Party Down: The 2012 Politics of Fantasy and Terror

Party Down: The 2012 Politics of Fantasy

by Ben Schreiner / August 23rd, 2012

Those who succeed in politics, as in most of the culture, are those who create the most convincing fantasies.
— Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion

With both tickets now set, the democratic farce that is the U.S. presidential election lumbers into its final act. And for a campaign already rife with all the petty trivialities and celebrity intrigues more suiting of a reality TV show, it is no surprise that both political parties intend on using their upcoming political conventions to furnish choreographed spectacles designed for little more than prime time viewing.

According to the New York Times, a “$2.5 million Frank Lloyd Wright inspired theatrical stage,” complete with 13 different video screens, will welcome the television viewer of the Republican national convention in Tampa. All part of an effort, the Times notes, to cloak that cold, vulture capitalist Romney in a veil of “warmth, approachability and openness.” As a senior Romney advisor boasted to the paper, “Even the [wooden video screen] frames are designed to give it a sense that you’re not looking at a stage, you’re looking into someone’s living room.” (Presumably a direct mock-up of one Romney’s living rooms.)

Protecting Mitt’s newly crafted aura of “approachability and openness” from the potential wayward vagabond, the city of Tampa will spend $24.85 million alone on law enforcement personnel during the four day convention. This will include a massive deployment of 3,500-4,000 “contingency officers” from up to 63 outside police departments. Hospitality clearly has its limits.
It is all much the same for the Democratic convention set for early September in Charlotte. The award-winning Brand Obama is also much too valuable to be tarnished by the taint of social unrest.

The looming crackdown on dissent Charlotte-style, though, will be eased by nothing short of an Orwellian city law allowing any large public gathering to be declared “an extraordinary event.” Arbitrary search and arrest of any individual the police fancy will then be ipso facto legal. (Like such police practices are in any way “extraordinary.”)

Of course, all those hapless souls set to be greeted with the swing of the police truncheon in the streets of Tampa and Charlotte will garner nary a mention from the herd of corporate media planning to embed safely within the bunkered convention halls. Instead, the legions of dimwitted media pundits and talking heads will busy themselves filling air time as they wax-poetic on the true splendor of American democracy manifested in the sheets of convention confetti raining from the rafters.

The media’s neat packaging of the entire spectacle as all part of the must-see docudrama titled “Decision 2012” will undoubtedly do little to hide the true nature of the charade from the perceptive observer. Nonetheless, the politics as entertainment orgy will precede forth, with the media present to celebrate and partake in it all. Which can only give added credence to the Neil Postman quip that, “In America, the least amusing people are its professional entertainers.”
The fundamental matter of whether there is truly decision at all to be made in 2012, needless to say, is rather dubious.

As the New York Times writes of the international outlooks of Obama and Romney: “The actual foreign policy differences between the two seem more a matter of degree and tone than the articulation of a profound debate about the course of America in the world.” Put differently, threats to bomb Iran, “contain” China, and bow to Israel are simply beyond debate.

Indeed, even leftist supporters of Obama admit there is no discernible difference between the two candidates. As Obama backers Bill Fletcher and Carl Davidson instead argue, “November 2012 becomes not a statement about the Obama presidency, but a defensive move by progressive forces to hold back the ‘Caligulas’ on the political right.” Such bankrupt arguments inevitably rear their ugly head every four years in the now tired attempt to send the fractured American Left scurrying straight into death vise of the “Party of the people.”
Given this altogether pitiful state of affairs, the presidential campaign necessarily must devolve into little more than a national marketing campaign—replete with the assorted gimmicks, tricks, and deceptions inherent to that vile craft deemed “public relations.” Thus, the “decision” to be made in 2012 is limited to that between Brand Obama and Brand Romney. No different in approach, really, than choosing between Pepsi and Coke—Nike and Adidas. For just as with all branding, the 2012 decision is not about deciphering between two differing products or candidates—as they both promise to deliver the same agenda of neoliberalism at home, imperialism abroad—but rather choosing between two sets of experiential promises (fictitious as they are). In terms of 2012, it’s the dim hope and vague slogan of “Forward” proffered from camp Obama, versus team Romney’s promise of comfort to be found in a restoration of America power.

In other words then, the man best able to peddle the most convincing fantasy to the American consumer this fall shall be the one to ultimately prevail in November.

All befitting of an empire of illusion.

Ben Schreiner is a freelance writer living in Salem, Oregon. He may be reached at: bnschreiner@gmail.com. Read other articles by Ben.

This article was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2012 at 8:01am and is filed under Democrats, Elections, Obama, Right Wing Jerks.

From Advanced Degree to Welfare

From Advanced Degree to Welfare

Due to cuts in higher education, and a lack of jobs in academia, people with advanced degrees increasingly depend on federal food stamps.

By Stacey Patton, from “The Chronicle of Higher Education”
July/August 2012 

 

 

 

“I am not a welfare queen,” says Melissa Bruninga-Matteau.

Is There Life After Welfare?

Desperately seeking a new story on $5.50 an hour...

That’s how she feels compelled to start a conversation about how she, a white woman with a PhD in medieval history and an adjunct professor, came to rely on federal food stamps and Medicaid. Ms. Bruninga-Matteau, a 43-year-old single mother who teaches two humanities courses at Yavapai College, in Prescott, Arizona, says the stereotype of the people receiving such aid does not reflect reality. Recipients include growing numbers of people like her, the highly educated, whose advanced degrees have not insulated them from financial hardship.

“I find it horrifying that someone who stands in front of college classes and teaches is on welfare,” she says.

A Shrinking Tenure Track

Ms. Bruninga-Matteau grew up in an upper-middle class family that saw educational achievement as the pathway to a successful career and a prosperous life. She entered graduate school in 2002, idealistic about landing a tenure-track job. She never imagined that she’d end up trying to eke out a living, teaching college for poverty wages, with no benefits or job security.

Ms. Bruninga-Matteau always wanted to teach. This semester she is working 20 hours each week, prepping, teaching, advising, and grading papers for two courses at Yavapai. Her take-home pay is $900 a month, of which $750 goes to rent. Each week, she spends $40 on gas to get her to the campus; she lives 43 miles away, where housing is cheaper.

Last year, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed a budget that cut the state’s allocation to Yavapai’s operating budget from $4.3 million to $900,000. The cut led to an 18,000-hour reduction in the use of part-time faculty like Ms. Bruninga-Matteau.

“The media gives us this image that people who are on public assistance are dropouts, on drugs or alcohol, and are irresponsible,” she says. “I’m not irresponsible. I’m highly educated. I’ve never made a lot of money, but I’ve been able to make enough to live on. Until now.”

Ms. Bruninga-Matteau is part of an often overlooked, and growing, subgroup of PhD recipients, adjunct professors, and other Americans with advanced degrees who have had to apply for food stamps or some other form of government aid since late 2007. Some are struggling to pay back student loans and cover basic living expenses as they submit scores of applications for a limited pool of full-time academic positions. Others are trying to raise families or pay for their children’s college expenses on the low and fluctuating pay they receive as professors off the tenure track, a group that now makes up 70 percent of faculties. Many bounce on and off unemployment or welfare during semester breaks. And some adjuncts have found themselves trying to make ends meet by waiting tables or bagging groceries alongside their students.

The percentage of graduate-degree holders who receive federal food stamps or some other aid more than doubled between 2007 and 2010, but shame has helped to keep the problem hidden. “People don’t want their faces and names associated with this experience,” says Karen Kelsey, a former tenured professor who now runs The Professor Is In, an academic-career consulting business.

Some adjuncts make less money than custodians and campus support staff who may not have college degrees. An adjunct’s salary can range from $600 to $10,000 per course. The national average earnings of adjunct instructors are just under $2,500 per course.

Elliott Stegall, a white, 51-year-old married father of two, teaches two courses each semester in the English department at Northwest Florida State College, in Niceville, Florida. He and his wife, Amanda, live in a modest home about 40 miles away in DeFuniak Springs.

Mr. Stegall is a graduate student at Florida State University, where he is finishing his dissertation in film studies. At night, after his 3-year-old and 3-month-old children have been put to bed, he grades a stack of composition papers or plugs away at his dissertation. They receive food stamps, Medicaid, and aid from the Women, Infants, and Children program (known as WIC).

Mr. Stegall has taught at three colleges for more than 14 years. When he and Ms. Stegall stepped inside the local WIC office in Tallahassee, where they used to live, with their children in tow, he had to fight shame, a sense of failure, and the notion that he was not supposed to be there. After all, he grew up in a family that valued hard work and knowledge. His father was a pastor and a humanities professor, and his mother was psychology professor.

“The first time we went to the office to apply, I felt like I had arrived from Eastern Europe to Ellis Island,” he says. “The place was filled with people from every culture and ethnicity. We all had that same ragged, poor look in our eyes.”

Mr. Stegall has supplemented his teaching income by working odd jobs. He painted houses until the housing crisis eliminated clients. He and his wife worked as servers for a catering company until the economic downturn hurt business. And they cleaned condos along Destin beach. They took the children along because day care was too expensive.

“I’m grateful for government assistance. Without it, my family and I would certainly be homeless and destitute,” he says. “But living on the dole is excruciatingly embarrassing and a constant reminder that I must have done something terribly wrong along the way to deserve this fate.”

 

“It’s the dirty little secret of higher education,” says Matthew Williams, cofounder of the New Faculty Majority, an advocacy group for nontenure-track faculty. “Many administrators are not aware of the whole extent of the problem. But all it takes is for somebody to run the numbers to see that their faculty is eligible for welfare assistance.” Public colleges have a special obligation to ensure that the conditions under which contingent faculty work are not exploitative, he says.

Michael Bérubé, president of the Modern Language Association, says that he and his wife, Janet, qualified for WIC while they were in graduate school in the late 1980s.

“Everyone thinks a PhD pretty much guarantees you a living wage and, from what I can tell, most commentators think that college professors make $100,000 and more,” he says. “But I’ve been hearing all year from nontenure-track faculty making under $20,000, and I don’t know anyone who believes you can raise a family on that. Even living as a single person on that salary is tough, if you want to eat something other than ramen noodles every once in a while.”

Ms. Kelsey, who helps graduate students and adjuncts who are homeless or on aid, says the false portrayal of aid recipients as “welfare queens” is an illusion that was created for political purposes.

“Racializing food stamps denies that wide swaths of the population, reaching into the middle classes, are dealing with food insecurity,” she says. Thirty-nine percent of all welfare recipients are white, 37 percent are black, 17 percent are Hispanic, and 3 percent are Asian. 

But race and cultural stereotypes play a significant part in how many academics are struggling with the reality of being on welfare. Kisha Hawkins-Sledge, who is 35 and a black single mother of 3-year-old twin boys, earned her master’s degree in English last August. She began teaching part-time while in graduate school, and says she made enough money to live on until she had children. She lives in Lansing, Illinois.

“My household went from one to three. My income was not enough, and so I had to apply for assistance,” she says. She now receives federal food stamps, WIC, Medicaid, and child-care assistance.

Like Ms. Bruninga-Matteau and Mr. Stegall, Ms. Hawkins-Sledge says she had preconceived notions about people on government assistance before she herself began receiving aid. “I thought that welfare was for people who didn’t go to school and couldn’t get a good job,” she says. Ms. Hawkins-Sledge says she grew up watching her mother work hard and put herself through college and graduate school. “My mom defied the stereotype and here I am in graduate school trying to do the same.”

“I had to work against my color, my flesh, and my name alone,” she says. “I went to school to get all these degrees to prove to the rest of the world that I’m not lazy and I’m not on welfare. But there I was and I asked myself, ‘What’s the point? I’m here anyway.’”

For Ms. Hawkins-Sledge, there is good news. She will begin a full-time, tenure-track job as an English professor at Prairie State College in August.

Stacey Patton is a staff reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Excerpted from The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 6, 2012), the No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators.
 

SALON

Saturday, Aug 4, 2012 03:30 PM EDT

“Total Recall” and America’s false-memory syndrome

Do we know who we really are? The 2012 election is a Philip K. Dick showdown between dueling American fantasies

By Andrew O'Hehir

Topics: 2012 Elections, Barack Obama, Editor's Picks, Mitt Romney, Movies, Politics, total recall, U.S. Politics

 
Colin Farrell in "Total Recall"


Every variety of nationalism, in every country in the world, involves some degree of invention, imagination and amnesia, standing in for actual history. Most scholars of Balkan history will tell you that the supposedly ancient enmity between Serbs, Croats and Muslims that led to the terrible civil war of the 1990s – the first serious outbreak of genocidal violence in Europe since the Holocaust – was a modern invention, deliberately inflamed by political leaders. Along with the even worse conflict in Rwanda between the Hutu and Tutsi, two groups indistinguishable to outsiders, this offered a gruesome example of what historian Benedict Anderson has called “imagined community,” the shared sense of a tribal or national identity that runs deep and links unconnected strangers together, even if it was actually concocted the day before yesterday.

So Americans are not unique when it comes to our ambivalent or hostile relationship to history, our preference for simplistic myth-making over the unsettled and perennially conflicted character of the past. Given our nation’s short and bloody history – and the fact that there’s so much of it we’d rather not think about – it’s possible that we suffer from an exaggerated version of this syndrome. Whether or not that’s true, in this historical moment we face an especially stark choice between different versions of the American imagined community, which is what I believe accounts for the poisonous character of this presidential campaign.

Whatever about the actual differences between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney – which I would argue are minor, in the bigger picture – their supporters see them as embodying different visions of the nation, both of which are notional or imaginary. One of them promises a renewal of the past, although it’s a past that never existed in the first place and one he certainly cannot recreate. The other seems to represent a more inclusive and optimistic future, or at least he used to. Given prevailing cultural and economic realities it’s a future well beyond his capacity (or anybody else’s) to will into existence.

This week’s new Hollywood remake of the science-fiction classic “Total Recall” is more concerned with Colin Farrell’s muscular frame and its exaggerated stunts and effects than with political allegory. But like the Arnold Schwarzenegger original from 1990, it draws its source material from Philip K. Dick’s famous science-fiction story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” which can absolutely be read as a loaded commentary on our understanding of history, or lack thereof. Farrell plays a factory worker who builds robot soldiers in a ruined, totalitarian future society, until he is thrust into an endless loop of epistemological doubt, where he can’t be sure who he really is or what he really knows about himself or the world. He may be a highly trained secret agent, or he may have an implanted false memory to that effect. Furthermore, if he is an undercover ninja assassin, he doesn’t know whether he works for the nefarious one-world government or the underground resistance.

America as a whole finds itself in a similar position, uncertain about the basic facts of its own history, let alone what lessons to draw from them and whether or not it’s truly on the side of the angels. That goes double, I think, for America’s declining white majority, which simultaneously feels itself embattled and undermined even as it still holds a grotesquely disproportionate share of power, money and privilege. This is among the principal themes of my Salon colleague Joan Walsh’s upcoming book “What’s the Matter With White People?”, which is certain to provoke much discussion as the campaign season heats up.

To paraphrase her argument into my own terms (which she may not entirely agree with), Walsh sees the contemporary Tea Party-aligned right wing as the latest manifestation of an enduring ideological current in American politics that appeals to a harmonious, godly and racially coded vision of the past. In our day, that means the past before the Civil Rights movement and feminism and gay marriage and all the social tumult of the 1960s that led inexorably, last but not least, to the election of a president who may or may not be Kenyan or Muslim but is certainly not one of us. Walsh further argues that there’s more going on here than simple racism, and she’s right. Most importantly, the idea that there was some period of universally prosperous and harmonious white hegemony in America’s past is a ludicrous fiction, employed to enable an especially pernicious imagined community. The real history of European immigration to North America is full of discord, bigotry and violence, with bitter nativist prejudice unleashed, in turn, against the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, the Jews and anyone else who came along.

Those groups were eventually able to acculturate as “white” in ways that African-Americans and most dark-skinned immigrants could not, but at the ultimate cost of having their cultural memories reformatted, “Total Recall”-style, or subscribing to Henry Ford’s famous proclamation that history is bunk. Again, I’m not suggesting that the allure of a mythological past is unique to Americans, or white people, or the Tea Party. But there’s no denying that the modern Republican Party has been extraordinarily successful at convincing the white working class to vote loyally and even enthusiastically against its own economic interests by offering a seductive vision of American identity that is based on a past that never was and that excludes vast swaths of the bicoastal urban and suburban population from full membership.

At times the left has also been guilty of its own historical mythology, a crypto-Christian vision of American exceptionalism turned upside down, in which the U.S. is a profoundly evil nation poisoned by the original sins of slavery and the Indian genocide. (This is roughly how the Martians view Earth in C.S. Lewis’ religious allegory “Out of the Silent Planet.”) That certainly isn’t what the Obama-era Democratic Party stands for (if it stands for anything identifiable at all), as much as Republicans love to harp on anomalous figures like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It’s difficult for any American to view the Obama-Romney contest from an objective distance, but when I try to do so, I come up against the fact that these are two men from slightly different sectors of the elite caste, who will pursue similar policies on a wide range of issues and have almost identical relationships with corporate capital, the true power center in our so-called republic.

No one should doubt that there are meaningful differences between Obama and Romney when it comes to healthcare policy, likely Supreme Court appointments, reproductive rights, gay marriage and a handful of other things – and then there’s the telling personal detail that Obama rose from the middle-class intelligentsia, while Romney was born into wealth and privilege. (Their foreign-policy differences seem largely a question of how loudly they plan to cheer while Israel nukes Iran.) Those don’t seem sufficient to explain the extreme level of invective on both sides, especially not the right’s depiction of Obama as a dangerous, tax-happy socialist with some concealed Hugo Chávez-style agenda ready for the second term. (Maybe he’s really a Red secret agent who just doesn’t know it yet, like Farrell’s character.)

I was raised by California liberals and now live in New York City, so of course I’m more attuned to the imagined community that Obama, however vaguely, seems to represent. If you’re reading this, you get it: A multiracial, multicultural future in which the universal prosperity and liberty imagined by our country’s screwed-up and contentious Founding Fathers finally extends to everyone. If that sounds more like the society depicted in a Verizon commercial than a realistic possibility based on our country’s actual history and its current state of economic decline, cultural division and political paralysis, well, you grasp the problem.


Sure, it’s a nice picture. But the imaginary version of small-town America circa 1953 that Mitt Romney stands for (also with a high degree of fuzziness) paints a nice picture too, in a different way. Neither of them has anything to do with what these guys will actually do as president – not much, as usual – let alone with the more urgent questions which Philip K. Dick and Henry Ford were actually addressing,each in his own way: where we actually are, how we got here, and how in hell we can get out.

Borderless News and Views

You are here: Home / We Say This / Republican hypocrisy: Guilt by association only applies to Dems

Republican hypocrisy: Guilt by association only applies to Dems

June 7, 2012 by Julie Driscoll 1 Comment

Gotta love all the practical applications of IOIYAR (It’s Okay If You’re A Republican).

Okay, start here.  Here ya have Mitt Romney, the now-official GOP presidential candidate, pal-ing around with terrorists fund raiser and self-described political powerhouse, Donald Trump, the yin to his yang, and a guy who’s elevated himself to just one very tiny step below the lunacy that is Dr. Orly Taitz, Esq. (attorney/dentist/real estate agent) and Sheriff Joe Arpaio. And yet Romney not only doesn’t denounce his  golden-egg-laying goose, Trump, but he’s pretty much ignored the whole birther debacle. Sure, okay, maybe Romney has expressed a view that President Obama is a U.S. citizen (big of him), but he hasn’t denounced his birther bro, and continues to share the stage with Trump at fund-raising events, complete with guffaws and back slaps  In right-wing-land, apparently, there’s no taint for Romney of guilt by association.

My, how things have changed.



Let’s take a trip down the “guilt by association” memory lane as applied to President Obama, shall we?

President Obama, guilty (by association) of rubbing elbows with Bill Ayers, a 60′s domestic terrorist, now a university professor and a guy President Obama had a passing relationship with in Chicago. Fox News hosts probably dream about the guy, they spent so much time with him in their heads.

President Obama, guilty (by association) of worshiping with his family at the church of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a Chicago minister who condemned American practices in a thundering sermon:  ”The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people . . . God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”  For those words, spoken by his long-time pastor, President Obama was condemned as anti-American (and, when added to the Bill Ayers association, an anti-American terrorist lover).

President Obama, guilty (by association) of allowing green jobs czar Van Jones to join the Administration.  When it was learned that Jones had loose links to the “truther” movement, had called Republicans names in a speech, had had a youthful infatuation with the Marxist movement and had advocated on behalf of an imprisoned cop-killer, Jones resigned from the Obama Administration. But that didn’t stop the gleeful Fox Newsies from tainting the President with the “guilty by association!” brush – which, coupled with the Ayers and Wright guilt, turned the President into an anti-American, terrorist-loving, committed communist revolutionary in the eyes of righty.

Ah, let’s remember Anita Dunn, the White House communications director who not only took on Fox News directly (accusing them openly of being a communications arm of the Republican Party), but made a passing reference to Mao in a speech – and boom, bam, President Obama was suddenly guilty (by association) of having Maoist ties.

President Obama:  An anti-American, terrorist-loving, committed communist revolutionary Maoist.

Kevin Jennings, a gay man and the Obama Administration’s Safe Schools Czar, was the target of a smear campaign alleging that he was a pedophile. He battled it back, and the Obama Administration stood behind him, but that didn’t prevent right-wing pundits and bloggers and crazy people from promoting the “look what whackjob Obama appointed now” meme. President Obama, guilty (by association) of, um, being homosexual?  Oh, and shielding a pedophile.

More recently, an old videotape was dredged up of President Obama hugging now deceased Harvard Professor Derrick Bell, one of the originators of the Critical Race Theory (which, for Fox and right-wingers, was evidence that Bell was a wild-eyed radical, and President Obama along with him).

And in Chicago, President Obama was connected to the scandal involving Tony Rezko, the attempted sale of his own Senate seat by Governor Rod Blagojevich, Jesse Jackson Jr. (somehow) and, for all I know, the 60′s mass murderer Richard Speck.

President Obama: 0; guilt by association:  8.

Learn it.  Know it.  Live it.  IOKIYAR.