Palin does SNL
The BAG nails the money shot from the latest SNL Palin skit.
Rebuilding from the bottom up
UPDATE: Lesson learned. If something seems either completely uncharacteristic or to good to be true, save it immediately. The NYT removed the image as I was writing this post. I was still able to find the thumbnail, which is not helpful to my analysis. Damn, live and learn.
We need policies that grow our economy from the bottom-up, so that every American, everywhere has the chance to get ahead. Not just corporate CEOs, but their secretaries too. Not just the person who owns the factory, but the men and women who work on its floor. Because if we’ve learned anything from this economic crisis, it’s that we’re all connected; we’re all in this together; and we will rise or fall as one nation – as one people.
This has become standard Obama rhetoric on the campaign stump during the past weeks. What one senses, and consistently reads throughout the press, is that American style free market economic hegemony is over. Obama also speaks directly to “failed ideologies” and the farce of “trickle-down economics.”
This photo AP photo currency leads the New York Times online edition (approximately Sunday, 2am Eastern). Here’s a photograph which communicates far more than the boilerplate images of Wall Street long faces, Middle Class house foreclosures or plummeting stock prices. The caption reads, “Coal miners at work near Coulterville, Ill. Natural resources mutual funds tumbled in the third quarter.” This is the only mention of workers in this article about stocks, commodities, and GDP. But visually, there’s more than one story. See the secondary photograph here.
UPDATE 2: This image doesn’t come close to the original. However, I thought it was still important, if not tepid, as workers do still provide a visual counter-narrative.
The interior of the mine shaft stands in as a metaphor for the economy. Someone with mining knowledge could no doubt offer an explanation of what’s taking place. But from my viewpoint, the situation looks precarious. The artistic style of the composition reinforces a worker heroism ethos. Socialist realism comes to mind. The men could easily be proudly embracing red flags instead of mining equipment. This is not unlike a scene from a Diego Rivera. The two miners stoically hold a teetering economy, which should it cave, will bury them and the working class alive.
Photographs, Seth Perlman/Associated Press
whither a maverick
Rolling Stone takes a hatchet to McCain’s utterly false “maverick” image. The title sets up a clever double play, simultaneously discrediting the narrative and referencing McCain’s increasingly childish behavior;
Make-Believe Maverick
A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty
Dishonest. That’s almost calling him a liar. Robert Grossman’s brilliant illustration reduces and captures the sad caricature that is quickly becoming the template. All the facts have been available public record since, well duh. But the corporate media isn’t typically interested in facts. It’s all about the narrative. Drill baby drill! Well this well is finally tapped. I’m coming around to the idea that the elite press has come to the simple conclusion that their money is simply safer under an Obama administration. But let’s not discount the tremendous, tireless push back work that takes place in the blog-o-sphere and the terrific work done by real maverick journalists like Cliff Schecter and Brock and Waldman. Not to mention, McCain’s own free-fall campaign has been its own worse enemy. Hearing Sara Palin go on and on about “a team of mavericks” just doesn’t have that authentic “mavericky” feel now does it?
But the Washington Press Corps’ willingness to accept this framework has been the glue that held this tall tale together. Neal Gabler’s confessional in the Times last March, “The Maverick and the Media,” revealed what political activists in the blogosphere have long seen as blatantly obvious;
IT is certainly no secret that Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is a darling of the news media. Reporters routinely attach “maverick,” “straight talker” and “patriot” to him like Homeric epithets. Chris Matthews of MSNBC has even called the press “McCain’s base” — a comment that Mr. McCain himself has jokingly reiterated. The mainstream news media by and large don’t cover Mr. McCain; they canonize him. Hence the moniker on liberal blogs: St. McCain.
Accompanying the Rolling Stone ten page article is a video titled, “Five Myths About John McCain” and two accompanying articles, The Double-Talk Express and Mad Dog Palin: The Full Story. Try puttin’ lipstick on that.
Tim Dickenson’s piece is particularly noteworthy because he starts out by challenging the keystone of the entire maverick mythology, McCain’s POW experience in Vietnam. He begins with an encounter between McCain and another ex-POW, Air Force lieutenant colonel John Dramesi. Dickenson sets up the contrast between these two and their respective experiences as “an honor gap.”
Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a “confession” to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn’t survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service’s highest distinctions.
He continues with a conversation between the two men which further draws into question why McCain has had a free pass all these years. Five years later McCain would leave his crippled wife for the young Beer heiress. Again, this information has always been available but the press has simply ignored it.
“I’m going to the Middle East,” Dramesi says. “Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran.”
“Why are you going to the Middle East?” McCain asks, dismissively.
“It’s a place we’re probably going to have some problems,” Dramesi says.
“Why? Where are you going to, John?”
“Oh, I’m going to Rio.”
“What the hell are you going to Rio for?”
McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.
“I got a better chance of getting laid.”
Yeah, there’s a guy putting country first. But it’s not just Rolling Stone. On October 4 the NYT ran a story, “Who You Callin’ a Maverick?” about a real maverick from my home town no less. What’s key in this story is the (re)association (by the press that is) of liberalism with patriotism.
“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” said Terrellita Maverick, 82, a San Antonio native who proudly carries the name of a family that has been known for its progressive politics since the 1600s, when an early ancestor in Boston got into trouble with the law over his agitation for the rights of indentured servants.
This was a local history I was unaware of and the “gobbledygook” was a funny bit of trivia. But I immediately recognized the meta-theme and so will you. This local San Antonio story can be seen as microcosm of the Republican reactionary war on Liberalism which took shape under the Nixon/Agnew “Southern Strategy:”
Sam Maverick’s grandson, Fontaine Maury Maverick, was a two-term congressman and a mayor of San Antonio who lost his mayoral re-election bid when conservatives labeled him a Communist. He served in the Roosevelt administration on the Smaller War Plants Corporation and is best known for another coinage. He came up with the term “gobbledygook” in frustration at the convoluted language of bureaucrats.
Then there was John Heilemann’s recent piece in New York Magazine which has been buzzing around the internet, “How McCain Lost His Brand: From maverick to crank in an instant.”
As both a media figure and a human being, Matthews is sui generis—and yet what made his comments so remarkable was how unremarkable they were. In the past several weeks, the shift of press-corps sentiment against McCain has been stark and undeniable, even among heavies such as Matthews long accused by the left of being residents of the Arizonan’s amen corner. Jonathan Alter, Joe Klein, Richard Cohen, David Ignatius, Jacob Weisberg: all former McCain admirers now turned brutal critics. Equally if not more damaging, the shift has been just as pronounced, if less operatic, among straight-news reporters. Suddenly, McCain is no longer being portrayed as a straight-talking, truth-telling maverick but as a liar, a fraud, and an opportunist with acute anger-management issues.
It may be to early to claim contemporary conservatism has died as a hegemonic force in American public discourses. But after eight years of horrendous neo-conservative pillaging of the state, and thirty years of a Republican culture war, a renewed sense of a patriotic liberal spirit seems to be rushing in to the void. Or perhaps that’s just my wishful thinking.
Illustration by Robert Grossman/ Rolling Stone
James Nachtwey on TED
TED simply provides one the most creative and innovative online forums. I first discovered TED while researching Al Gore’s climate presentations. I soon found myself “losing” hours at a time clicking through various speaker presentations.
H/t NCN for bringing this “low-tech” (for TED standards) yet utterly stirring presentation to my attention:
Photojournalist James Nachtwey was one of the 2007 recipients of the TED Prize. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and it brings people from these three worlds together to spread ideas, mostly by challenging fascinating thinkers to “give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. These talks are available on-line at TED.com. The annual prize winners are given a $100,000 award AND granted one WISH to help change the world. James Nachtwey’s wish is to “break [a story that the world needs to know about] in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digitial age.” That story will break on October 3 both on-line and around the world. Don’t miss it!
Given my growing interest in the intersection of photojournalism and visual culture on political culture and democratic society, I’m particularly interested in how online technology may be able to “rescue” the image from the “crisis” that Hariman and Lucaites so convincingly demonstrate in their landmark book, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy.
Arguing against the conventional belief that visual images short-circuit rational deliberation and radical critique, Hariman and Lucaites make a bold case for the value of visual imagery in a liberal-democratic society. No Caption Needed is a compelling demonstration of photojournalism’s vital contribution to public life.
Here Nachtwey and TED look to reinvigorate the role of photojournalism, understood as a critical tool for liberal-democratic citizenship, and place it back into a central space in our public discourses. Here it’s interesting to see how the internet, a major enabler of media over saturation can be redeployed to cut through all the white noise.
Stay tuned, today is October 3, 2008.
Looking into the Financial Abyss
During this latest “financial crisis” there have been some fascinating images which communicate possible alternative narratives to the daily press stories. The image above from this NYT article particularly caught my attention. Here, despite whatever giveaway, formerly known as the bail-out, “rescue” the Senate may approve on Wednesday, the message in this photo seems clear. We are staring down the abyss. Not only are we looking down the cliff but from this angle, we’ve already walked out past the ledge. This is the moment Willie Coyote realizes he’s about to free fall into oblivion.
I also appreciate how all those electric green symbols on the giant electronic ticker are cascading down to the floor were there are more wires, screens and computers than human beings. This theft was not created by machines, but it is the machine that’s been employed for all those “complex” unregulated investment instruments which lie at the center of the “crisis.” The Matrix thus serves as another appropriate metaphor (borrowing from Baudrillard) as the “code” merely supports the illusion of stability.
I’m drawn back to a scene from Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis in which the protagonist, a billionaire Wall Street speculator converses with his “Chief of Theory.” At one point in the conversation his theorist says, “We are not witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable” (p 80). Earlier in the conversation she states that, “Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself” (p 77). A paragraph later she continues:
“And property follows of course. The concept of property is changing by the day, by the hour. The enormous expenditures that people make for land and houses and boats and planes. This has nothing to do with traditional self-assurances, okay. Property is no longer about power, personality and command. It’s not about vulgar display or tasteful display. Because it no longer has weight or shape. The only thing that matters is the price you pay…The number justifies itself” (p 78).
Is this what Bush’s Treasury Secretary Paulson told Congress when asked about the number, seven hundred billion dollars? Congress (and the American people): “Why do you need that much money? How did you come to that figure?” Secretary Paulson: “I know its very difficult for all you untrained economists to grasp the complexity of it all. But you see, the number justifies itself!”
I can’t know the complex, inter-dependent, and highly subjective process that went into this photo ultimately finding its way to the pages of the New York Times. But neither painting nor any other art form has “lost its narrative quality.” Even right now, where money is just “talking to itself,” art is still talking to us. We ultimately don’t suffer from a lack of alternative narratives but a lack of meaningful political power.
Just over twenty two years ago Paul Simon released his album Graceland, an album which has never found itself in “the old stack.” Six years into the Reagan financial revolution (aka the beginning of the end of the regulatory state) Mr. Simon clearly saw the writing on the wall. In 1986, the first track on Simon’s album illuminated some of the simple truths that DeLillo would visit in Cosmopolis and Justin Lane asks us to consider in the photograph above.
I dedicate this song to Secretary Paulson, “the boy in the bubble.”
And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
Thats dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And dont cry baby, dont cry
Dont cry
Image: Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency