic, and social power trying to play the "I'm being repressed!" card:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
GOP - Special Victims Unit
www.thedailyshow.com
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It seems even in the nearly-meaningless world of sports that representatives of certain groups who most certainly are not being repressed in the U.S. -- but who seem to have a deep-seated need to try to convince people otherwise -- are playing this card.

This is ridiculous. Here's an historically accurate representation of real repressive violence inherent in the system:

Osama bin Hitler Bonaparte Boothe

Uh-oh.

Reading the lines between the lines

I started to reply to Anonymous' comment to my post "The white men fired back. That is the story," and then realized that I was in the process of writing another post on the topic of a recurrent theme in this blog, "what use is history?"

Anonymous' shouted comment was: "MURDER IS MURDER IS IT NOT? IF IT WAS YOUR FAMILY HISTORY WHAT WOULD YOU SAY THEN?"

My reply below . . .

"The white men fired back. That is the story."

I was doing some research in the Oregonian the other day and came across a 1931 interpretation of Euro-American settlement of Oregon that will likely strike some modern readers as quite dated:

"But They Fought Back," Morning Oregonian, June 20, 1931, p6.

In case you're not able to read the text, the pertinent and eyebrow-raising sections are as follows:

Hiding the beer from Mom

Tom Scocca has provided a fascinating interpretation of a topic that has baffled me for quite a number of years: Why macrobrewery beer commercials (from the likes of Budweiser, Coors, etc.) are so ridiculously asinine. The way Scocca outlines it, many of these beer commercials (for the past twenty years or so, in my experience) revolve around the following two-point narrative:

1. Beer—cheap, common, domestic beer—is a rare commodity that drives men mad with the desire to have it, at any cost.

2. Women are the great obstacle between men and the fulfillment of this desire.

"Taken literally," Scocca writes, "this is baffling" because "beer is cheap and easy to find" and "many single adult heterosexual men seek out female company when they're drinking."

Why do the big American Lager breweries perpetuate the same two-point narrative, then? Scocca asserts that they do so because their target audience is sixteen-year-old males:

The girls [in the commercials] aren't really girls; they're Mom. And Mom is the first hurdle in the thrilling obstacle course that makes up the world of the teenage beer drinker.

The big American Lager brewers perpetuate this dynamic purposely:

That's what the beer commercials are going after—the enthusiastic desperation of the underage drinker.

Fascinating.

The comment thread on Scocca's post is also worth reading.

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Newspapers as "the first draft of history"

Tim Lacy at U.S. Intellectual History had an interesting post that asked readers to respond with an overview of how they used newspapers as primary sources in historical research ("Newspapers As Sources For Intellectual Historians: Or, Jack Shafer Doesn't Understand How Historians Work"). Lacy's post was prompted by a recent Jack Shafer article at Slate.com in which Shafer asserted that

"Historians tend to view journalism as unreliable and tend to be dismissive of our work. They'd rather work from primary sources—official documents, photographs, interviews, and the like—rather than from our clips."

His lamentation, however heartfelt, is quite inaccurate, at least from my point of view.

This post got me thinking about the historian's craft -- a topic I'm quite fond of -- and I replied with the following:

"What If We Ran America By The Poll Numbers?"

Fascinating show recently on KUOW's Weekday program: "What If We Ran America By The Poll Numbers?."

President Obama pointed out that religious freedom is a constitutional right which is guaranteed to all Americans when he addressed the possible construction of an Islamic cultural center and mosque near ground zero. Yet any show of support for the cultural center goes against the will of the people — at least according to recent poll numbers. The majority of American's are against the project, if not insulted by it. What if our country was ruled by the majority? What if polls were always the deciding factor in what could, or could not, happen? Which is right: The religious freedom argument, or that the sentiments of the majority should be respected?

The guests on this program discuss the disconnect between what some people believe and what the facts of the matter actually are. This is a conundrum that I've been thinking about a lot recently. Why is it that some people -- most notably a lot of people who associate with the tea baggers, many libertarians, and the extremist fringe of conservative fundamentalist monotheists -- hold the beliefs that they do, even though the facts do not support the belief? Here I'm thinking of issues that are amenable to proof or disproof using factual evidence, such as whether or not President Obama is an American citizen, or claims about the participation of immigrants in violent acts.

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Some things to keep in mind while using Internet sources

(X-posted at the Sustainability History Project)

Howard Rheingold provides some useful guidelines to evaluating Internet sources in his article Crap Detection 101.

Rheingold begins:

The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge - the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part - the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. At that point, it's up to you to sort the accurate bits from the misinfo, disinfo, spam, scams, urban legends, and hoaxes. "Crap detection," as Hemingway called it half a century ago, is more important than ever before, now that the automation of crapcasting has generated its own word: "spamming."

To summarize Rheingold's points:

Reasons why one particular American doesn't care about soccer . . .

Much ink -- both actual and virtual -- continues to be spilt discussing why Americans aren't as rabid about soccer as most of the rest of the world. There are many theories:

** "Soccer would be popular in the U.S., but it can’t be televised profitably because there are no natural breaks for advertisements."

** "Americans have neither the belief system nor the temperment for such a sisyphean sport as soccer. We are a society of doers, achievers, and builders. Our country is dynamic, constantly growing, and becoming ever bigger, richer, and stronger. We do not subscribe to a 'zero sum' mentality. We do not labor for the sake of laboring. And we like our sports teams to score."

** "America isn't interested in football because they can't win, plain and simple. Enough BS American propaganda."

** "Maybe the sales pitch is wrong. . . . perhaps the best hook for Americans is not the beauty of soccer, but the fact that the game is also, in truth, pretty ugly."

** "it’s a sissy sport"

** "[Americans' dislike of soccer] can be easily explained in two parts[:] First, as a nation of loony but determined inventors, we prefer things we thought of ourselves. . . . The second and greatest, by far . . . is the element of flopping. Americans may generally be arrogant, but there is one stance I stand behind, and that is the intense loathing of penalty-fakers."

** "Another big factor as to why Americans don't get as passionate about soccer is because, generally speaking, we don't have a strong sense of nationalism."

My take on the matter is . . .

On sports & media-manufactured role models

Tim Keown has written a thought-provoking piece about one of the most recent big-time sports stars who got caught acting like a sociopath. In this case, it's Ben Rothlisberger, star quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers.*

Keown includes a fascinating take on this topic that did not occur to me until I read it (most fascinating part for me in italics):

The whole role-model thing might be the most ludicrous idea ever imagined. The concept of our coddled and impressionable youth drawing life lessons from a guy with a big curveball or an ability to move in the pocket is solely a construct of the industry and its mouthpieces. It was born on the back of myth: the slugger promising the ailing boy a homer, the fearsome defensive tackle tossing his jersey in exchange for a soda. In real life, a kid might model his seven-step drop after Roethlisberger, but beyond that they're both on their own.

I don't specialize in this field of history, but identification of the source of the myth of the sports role model seems accurate. To add to this, consider other corporate- and media-manufactured "role models": Babe Ruth and Red Grange. I don't have time to list them all.

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* Who have two very lucky Super Bowl victories to their credit over the past few years to add to their amazing run in the 1970s. Did I mention the part about them being very very lucky? Particularly against those plucky Arizona Cardinals. Lucky bastards.

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Portland's Black Panther Party & local media response

On Thursday, March 18, the Northwest History Network (NHN) sponsored a presentation by Martha Gies and Jules Boykoff on the topic of media representation of Portland's Black Panther Party from ca. 1969 to 1978. Former Portland BPP members Percy Hampton and Kent Ford were also featured at this event, and provided stories from their own experiences to augment Martha & Jules' analysis.

A representative from KBOO was there and recorded the event. He told me that the radio station may broadcast the event in its entirety, or they may use clips of the recording to create a news story; as of today, I checked their website and didn't find archived broadcast of the event or an announcement of such a broadcast in the near future. I did, however, find an archived show from Feb. 28, 2008, here featuring "former members of the Portland Chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense: Oscar Johnson, Percy Hampton, Gary Clay, and Kent Ford."

Aha! Global Climate Change and Media Mis-Representation

This article makes a point that I've heard about for years but that I hadn't yet taken the time to research to any significant degree. Specifically, this article "demonstrates that US prestige-press[1] coverage of global warming from 1988 to 2002 has contributed to a significant divergence of popular discourse from scientific discourse."

The above quote is from the article abstract. The rest of the abstract is written in academese:

This failed discursive translation results from an accumulation of tactical media responses and practices guided by widely accepted journalistic norms. Through content analysis of US prestige press . . . this paper focuses on the norm of balanced reporting, and shows that the prestige press’s adherence to balance actually leads to biased coverage of both anthropogenic contributions to global warming and resultant action.

The takeaway here his that these researchers have found evidence that the print media's top-of-the-food-chain has misrepresented scientific evidence on global climate change[2] to make it seem as if the issue is much more scientifically contentious than it is. What this means is that the general public does not have as complex or complete an understanding of climate science as it should have. This suggests to me that there are underlying political, religious, and economic factors at work here that override scientific evidence.

I'm not at all naïve enough not to understand the repercussions of Thomas Kuhn's work, nor the basic Marxian interpretation of the influence of capital on media systems. This said, it still strikes me as highly lamentable that the masses in the U.S. can be so easily manipulated, and that the media in this country tend to be so corrupt.[3]

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[1] Meaning, in this case, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

[2] AKA "global warming." Don't get me started.

[3] Yes, I was just born yesterday.

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Palin as "P" and/or "p" populist? How about "hypocritical theocratic authoritarian libertarian?"

Ralph Brauer at Progressive Historians has written a thought-provoking analysis of major media outlets characterizing Sarah Palin as a "Populist." Brauer provides a counter-argument to this characterization based upon historical evidence.

Brauer's analysis is noteworthy for a few reasons. First, it provides another clear example of the ways in which the mass media -- in this case the New York Times and the New Yorker -- misrepresent history. This case is important because many national, regional, and local media outlets take interpretive cues from the NYT -- so, if the NYT publishes inaccuracies, they're much more likely to be perpetuated throughout the nation than if, say, Portland's Mid-County Memo published such a story.

Second, Brauer's article also shows another example of how shallow mass media news reporting can be. This shallowness is likely due to the deadline-driven nature of the news reporting cycle, which doesn't allow reporters sufficient time to go in to any depth on most things. This, in turn, is due both to the fundamental nature of news reporting, which has a very short-lived expiration date, and the fact that media companies are profit-driven, and so scoop-driven, which then drives reporters to publish something -- anything! -- on a given topic before the competition.

Third, Brauer's article shows that many, many people operate by simplifying, categorizing, and mythologizing current events in the light of a simplified, labeled, and mythologized history that carries with it a clear-cut narrative structure that aides in interpretation by condensing complex ideas into easy, bite-sized bits of caricature. This is lamentable to we historians, but it seems like such a wide-spread and profound propensity among us (Americans? Westerners? Homo Sapiens?) that I'll be writing about this much more in the coming weeks and months.

Specific sections of Brauer's article that are apropos:

"If Sarah Palin is not a Populist, is she the heir of William Jennings Bryan as both the Times and the New Yorker imply? In word, no. Actually, this comparison is even more ridiculous and dangerous than the Populist one. In their defense the two mass media giants could fall back on the muddled and watered-down contemporary understanding of populism, but in the case of comparing Palin to Bryan, the historical record allows no such leeway."

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". . . one of the implied factors in the media comparison of Palin and Bryan has to do with the perception both are/were not exactly the brightest people to run for higher office . . .

"To imply Bryan lacked intelligence is to show a total lack of knowledge of his career. To understand this, forget that he delivered all his speeches from memory or extemporaneously or that he was one of the most feared debaters of his era (contrary to the image in [Stanley Kramer's melodramatic] Inherit the Wind), and go back to Bryan's first Congressional speech, which ranks as one of the most auspicious debuts in Congressional history.

It is a far cry from Sarah Palin's stumbling press interviews, her scripted speeches, and her lack of knowledge of domestic and world affairs."

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"The speech also highlights yet another important contrast between Bryan and Palin--their values and vision. If anyone out there can tell me what Palin's vision is for America please feel free to comment--and please when you do so cite something she has said, not a paragraph from a ghost-written book."

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"If Palin's supporters seem to go tongue-tied when asked to name specific policies she advocates, few people at the turn of the nineteenth century did not know what William Jennings Bryan supported. A major reason for this is Bryan's tireless advocacy for those issues."

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Follow the comment thread on Brauer's piece for some illuminating insights into the issues.

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