Annals of Scapegoating, Part Two: Yosi Sergant

Three days ago, in an essay about the scapegoating of green jobs advisor Van Jones, who was hounded out of office by wingnut Fox commentator Glenn Beck, I wrote this:

We must act now to put a brake on scapegoating before it once again becomes the force that controls public life. The issue will not die down when headlines about Van Jones have faded. Now that Beck has tasted blood, his appetite will grow, and if we let it, sooner or later, one of his pack will be nipping at our heels.

I had no idea that Beck had already launched an attack on the artists and activists I’ve been writing about, focusing on Yosi Sergant, who according to reports still works in the National Endowment for the Arts’ communications department, but is no longer its director. Beck focused on Yosi’s involvement in encouraging artists to volunteer as part of the administration’s United We Serve campaign.

Read all about it, and watch the Beck videos, at the Huffington Post.

There’s not much information available yet, just a chilling sequence of events: Patrick Courrielche, a blogger for the right-wing entertainment industry site BigHollywood.com, participated in an August 10th teleconference in which Yosi Sergant and others encouraged artists to take part in United We Serve. Courrielche, a stalwart of the paranoid tendency in American politics, decided asking artists to volunteer to to advance aims such as clean energy and healthy communities was a symbol of creeping Big Brotherism. He recorded the call and shared the recording with Glenn Beck.

As you’ll see from the videos, Beck huffed and puffed Courrielche’s hysteria into a full-blown segment of his scapegoating campaign, widening his eyes and lowering his voice as he showed viewers images of Rock The Vote posters advocating healthcare reform—clearly, he indicated, part of a nefarious plot. The implication was that by supporting one public-sector program, United We Serve, another public-sector program, the NEA, somehow committed a transgression. I wonder what that could be?

Courrielche and Beck hinted that NEA money would be channeled to politically approved projects emerging from the conversation, but need I point out that United We Serve is all about volunteer projects?

Yosi Sergant and I don’t always agree, and part of our disagreement has been about the value of asking already hard-pressed community artists to prove themselves again by volunteering even more, a topic I explored in my recent essay on service programs at communityarts.net. It remains to see how the NEA will characterize Sergant’s demotion, because there may be some sort of cover in an extremely minor subplot about how he described the August 10th teleconference to the Washington Times.

But technicalities and cover-stories aside, this much is true: Yosi is the very model of a dedicated public servant, who not only performed yeoman service in the campaign, but followed that up by volunteering at the White House Office of Public Engagement. Glenn Beck, a vicious person who evidently cares nothing for either truth or consistency, is trying to manufacture scandal out of entirely innocent materials: every administration since time immemorial has employed countless people who took part in the election campaign; every administration since time immemorial has spent public funds in myriad ways to promote its aims (who pays for those widescreen commercials for military service I see all the time in movie theaters, Mr. Beck?); every administration since time immemorial encourages Americans to take part in volunteerism (remember the “Thousand Points of Light” of President Bush?).

A stalwart public servant has been scapegoated here, as was Van Jones, both convenient objects to attack an administration Glenn Beck and his employers at Fox News abhor. Scapegoat #1, an African American man. Scapegoat #2, a Jew. I repeat:

We must act now to put a brake on scapegoating before it once again becomes the force that controls public life. The issue will not die down when headlines about Van Jones have faded. Now that Beck has tasted blood, his appetite will grow, and if we let it, sooner or later, one of his pack will be nipping at our heels.