Has the Tea Party Been Watching Mad Men—and Taking Notes?
Don Draper is a fictional ad man who helps sell death and disease in a very small package. A cigarette package to be exact. Draper is the main character in the TV series Mad Men about the advertising industry in 1960‘s NYC. Advertising cigarettes by describing the symptoms of lung cancer and emphysema would be a tough sell. So Draper conceals the real nature of the product by surrounding it with clouds of positive emotion and mental images that evoke pleasure, sociability and success.
Corporate advertising and its close cousin political propaganda are not always about lies. They can be about selling a product or a policy using truth. But when the product or policy is evil, lies are the only choice. Don Draper‘s sophisticated understanding of human weakness burrows past any human logic and seizes on the most primeval emotions. Of course his ad campaign of lies is made easier because the product is viciously addictive and sold by a company whose morals would shame the most hardened criminal.
Today selling white supremacy also demands the use of sophisticated lies. It’s 400 year survival in America attests to its viciously addictive nature. It is sold by individuals who are as amoral as Don Draper pushing Luck Strikes. Over time white supremacy has been forced to give ground, grudgingly of course. It took a Civil War to end slavery. One hundred years of civil rights protest were met by mass arrests and terrorist attacks that would impress your typical al Queda cell. But today the most powerful organization pushing white supremacy is the Republican Party and its political attack dog, the Tea Party.
I will always hate guns. Passionately. Intensely. For as long as I live.
When we think of Americans at war, we usually associate that with some far away place. We see mental images of Humvees, attack helicopters, desert camouflage, heavy backpacks and polarized sunglasses.
Perhaps we also remember the gardens of stone at Arlington National Cemetery, the place where my dad is buried to honor his military service in WWII Europe, a war he rarely talked about and which caused to him to hate war with a passion that exceeded most pacifists I know.
Perhaps we also have images of people, young and old, marching with signs that cried out for peace in places like Vietnam, Central America, Iraq and Afghanistan. We might even have mental images of a stern looking Martin Luther King, of a very young John Kerry, of Cindy Sheehan with her mother’s grief or Code Pink activist Medea Benjamin being carried off for shouting “Peace!” in a crowded room.
The new film by Chicago’s award winning Kartemquin Films does not take us to a faraway battlefield. It takes us to a war right here in the USA. It is a war on the streets of South Side Chicago and a peace movement led by people like Ameena Matthews, daughter of one of most feared gang leaders in Chicago history and Eddie Bocanegra who is still conscience stricken about a murder he had committed when he was 17 years old. The film is “The Interrupters” by Chicago’s own Kartemquin Films and the peace group is called CeaseFire.
That Wall Between Church and State
The USA is choking in religion when compared with other wealthy capitalist countries. It seems that our worship of money and status is not enough, that we must invent gods to punish our economic rivals and reward us with eternal bliss as well. Keeping religion out of government may be a laudable goal, but it stands about as much chance as gun control or abolishing traffic jams at 5pm.
A more realistic approach might be to keep certain kinds of religion out of government. The cruel and violent religious fervor that seems to animate the cold hearts of people like Sarah Palin and the Focus on Family crowd certainly has no place in government. It celebrates the worst of our American traditions: our imperialism, our bigotry, our deference to wealth, our contempt of the poor and our irrational fear of how the universe actually works.
It’s Time To Say It Out Loud: America Needs More Socialism
Filed under: Global Economy & Politics, Society & Economy, U.S. Politics, Workplace
When I was a kid I played in a pasture and what a playground that was. There were weird bugs and colorful plants to play with, birds to look at and even box turtles to pick up and admire. Then there was also a lot dull looking but benign tall grass that made finding the interesting stuff more challenging and fun. In short, a diverse stimulating environment.
But it also had hazards, like piles of horseshit, which were definitely to be avoided. In that way, it reminds me of textbooks I’ve seen over the years, both as a student and as a teacher. Some fairly dull stuff, some very informative stuff and piles of intellectual excrement that you don’t want to step in.
Which brings me to the following textbook-style dictionary definition of socialism:
“Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.”