Morning In America

Posted on November 5, 2004

A freak storm hit our little town north of San Francisco yesterday.
Oddly, lightening rarely strikes here. But Wednesday, while I
walked through our town square, a lightening bolt flashed across the
sky accompanied by soul-rattling thunder. In a scene from a Stephen
King movie, a woman looked up, shook her fist at the heavens and
shouted: Bush! I ran into a dear friend who said he’d slept ‘til
noon, just couldn’t get out of bed. I hopped in my car and turned on
the radio, to KGO in San Francisco, one of the few talk stations in the
US with both conservative and liberal commentators. Someone had called
in and said the same thing my friend did. She couldn’t get out of bed
either.

The temperature dropped 20 degrees in one hour. My wife called me.
“Pick up some firewood,” she said. I bought a box of logs and a bottle
of good scotch whisky and headed home. I threw a log on a fire and my
wife prepared dinner, comfort food: fish and mashed potatoes. A
neighbor knocked on the door. Sullen, he just wanted to talk.

Never has an election so traumatized such a large percentage of
America. I got calls and emails from people who said they want to leave
the US, a business client, people who have never intimated their
politics to me before: successful people who would have an economic
interest in keeping tax-slasher Bush in office.

I feel the same chill I did when Richard (Tricky Dick) Nixon was in
power, when he rallied the “the silent majority,” whose symbol was the
hard hat construction worker, against what his crooked and later
indicted Vice President Spiro Agnew called “nattering nabobs of
negativism” i.e., liberals, to gain power. I was a fledgling journalist
then. Like Tuesday’s rally of faith and flags over facts, Nixon managed
to camouflage real issues, to cynically tribalize a country for
political purposes. Nixon was less dangerous, however. He faced a
Congress with the votes to impeach whereas Bush, with power over both
houses of Congress and possibly, soon, the Supreme Court, will preside
over a one-party oligarchy, with no checks and balances, and no re-election campaign to face. He and like
minds will pursue their agenda, good or bad, practically unimpeded,
with the added “shock and awe” power to destroy opponents with
impunity (recall the ruthless pursuit of Bill Clinton).

“I am a bit frightened,” said my friend.

“I am scared,” I said as I took another swig of Scotch.

During the Nixon era I got fired from a TV show for using Agnew’s
“nattering nabobs” alliteration in what I thought was a sly report. My
boss said that they had received a letter of complaint and hinted that
management was scared because Nixon’s FCC was challenging the licenses
of the Washington Post’s TV stations. The Post broke the Watergate
scandal. Now it is Janet Jackson’s “boobgate,” where the Bush’s Federal
Communications Commission is imposing huge fines for any TV or radio
content the FCC judges as being indecent. Could more sinister forms of
censorship be far behind? Just before the election, Texas
Republican Joe Barton, Chairman of the House Commerce Committee
threatened to seek Congressional “safeguards” regulating TV news
content. Add to this a news conference today during which the
President-reelect was asked two questions by a reporter and declared,
“Now that I’ve got the will of the people at my back, I’m going to
start enforcing the one-question rule.” Later, when another reporter
asked a second question he said, “Obviously, you didn’t listen to the
will of the people.” Giving little men big power has historically not
bode well for the world. Yes, I am scared out of my wits.

Over the years, as a reporter, a journalism professor and now, a cranky
outsider, I have watched television news change from an informative,
responsible public service to a “give ‘em what they want” entertainment
mentality. Working in TV news in the 70s and 80s, I shared notes with
friends around the country about the consultants who began swarming
like fire ants over television newsrooms imposed sure-fire,
ratings-boosting formulas: live reports leading a newscast no matter
how irrelevant and inane, time limits and style restriction on stories,
quotas for animal stories, etc. I was turned down for a job at ABC in
Los Angeles for not “selling my news.” KGO-TV in San Francisco, one of
the pioneers of so-called happy talk news format became the acronym, in the industry, for
“kickers, guts and orgasms” and its competitor became known as
“Eyewitless News.” This same mentality spread to newspapers.
Journalism became market-based instead of information-based.

Even without overt censorship, US media coverage of this election,
especially on the cable news channels, was glaringly irresponsible.
Every day candidates were allowed to deliver their rehearsed
soundbites, repeating their mantras over and over until they became, in
the minds of voters, Orwellian truths, with little analysis except from
trained spinners and entertaining loudmouths. Where were the “yes,
buts” after every already-proven, repeated lie? “Fair and
balanced” meant that truths, half-truths, lies and whopping lies
received equal treatment. If nine people held a truthful opinion and
one crackpot was lying, the crackpot was afforded equal time. I give a
pica of credit to our own San Francisco Chronicle: you could find
important news in it, stories that should have caused outrage, but
buried in the inside, not crowding out the fluff above the fold on the
front page. That’s the way our market driven journalism works.

Now, with almost total power in the hands of one man and his “kill the
messenger” puppeteers, cheered on by a right wing constituency, the
news media, our so-called “fourth estate”, a term coined by Edmund
Burke to mean the press watchdog of the three estates of Parliament, is
in deep danger. Thank goodness there are alternative media such as
web logs and other viral networks of computers and cell phones to keep
corruption and wrongdoing on the radar screen when traditional media
fails. But expect a fight.

I truly hope that Mr. Bush will live up to his acceptance speech when
he says that he will endeavor to unite a divided nation. But it
is difficult to dismiss history’s tyrants who, like Mr. Bush, used
fear, often combined with unconfirmed quotes from God (journalists
usually require three sources), to incite the masses to their own ends.
To my friends who voted for Bush on the faith and morality issue: I
hope you will not be too insulted when I suggest that you were
used…exploited. Bush divided and conquered…got your vote. Now, what
will he do? If gay marriage was a big issue with you, rest assured that
it was a mere footnote on the Bush agenda, a political ploy. His
ambitions are much higher. Exploitation of these so-called “morality
issues” has spread divisive hate, not the Christian love and compassion
I grew up with. The United States is now the Divided States.

Bush’s hubris may be one of the last gasps of a waning empire. Empire,
in this age of connectivity and globalization, is a dying concept.
Americans who haven’t traveled or who have only seen the world through
the tinted windows of a tour bus should, instead of being
self-righteous, wonder why most of the rest of the world is at odds
with our government, even though you will find little animosity toward
American people. You might also look at places like Shanghai. In a few
years, China won’t need America’s designs anymore – that’s their plan
–and neither will India for which we will only be another customer.
The middle class in Asia, and its economic power, is growing while the
gap between rich and poor in the US is shrinking. The US is no longer
trusted as the “world’s policeman.” The rest of the world is financing
our huge debt. We need the rest of the world as much as it needs us. We
have to get along.

I fear that as a traveler I will, in the short term, become pigeonholed
as an ugly American, a symbol of deep wrong. It will not happen among
my many friends around the world, my fellow travelers of all
nationalities and religions, but people on the street, people who, like
the Bush constituency, are honest, hardworking folk who have been
manipulated by symbols of hate. One small thing I will continue to do
is to travel, share tables, stories about my kids and bad jokes with
friends around the world and try to convince others to get out of the
tour bus and do the same. I would like to convince my fellow Americans to
join what Welsh author Jan Morris calls the Fourth World, people for
whom there are no boundaries of race, religion and politics, people
whose only real ambition is kindness.

The wind is getting louder, Its getting late. The scotch is having its
effect. I will try to sleep but I will probably be up all night trying to
reconcile fear and anger with kindness. Maybe I’ll catch a few
ZZZZs tomorrow.