Not just tea and biscuits

It’s as if two Koch underlings and Karl Rove were to smash in your door, break your china, threaten your old parents, steal your children’s books, lock the kids in the bathroom, and kick your dog on the way out. And, if they brought Newt Gingrich with them, he’d’ve tried to chat up your college-age niece.

In your indignation, explaining to your neighbors, you’d discover they’d bought the official version: that your toothless 13 year-old Sheltie had threatened to savage your interloper “guests” who’d come to check up on your anti-American activities.

And, however much you protest, the Koch brothers have been running TV ads in the area and your whole community believes you responsible for the radicalization of Muslim youth. Even your best friends, who know you’ve been Episcopalian all your life, hate to get involved; the Kochs have promised to buy their mineral rights for a pretty penny.

We live in the land of Bad Faith – and it smells as bad as three day dead opossum. I know about the opossum, because my dog and I walk by it every day.

Bad Faith makes possible the current uncivil discourse, and enables the right-wing war on reason, women, scholars, children, old people, workers, and the lower 98% of the economic spectrum.

Bad Faith is as pervasive as McDonalds and even worse as a diet.

We need something like the graphic on the backs of food packages to moderate our intake of the stuff and improve the health of the nation. (Michelle Obama has her crusade and, for a moment, I have mine.)

Serving size would be in minutes; calories would be BFUs (Bad Faith Units) and listed below in bold face would be all the unhealthy ingredients: Lying, Cheating, Bullying, Fearmongering, and perhaps some of the –usually—lesser incivilities: weaseling, sniveling, no-apology apology, and the subcategories of Bullying: ambush interviewing, attempts to intimidate, refusal to listen, constant interruption, name-calling, shouting, misinterpretation, misdirection, and so on.

If there were mistakenly anything in the BFU-ridden portion being offered, anything that fostered civil discourse or consensus building, anything like honesty, integrity, flexibility, sense, any of that life-sustaining stuff, the proteins and complex carbohydrates that might build a healthier body politic, or anything like a vitamin or antioxidant, then that too could have its place.

But mostly I’m concerned about those BFUs.

I remember all those Sci-Fi novels that depended on going back in time and making one historical change, creating alternate realities, all those earths a minute or a second or a fraction of a second apart, circling the same sun, every one different in greater or lesser degree. In some, Columbus is eaten by a shark before he leaves European waters, in some the American Revolution fails, or the South successfully secedes, or Gore wins – oh! Didn’t that happen here? You get the picture. Lately it feels like all of those different realities sent ambassadors here and they’ve collectively joined the Tea Party (except for the Gore as President ones, of course).

So suddenly we all share this one particular world, one reality, and it’s important to use the facts here, the real facts, the observable facts, the facts of reputable unbiased sources, rather than factoids, spin, innuendo, psychological defense mechanisms (projection, denial), or Big Fat Lies. BFLs are just full of BFUs.

You’ll see I’m picking on the right wing here. It seems warranted. Despite Jon Stewart’s call for civility on both sides – and I want that too – the assumption that both left and right are equally to blame for the current unhealthy mass consumption of BFUs needs challenging. To conflate the two sides as if everyone is equally guilty is to tar every political argument, every position, and every bias—whether arbitrary or well-reasoned – with the same brush. This universal blaming flattens the whole landscape, assigning us all the most cynical intentions and the vilest behaviors. It treats discernment like prejudice.

On the internet, it is true, there’s oodles of vitriol on either side – or every side for that matter, every minute, second, fraction of a second along the arc of differing opinion, but I want to discuss what shows up on the big screens, not in a little blog (like mine) with fewer than a dozen followers.

I want to talk about purveying tons and tons of bad faith discourse into the marketplace. So I am talking about the spin on the right, as right now it’s the McDonalds of BFUs.

And the right has the BIG LIE on their side: According to a recent Public Policy Polling survey, 51% of Republicans voting in primaries think their President is not a citizen; 40% of an Iowan Focus Group of Republicans told Frank Luntz that the President is Muslim. There is nothing on the loopiest part of the left like this, nothing of this magnitude.

The Big Lie is supported and abetted by unwilling adherents to the truth, so John Boehner is willing to take the President’s and the State of Hawaii’s word that the President is a citizen, but is unwilling to defend the President against any birther: “it's not my job to tell the American people what to think.”

He says this with a straight face, as if delusion and fact are all the same, as if he has no obligation as an elected official to try to clear the air and steer us toward some greater good, and as if he doesn’t try to influence public opinion daily. (Easy cheesy BFU, anyone?)

Bill O’Reilly tries to weasel out of any responsibility, his own or corporate, for fostering the delusion, by saying no sane person would believe it, and why are we devoting so much time to it, as if it hadn’t been nourished and cherished by Fox viewers and pundits alike.

Other Fox lies help maintain the big one, so Huckabee lies about President Obama growing up in Kenya and mistrusting the British as a result of the Mau Mau Revolution. When found out, Huckabee offers a sliver of weaseling, nothing old-fashioned like a protein apology. Instead it’s a “slip of the tongue,” something more like an oops at the table, nothing you can get your teeth into, nothing approaching the sincere and thorough retraction such an occasion demands.

Even after the almost-not-an-apology apology, Huckabee says Obama is not a typical American, as if it doesn’t matter about his actual birth here, because Huckabee can support the underlying notion cherished by the right that Obama is not like us, not really President, not really American. In short, the Big Lie.

Besides lying, we have cheating; James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart are here on the American menu with Mega BFUs. All it takes is hours and hours of filming, funky costumes from the Goodwill, misrepresentation, a total disregard for a larger context, and extremely selective editing to create what is essentially another BIG LIE – That Acorn, Shirley Sherrod, and NPR are un-American and deserve the axe.

This is reality TV that has no reality; this is anti-journalism, when a single remark out of context slanders every integrity. Long-term good is undermined; people of character and projects of merit fall; and all that Astroturf outrage is bad for our hearts – misled viewers' and victims' alike.

Then we have spin, innuendo, twist, what have you. We’re used to spin. As long as we know it’s a sales spiel, we generally can ignore the craziness of advertising, where dirt, romantically impelled, chases the latest Swiffer product, and angels fall out of the sky tossing their halos away because of the newest men’s cologne.

But sometimes it doesn’t look like straightforward advertising. There’s the spin at Fox News, starting with its being “fair and balanced,” although Rupert Murdock gave $1 million to The Republican Governors Association, and we see no Democratic hopefuls, but plenty of Republican legislative and Presidential hopefuls hanging out as paid employees, current and past.

And we have the Koch brothers, founders of Americans for Prosperity, funders of the Tea Party, whose advertising looks as if it comes from and is about middle class folks, even while policies it promotes – as we can see in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, for instance—not only strip workers of their rights and reduce their pay and benefits while shifting state monies to tax incentives for businesses, but also push laws that will make it easier for corporate cronies to buy state assets without competitive bidding or take over municipalities declared to be in fiscal trouble by a Republican governor.

As it is, “Americans For Prosperity” needs a better name; “Increased Prosperity for Billionaires” would do, and would reduce the BFU count, but would probably not sell as well.

Spin seems to be the High Fructose Corn Syrup in those BFUs – so persistent that our local paper ran an AP article entitled “Dems Hope to Taint Romney with Health Law Praise.” Of course the article starts with a comment about President Obama being quick to praise Romney, but this is a centrist President who has long aspired to being bipartisan and unifying the country. As he’s recently mentioned, he’s also open to states creating their own health care law if it provides similar care to the federal law. So why should we assume that he isn’t 1) sincere and 2) trying to demonstrate his centrism?

We’re persuaded not to trust him, because the rest of the article shows pundits weighing in on this praise as a strategy, Huckabee’s response, Romney’s attempt to distance himself. It’s as if the very air is so greasy with the BFUs we’ve been taking in that it’s impossible to believe, sometimes, in a healthy raw vegetable or a simple piece of fruit.

In the BFU world, the President can never be sincere; the pundits will always be cynical; Fox will continue to pounce, and Republican hopefuls – afraid to stand up to the loonies in their base – will continue to move as far away as they can from anything Obama.

Where’s the proof that the President himself is attempting to “taint” Romney? I hope he has the country’s and the people’s good at heart.

Don’t we all hope this? Or at least those of us who’re not still pouting and sulking with Limbaugh and wishing this President fails, or those who hover on the delusional with Glenn Beck, who is pretty sure Obama is a socialist/racist/communist/Satan worshiper.

The BFUs pile up. Name-calling can be bad for you. (It depends on the name: “Satan Worshipper” tends to raise blood pressure and cause heart palpitations. “Not an American” also has a lot of BFUs. “Asshole,” on the other hand, does not make you ineligible from office, and, as used back and forth between warring political points of view, is almost friendly in comparison.)

Don’t almost all of us want government that works? Good government takes an informed citizenry, honest give and take among various parties, actual civil discourse. So when Bill O’Reilly, interviewing the President, serves up every obstacle to healthy conversation, we have a big plate of BFUs, heart clogging and mind clouding.

Not only did he interrupt the President 42 times, not allowing him to make a point, O’Reilly added uglification—like those extra bacon bits on that loaded potato. “People hate you,” he tells the President. I wouldn’t let a second-grader say anything that mean-spirited.

It’s not that the President was discomposed by this, and it’s not like O’Reilly doesn’t have his own detractors, including some birthers he’s offended who think he’s a leftist shill, it’s just O’Reilly’s absolute refusal to have a legitimate conversation is unhealthy for all of us.

If we can’t have actual give and take, if we can’t have honest interaction, we will never get to the real work of the country and we may as well eat that whole box of doughnuts in despair.

Or better, we need to know what we’re taking in – and do our best to go around it, and maybe warn others of the BFU count. (I need a reliable measurement for the relative BFU value of all these unhealthy practices. Then I could put it on a super-nifty chart. I envy Rachel Maddow, who loves real facts, and has measurable stuff to put in her charts.)

Meanwhile, if you have a big old slab of O’Reilly, followed by some flaming Limbaugh, you gotta know that no Pepto-Tums-Alka-Seltzer cocktail is ever going to fix it.

And if you’re drinking in all that Koch product, and following along as the corporations tell you what to do, you won’t notice until it’s too late that your pockets have been picked, your benefits stolen, and you’re not only sick, but too poor to get medical attention.

Woman's Tongue

I spend more time than I want to in waiting rooms. And while I’m there, when I find myself without the book I meant to bring, I peruse a couple of Arkansas magazines, generally well written and well intended, full of the sweets of the South: pictures of local Homecoming Dances, cheerleaders, charity events, makeovers, home interiors, gardens; articles on couples and families, profiles of a local celebrity (always including a discussion of church activities and family life); inspirational essays; instructions for Your Creative Project – decoupaging the cover of Your Bible Study Notebook or stenciling nursery rhymes on the walls of your baby’s nursery.

Sometimes I see a photo of one or the other of my more civic-minded friends; sometimes I like looking at an interior I’ll never be able to afford.

One magazine in particular has “Women” in the title, and apparently has the intent of appealing to the whole gender, but I think of this magazine as Southern Affluent Conservative Certain-kind-of-Christian Mothers and Wives. So, recently, reading the marriage counseling, and being told, based on St. Paul, that women primarily want to be loved, and men primarily want to be respected, my heart sank.

Here I am again – outcast and reprobate. I must not be a real woman; I just don’t fit that ruffled pink suit with 4 inch black heels idea of the feminine. It’s not my color, and it’s not my style. More than that, I like to believe I’m a little more complicated than the marriage counselor thinks, and that I actually do require a lot of other things in my life including a full measure of respect, intelligent conversation, and a sporting chance at the TV remote.

Oh yeah, I’m also not so conformable anymore.

On International Women’s Day (Happy Belated March 8th), as I went through the cash register line at Krogers, the cashier and I talked a little about coupons and such – nothing mean-spirited, nothing personal, nothing offensive in the least to anyone was discussed, but apparently, the cashier felt she’d said too much. “Oh,” she said “I just need to bridle my tongue.” I’ve heard any number of Southern women say this to me. And, none of them in circumstances that I thought required silence. I asked my husband whether men ever tell each other such a thing. If so, they’ve never said so to him. I guess this is something taught from the Southern pulpit that discourages women’s voice, something along the lines of “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything,” but with that scary church tang that promises judgment, hell, and other retributions.

I just feel squashed by that women’s magazine – however well-intended it is. I’m hankering for something more: some place where women can give voice to their depths and create larger spaces for themselves, maybe interspersed with articles about 17th century Chinese ceramics, the Baha’i in Arkansas, the life cycle of the Moss Mantid, or some thoughtful observation that moves us beyond the conventional. And where, sometimes, we risk saying something “not nice” and refuse to bridle our tongues. It’s like we’ve got a brand new HD flat screen that only shows black and white movies. Bring on the color! Let’s try the 3-D glasses!

I used to think we had a space already cleared and open for all those new voices, but we seem to have created a big political stage so we can hear the leading female performances of . . . wait for it . . . Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, who fritter away the power of women in incoherence and inadequacy. Too many other women must be bridling their tongues.

So, Happy Women’s History Month!

Here are a few other voices:

Gloria Steinem recently to Bill Maher:“For Republicans, life begins at conception and ends at birth.”

English Proverb: A woman's strength is in her tongue.

Hillary Clinton on March 8th: "Women and girls drive economies. They build peace and prosperity. Investing in women and girls means investing in global economic progress, political stability and greater prosperity for everyone the world over. So let us mark this day by finding ways to ensure women and girls access to education, healthcare, jobs, and credit, and to protect their right to live free from violence."


Ann Jones in Why Peace is the Business of Men (but shouldn’t be) about the absence of women in peace negotiations although many folk give lip service to the value women might have in them.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/women-peacemakers-un-resolution-1325


And here, off the beaten path: a documentary about women called Heart to Lead from a group called Imagine the good. http://www.imaginethegood.com/

In the first thirty seconds of Heart to Lead, Rama Vernon chants, connecting earth to sky with an OM bigger than you’ve ever heard. (The trailer for Heart to Lead doesn’t do that first scene justice; in the trailer her voice is just background sound, without the amplitude it has in the film.)

This is a woman creating sacred space through her voice. Need I mention she’s not bridling her tongue?