"[T]he job of the community is not to catch sinners and punish them but to find people out of balance with the community and to bring them back into balance."
--- Thom Hartmann, Green Festival, Chicago 2008
Anyone who has seen the original video of Shirley Sherrod telling her
story to her original audience can't be surprised that Andrew Breitbart
needed to interrupt that story. As Rachel Maddow remarked to Eugene
Robinson the other night, the Tea Party and more specifically, the
American right wing, has used tales of scary black people "coming for
your stuff" for years to frighten white voters. What could be more
subversive to this cynically divisive narrative than Shirley Sherrod
telling her own true story of cross-racial empathy, self awareness,
generosity and community? Of course Andrew Breitbart, as a Tea Party
activist, had to go right after that one.
If you look at his
record carefully, you'll find Breitbart goes after black leaders that
put community passionately above and beyond everything else. And with
good reason. ACORN, Van Jones, Shirley Sherrod all share a vision of an
America that prospers through strong communities, through embracing and
mustering diversity. Clearly, these people had to be interrupted
because their stories make the "scary black people" lie grossly obvious.
But
this last flap, as repugnant as it was and is, is even bigger than race
if there's anything bigger than race in America. And I didn't
understand it until I caught Anderson Cooper's report on this story,
"Truth Matters". Cooper did a good job of showing Breitbart's
dishonesty and his utter unwillingness to take responsibility for any of
the damage he'd done to Ms. Sherrod. Cooper made a serious effort to
follow up with Ms. Sherrod. But even someone as well intentioned as
Anderson Cooper seems to be wasn't able to step outside of our national
dysfunction long enough to drill down to the bedrock of this story
which is all about interrupting a community-building narrative that runs
counter to the right wing owned media's divisive agenda and to the
Democrats' enabling M.O.
Cooper's report went up on the net in
two parts. In the early moments of the first part, he takes ungrounded
swipes at "the left". Referring to Breitbart's refusal to admit a
wrong, Cooper said there are ideologues on the left every bit as narrow
minded and just as recalcitrant about admitting wrongdoing -- as if
anyone on the left has a serial history of fabricating evidence to
destroy someone politically. That's not true. There is no Andrew
Breitbart of the left. Cooper said that the left has anchors who won't
cover stories that don't fit their "slant". Maddow and Olbermann not
only covered this story but vigorously criticized the Obama
administration in their commentary. So, that's not true either.
Cooper claimed the internet was even worse for "having no standards" and
exploiting anonymity as if the entire intertubes functions as Andrew
Breitbart does. Thankfully, that is certainly not true. Some of the
very best reporting and whistle blowing is only on the net right now.
Baby, bath water.
Ironically, Cooper's critique of Breitbart used
the very same "they both do it" argument that makes Andrew Breitbart
possible.
Breitbart's argument, one he has repeated over and
over again in these incidents that he creates wholesale, is that black
people (from our president on down the food chain) discriminate against
white people just as much as white people discriminate against black
people. In other words, "they both do it". This argument puts into
question every single healing program our country has put together to
drag ourselves away from a history of racial discrimination, not to
mention, it obfuscates the reality of white power and privilege. If
"both sides do it", we now have a controversy where before we had a
community goal. Voila!
You'd expect that sleight of hand (or
mouth) from a cynical hack like Breitbart. You might not expect, I
certainly didn't expect the same "everything is everything" argument
from Anderson Cooper. Because someone who saw New Orleans drown and
someone who sat at the Israeli-Gaza border during Operation Cast Lead
and someone who spent time in post-earthquake Haiti would know better.
He'd be more careful, just from his own experience, about who is telling
stories and who has been silenced and who benefits from that silence.
Near
end of his report (in the Part 2 posted to the net) Cooper asks Ms.
Sherrod what she had learned from this fracas, and she responded in
terms of "we". Amazingly, this lady who had been run to ground for no
good reason did not answer in terms of herself, not at all. She only
answered as a member of a community, not in terms of a wronged
individual: "I wish I could understand why they would want to divide us
so much . . . why is it that they think we can't all live and work
together in this great country". Cooper is asking Ms. Sherrod to
respond from a split off, marginalized place and she answers from the
full throat of a community, of a person grounded in community.
The
smaller point here is that Anderson Cooper incorrectly accused the left
of being a mirror of the right and that was not fair. It isn't. There
is no left wing hack mounting effort after effort to put false evidence
out into the media to destroy their opponents' political careers.
"Both
sides" don't do this. The left, the Democrats (who have a tenuous
relationship to what used to be called "the left" in this country), do
something else. They leave the field to the Breitbarts. They don't
take the risks leadership demands in the media or put another way, they
bail on their communication with the American people to protect their
own political goals. That is cowardly, convenient and harmful to the
nation. The Democrats are every bit as responsible as Andrew Breitbart
or as Fox for the dysfunction of our political discourse. They are as
much complicit in the disgusting state of our media and our national
conversation as the Fox caption editors who designate Republican values
offenders as Democrats (D) in the Fox crawl every time a Republican gets
caught in a bathroom stall with his pants down. But the left, the
Democrats, do not do the same thing. They do something different (and
complementary) to keep this dysfunction in place and they seem to have
zero interest in correcting their own contribution. That's how
alcoholic families work, too. No matter how destructive the characters
are, if the system achieves a balance which allows everyone to continue,
everyone protects the system at all costs. John Bradshaw used to use a
mobile to illustrate this for his seminars on addicted families. All
the elements together created a crazy, stressful and completely
artificial balance and don't you even think about tugging on this string
or moving that one because the whole enterprise will tangle and fall in
a heap.
So while Anderson Cooper is unfair in saying the
Democrats "do the same thing" as Andrew Breitbart, he is also unfairly
letting Democrats (the nominal left) off the hook by not really
describing the situation they create with and in response to the
Republican rightwing strategy. In using the "they do it too" argument,
Cooper is tacitly agreeing to hide from the nation their desertion of
the discursive field. And so is our dysfunction maintained by even the
good guys in the corporate media.
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