Lies, big or small, are corrosive worms that can weaken foundations of trust, influence how events are framed, injure the liar as well as those lied to. When those untruths come from private individuals, the consequences usually are contained. When public officials lie, the moral dry-rot can be wide-ranging, sometimes leading to catastrophic results (read: Iraq).
I.F. Stone, one of my journalistic heroes from the '50s and '60s ("I.F. Stone's Weekly"), believed, correctly, that all governments lie and it is up to reporters to ferret out the truth. Izzy, who died in 1989, once regaled me by confessing that his greatest journalistic joy was in finding hidden truths in public documents at the local library or Library of Congress or in one-paragraph fillers in the newspapers or buried amidst the final paragraphs in long stories in the mainstream press. A good journalist, he said, doesn't have to make anything up; the truth of what's really going on is right there in the open, ripe for the picking if you know where to look, and how to look. And, most importantly -- do you hear, mainstream-media reporters?? -- if you're willing to look.
So what I'd like to do here is to browse through some current events and see what can be learned politically, socially, personally, from nuggets of news unearthed from the daily newspaper in the past few days. Here we go:
1. "DISAPPEARING" THE ANGER
What happens, and what is being said, when bureaucrats bring political sensibilities into the designs of a public artist?
It often happens. For example: Maya Lin's emotionally powerful Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., a black granite wall emerging from the earth with the names of the fallen etched into its reflective surface. Lin was forced by conservative opposition in the early 1980s to share the memorial grounds with a traditional sculpture of three soldiers. The two memorials don't mesh at all. (If you hang around and watch where the three million annual visitors to the memorial grounds go, it's directly to Lin's non-traditional Vietnam Veterans Wall, with few even paying attention to the aesthetically irrelevant three-soldiers sculpture next to it.)
Now the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is being planned for the National Mall in Washington, D.C. An artist recently showed his rendering of the Rev. King sculpture to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the federal panel that oversees monuments and memorials on the Mall. According to a three-paragraph story in my local newspaper, the commissioners indicated that the statue made King look "confrontational" and suggested that the sculpture be altered "both in form and modeling." The reaction of the artist was to alter the design by turning up King's mouth slightly to indicate the hint of a smile.
That was the extent of the little story. What can we learn from this?
The demand by the commissioners reminds one of Stalinist editing. Someone out of favor with the Soviet dictator? Airbrush him out of the photo. Don't like the way a novelist writes? Send him to the gulag. Object to a playwright's words? Have the censor remove them.
In this instance, the forces of reaction are demonstrating that they don't like blacks to be seen as angry or confrontational (formerly called "uppity"). So a softening smile appears on the civil rights activist who probably was one of the most confrontational social leaders in American history, able to transform justifiable African-American anger into a non-violent confrontational movement of huge and lasting impact.
Much of white America in 2008 would prefer to believe that the racial problem is over and done with or at least well on its way to being solved. Barack Obama is a candidate for the presidency -- therefore, they reason, black anger and frustration are unnecessary.
If you want more evidence of where this anger comes from, and why it won't disappear for a long long time, check out a new book by the award-winning Wall Street Journal writer Douglas Blackmon, "Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II." Blackmon convincingly argues that a brutal era of economic/political "neo-slavery" took hold in the American South after the Civil War, and was largely tolerated by whites in the North and by the federal and state judicial systems up until post-World War II. Only after the fallout from that war, the integration and affirmative-action rulings by the Supreme Court and the historic voting rights- and civil rights-legislation pushed through in the mid-1960s by President Lyndon Johnson as a result of courageous civil-rights activists, did the Jim Crow system finally begin to break apart. (I grew up in the post-war South, so can vouch for the accuracy of Blackmon's thesis.)
Here's the transcript of a fascinating interview with Blackmon on PBS' "Bill Moyer's Journal" from last Friday. ( www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06202008/transcript2.html )
So, public artists, you've been given your marching orders. Remember: Public art should make people feel good -- and "patriotic." When in doubt, add an American flag. Yep, that's what the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts did to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, just in case visitors get confused as to what country they are living in.
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org).
Dr. Weiner makes several good points. But, the best point is that I.F. Stone was a journalost outside the establishment who not only didn't trust the government, he also had a healthy skepticism of the media. It's too bad he wasn't alive in 2000-2008 to do what journapists should have been doing--questioning executive branch statements.
walt brasch
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Brasch (59 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 46 comments)
on Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 3:14:10 PM
I greatly admire most of the writings of I.Stone. However for another view pointing out some interesting flaws I strongly recommend googleing I.F. Stone Education Forum. This covers I.F. Stone's defense of the Warren Commission, and some interesting points made about Stone's career that were printed in 1964.
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Nathaniel Heidenheimer (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 44 comments)
on Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 4:22:03 PM
One of the best articles I have read on this website. Thought provoking without being excessively partisan.
I liked your observations on the MLK statue. I blame those problems on committees in general. Anyone who has served on a committee knows that committees spread out the responsibility for making decisions.
I appreciate your observation about the soldiers. The Vietnam War Memorial is one of the most powerful public displays I have ever seen. (My wife and I stood before it crying like babies while our children looked on in bewilderment. Four of my Marine friends' names were on the wall.) The presence of the soldiers in my opinion doesn't detract from it and but they do not add anything either. I haven't a strong opinion about MLK's statue but a smile doesn't seem appropriate. He rarely was pictured with a smile on his face. He was on a serious mission. I wonder what he would have wanted. I think we, meaning most people, are well past thinking of black people as being uppity.
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Mad Jayhawk (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 232 comments)
on Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 10:33:59 PM
