Arlene Goldbard

“Dinosaurs” was a hilarious and unique TV series that ran for four seasons in the early nineties. (You can get it on Netflix if you missed it the first time around.) It’s a classic family-centered sitcom, very much on the model of the original “Honeymooners,” except that Mom, Dad, the kids and pets are all Muppet-style dinosaurs, as befits the setting, Pangaea in 60 million B.C.

Earl, the hard-hat–wearing father-figure, supports his family as a tree-pusher, knocking down ancient forests for his rapacious corporate masters. It was the best political satire I’ve seen on American TV, complete with newsbreaks from deep-voiced talking-head Howard Handupme, who issued regular soothing bulletins even as the Ice Age dawned, ending both the series and the known world. At the time, I marveled at how fully this allegory encapsulated the contemporary scene under President Bush the first: climate change, environmental despoliation, unsafe working conditions, corporate indifference to workers and consumers, commercial media serving that agenda, and all of it wrapped in a lighthearted look at growing up in the Cretaceous.

It came to mind this morning as I watched a clip of Glenn Beck’s recent attempt to hijack the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., in service of his remarkably well-funded and stunningly deranged campaign to colonize white Americans’ minds. Beck, as you must have heard, has claimed that Tea Partiers deserve Dr. King’s mantle:

We are the people of the civil rights movement. We are the ones that must stand for civil and equal rights, justice, equal justice. Not special justice, not social justice. We are the inheritors and protectors of the civil rights movement. They are perverting it.

Twenty years ago, I realized this morning, you would have needed a time machine to foresee the precise cocktail of sugarcoated racism, religiosity, and bald-facing lying that infuses our national media artifact, the real, live anti-Muppet, Glenn Beck.

If you’ve caught even a glimpse of Beck, you know what comedian Lewis Black meant when he said Beck had “Nazi Tourette’s,” comparing anyone or anything he dislikes to the Third Reich. “This is a guy who uses more swastika props and pictures of the Nuremberg Rallies than The History Channel,” said Black.

But those are only outward trappings. Clearly, Beck has also learned a great deal from Nazi propaganda techniques, and he is putting it to work right here and now. The tactic that interests me most is “the big lie.” Now, the Nazis didn’t lay claim to that concept. In fact, they attributed it to the Jews and the British. And this, too, is classic: accuse your opponent of the misdeeds you have committed (Beck accused President Obama of racism, for instance, an assertion he has recently tried to soften), to insulate yourself from the same charge. Hitler laid out the concept in Mein Kampf, expressing the contempt for ordinary people in which his own grandiosity was rooted:

[B]ecause the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

In a psychological analysis of Hitler commissioned by the wartime Office of Strategic Services, Dr. Walter Langer summed it up thusly:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Sound familiar? For the big lie to work, certain factors have to be in place.

First, there are the facts of human cognitive function. It is in our nature as human beings to construct reasons for the things we do (often our reasons are invented long after the action has been initiated). Of course, we like reasons that put us in a good light. Between the choice to see oneself as a hero in the mold of MLK, or as a person who is distorted by the fear of losing privilege and by resentment at all who seem to be taking it away, there’s not much of a contest. To eschew the easy, self-aggrandizing option, you have to know that humans are susceptible to such delusions, you have to make a conscious choice to guard against them, you have to be willing to regard yourself in the cold light of truth stripped of narcissism. Exploiting the nearly universal proclivity for self-justification, Glenn Beck has made a career out of providing shiny self-deluding rationales for deeply repugnant attitudes.

I’d like to say there is an easy remedy, but I’m afraid there is only one remedy, self-awareness. Knowing that we humans—even you and I and all the right-on people surrounding us—have this inbuilt tendency, that it is hardwired into our brains, is just about the only ally we have in noticing and correcting for it. The Tea Party people aren’t stupider or more gullible than the rest of us; it’s just that nothing has as yet disturbed the trance of self-justification that masks their awareness of the big lies they’ve been swallowing.

Second, there is the way that, in being adopted as a media icon of nobility, Martin Luther King the symbol has been stripped of much that made MLK the man such a brilliant, brave, and inspiring figure. As the years passed, Dr. King’s understanding of the integral relationship of racism and other oppressions grew deeper and more powerful. In a stirring speech delivered a year to the day before his death, Dr. King laid it out:

We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies…. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth…. A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.”

Glenn Beck’s ability to impersonate entitlement to MLK’s legacy depends on people not knowing what Dr. King really stood for. We need to strip off the padding Beck and his ilk have glued onto the rough edges of Dr. King’s righteous anger and fearless love. Sharing this information will make the big lie harder to swallow.

Finally, in the inflationary atmosphere that nurtures the big lie, it is very hard for people to see how they are being lied to by those they trust most. Of course, we want to trust someone. If everyone is lying, the world starts to tilt, and vertigo sets in. Frank Rich has a good column today about the billionaires cynically bankrolling the Tea Party movement to advance their own interests. Through Fox, Beck is able to blast his big lies nearly twenty-four/seven. Populist rage might be real—certainly, we all have good reasons to revile some of the ways our taxes are being spent, to resent government’s preferential treatment of the rich while the ranks of the unemployed balloon—but what the people who are underwriting this movement have in mind will do nothing to reverse those trends. Quite the contrary.

One of the things I loved about that old TV show “Dinosaurs” is how forthright it was about the bought-and-sold relationships between mega-corporations, government, and the commercial media. All the family names (Earl Sinclair, Ethyl Phillips) were based on oil companies, a rather nice reference to the fact that our petroleum-based world owes its existence to the great catastrophe underfoot that resulted from dinosaurs’ extinction. The corporation that owned everything in Pangaea was called “Wesayso.” Would it help if Tea Partiers and their fans knew who was benefitting from Glenn Beck’s casting as Howard Handupme? It couldn’t hurt.

This bone-chilling antiracist song, “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday, was written by Abe Meerpol, who later adopted the two boys orphaned by the government’s execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. When Holiday approached her label, Columbia, about recording the song in the late 30s, they refused on the grounds it might hurt sales in the South. She was finally granted a one-time release to record it for the Commodore label. This is merely a single facet of the reality Martin Luther King’s words illuminated for the world.

Next time you hear Glenn Beck tell an all-white Tea Party group that “we are the inheritors of the civil rights movement,” think of this song, and know that the big lie has been told again.

It’s been well over a month since I was persuaded to try online dating. All in all, it’s been much more fun and interesting than I anticipated when I announced my intention to try it.

Returning to dating after many years, I am compelled to state the obvious: things have changed. Those changes shine a light on the key challenge of our increasingly virtual world, namely: as we relate more and more through computerized text and images, how do we capture, notice, integrate, allow, and enable the forms of information and interaction that can’t be conveyed in bits and bytes?

When I shared a little of my experience with a friend recently, he told me to “Be careful.” With my heart, I think he meant, but of course, the boatload of cautionary evidence now being launched against online interaction has more to do with other dangers. We are warned against revealing too much to strangers, against making ourselves vulnerable to predators. (And yes, my lovely friends who are reading this, I am indeed being careful; no need to worry.)

But as more and more of the human interaction we are used to experiencing in real, flesh-and-blood encounters is being moved online, it is the opposite truth that strikes me. I find myself touched by the extent to which men and women who have loved and lost are willing to open themselves anew to hope and opportunity, by how much vulnerability they are willing to risk by exposing their yearning for connection. Human vulnerability is timeless, of course, but if memory serves, I think there is even more exposure entailed in posting an online profile than in standing hopefully at the perimeter of a party, impersonating cheerful indifference to the fact that everyone else seems to be part of a couple.

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A long time ago, when I was a young artist-organizer obsessed with questions of artists’ rights and livelihood, I used to give talks to groups of artists. I often began with the archetypal tale of Sleeping Beauty, in which Beauty must slumber hopefully, entirely passive until kissed into life by the prince. That was the conventional expectation of artists: that they would study, practice, dream, and hold themselves in a state of readiness for the moment when they would be recognized by a critic, agent, or some other prince whose attention could grant them a future.

I spoke in aid of self-awakening: forget the prince and just get on with it.

Even then, there were many ways to set out on the self-directed path of art. I’ve written about artists who place their gifts at the service of a community or a cause, about public service jobs for artists and all they can accomplish. The internet has opened up vast new vistas of creative work, from new forms of publishing and distribution to the new crowd-sourced philanthropy that entirely avoids the art market and its gatekeepers. Even some of the educators whose institutions continue to amass tuition revenues by enticing young artists with the fantasy of Madison Avenue, Broadway, or Hollywood have begun to doubt the sustainability of graduating thousands who serve out their apprenticeships (many of which never end) by tending bar and waiting on tables, and have begun to offer preparation for alternate routes to artistic livelihood.

And then there is the path of self-actualization, which the words of Spanish poet Antonio Machado describe perfectly: “Traveler, there is no road. We make the road by walking.”

The profoundly wonderful jazz singer/songwriter Abbey Lincoln is dead at 80, and the world has lost a great artist who walked that path.

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Sometimes life delivers moments of irrefutable insight, shattering fragile illusions like so many soap-bubbles. Remember that post-Katrina telethon where Kanye West said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”?

There was a great commotion, the President’s compassionate conservatism was vigorously asserted, West was condemned for incivility. Now, five years later, take a look at New Orleans—at all of its grassroots creativity and determination and all the official indifference and moral constipation that have transpired—and tell me with a straight face that West was wrong.

David Stockman isn’t Kanye West, to be sure, but it’s worth giving a little attention to what this Reagan-era Director of the Office of Management and Budget, closely identified with “trickle-down economics,” wrote in The New York Times:

It is not surprising, then, that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1 percent of Americans — paid mainly from the Wall Street casino — received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90 percent — mainly dependent on Main Street’s shrinking economy — got only 12 percent. This growing wealth gap is not the market’s fault. It’s the decaying fruit of bad economic policy.

The day of national reckoning has arrived.

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Could everybody please stop for a minute and take a breath?

A milestone has been reached, one we might best commemorate by a collective inhalation, sending a little oxygen to the national forebrain, which seems to be suffering the symptoms of acute deprivation.

The scapegoating of Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department official who was forced to resign last week, was such a perfect, surreal, and toxic example of everything that is wrong with our politics that I am daring to hope we can actually learn something from it.

In case you’ve been taking a media fast, here’s a quick recap. … Read the rest of this post»

On July 1, education leaders in Burlington, VT removed from her post a school principal who was, by all reasonable accounts hugely admired and wildly successful at loving and educating the pupils in her charge. According to the New York Times, Joyce Irvine of Wheeler Elementary School…

[W]as removed because the Burlington School District wanted to qualify for up to $3 million in federal stimulus money for its dozen schools.

And under the Obama administration rules, for a district to qualify, schools with very low test scores, like Wheeler, must do one of the following: close down; be replaced by a charter (Vermont does not have charters); remove the principal and half the staff; or remove the principal and transform the school.

Do yourself a favor and read the entirety of this excellent Times article by Michael Winerip. Its distinguishing feature is a true diversity of stakeholder voices, and a true willingness to question official pronouncements, both increasingly rare in daily journalism.

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The gulf between practice and preaching is vast enough to swallow almost anything, but I am beginning to think we have something caught in our collective throat. Despite all our claims for the higher virtues of compassion, truth, and altruism, our common culture has persisted in attaching a positive presumption to material success. Those who excel in economic competition, the tacit reasoning goes, must merit it; and therefore they deserve to be heeded. They deserve the benefit of the doubt.

This is in contrast to the cultural assumptions that dog losers in the economic race: they are lazy, they fail to plan ahead and conserve, they deserve punishment for spending beyond their means, their misfortune is self-created. Rather than meriting the benefit of the doubt, they deserve to suffer. Nearly a week ago, Paul Krugman’s “Punishing The Jobless” column on the shameful Congressional failure to extend unemployment benefits quoted Sharron Angle, the Republican senatorial candidate from Nevada:

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As the U.S. pauses from work to celebrate freedom, what national liberation do you desire? At the risk of seeming ridiculous, I’d love the public interest to awaken from its self-imposed trance, putting the people’s business before self-serving politics.

When a pig flies, you say? Look north, up in the sky, what’s that pink blob flapping over Iceland?

Jon Gnarr, the new mayor of Reykjavik, Iceland, is a comedian by trade. In fact, it was widely assumed that he embarked on his election campaign primarily to satirize political conventions, using his skills as a humorist to highlight the absurdity of his city’s actual existing government.

Then he won.

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“The personal is political.” If you were sentient in the sixties and seventies, you heard it almost daily. No doubt, you also said it now and then. It still echoes occasionally around the Zeitgeist, but with a less commanding tone.

It’s been a little over a year since I left a decades-long marriage, and I am ready to explore relationship again, which for me means meeting men. The trouble is, I live the life of a writer and speaker whose main subject is culture. In comparison with the normal pattern of going to an office each day, I spend a remarkable amount of time alone with my computer, mostly loving every minute of it. (I’m lucky, I know, to experience bliss in the act of writing, even when the results fail to induce the same state in readers.) In between, I take to the road for work. I’m glad to have had quite a few speaking and consulting engagements this spring, mostly journeying to that corner of the universe known as “the arts,” where I am surrounded by women (roughly two-thirds of the people who work in that field, by my informal estimate) and gay men, with a sprinkling of married men in the crowd.

Wherever I go, I’ve been driving my friends a little crazy with this topic, and their response has been to urge me to register with an online dating site. Yesterday, I let myself be persuaded, which entailed answering a long list of questions about my background and personal tastes and habits. The idea is that on the basis of some algorithm, I will be matched with compatible men (although the first batch of matches has left me feeling skeptical).

Still, it’s good practice, friends say, recounting all the happy couples they know who met online. So I am practicing, and as I practice, I wonder if anyone is paying attention to the politics of mature romance, a subject ripe for exploration.

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My friend heard it from Wilbert Rideau, a writer she admires. He was commenting on the constraints that shape certain prison writers’ perspectives. “They can only see the world,” he said, “through the lens of their own pain.”

Some of us are imprisoned by iron and stone, some by cages erected in our own minds. When you are so identified with your own story that you can admit no other truth, pain owns your vision. The only antidote is awareness, which can sometimes be activated by glimpsing a wider lens (check out the wise writings I’ve linked at the end of this post).

I’ve put off writing about Israel and the Gaza flotilla, even though they are much in my mind, because I didn’t want to rattle people’s reactivity, unleashing the friend-or-foe perspective so often seen through the lens of pain. But then this statement was posted to a progressive Jewish e-list: “Maybe I live too much now in the 1930’s and am experiencing these times as 1938.”

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