Letter to Village Voice: RE: "White America Has Lost Its Mind"

Dear Mr. Thrasher:

Your story is interesting and there are many like this now. They skirt around the issue. They avoid stating the obvious. They lack historical perspective. They set us all up to re-live history! You put it all down to White racism, White doubts, White falling economic fortunes. Brownstein, another smart guy from the National Journal, supports you in all of that with data, stats, and even psycho-babble thrown into the evidence.

• "Boomers and their fixations and fears explain nearly everything..."
• "Slow-moving but irreversible forces may generate enormous turbulence as they grind against each other..."
• "A devastated economy. Two wars, neither being fought with clear goals. Housing markets that resembled war zones...a health system crippled...an auto industry cratering"
• "In a time of crisis...just another form of the same old thing...in this conflicted multiracial country"
• "White people have simply gone sheer fucking insane".

I worked on Mad Av, so know the workings of the machine that exists to manufacture "fixations"  and "fears", "desires" and "longings", and even "feelings of inadequacy", too.  That machine came of age working on heads belonging to precisely the Boomers. Why don't you look behind the curtains a little for the sources of these Boomer "fears" and "fixations" Brownstein so confidently pronounces? You did leave clues.

I've had this same discussion recently with other people in universities and NFPs paid to combat bias who should also have a deeper understanding of the cause and effect of all this, what legal conditions created it, and legal reversals that could go some distance to fix it! At least, the right people should be fingered by the Fourth Estate in a free- and open-democratic society, not just more reverse racebaiting!

Can we look a little deeper at the enterprises behind pumping this stuff into people's heads?  Media, entertainment, and sports is concentrated into about 7 corporations in this country now, with a handful of others on the fringes like your New Times Media.

Since 1988, and repeal of Eisenhower post-McCarthy Era "fairness doctrines" under Reagan, at least 1500 talk show hosts spew dis-information as "free speech" and "opinion" all over the heartland of this country using publicly owned FCC licenses, which despite the Internet are still the primary source of active and passive media exposure in this country. This heartland full of White People is exactly where all these "cratering" auto industries, and "devastated economies" hit hardest and first 30 years ago with longest-lasting, most- enduring, and now devastating effects!

In 1996, Clinton signed an act that lifted all ownership restrictions on media which had been put in place precisely because of the abuses of Fascists during the 1930s using electronic mass media for the first time to inflame whole nations against themselves, and others, serving to distract them for a decade from the real systemic failures in their economies and governments. After 1996, anyone with an axe to grind, or a political agenda like destabilizing a government or lowering taxes for top taxpayers, as long as he had or could borrow money, could furtively build-up his own "weapon of mass distraction". That weapon is of use to nobody else but the small group of others who share the same goals as him, and now after Reagan and Clinton unabated by any Democracy that might try to protect the masses from the few powerful as Socrates said it is supposed to do, using something like a free and independent Fourth Estate!

How right you are that economic collapse and economic inequality are the conditions into which history shows exploiters step for a free ride and a free rein. Xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, Jim Crow, Anti-Semitism, Anti-Romany, Anti-Okinawan, Anti-Hmong, etc, and now Islamo-phobia all get painstakingly and systematically established by willing or unwitting, conscious or unconscious "tools" in cultural institutions which pass-on lies and half-truths as doctrines to set-up the game of "divide and rule", in service of nobody but the failing ruling elite, who are running out of ideas and know-how, but never money to pay "tools"! 

It was like this in Germany in the 1920s, after their unrestrained Plutocrats, led by Kaiser Wilhelm von Hohenzollern II and pommeling a newbie and weak parliament, took the nation once again into war playing all his grandfathers' old cards, he thought just this one last time. Use the people's resources to start a war against a cousin to get yourself and your noisy haute bourgeoisie out of another unrestrained economic Bubble Bust!  If you win the war, you'll have spoils in the Treasury and you'll even share some of those with the top lieutenants and henchmen! If you lose, well...it's anybody's guess! That had been the game for his crowd since the Middle Ages!

And just who created these economic conditions we're in now? Who walked diligently over our politics the last 30 years using tools like Breitbart and O'Keefe to get everything including media and finance de-regulated so they could be "first in/first out" to start increasingly humongous Bubble Economies? Here and all over the world willy nilly when it suited them to profit by bringing down other nations, too!

• Who does the evidence say profited from all this? To the tune of about 400% over 30 years? Is your family one of those 400% richer than you were 30 years ago? That may explain why you chose to leave these things out of the story you wrote!
  
• Who has the money to back the Politicians baiting and profiting from all this paranoia? They will pay dearly later history shows, with personal reputations for the Pols, not the backers who can scurry-off somewhere like Argentina, or Costa Rica more friendly now to American tax-exiles. You mention the raging White people of Delaware with O'Donnell, or New York with Paladino, but you mention not at all the County and State Party Committee machines whose heads alone choose who is runnable, and use media money to stir-up the pot. We know moderate lifetime Republican leaders in PA who can't get a slot now from County or State committee chairs, who we also know very well. And we sense their real aims. 
  
• Who is finding and selecting the radio and TV personalities that daily spread "fucking insanity"?  You mention Schlessinger and Limbaugh, but not the common thread - Clearchannel Communications, or others like Premier Radio Networks. Now that is a revealing can of worms! Well, the programming VPs and editorial directors find them. But, who pays? Who promotes? Who tacitly approves from the Boardroom everything broadcast over an FCC license? They don't have to approve on their personal reputations, that is for sure, since people like you in the Fourth Estate are not looking behind the curtain at them (just like the Great and Powerful Wonderful Wizard of Oz told you, good boys and girls)!

You and others in your business feel so confident to talk about and maybe even gloat over the insanity, but you don't feel you have an obligation at the Village Voice to dig in and find out where it all comes from? The magazine for the village people can't see a new set of small-town people, not the usual suspects, who have been divided and ruled? Yikes! Maybe Matt at Rollingstone has a right view and can take on this hard job!

Goebbels and his tools like Reiffenstahl were prosecuted in Nuremburg for the very dis-informing and fear mongering of "white people" in NAZI Germany in similar conditions using similar methods that you painstakingly detail in your long article.

When Neil Postman was alive, he would have done Lexus/Nexus searches on all these misconceptions you talk about as plaguing White People's minds and he would have figured out just how many thousands of times they were amplified by your profession, and by which media outlets, and owners. He also would have had good evidence about who started any particular framing like "Ground Zero Mosque". Let's give that a try! Wouldn't it be great to get the scoop on the eventual Nuremburg trials we'll have here?

I will give you some credit. You at least present some clues worth pursuing. You mention Koch brothers as behind this stuff. There are others. Scaife is another controlling several foundations with benign sounding names full of generations of Mellon Bank money made with similar business methods as the Kochs. Scaife also constructed an alternative media enterprise in the post-Reagan years because the White Democrats in Pittsburgh needed "divide and rule" and some "cultural invasion" with "fears of others".  They've got that sewn up. An independent voice tried last year to get a little FCC bandwidth for minority voices in that long over-crowded radio market. And it was a tough fight. George Westinghouse invented commercial radio in Pittsburgh. DeVos is another. Amway fame, with nephew Erik Prince (the surnames can change with the generations) of Xe (i.e. Blackwater).  Joseph Anschutz funder of many things but Mad Av propaganda arm values.com springs to mind. While using Conservative Christianity to reach White People, you won't find the main values for social justice or community interdependence that Jesus himself spoke about and allegedly died for on values.com. You mention Peter Thiel, and link him and his "Leadership Foundation" (another benign sounding name) to O'Keefe, or Breitbart. They could be the Father Coughlin's of their age. This last generation of all these characters particularly benefited from the annual compounding powers of 30 years of Reagan Era regressive taxation. And especially if their surnames changed, no fingerprints! The Octogenarians amongst them are working to remove estate taxes so their sons and grandsons can have even more power over this government, and us, and our heads, than they've even had during their long lifetimes. That will be a slamdunk!  And they're all prepared  to play today and long into the future the same "divide and rule" and war profiteering games my grandfathers said they played 100 years ago, imperceptibly to most, and with impunity, then as today!

There aren't even many of these people to report on. A handful of corporations. A handful of interlocking Boards of Directors and cross-shareholdings. Thomson has a nice product about that with about 3,000 names who more or less run it all. So does the FT. A handful of pundits "tools" put their own dumb necks on the line like Limbaugh, Beck, or Schlessinger carefully plucked from the local radio farm-team and amplified widely and easily across huge networks run from a single server in Austin, TX! How perfect! History shows how cultural institutions like churches, or now powerful mass media concentrated in a few self-interested and unrestrained hands are being used despite our Constitution to play this "divide and rule" game once again on us this time, now so long after 1945, and with the same devastating results. Add to that list of institutions about 50x2 Top Dogs picking, media training, and running the candidates (and running radio and TV spots) on-top-of each State Party Committee machine.

I hope you and your colleagues can get a little more serious about all of this. Because, it is now getting serious!  And, with you, I and my family will have to re-live history too, even though my family are not ignorant of it, nor any of its obvious consequences!  The Fourth Estate and some in the tax-exempt sector who should be talking about all of this are like "reverse free-riders"*!

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-09-29/news/white-america-has-lost-its-mind/


*We're gonna' have to get the esteemed Econ Chairs, funded by the same families at the Top Universities, and routinely invited to testify to Congress, to add that notion to our ideological over-simplified over-believed-in (hmmm why that?) out-of-date linear-thinking economic calculus!