Corporate personhood

Someone on Facebook objected Tuesday to my assertion there (in connection with Friday's post, "Calling all voters") that "donating money for election campaigns is unnecessary; most American voters can read and have the ability to obtain reliable information about the candidates and the issues. They don't need to watch or read political advertisements."
    I was later grateful that, in objecting, Mr. Tom Lowe directed my attention to the Frank Rich article in the June 16 issue of New York Magazine ("Nuke 'Em: Why negative advertisements are powerful, essential, and sometimes (see “Daisy”) even artistic"), for I based yesterday's post about political attack ads on it.
    But the first part of Tom's comment was:

Problem with that stance is—according to the recent studies I've seen—most people get their information from TV these days. So acting on this reasonable principle means ceding the advantage to Fox News and the Koch brothers.

    To which I at the time flippantly replied:

Technically, [the post's] second suggestion ("Ignore the campaigns, don't watch advertising") covers this, seeing as how Fox News is essentially political advertising.

    Then yesterday I saw Jeremy W. Peters's article, "Enemies and Allies for ‘Friends’, in The New York Times, critical for the usual reasons of Fox News and, in particular, of its show "Fox & Friends":

"You can huff and puff about how outrageous [Fox News] is," Mr. Weiner [the former New York congressman who was one of the few members of his party regularly to accept Fox News invitations] said. "But they have millions and millions of people watching them. And you have to proceed under the assumption that at least some of those people are persuadable."
    Despite all the outrageousness there is a keen self-awareness inside the network about "Fox & Friends." "We reflect who the audience is," said Mr. Shine, offering a recent example. "We didn’t spend a lot of time discussing who won the Tony Awards."
    He added, "Our audience knows us, and we know them."

Incestuous clan that, Fox News and its audience.

I took advantage of Mr. Peters's publishing immediately on the heels of my remark about Fox News's being "political advertising" to bolster my flippant reply by posting a link to his article on Facebook, commenting that,

As I said to Tom Lowe recently in a comment on Facebook, Fox News is essentially political advertising, watched by folks who don't (and apparently can't) think for themselves and want (and possibly need) to be told what to believe (so long as it suits their existing prejudices).

    Flippant indeed. Why single out Fox News?
    Joe Story, a political observer in Kansas City, Missouri, pointed out that

The same could be said about MSNBC. Fox News is not the only channel in the political advertising, brain washing business. I don't watch either show.

    And the reliably well-informed Mr. Lowe, who is a close student of history and an astute social commentator out in Berkeley, California (the city of my birth), made a more general point, one particularly pointed in the context of attack ads designed to nuke Mitt Romney:

Just as ABC was known in the Reagan era as the "Administration Broadcasting Company," CBS provided press credentials to CIA operatives in the 1950s and 60s, and NBC ran pro nuclear energy stories on their news shows when owned by General Electric. No clean hands to be found anywhere when corporate interests are involved. [emphasis mine]

Whose context?
    Right.
    His who said: "Corporations are people."

Mission not impossible

Images from
LBJ's "Daisy"
ad attacking
Goldwater

Your assignment: Describe an attack ad that the Democrats could use to "nuke" the Republicans in the coming political election.

In his current column in New York Magazine, "Nuke 'Em: Why negative advertisements are powerful, essential, and sometimes (see “Daisy”) even artistic," June 16, Frank Rich describes Chrysler's halftime ad for Super Bowl 2012 as arguably "the best political ad of 2012 so far."

...Narrated by Clint Eastwood, [it] was so arresting, and, intentionally or not, so supportive of the auto-industry bailout, that [Karl] Rove hailed it as an "extremely well-done ad" even as he said he was "offended" by its seeming Obama partisanship.

    Rich fails to point out that Eastwood's final line could be the anthem for Obama's re-election campaign: "Yeah, it's halftime, America, and our second half is about to begin."
    President Obama's first half taught him one of the lessons that America had been depending on him to learn: Trying to work with ideologically rigid Republicans in a bipartisan spirit doesn't work. In his second half, which begins with winning re-election, the President must hit the Republicans hard and drive them back to their own goal line.
    I predict that he will take effective steps to do just that, and the momentum he establishes by winning re-election will result in his achieving some more of the things in his second term that we'd hoped to see in his first.

Moristotle readers can help. You may already have thought of an idea that could be developed into a highly effective attack ad.
    If not, I suggest that you go read "Nuke 'Em." Rich provides links to about ten political ads that you can watch for stimulation, including the "Daisy" ad referred to in his column's subtitle, which the Johnson administration used devastatingly against Senator Barry Goldwater, who lost to Johnson in a landslide.

The Johnson team had a number of promising lines of attack to work with in going after Goldwater: his opposition to civil-rights legislation, his desire to make Social Security "voluntary," his fellow-traveling with John Birchers and other loons of the far right. But the campaign settled on Goldwater’s sloppy bluster about nuclear weapons because the prospect of an atomic Armageddon transcended ideological or policy differences and cut to the emotional quick of the electorate's existential fears.
    The content dictated the bold form. Goldwater’s propensity for flip rhetorical bellicosity was so well known that any replay of his actual words in the ad would be a gratuitous distraction and could be dispensed with. Better still, from the Democrats' point of view, it was Goldwater's own vanquished GOP rivals for the nomination—Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton—who had led the way in publicizing his loose talk and portraying him as a risky warmonger. (The then-governor of Michigan, George Romney, was another helpful Goldwater basher.) The Republicans had done such a good job of advance hatchet work that voters taking in David and Bathsheba [the movie on TV during which the ad was aired] could let their own imaginations run wild while filling in the ad's blanks. As any student of horror movies knows, what isn't seen or stated is far scarier than any literal enactment onscreen. It's hard for a Hitchcock fan to look at "Daisy" and not see it as a cinematic stepchild of Psycho (1960), in which the brutal shower scene is all the more terrifying because the audience never actually sees the knife violate Janet Leigh's body.

Study Rich's paragraph that describes Mitt Romney’s résumé as "a preposterously target-rich environment for attack ads."

...his lackluster record as Massachusetts governor...his career at Bain...Potentially abortion [would] be criminalized [if Romney were elected]. Women [would] be denied contraceptive services. He’s far right on immigration. He supports efforts to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage.
    ...There’s also the flip-flopping Mr. Etch A Sketch...countless tone-deaf attempts to feel the pain of the 99 percent...his effort to deny that his Massachusetts health-care law was the precursor of Obama’s Affordable Care Act...his truculence in foreign policy...[his] "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt"...the money stashed in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland...his endorsement of the Paul Ryan budget, which would mutilate the social safety net, including benefits for seniors...his endorsement of Arizona immigration policy as a national "model"...his call for illegal immigrants to submit to "self-deportation"...the radical party he is attempting to mask with a moderate image....

When you've finished shaping your best idea for an attack ad against Romney and the Republicans, submit it to Moristotle for publication. Moristotle's readers will vote to determine the best attack ad idea submitted, and Moristotle will send the winning idea on to the Obama re-election campaign for consideration.
    Multiple submissions are allowed. If you submit two or more winning ideas, you might have a future in political attack advertising!

Read it!

I hope that yesterday's post sufficed to send you to Hal Crowther's essay on the November 2 election ("Gone Missing: The Country's Conscience, Brain, and Heart," in The Independent). It's that prescient. All thoughtful citizens owe it to themselves to read it, and we should be thankful that we have a few fellow citizens like Crowther, who I believe lives only a few miles from me, over in Hillsborough.
    In case you need to sample some more of his essay before deciding to read the whole thing:

...Though the troglodyte triumvirate of [Rush] Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity is paid $114 million annually to seduce the subliterate multitudes—for nine hours daily on Fox Radio—the usual lavish smorgasbord of reactionary bile and gibberish was deemed insufficient for 2010. Unleashed by a Supreme Court majority who ruled that corporate campaign spending, even anonymous spending, was the exact equivalent of First Amendment free speech, those dark forces "outside" the political system reached deep into their well-lined pockets and spent nearly half a billion dollars, a quarter of it from "undisclosed" sources, to underwrite attack ads and steer a staggering, half-bankrupt nation to the right.
    ...Shrinking or neutering the government never helped anyone with a net worth less than eight figures. You can sell almost anything in America but common sense. This country is notorious, and unique, for all its poor people who want to keep wealth unchained, just in case they should acquire some.
    ...It may be that voters below a certain level of ratiocination, their logical faculties permanently maimed by reality TV and video games, are no longer able to resist the kind of attack ads that came at them in a $4 billion tidal wave. The big corporate contributors wouldn't fund this operation so generously if they weren't confident of a handsome return. Never in human history has so much cash and so much expertise been devoted to what would once have been called mind control, or brainwashing, and is now called free speech. [emphasis mine¹] There's no apparent limit to what the right-wing coalition can spend, or will spend, to bring out the worst in Americans.

To paraphrase what many people have said with reference to Strunk & White's Elements of Style², read Crowther's essay!
_______________

1. George Orwell must be turning over in his grave. I'm thinking of his "Newspeak," from Nineteen Eighty-Four (which was only ten years before the election of 1994, with which this series of posts on Hal Crowther's writings began).
2. "Read the little book!"

Worse than 1994

Moristotle's previous post ("November 2, 2010: 1994 all over again") excerpted Hal Crowther's 1994 article that The Independent had reprinted recently because of its aptness to both the 1994 and 2010 elections. When I mentioned Crowther's article on Facebook, my friend Ken commented that

Today's problems are a lot more dire than [those of] 1994. The "cheap entertainment" that the D's and R's are treating us to is costing us dearly.
    In a democracy, you get the government you deserve. Ultimately, the ignorance of the ...electorate is the problem.

Well, now The Independent has published Crowther specifically on our recent election ("Gone Missing: The Country's Conscience, Brain, and Heart "), and he seems to agree with Ken:

The midterms...mark the most successful manipulation of the gullible by the cynical that this deceitful republic has yet witnessed. Billionaires and "undisclosed" corporate donors poured kings' ransoms into relentless attack ads against vulnerable Democrats. Right-wing broadcasters circulated myths and lies that would have made Joseph Goebbels blush, and every racist and xenophobic impulse threatening to a nonwhite president was exploited without apology. The secret money served it up, and the logic-impaired tea party irregulars swallowed the poisoned bait with relish. The net result of the vaunted populist rebellion of 2010 was a sharp turn toward corporate feudalism, as the House of Representatives and many state legislatures and governor's mansions reverted to a rudderless but ruthless Republican Party that has never been less deserving of another chance.
    ...America will survive this election. It will not, in the long run, survive what the voting revealed about our political system.
    We've finally achieved institutional incoherence....
    ...
    ...[T]here was nothing much in this election cycle to inspire confidence in the American electorate or the candidates it produces and elects. And far less to inspire confidence in the media that egged them on, and not coincidentally milked them and their "undisclosed" cash cows for several billion dollars in venomous, repetitive, content-free attack ads.
    The one way the media blitz swayed me was to change my stance on immigration. Though easygoing Australians have always been among my favorite national types, in the future I vote to keep them out of America. If we could have stopped just one Aussie, Rupert Murdoch, from achieving naturalization, what a much kinder, cleaner, smarter nation we would be. If Rush Limbaugh deserved a lion's share of the credit for getting out the Neanderthal vote in 1994, we can thank Murdoch's Fox News and Fox Radio, the boiler rooms of neo-fascist reaction, for the triumphant return of the American knuckle-dragger in 2010.

Whew! I think that Crowther more than agrees with Ken. And more than agrees with me, too, when I commented to Ken on Facebook that

it may be even worse than you say, for even if the electorate could magically become informed and wise, the money system Senator Mitchell mentioned back in 1994 has become even more entrenched and would hinder [I should have said prevent] the electorate's exercising their new-found smarts. Of course, no such magical transformation is going to take place anyway. Ironically, the electorate's predilection for magical thinking more or less ensures that.

I haven't defined "magical thinking" lately, although I use the term frequently. Magical thinking, which has an entry in Wikipedia, is not a precise term. It has different senses depending on context and theorist. Rather than attempt to define it, I'll give some examples. The voodoo belief that a practitioner can cause someone pain by sticking pins in an effigy of the person is magical thinking. Thinking that a prayer or ritual can prevent a plane from crashing, a child from dying, a nation from declining (or anything else from happening) is magical thinking. I joke that as long as I own books I haven't read yet I won't die; that would be magical thinking if I actually believed it.
    I recently gave an example of political magical thinking: the belief that whoever you voted for this time will be able to fix things. In a very general sense, it's magical thinking to suppose (or wish) a causal connection between one thing and another without any evidence that there is such a connection.
    According to The Skeptic's Dictionary:

Dr. Phillips Stevens Jr. [writes that] "the vast majority of the world's peoples...believe that there are real connections between the symbol and its referent, and that some real and potentially measurable power flows between them." He believes there is a neurobiological basis for this, though the specific content of any symbol is culturally determined.

Cleaning up after breakfast this morning, I felt a sense of the miraculous (or the providential) that I should be privileged to live (and to have lived for almost sixty-eight years now) when children die young (of defect, disease, starvation, accident, mayhem), when one of the almost always two young Nazca booby hatchlings is pushed out of the nest by its older sibling ("It always dies," said the narrator of the BBC program about Galapágos), etc., etc., etc., to the countless gazillions of blameless creatures on the Planet Earth who don't enjoy a long, full life.
    I suspect that Dr. Stevens's "neurobiological basis" promotes a connection between such a sense and whatever can easily explain it. Only, Loving God's somehow protecting me (or the older Nazca booby hatchling) doesn't explain it. In fact, to me, the fact of all those unfair deaths rather testifies to the contrary. That's using critical thought to break the neurobiological tendency to establish a magical connection.

Crowther concludes:

Where's the country's conscience? Where's its heart? Where's its brain?

I think it's in its knee, which jerks predictably at the slightest magical provocation.

November 2, 2010: 1994 all over again

In November 1994, Hal Crowther published in The Independent an article about that month's national election. Our current month's election seemed so similar to 1994's that last week, The Independent reprinted Crowther's article last week, under the title "We've seen this movie before: 1994 revisited." Some excerpts:

I remember my first editor laughing at me because I seemed to require logic in my politics. But can you deliberately block your opponent from achieving anything, then ask the voters to sack him for his lack of achievement?....
    The stuff that animates rightwingers in my part of the world is so inchoate and simplistic you couldn't accurately call it ideology. My guess is that neither ideology nor widespread misery derailed the Democrats...Throwing out some of the best politicians along with some of the most expendable was a voter's irrational reaction to a profoundly irrational system.
    The one thing in this country that's indisputably wretched is the way we conduct our politics, and the way we govern ourselves as a consequence of those politics.
    "Every Senator who participates in it knows this system stinks," says the [in 1994] retiring Senate majority leader, George Mitchell. "What matters most in seeking public office is not integrity, not ability, not judgment, not responsibility, not experience, not intelligence, but money...Money dominates this system. Money infuses this system. Money is the system."
    ...
    "We think the diametrically opposed party system is an absurd joke," one college student told The Washington Post [in 1994]. "We're just watching the whole American experiment and wondering 'Can this go on?'"
    ...
    Do Americans grow dumber as they grow older, through some insidious process that probably involves television? Is there intelligent life after 30? Trust the young people. If the two-party system isn't dead already, it smells pretty funny to me. Resisting even the most basic campaign reforms, perpetually posturing and positioning themselves for elections years away, the Democrats and Republicans have reduced democracy to a rowdy, childish tug-of-war that provides almost nothing but expensive entertainment.

"Comments are no longer being accepted"

This morning and the other day, for the first times, I noticed the statement, "Comments are no longer being accepted," posted atop the comments section of a couple of op-ed pieces in The New York Times. I saw the first one on Friday, the morning after the vice presidential debate, warning any further readers from trying to comment on David Brooks's op-ed piece, "The Palin Rebound." Brooks's piece was so mind-bendingly, fawningly complimentary to Palin's showing in the debate that I felt an urgent need to ask Brooks whether he'd been smoking dope. Alas, after searching all over for the place to comment, I saw the notice. And this morning I saw the notice again, above William Kristol's equally fawning piece, "The Wright Stuff." Within only a few hours, enough ridicule had already been heaped on each of these right-thinking gentlemen, thank you. Enough is enough! The only question is:

Did Brooks and Kristol throw in the towel themselves, or did their editor call the fight to protect their dignity and their possibly injured ability to meet the paper's deadline for their next pieces?

I don't remember how many comments Brooks had suffered before further comments were disinvited, but Kristol (or his editor) threw in the towel before even 200 comments had been posted. While it's fun to wonder who stopped the fight and precisely why, I regret that "Comments are no longer being accepted" meant what it said. Even still fairly early this morning, I was already too late to ask Mr. Kristol whether, for example, Palin hadn't bewitched him? (Her voodoo pastor's incantation was intended, presumably, to protect her, not people on whom she herself might practice.) Not that similar questions hadn't already been asked by the hundred and eighty some commenters who'd gotten through. Like #23, by LGG of Orange County, California:

It's so heartening, Bill—may I call you Bill?—that you are so concerned with Obama's now-renounced pastor and church affiliation. I have no doubt, then, that you will as vociferously investigate and report upon Palin's associations with Muthee, the African witch hunter. Curious, isn't it, that we get 24/7 coverage of Wright's inflammatory comments, but one has to go to Yyoutube to see Palin being exorcised of witches by Muthee. Why is that, do you think? The clip of Palin being exorcised is certainly not a fake as evidenced by the fact that the pulpit upon which Muthee stands and behind which Palin stands is identical to that which multiple other clips show Palin speaking from when addressing her church's congregation. Things that make you go "Hmmmm."

10-7 Flash

I see that the number of comments on Kristol's column has now reached 525, which indicates either that several hundred comments were still being "moderated" (approved for posting) when the spigot was turned off...or that the floodgates were reopened, the editor maybe having decided that Kristol deserved comments like, say, #523, from Peter in Indiana:

Oh, Bill, there you go again, looking to the past instead of to the future! (By the way, did you happen to ask Palin about McCain's association with that economic terrorist, Charles Keating, or her own association with the witch-exorcizing priest? Or is sauce for the goose not sauce for the gander?) Here you are, being bamboozled by some pretty-face, Gidget-goes-to-Washington type who talks outside of both sides of her mouth, whose talk (when it's possible to understand it) is mostly vacuous, who spouts off baloney about the Constitution's take on vice president (but fails to comply with a Constitutionally valid sub poena), and your take is that the drivel is mostly the fault of her handlers instead of her inherent lack of understanding. Even the latter is a sign of the classic Republican who yaps about accountability and responsibility except when it comes [to] them—then it's always someone else's fault.