By Partha Banerjee
(Author is a college teacher and human rights and media activist in New York City. Email: banerjee2000@hotmail.com. Web: http://www.geocities.com/chokmoki.)
Just in a few days Americans will vote to elect their president. This historic election will decide the course of social, political and economic movements, not just for the U.S., but for the entire world.
As a foot soldier of democratic rights, justice and peace movements, I’ve always supported the candidacy of Barack Obama. In diverse capacities, I’ve worked for his election campaign in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania; I’ve also written and spoken in various forums to promote his candidacy and the significance of his victory. Apparently, based on the gallup and tracking polls, the wind is behind his sail. Still, in these final hours just before the November 4 elections, I express my doubts and fears whether Obama is really going to win. Because, the climate of lies, prejudice and divisive politics that is now pervading this country is unprecedented; one might compare it with the fourth and final quarter of a game of American football – a game where the heretofore losing team has suddenly turned violent, and is desperate to steal the show by any underhanded, unimaginable means.
Can a principled, issue-based, straight-talking Obama fight off the heinous opponent and still win it?
Way back when, during my school days in Calcutta, I played minor league football (the international version where feet, and not hands, move the ball around). Along the way of playing across the city, I discovered Kajal the Referee – infamously known as Kajal the Crook. I discovered that he was a millionaire black-market broker, with shady dealings with Calcutta’s two leading football clubs. This man would provide muscle power for the club elections, kidnap the young rising star players during the pre-season signing, and keep them under his personal surveillance til the period was over. He would sponsor the neighborhood minor leagues, fix matches, descend on the field himself as the celebrity referee, and employ his cadres of thugs to jumpstart violence should his match-fixing ploy not work well; at the least, his musclemen would make sure the opponent’s young, talented kid is kicked unconscious, when the referee himself would look the other way. We were also told that because both the teams in the championship match were sold to him, it didn’t matter who won: Kajal the Crook and his army would just manipulate the tension high through the end.
When I look at the way the U.S. corporate media work, I can’t help but remember that manipulative referee. The way big media keeps making up new, sensational stories round the clock, the sole purpose being build and perpetuate high-electricity tension – never mind the lies, half-truths and cooked-up scandals – is no different from the way that Calcutta crook played his game; the striking resemblance is that both shoot for the same goal: reaping maximum profit (I'm afraid using the phrase "by hook or by crook" would be chastised by redundancy-conscious readers).
Here’s the real story about big media here in the U.S. They work on a couple of basic premises. One, almost all of them work directly for or under some multinational corporations such as General Electric, Walt Disney, Westinghouse or Rupert Murdoch’s star empire – where the primary political tenet is that they would not allow anybody outside of their own beltway to pose as a serious contender for the prize of presidency; just as none other than the two big teams would ever win the Calcutta Football League, nobody but some insider Democrat or Republican would ever be promoted by big media to become the U.S. president (or members of the Congress) – I can only imagine big media were in a shock when Barack Obama defied all the conventional wisdom, defeated the Clinton powerhouse, and actually became the Democratic presidential candidate. Big media such as CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, PBS or NPR made sure even within the Democratic Party, anti-status-quo voices such as Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton, et al. were silenced long ago; we’re not even talking about right-wing nuts and the ilks of Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Dobbs, Hannity, Malkin or Drudge.
Two, U.S. media's primary objective is profit and their worldwide business survives and flourishes on their commodity: news. Just the way potato farmers and distributors would need various brands of chips, fries and salads to create, sustain and increase their profits, media corporations would need various news and views packages to make their money. As a result, in order to keep you on the edge, media would bring in fake, hollow and meaningless news and analyses by so-called experts, which in turn would find the all-important ratings to stay ahead in their own competitive world. The higher the Nielsen and other ratings are, the more media companies make money through mass consumption, and especially through commercials from car, food, make-up, beer, insurance or drug companies. Mega-dollars of revenue would make them mega-rich.
Following this simple logic, big media have built an extreme tension on the election battle between Obama and McCain, excitement that one can normally find in the fourth quarter of a Super Bowl game. They must do it because after all, the incredulously high amount of fundraising by the two campaigns (especially when the U.S. economy is such tatters) is essential to feed the media dinosaurs and their insatiable appetite for advertisement dollars. Especially in a country where a virtual society has largely replaced the real society, TV, radio and Internet commercials are the street corner rallies, main-street marches, even though Obama has recently managed to physically meet a 100,000-strong crowd in St. Louis; in an exceptional departure from American politics-as-usual, he’s done it repeatedly especially since August.
Following the time-tested formula, however, big media have manufactured an array of package – diet, regular, salty, unsalted, sweet and sugar-free -- to sale and to profit. Thus, in this end game, media have manufactured a star out of Sarah Palin and her far right wing “base” (whose activity and rhetoric remind me of Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena or Jamat of India). Media have brought into the drama a new character named Joe the Plumber. Following the footsteps of the “success” they had with Rev. Jeremiah Right, they’ve now brought in the so-called terrorist connections between Obama and Bill Ayers of Chicago. As backup entertainment, they’ve added grassroots group ACORN and its so-called far left agenda. They’ve included in this potpourri the Lieberman-fashioned, unguarded remarks of Joe Biden.
Yet, each of these packages has proved to be trash, and should’ve been trashed. After the revelations of the Alaska wrongdoings of Sarah Palin and her husband, media should’ve challenged them more vigorously instead of rewarding them with further stardom and insipid interviews. After it was known that Ohio’s Joe ran his business without a license (i.e., perhaps ran it tax-free?), was a registered Republican who meant to harangue Obama, and would actually be benefited by Obama’s tax cuts, media should’ve dropped the Joe the Plumber issue altogether. After it was came to light that Bill Ayers could not have political connections with Obama during the sixties – for the simple fact that Obama was eight years old at that time – media should’ve faced off with McCain and Palin on exploiting it.
But they decided not to do it, again, for the simple reason that keeping tensions and excitements – however false – would be profitable; after all, mega-rich owners and their rich anchors and hosts would not lose much should either Obama or McCain be the next president. (I sometimes wonder whether media corporations lost wealth the Lehman Brothers or AIG way even in these horrific, meltdown days!)
Consequently, even those American voters who’ve miserably suffered during the past eight years of Bush-Cheney-Rove-McCain destruction of the economy, those who’ve lost jobs, mortgage, health care, retirement savings, are not able to send their children to college, are still undecided, unsure. Can we rather say that the vested interest have purposefully kept them unsure?
And on top of that, we now have witnessed in the U.S. a resurgence of hate, bigotry, racism and violence; the fringe but powerful far right, with help from airwave hate talks, are screaming for blood. Even today, a sizeable population in this country is too prejudiced to stomach the possibility of a black man to be their president, even though this black man is a Harvard-educated lawyer and has proved to have more than the necessary presidential character, composure and judgment (particularly in comparison to his opponents). On his side are now elite personalities such as Warren Buffet who’s carefully heard by Wall Street; he has on his side Colin Powell, a top general respected by both parties. Most importantly, millions of new-generation students, youth and workers – black, white, brown and yellow -- have come out to be on his side. This is an unprecedented, formidable coalition! I’ve seen this revolutionary coalition at work during my campaign days in New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania.
Just don’t forget our Calcutta referee Kajal the Crook. His mastermind is always busy fomenting trouble: who knows what’s up his sleeves now? There could be mass fraud and voter suppression the 2000 Florida way, there could be violence instigated on election eve, or there could be a backlash against the equality doctrine of Obama that WSJ, CNN, PBS or Times never likes anyways. Now that Pat Buchanan has fatwah’ed that with Obama’s rise, “center-right” America will surely turn into a far-left state, the so-called center-right church and social leaders under the auspices of Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson or Phyllis Schafly would preach last-minute sermons to their devotees to defeat the demon of communism. All the other issues namely jobs, money to buy food and gas, education for our children or Medicare for our elderly parents would be sermoned to be less significant.
This Halloween is going to be mighty spooky.
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