Remember, Remember the 17th of September

For some indescribable reason (my reasons for these things often defy description), I was immediately bummed out by the visage, pants, and lankiness of this morning’s substitute yoga instructor. Since Dana, with whom I practiced too briefly, returned to the east coast, I’ve been adrift, looking for the flow yoga instructor who inspires me to get over my uncomfortableness with the idea of even having a practice to speak of and, well, go with the flow. I suspected this guy would not be him.

He spoke with an inscrutable accent that I guessed to be mere affectation or the product of life as a military brat, dragged from post to post, picking up a lilt here and a dropped consonant there. I found it to be a little annoying. When he off-handedly mentioned that, on his first visit to Occupy LA, he had expected to see a bunch of strangers but instead found only familiar faces, I appreciated the connection to something I respect but doubted his motives: is he trying to impress us?

I can be pretty judgmental of individuals–sizing up motives and weaknesses like a lioness deciding whether to mate with a male or sic her pride upon him. So its surprising–even to me–that I have never shared the skepticism many on both the left and right harbor about the Occupy Wall Street movement. While I have identified with it from the beginning, I’ve never felt an overwhelming desire to pitch my yellow North Face tent (a prized possession) on the lawn of Los Angeles’s City Hall. I’ve visited a number of times, wandering through the maze of tents and signs, peering into the library and kitchen tents; one weekend, I even served granola to a line of Occupiers, all sleepy-eyed and grungy and spirited and hungry. I’d call myself vaguely connected to the movement. I follow along on Twitter and think about it daily and occasionally donate a box of granola and carton of soy milk. I’m certainly no expert.

Which I suppose makes me an expert, given the spirit of the movement.

I’ve scrutinized the efforts–both earnest and contemptuous and always quixotic–to define this movement and discuss its shortcomings and attributes. The constant clamoring chorus desiring a single, clear, articulable goal or single leader to emerge from Occupy have missed the point completely. And so my effort here is not to add to that particular chorus, though I’m inevitably doing so simply through the very act of writing about it. I suppose I only wish to add another voice to the rhythmic beat of individual voices, to discover what this movement has meant to me and how I can participate in a chorus of a different kind–one that encourages all ideas to have a voice, one that can drown out the cacophony of talking heads that wish to add more noise to the same old paradigms.

I see the Occupy movement as an effort to bust through binaries, the oversimplifying of nearly every aspect of American life into black/white, either/or. Some of the most idiotic attacks on the Occupiers have gone after those involved in it as hypocrites, claiming that mere consumption of corporate goods somehow undermines any questions one might raise about any corporate behavior, no matter how insidious. These people claim: you can’t have it both ways.

The Occupiers gleefully retort, with chants and drums and signs and the People’s Mike: Why not?

It is the People’s Mike, in fact, that I regard as the fundamental characteristic of this movement. Traditional lefty protest–which this both is and is not–tends to be identifiable by its leaders–those who hold the megaphone, which, by virtue of its being the property of someone lends to a hierarchy of ownership and signifies a sort of bureaucracy that mirrors the bureaucracies these movements so often push against. But early on in the Occupy Wall Street movement, an effort to silence the protest–to strip it of the megaphone–strengthened its core principal: everyone has his or her own voice, and everyone has the right to be heard. This perfectly responds to the confusion about a singular message: there is, through this device, a singular voice, but this voice has an endless number of speakers. There is no ownership of this voice, no ability to turn it off, and no dominant rhetoric nor ideology. It is the voice of the individual and the voice of the group. It is not neither nor both.

This exploding of binaries helps to explain the conundrum of consumption. Another popular image of the Occupy movement has been the Guy Fawkes mask. Of course, the history of Fawkes himself dates back 400+ years; however, the mask’s roots lie in the pages of Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta. But the image adopted by hundreds of protesters, who are fed up with the monolithic control forced upon them by a government and corporatocracy that are an intertwined massive symbol of oppression, is most readily tied to the film version of the graphic novel, released in 2006 by mega-super-conglomerate Warner Brothers and written/produced by the duo then known as the Wachowski Brothers–a monicker that is no longer used, as Lana (then Larry) Wachowski is a transgender woman. The layers of this historical/written/drawn/filmed image are so vast and tricky that peeling them back is like counting grains of quicksand while standing in it. So if the People’s Mike provides the character of this movement, this mask is its perfect symbol. It’s not necessary to go into the history of Guy Fawkes or the general symbology of masks as a tool–these things are understood easily enough. It’s the mediated layering of experience that is most compelling.

The adoption of undeniably Big Media iconography as the “face” for so many largely anti-establishmentarian protesters provides a glimpse into why one can both be and not be a consumer of corporate content and goods. The perceived dichotomy between corporations and anti-corporate sentiment is one of the many ways in which we can underestimate the complexities of our lives. While the talking heads of news show hosts/guests and politicians consistently strive to stand firmly on black and white talking points, we all know this dichotomy of ideas to be a canard. Nothing is black and white. Nothing is simple. Things are complicated and messy–the gray spaces are where real insight occurs. And so a generation that has been brought up on media imagery cannot simply reject that imagery as a form of protest. This movement co-opts from everything and everywhere: the placards and signs of previous movements, the images of the political protests of imagination–like the one staged in V, the philosophies of those who came before, recycling the ideas (as young people always do) of Marx and Bakunin and Nietzsche and Rawls. But there are new things too–the incessant drumming, the universal leadership (such a brilliant way to avoid scapegoating and martyrdom), the tents.

The tents.

From early October, when tents only sparsely occupied the City Hall lawn.

If Guy Fawkes masks provide the perfect symbol–all layered with the medium and the message and the metaphor and the moment–the tents provide the movement’s central imagery. They are the physical embodiment of Occupation. Tents provide a sense of place–they are stable and constant if not permanent nor impenetrable. They both are and are not a home. With tents, the Occupiers have solidified what is perhaps the single most cohesive message of the Occupation: public space, public access, and public ideas are essential in a democracy.

To dig deeper into these ideas, I think we need to consider geography, space, and some heady French dudes–most notably Lefebvre and Foucault and Baudrillard. I’ll leave the latter two alone in this piece, though within their (often nearly impenetrable) works lie clues to the bones of this movement’s anatomy, if not the sinew and muscle. Lefebvre, however, will get his moment. In a discussion of class hegemony, he writes:

Hegemony implies more than an influence, more even than the permanent use of repressive violence. It is exercised over society as a whole, culture and knowledge included, and generally via human mediation: policies, political leaders, parties, as also a good many intellectuals and experts. It is exercised, therefore, over both institutions and ideas. The ruling class seeks to maintain its hegemony by all available means, and knowledge is one such means. (10)

If we replace “ruling class” with “The 1%,” something begins to take shape. And I don’t think The 1% is merely defined by financial wealth. Many who fall into the quantifiable distinction of the 99% balk at the idea that economic inequality has led to a corporatocracy in which ideas are divided into binaries of To and Not To or Buy or Not Buy, and there are those who are of the economic 1% who understand that these binaries help to limit choice, opportunity, and freedom. But the symbolic 1%–as practiced by a far larger segment of the population than that mere 1/100th–is this hegemony that wishes to control both space and conversation–both “institutions and ideas.” In recent weeks, for example, we’ve seen institutional power exercised through the use of police who attempt to divide Occupiers from the spaces they occupy (cops function as a form of mediation–the medium through which the hegemony, both political and corporate, sends a clear message). The Occupation, on the other hand, succeeds most as a completely new model–a society in which the free exchange of goods and ideas are marked by the ownership of things (iPhones for Twittering and tents for sleeping in) and the not-ownership of anything (a donated library, donated food, the People’s Mike). And the embodiment of these various ideals–as vast and diverse as those who espouse them–is seen in the embodiment of public spaces all over the country and the world. Zuccotti Park, myriad city halls, parks and campuses–these are merely places, no more singularly significant than one person’s voice or ideas. It is not the place that matters–it is the space and the people who occupy it.

And I think this movement has impacted the way many Americans understand space. Edward Soja, jumping off the insights of Lefebvre, identifies a Third Space–the breaking down of binaries to create a space that is both inhabitable and conceptual, “an ‘in between’ position along some all-inclusive continuum” (60). This Third Space produces an open alternative that is “both similar and strikingly different” (61). In the language of the Occupation as I understand it, this is where the tattoos of movements past layer over and under the inking of a new conceptualizing of the meaning of a movement. If there is a dominant hegemony (is this even an “if”?) that wishes to bifurcate all of our experiences into easily digested either/or poles, then the only way to re-imagine our lives in a completely different way is to live inside our paradoxes–we are consumers and revolutionaries and media whores and adbusters. In order to survive the complexities of a world that is constantly–and wrongly–being whittled down into easy-to-market pieces, we have to embrace the confusion and revel in a lack of understanding in order to truly understand. Or, to draw again from Soja, the Third Space occupied by this movement is perhaps “distinguishable from other spaces (physical and mental…) and a transcending composite of all spaces” (62). If some of us–through conversations about tents and parks and public spaces and what they represent–begin to even conceptualize this sort of non-binary understanding of ourselves and our place in the worlds of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, politics, media, and poetry, then this movement has already succeeded in altering the dominant conversation in some fairly profound ways.

As it always is, today’s yoga class was a journey, one I’m always happy to be on, in spite of legs that shake in the warrior poses and spaghetti arms that battle through each chaturanga. But I have my strengths, too–the ability to lay my belly on the ground when my legs are splayed wide to the sides or to fold into an odd pretzel, arms clasped behind my back, legs creating a helix in front of my head, which is firmly implanted near my crotch. Like all yogis this new guy encouraged us to venture as far into the poses as we could, or desired to, listening to our bodies and adjusting for the particularities of the day. There’s a clear line from this sort of yogic thinking to the Occupy movement–there is no one size fits all, and the search for enlightenment is individualized and shared, singular and universal. And, despite my own penchant for applying theories and philosophies in order to comprehend ideas in a measurable way, perhaps it’s often best that some ideas defy the ability to reason with them, forcing the thinker to dig deeper and deeper (…breathe into the pose to take you deeper…), revealing and refuting and re-imagining and renewing. Some things are best left inscrutable because scrutiny leads to being “pinned and wriggling on the wall” like the existentially doomed Prufrock, measuring life with coffee spoons. Or with price tags. Not everything should be so easily quantified.

By the end of my yoga class, I had somewhat warmed up to my new instructor. Despite his unplaceable accent (I knew Dana was from Maine the first time I met him, having gone to graduate school with a man who had the same strange accent, marked by a sort of geographically-specific speech impediment) and impossibly pointy elbows, shoulders, and knees, he kicked my ass a little bit, and I respect that. After class, a fellow practitioner, clearly as curious as I, asked the yogi where he comes from. He chuckled, obviously having been asked before, and responded, “I’m from Cleveland.” Now that was not the answer I expected.

Works Cited

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991.

Soja, Edward. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996.

Broadcast News

Last night, NBC covered the DNC for an hour. They began with a 3-minute clip of Ted Kennedy’s speech, and then talked about how wonderful and meaningful his speech was for a full half hour. They showed Michelle Obama’s full speech, which I almost felt thankful for after the Teddy debacle, as if I should thank them for showing the actual news rather than talking about it.

The fact that this is a dangerous state of affairs should come as no surprise to anyone. Albert Brooks has a line in Broadcast News that’s been playing in my head. Brooks, a field reporter, jokes: “let us never forget that we are the news.” His character thinks journalism is losing the battle to personalities–to selling itself. He thinks William Hurt’s character, a coifed idiot who can’t write his own copy, is the devil. Films like this and Network have served as notably ironic warnings for decades. Now, with the news firmly filtered through TV’s talking heads, cut up to create a narrative for us, we have lost some sense of reality. Watching it on any level makes me a little crazy.

So tonight I tape seven hours of C-Span. I can’t wait!

I Am Not A Journalist

I’m not. I’m not one of those bloggers who fact checks or cares about journalistic integrity or, hell, even knows much about journalism at all. Some bloggers (I’d barely even consider myself one of those; I’m a mental masturbator, and I find it more kinky to do it in public), however, are journalists. Just as all Asians aren’t crappy drivers, all Jews aren’t rich (tell me about it), and all teenage boys don’t smell like goats (actually, this one is true), all bloggers are not equal. Some of us do it as an exercise in procrastination (that’s me!), some because they have no friends, some because it’s their job, some because they hate their job. Whatever the reason, there is no single reason.

So I find this op-ed in response to another op-ed that I have not read (I’m not a journalist, didn’t you hear me?) to be interesting.

Because I do think bloggers can be journalists. In fact, I think they must be. Someone must be. Newspapers are no longer (were they ever?) bastions of journalistic integrity. The corporations that own them are as money-grubbing and corrupt as those that own the newsmagazines and news TV. There has been a shift in this country from serving the story to serving the corporation, and it’s equally as dangerous as if our news were all government-run. It’s actually more insidious because corporations are so good at marketing. They can actually market themselves out of the picture. They can make us forget they’re even there. Quietly, our freedom of press is being commodified, censored, and regurgitated.

For this reason, independent news is necessary for the survival of democracy, and don’t think I’m playing at hyperbole when I say that. I mean it. TV news is crap, we all know that. But to keep up with the trend of Americans that can’t or won’t read, newpapers have become just as useless–all flash, graphics, 5th grade readability, and, most significantly, lacking in news that might upset any corporate apple carts. Journalism cannot survive if the pocketbooks of a few are more important than the knowledge of the many.

So, no, I’m not a journalist, nor was I meant to be. To continue the Prufrockian nod, I am the pair of ragged claws that scuttles along the bottom of this blogger sea. Me? Bottom feeder. Elephant Picnic could not eat me without epinephrine. But I’m grateful for those bloggers who offer true journalism to those who care to find it. Naysayers will cry that there’s no system in place to insure the accuracy of their reporting. To that I must ask, is this anything different than the alternative? At least bloggers often cite or link sources. This is better, way better, than “some people say.”

It’s Literally the Least You Can Do

Food and Drink Corporations, faced with largely obligatory pressure from the FTC, have decided to do very little in hopes of throwing their own government arm (because if ya think there’s any real separation between the FTC and McDonald’s…) a token bone. Then everyone looks good and nothing has to change.

Cuckoo Bird Casualty

We’ve Got Some Catching Up To Do

Wow. Sorry. One semester ended, one began. I’ve been a revolving door recently. But I have had some thoughts.

1. To go back to hockey for a moment, Detroit’s old man club will live on. Chelios has signed another one year deal, meaning that by the end of this contract, he’ll be 46. Looks like Hasek wants to come back and play over his 43rd birthday. A year ago, I would have scoffed at this prospect. I wasn’t happy to have him back after watching him play a few injury laden years in both Detroit and Ottawa. Now? Sure. Why not! He had an amazing year and, though the Red Wings didn’t make it to the Cup round, he made it farther than the goalies everyone swoons over like Brodeur and Luongo. But all the geriatric action this week ties to the ten year anniversary of the big accident, and it makes me think where Vladdy would be now. Likely retired, but with a few more Cup wins under his belt. It’s easy to forget just how phenomenal he was–so imposing, so smart. Like his fellow defenseman Nick Lidstrom, he rarely made a mistake, and he always made the other team pay. With one more year, Chelie will have been with the Wings as long as he was with the Blackhawks; that’s amazing to me. Had Vladdy never been in that limo accident, I doubt Chelios would have ever moved to Detroit. It’s an important moment in team history, and one I will always reflect upon when I see Vladdy sitting up in the team box with the big guns, or when he shuffles out onto the ice for a team tribute.

2. Why is Paris Hilton news? I’m so bothered by this.

3. I’m honestly surprised by all the Sopranos hubbub. Did I love the ending? No. But I expected it. The existential nature of the show’s ending was in line with the design of its final three seasons. We were never going to get an end to the show in which Livia plotted to kill her son with his uncle and the guys all bumped Pussy off on a boat. This great Greek tragedy no longer existed. Life became random, meaningless, and a little drawn out. There were moments I loved in the last few seasons, but it wasn’t precisely the show that began. We were never going to get an end to that show. It hasn’t existed for a long time. I would argue that 9-11 completely changed the tone of The Sopranos and the stories that David Chase wanted to tell. In that way, all the surmising that Tony did/didn’t get bumped off as the screen went to black is relatively beside the point. I think the blackness itself, its empty silence, was point enough.

4. Rupert Murdoch has suddenly decided to be an environmentalist. In typical Murdoch fashion, he has found ways to make this pay off. A little local worker bee told me that the entire locations crew on 24 walked because Fox wanted to offer them Priuses to drive around in. That sounds nice, right? Then consider that these guys make something like $350 a week in transpo money. They would lease a Prius for a quarter of that. The union says they either need that money or a car. But their jobs are painfully insecure. They could be fired next week. Their shows could be cancelled (one show that’s facing the same issue almost was). So they have to keep up the car they have lest their shiny new Prius is torn from their clutches next week. They’re losing money, a lot of it. And if you don’t know, locations folk are not only comparitively underpaid, they’re overworked and often the most miserable people in the business. This is just one small example of the way Murdoch’s new found activism will work for him. And his executives. And his producers. But not anyone else.

I think that covers it for today. I’m sure there’s more. Don’t worry, I’ll return eventually.

Let Them Eat Fake

In light of Paris’s version of freebird and back to our discussion (my discussion, but whatever) of citizenship, democracy, and media, Marty Kaplan’s blog post on Huffington Post today touches on what might be the most dangerous media attack on democracy today–television journalism. The whole post is worth a read, but I’ll give you this little nugget to savor:

“Democracy, said our Founders, depends on an educated citizenry. That’s why they protected the news business with the First Amendment. On the other hand, it’s a good bet that Spring Comes Early for Paris isn’t exactly what they had in mind.”

The Continental Divide

I thought this Nancy Cleeland post on Huffington Post was too relevant to let slip by posting here. The implications both for discussions of media and democracy as well as journalism ethics are at home in this piece. Cleeland touches on not only precisely the overwhelming problem in traditional media today, but she has made the best possible choice a single person can make to effect any kind of change: try something less traditional.

Where Are All the Good Men Dead, in the Heart or in the Head?

There’s a recurring topic surrounding me this week (all two and a half days of it), and it’s not a pleasant one. Murder. It’s the watchword.

I’ll start here:

On Sunday, Joss Whedon posted an already oft-discussed entry on Whedonesque. For your perusal, I’ll repost it here:

This is not my blog, but I don’t have a blog, or a space, and I’d like to be heard for a bit.

Last month seventeen year old Dua Khalil was pulled into a crowd of young men, some of them (the instigators) family, who then kicked and stoned her to death. This is an example of the breath-taking oxymoron “honor killing”, in which a family member (almost always female) is murdered for some religious or ethical transgression. Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith, had been seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim, and possibly suspected of having married him or converted. That she was torturously murdered for this is not, in fact, a particularly uncommon story. But now you can watch the action up close on CNN. Because as the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones.

There were security officers standing outside the area doing nothing, but the footage of the murder was taken – by more than one phone – from the front row. Which means whoever shot it did so not to record the horror of the event, but to commemorate it. To share it. Because it was cool.

I could start a rant about the level to which we have become desensitized to violence, about the evils of the voyeuristic digital world in which everything is shown and everything is game, but honestly, it’s been said. And I certainly have no jingoistic cultural agenda. I like to think that in America this would be considered unbearably appalling, that Kitty Genovese is still remembered, that we are more evolved. But coincidentally, right before I stumbled on this vid I watched the trailer for “Captivity”.

A few of you may know that I took public exception to the billboard campaign for this film, which showed a concise narrative of the kidnapping, torture and murder of a sexy young woman. I wanted to see if the film was perhaps more substantial (especially given the fact that it was directed by “The Killing Fields” Roland Joffe) than the exploitive ad campaign had painted it. The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.

“I’m sorry.”

What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence — is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.

I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.

It’s safe to say that I’ve snapped. That something broke, like one of those robots you can conquer with a logical conundrum. All my life I’ve looked at this faulty equation, trying to understand, and I’ve shorted out. I don’t pretend to be a great guy; I know really really well about objectification, trust me. And I’m not for a second going down the “women are saints” route – that just leads to more stone-throwing (and occasional Joan-burning). I just think there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted. If we were all told the sky was evil, or at best a little embarrassing, and we ought not look at it, wouldn’t that tradition eventually fall apart? (I was going to use ‘trees’ as my example, but at the rate we’re getting rid of them I’m pretty sure we really do think they’re evil. See how all rants become one?)

Now those of you who frequent this site are, in my wildly biased opinion, fairly evolved. You may hear nothing new here. You may be way ahead of me. But I can’t contain my despair, for Dua Khalil, for humanity, for the world we’re shaping. Those of you who have followed the link I set up know that it doesn’t bring you to a video of a murder. It brings you to a place of sanity, of people who have never stopped asking the question of what is wrong with this world and have set about trying to change the answer. Because it’s no longer enough to be a decent person. It’s no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself. I’ve always had a bent towards apocalyptic fiction, and I’m beginning to understand why. I look and I see the earth in flames. Her face was nothing but red.

All I ask is this: Do something. Try something. Speaking out, showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded e-mail. Pick a cause – there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink of tacit support to action. Once a month, once a year, or just once. If you can’t think of what to do, there is this handy link. Even just learning enough about a subject so you can speak against an opponent eloquently makes you an unusual personage. Start with that. Any one of you would have cried out, would have intervened, had you been in that crowd in Bashiqa. Well thanks to digital technology, you’re all in it now.

I have never had any faith in humanity. But I will give us props on this: if we can evolve, invent and theorize our way into the technologically magical, culturally diverse and artistically magnificent race we are and still get people to buy the idiotic idea that half of us are inferior, we’re pretty amazing. Let our next sleight of hand be to make that myth disappear.

The sky isn’t evil. Try looking up.

[/Joss Whedon post]

As a person who discusses media ad nauseum (not only here where I should gear more towards media literacy but I choose, instead, to regale you with insipid thoughts on TV viewing), I’ve touched on this topic many times. This semester in my media literacy class, my students have been bored to tears with gender discussions about media. Even I’ve grown tired of it. If I have to read one more student essay about how advertisements give girls anorexia, my head will explode. To me, the effects discussion is far less interesting than the causes one.

One of the things I think is inherent to Whedon’s words is the question of race. He could have easily sat back and judged these Muslim men, most notably because that is currently our country’s raison d’etre: we love to throw stones at Muslims and Arabs from our glass houses. However, the link in this piece between honor killings and American media cannot be understated. Do honor killings occur in the US? Of course they do; many men who beat their wives to death do so to preserve their own sense of “honor.” However, we do not live in a society where it’s best to videotape such crimes. One will go to jail, perhaps receive the death penalty (another topic I would like to never read an essay on) for his actions.

But reality is clear, and I don’t think we need to enter into a discussion of abuse here. This is, afterall, a media blog, and it’s the subversion of “equal rights” that is the angle I’m taking for both sanity and brevity’s sake. One distinction we are forced to make is this: are recording an actual misogynist murder and staging one for the sake of entertainment the same thing? I think we’ll all agree that no, they’re not. However, if we step away from the result and study, instead, the impetus, they become strikingly similar. One commenter on Whedonesque says “sod feminism”; he or she believes this issue to be about humanism. This person, on a certain level, is clearly right…but also gravely wrong. There is a difference between hatred and misogyny, just like there is a difference between hatred and racism, and, honestly, I think many people tired of discussions of “patriarchy” and “women’s rights” so much in the early 90′s that these terms have become moot. Feminism is no longer a mantra to some and an insult to others; it’s merely passe.

But I look at the media and I see a distinct backslide. There was a time when I applauded third wave feminism as a new beginning for women: we no longer had to assume supression; merely assuming equality could change the world. Now I have to backpedal and say that I was wrong. Sure, there are great third wave heroes–Buffy being the best example–but, more often than not, the “we dress like we want to, have sex like we want to, and you can’t touch us” attitude has fallen into the hands of women who have no concept of what this means. This means ass-crack pants and grinding men in public to get them off. There is a vast chasm between screen violence against women that illuminates the horrors of violence against women and that which glorifies it. I’ve discussed the Captivity billboard here already, and Whedon notes it in the piece above, and I think we all know to what I refer when I make this distinction. As a die hard fan of horror films (even some with questionable misogyny), I’m quite familiar with the latter form of violence. And so I return to the original question:

I reject the idea that media violence causes real-life violence. What I accept is the fact that our acceptance of media violence, particularly misogynist violence, holds a mirror up to patriarchal, heteronormative values that are so ingrained that deprogramming seems impossible.

It is our ability to be outraged by the kind of violence that forced Khalil into submission and death juxtaposed with our broad acceptance of casual misogyny (yes, my broad acceptance) that shows how alike cultures are. As Whedon notes, nothing if not misogyny can bring us together.

Last night, Chereth and I went to see Adrienne Shelly’s final film, Waitress. The film, which is wonderful and touching and fantastic and delightful, is about Jenna (Keri Russel), a woman who desperately wants out of her life with abusive husband Earl (Jeremy Sisto) and the fetus she carries. She has to decide, over the nine-month course of her pregnancy, what is right for her. She has to train herself to do the right thing. Let’s first say that Jenna’s lover/OB-Gyn played by Nathan Fillion is so wonderfully adorable that he makes my heart beat faster. But I don’t want to discuss the film here. I want to discuss Shelly, who was murdered last year by a construction worker she confronted about noise. There seems to be no indication that this murder was misogynist; it was random, stupid, pathetic chance. Either way, when the credits rolled on her film about love, family, and hope, Shelly was the last thing I thought about, and how a woman who made a movie with such a delicate, lovely touch, must have herself been lovely. Some movies just feel like a person’s heart bared raw.

There was another murder discussed around here in the past few days, a woman who perhaps killed her husband years ago. I’m not (not not not) going to get into specifics here, but I wonder what circumstances drive a woman to such lengths. I can’t help but wonder whether the world beat this woman down in a way that only many women and a smaller number of men (because gender abuse is not about sex per se) can truly understand.

I don’t know what else to say. How to end. How to bring all the pieces of this together. My puzzle piece doesn’t fit today, hasn’t for the past few days, and I think murder, images, intent…all of these things are reasons.

ABC, NBC, CBS, FCC…They’re All Just Letters

The apparent burial of a report that would counter big media interests once again shows not only the dangerous strength of media lobbyists in DC; it helps to illustrate how easy it is to infiltrate those watching the media when the FCC consistently uses media conglomerates as its hiring pool. In fact, many people work for one of the companies, do a stint with the FCC, and go right back to the company they came from.

In My Email This Weekend…

I received an action notice from Moveon.org that included this sentiment regarding ABC’s film The Path to 9/11:

The Path to 9/11 appears to be part of a coordinated push—including speeches by President Bush and millions of dollars in advertising—to exploit the five-year anniversary of 9/11 for political gain. That’s not acceptable from anyone—especially not a news organization like ABC.

I agree with this statement almost completely. I feel a definite push to remind Americans that they are not safe, that the GOP can truly protect them. However, I also have to ask, as a dedicated follower of the First Amendment: is it wrong of ABC to air this show (if they end up airing it)?

On one hand, I have to say yes. It portrays real political figures in situations that perpetuate blatant lies at a time when our country is vehemently looking for truths. But, ultimately, this is tasteless more than it is wrong, as they are selling the show as a “docudrama,” which can mean pretty much anything. These things are never true; it’s just that, this time, they are taking a political side rather than that of an involved indiviual (say, Amy Fisher). This isn’t the first time that a news-interested company took a side. Have you watched Fox News? At the end of the day, that’s a more diabolical tie to misinformation, as FN sells lies as truth and carefully manipulates their information. FN sells lies as “news”; ABC is only selling them as drama, which makes it, in some ways, more truthful than a reality show.

So, while I support the attempts to keep this show off the air (because, really, there’s nothing to lose), I am not sure the reasoning that ABC is a news outlet is quite sound. When CBS and Viacom were one company, they aired news on CBS and the clearly left-leaning Daily Show on Comedy Central. Is that a conflict? If we are to suppose that a single channel has such responsibility, should it not stretch to the whole conglomerate? After all, consumers only believe there are many choices; really, we have very few. I for one would never give up my Jon Stewart, and so I cannot ask the conservatives to give up their infiltration of fictional drama. They’ll do what they must; I won’t watch. But I can’t help but think that misinformation from media outlets is much more dangerous when presented as “news” than it is when presented as “drama.” Will people believe lies? Yes. But individual stupidity is not enough to cry foul. If ABC wants to air this show, they’ll air it. They have every right to do so. After it airs, the rest of us can tear the inaccuracies to shreds and point out, once again, that the concept of “liberal media” is a fallacy. Perhaps that’s the way the system works best: everyone gets their words out, and then we debate.