Djelloul Marbrook

There’s a lot of tiresome hooey in the media about what Americans really want and why they vote the way they do.

Republicans, who suffered head trauma in the last presidential election, are claiming that the victories of their candidates for governor in Virginia and New Jersey have given their ideas a new validity.

Democrats claim that their victory in New York’s far north 23rd Congressional District after 138 years as a Republican sinecure is a vote of confidence.

And Blue Dog Democrats and moderate Republicans are duking it out with their parties’ leaders.

So who knows what? Not me. And not, I think, the Sunday pundits and the op-ed heavyweights. That’s the most wonderful thing about democracy, it’s so mercurial.

But I would like to weigh in at one small sector of the arena. I think your average school bully plays a role in all this. I think liberals have been bullied into the namby-pamby corner by loudmouth thugs. I think Republican moderates have similarly been cowed.

The guys who talk tough out of the sides of their mouths, who claim to have the answers the rest of us are only groping for, these guys have convinced too many of us that we should walk on eggs around them because the rest of us hardly know how to spell patriotism without them.

I’m not making a case for more polarization. I like and admire Barack Obama’s willingness to set the table for everyone. I like compromise. Indeed, I believe a democracy can’t do without it. But that doesn’t mean an endless night of the long knives or stage handling by ruffians.

Consider what has happened to radio and television. It has been hijacked by ideologues, all mouth and no ear. All belligerence and mockery and damned little respect for anyone, even less civility. This isn’t democracy, it’s adolescence. And it’s cheap and avaricious.

How so?

Well, if you pay a talk show loudmouth a half million dollars a year to fill up the publicly owned airwaves with his own half-baked opinions, that’s a lot cheaper than a team of investigative reporters or a newsroom or a real news operation or documentaries or anything else that might really enlighten a listener. So, at the end of the day, this ugly incivility that jangles our nerves and poisons discourse is about money, about greed. And Big Media doesn’t even have the excuse of the Somali pirates—hunger.

And where are the preachers when it comes to this? Still blathering about family values, about gays, about patriotism, about a return to an America that was more securely Eurocentric? Where are they when it comes to the greed that has eaten the very fabric of our economy and happens to be one of the seven deadly sins? They’re silent, because Mammon pays them well.

There were moderates and even progressives in Germany in the 1930s who thought the Nazis could be accommodated. We know how that worked out. Most of them ended up dead. Bullies can’t be accommodated, whether they’re Stalinist or fascist. Anybody who was ever pushed around in high school knows that. Their mandate is our acquiescence.

Sound-byte media pose a fundamental challenge to a democracy. A democracy is based on the exploration of ideas, on people having their say, on respect for each other’s opinion. On civility. But sound-byte journalism is reductive and divisive. It reduces issues to simplicitudes. In this environment the right wing of almost anything thrives because it is inherently easier to turn conservative ideas into slogans than it is to intelligently rummage through a spectrum of progressive ideas. This is not to disparage conservatism; I’m simply suggesting that it’s easier to express than socialist ideas. Communism, on the other hand, has proven as conducive to sloganeering as fascism. It’s the ideas in the middle of the intellectual spectrum that are hard to express succinctly, and that is why extremists thrive. And it also explains why contemporary journalistic standards constitute a national tragedy. There is only one reason for them to be so low: Greed.

Take the word socialism. It is sound-byte journalism that has allowed the word to devolve into a bugbear. Almost all our European allies practice a form of socialism, including the United Kingdom. But here it is the paint the media use to smear any likely idea that seeks to redress class injustice and inequality. How has this happened? It has happened because Big Media is owned by the same corpocracy that owns the insurance and financial and defense industries; it serves its corporate masters. But are those corporate masters as concerned with democracy and justice as they are with profit? Is such a balance of interests even possible? These are questions that fall by the wayside because our overheated journalistic environment is hostile to them.

In the land of the sound byte the conservative position on health care reform is breathtakingly easy to grasp. Conservatives don’t like it and won’t negotiate. But the position of reformers is diverse, nuanced and often difficult to grasp. Reforming something is a lot harder than sticking with business as usual.

So what do I think about the popularity of the rightist blabberers? Well, how many of us liked math in school? How many of us liked school? But we know that without math, without school, we’re a third-rate backwater. It’s always comfortable to belong to the bullies’ cliques, to hang out with the thugs, and it’s always scary to stand up to them. But it’s what tests our mettle. And now it’s our national mettle that is being tested. —DM Far From Algiers music