On Monday, December 2, 2002, at 06:18 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>
> Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Nonsense. Go out and grab that TV audience and things will be better
>>> than if you had remained isolated.
>>>
>>> Todd
>>>
>
> (Let's take this independently of the ongoing sniping between me and
> Doug.)
yes, let's.
>
> First a fact: The enemy owns, and will _always_ own the TV stations.
defeatist. you've just written off the bulk of mass media. if the enemy can own it, so can we. it just takes work.
> <snip>
> That is how it has always been on the left; that at least will remain
> so
> in the future.
while i certainly appreciate the power of one-on-one organizing, having done some, that is not an argument against the power of mass media. the question, as it went in our process arguments at union meetings, is who controls the agenda. the lord giveth and the lord taketh away.
>
> Secondly, Reagan and _all_ bourgeois politicians use an invisible
> jargon
> in which the public has been trained by the totality of our culture.
> The
> language belongs to them, not to us, and whatever we say will either
> (a)
> be intterpreted with _their_ meanings or (b) seem strange, "jargonish,"
> opaque, counter-intuitive.
again, you've already given up the ship in the premises of your argument. no wonder the ship always goes down.
> Chomsky has focused on this from the
> beginning. "The US military action to arrest Noriega was a terrorist
> attack on Panamanian people." Nothing abstractly difficult about that
> language, and it is easy enough (if someone will sit still for, say, 20
> minutes listening to the recitation) to provide the facts -- but the
> proposition is fundamentally unintelligible, because in the language of
> public discourse (the language used by Reagan & the Washington Post and
> even, for the most part, by the _Nation_) combining "US" and
> "terrorist"
> is a misuse of words. By definition the U.S. is for peace and liberty
> and freedom, and that definition cannot be violated by any rhetoric.
if they learned that, they can be unlearned of it. if they can't, we're doomed, anyway. if they can, then there are lots of ways to do it, and mass media can be a powerful tool in effecting that unlearning.
>
> Now this barrier of language _can_ be broken through in one-to-one (or
> very small group) extended conversation. I have done it myself many
> times over the last 37 years. BUT . . .
do you think they learned all that through one on one discussions? it can be broken through, and it doesn't necessarily take you or yoshie or whoever going door to door to do it. although house visits can be a good thing. ;-)
>
> There are about 20 different directions to go from here (and all of
> them
> have to be followed, and followed in such a way that eventually they
> are
> all followed at once), but I'll stop for now.
yes, there are lots of directions to go, but i'd also say there's a fair bit to talk about before we even get that far . . .
>
>>
>> that presumes that you can appeal to people without pandering to them.
>> apparently, some people don't think that's possible.
>
> No, it's very possible. But leftists have to do that in an entirely
> different framework from that in which the DP & the RP work. (In fact
> left discourse that panders to people as Reagan or for that matter
> McGovern is self-defeating. No one listens.) And the first great
> difference between their framework and ours is that theirs exists,
> while
> we have to create ours by out actions before we can speak to anyone
> within it.
i don't know. yes, it's easier for the enemy, so to speak, to speak in cant and get away with it, because people understand it, and when they don't it resonates, anyway (a la mcluhan), and people are often happy enough to let it be that way. but giving people a reason to think differently about things, or even just to think about things at all, is going to be work no matter which way you slice it. the truth about "leftists" on tv or whatever is not that they have to avoid mass media or mass media appeal; it's that they have to be fucking smarter about using mass media. yes, if you show up on the o'reilly factor screaming bloody revolution, you'll look like an idiot and only reinforce already ingrained stereotypes. what i don't understand is why someone like jennings, even, can't go onto o'r's show and kick the shit out of him. truth is, no one wants to. it's sullying and that's not how you change minds, anyway.
poppycock. when i was organizing in grad school, we got frustrated at all the "open fora" the university wanted to do to "talk through" our "issues," but we also salivated every time they suggested it, because, i swear to you, the administration did our best organizing for us. leftists in this country appear not even to have understood this as a strategy, much less figured out how to make it work.
sure, it's only one piece of the puzzle. but it's a big piece, and it seems to me like you're just writing it off in this kind of terminally-in-opposition way, rather than thinking through the use of media like tv as a tool, and, er, a medium of communication.
btw, and i am tempted to separate this, so as not to let it take over the thread, i think we have something to learn from michael moore on this topic. while i think that most of the critique of "bowling" from TAP (posted by, uh, someone . . .) is self-evidently true, i also think it runs the risk of simply tearing down in progressive eyes what is, in many ways, a very good, very effective piece. rome wasn't built in a day, for chrissakes. and moore doesn't have to convince mothers in the projects that guns are a problem there. if everything that could be a piece of this framework you talk about we tear down because it doesn't build the framework in one fell swoop, well, you're goddamned right we'll never have a framework.
peace
j
ps--per one throwaway from the TAP critique: i am sick and fucking tired of listening to all these progressives cry "shame" over the alleged ill-treatment of ooooold, siiiickly, charlton heston. fuck charlton heston. the man is a bastard, more so now than when he was 30. age and alzheimer's are not a license for demagogy. you put yourself out there the way he does, you ask for it--no, you are *begging* for it--imho.