| Columns like Shaprio's make me sick because they are part of a plan to tap into subconscious prejudices and fears and to turn them into political outcomes. It's a plan to avoid any real discussion of actual policies favored by the president or his opponents. It's a plan that largely worked in this past election.
As progressives, we have to come up with a plan to fight back. We have to break through the media monopoly in small town and rural America. We have to make our national political discussions about policy and not personality. This is vital to the success of progressive ideas and more importantly it is vital to nurture a thriving democracy. As President Clinton famously said, "No personal attack ever created a job or educated a child."
And the personal attacks on display in Mr. Shapiro's column should be downright laughable. They are so over the top that the article is almost a parody of itself. Stephen Colbert could deliver it word for word and we would all roll on the floor laughing. But in part because of a small town conservative media monopoly, this is actually passing for political discourse. And it is absolutely absurd.
Shapiro relies solely on anecdotal evidence from Barack Obama's childhood given by people who may or may not have intimately known him. He then exaggerates those anecdotes and extrapolates even more exaggerated conclusions from them. For example, he claims a third grade teacher of Obama's said that Barack "studied the Quran" and "kept going to classes because he was interested in Islam." Big deal. So have I, as a religious studies major and later religious studies graduate student. But Shapiro concludes from this anecdotal evidence that Obama "still has a tremendous love for Islam and radical Muslims." Then he says that the proper response to anything Islamic is, of course, to fear it.
"Traveling to an Islamist country would scare most people-for Obama, it was like traveling back to his childhood." First of all, he conflates modern Indonesia, the world's largest and among the most modern Muslim nations-with an "Islamist" state such as Afghanistan under the Taliban or maybe like Iran under the current regime. I am almost certain that Mr. Shapiro knows better, but he knows that they're all the same to the readers his column targets. And of course, any "normal" person would be overcome with fear when visiting those scary Islamists. The fact that Obama was not afraid shows how "out of touch" he is with ordinary people. You know, the kind that people like Mr. Shapiro have scared to death.
Second, Shapiro makes much of the fact reported by the New York Times (as if a reference to the Times as a "source" gives his piece credibility) that Obama had a nanny who was (gasp!) openly gay. Oh, his nanny played for a transvestite volleyball team. What does this mean about Obama? Clearly it shows that he is "comfortable with militant homosexuals." I don't even know what that means. Does that mean Obama is comfortable with openly gay men and women serving in the military? That would be horrible. Except there's little policy evidence that he is so far. After all, DADT is still in place for the time being. So if Obama is somehow secretly harboring this militant homosexual thing, he has a funny way of not showing it to anyone but Mr. Shapiro.
Shapiro keeps finding more and more to fear via "guilt by association." Obama once knew a guy who was a communist. Obama once knew a racist. Obama knew Muslims. And all those groups went on to form "Obama's idealistic base." It's a base of "gay rights militants, black racists, socialists and radical Muslims." Never mind the fact that I still don't know what a gay rights militant is, but it seems odd that radical Muslims would be on board the homosexual rights agenda. It seems unlikely that socialists who emphasize class difference as opposed to race would get along with those black racists. But none of this matters to Mr. Shapiro. You can be a godless atheist Communist AND a radical Taliban-style Muslim at one and the same time. You can be a racist and also in pursuit of a world with no class or race distinctions as well. If any of Mr. Shapiro's readers ever realized how blatantly contradictory most of the positions that Mr. Shapiro attributes to President Obama actually are, they would have a brand new thing to worry about-Obama is clearly schizophrenic!
But "guilt by association" arguments will always lead you into these kinds of ridiculous contradictions. I once had a biology teacher who was an avowed and unapologetic atheist. By Shapiro's reasoning, that means I am a militant atheist with a social Darwinist agenda. And if that's not bad enough, I also had a Geometry teacher who was a fundamentalist Evangelical Christian. That means I am a bible-thumping religious zealot who believes in teaching only creationist geometry in schools! Oh, and I went to Istanbul once after taking a course on Classical Islam and do to my flying phobia, I was only afraid of the airplane ride and not at all of all those scary Muslims! Clearly that shows how very odd and scary and radical I am. That's right, I'm an atheist-radical Muslim-geometry creationist-social Darwinist-bible-thumping Evangelical who is out to destroy the airline industry! Be very afraid America.
The most ridiculous part of Shapiro's column is the way he takes a childhood anecdote about Obama and some classmates speculating in a "what do I want to be when I grow up" way and turning it into some profound revelation that Obama "was always a narcissist concerning his own power." Really? Because he said he "wanted to be president" and have business people build stuff? What little kid hasn't said that at some point? What little kid, for that matter, hasn't said they're going to grow up to be "king of the world" or "the greatest baseball player ever" or a million other things. I used to want to explore outer space. Does that mean if elected president I would have a secret agenda to transfer all funding to space exploration? Does it show that I secretly want to turn over America to alien overlords from beyond the moon? In Mr. Shapiro's world, it probably does.
But forget all of the reliance on anecdotes taken out of context for evidence. Forget about absurdly exaggerated extrapolations. Even if I agreed with Mr. Shapiro, I'm still left with a big "SO WHAT?" Why should it bother me, or anyone, if Barack Obama is "comfortable" around homosexuals? Why should it bother me, or anyone, if Obama doesn't get the heebie-jeebies when he travels to a Muslim nation? Why should it bother me that Barack Obama grew up in a diverse environment? There is nothing wrong with being comfortable around homosexuals and Muslims and atheists. I would argue that there IS something wrong with being uncomfortable around another human being just because he or she is different from you. If you told me that Barack Obama edged his seat a little further away from anyone who was a little different than he was, THEN I would be worried. (For a longer rant on this point, see a diary I wrote previously about why anyone should care if Obama were, in fact, a Muslim.)
We have got to fight back against this kind of ridiculousness. Those of us in small town America must write letters to the editor of these awful papers and set things straight. Maybe they'll even publish some of them. We need to find ways to break the monopoly that conservative media now enjoys in small towns and rural areas. We need chains of progressive-leaning (or at least centrist-leaning) newspapers and editorial boards. We need progressives on small market news broadcasts. We need to fight the prevalence of Fox News in public places in our small towns. It's no wonder, while living in Wheeling again for these past few months, why America outside of the cities is leaning so hard to the right. You never see or hear anything else. (Oh, and you could claim that MSNBC is available, but it's on channel 183 while CNN is 32 and Fox is 34. Fair and balanced...)
We need to put the people who agree to publish this non-sense to shame. We need to fight back with the truth. We need to make politics about policies and not about far-fetched made up personalities. Who's with me?
I would love to see comments that propose ways to go about doing exactly what I've been talking about here. Are there progressive media companies trying to get into the small and medium size markets? Can we start out own? Let's get to work people!
Note: Cross-posted at DailyKos |
