Mehdi Hasan and Whoopie Goldberg, two voices we need to hear more from

 Mehdi Hasan, on MSNBC this week, captured one of the glaring holes in the public mind and consciousness when he blasted the U.S. media for focusing on the occasional “good news” story about, for example, neighbours to came to the aid of a teacher who had to continue to drive his daughter 100 miles each day for cancer treatment after having lost all of his sick days. His teacher colleagues pooled their days, and donated them so he could continue his compassion pilgrimage. Hasan complained that the media does not ask the question, “Why are there not more sick days for all workers in the United States?”

And the point is not relative only to the media’s having succumbed to the private sector’s, and thereby the public discourse’s, fixation on the micro, as proof of some larger evidence of good will, when, in fact, the foundation of  public need and interest has crumbled under the weight of conventional perspectives of the powerful and rich pandering to the powerful and rich.

Let’s peel this onion a little more.

What are the media selling and reaping loads of cash for the exchange? They are selling minimal, superficial, hot-button social and political gossip. Of course, occasionally, they will print and interview ‘historians’ and ‘legal experts’ to provide some background for a story, without actually pulling the scab of racism, for example, or downright unspeakable hunger, poverty, destitution and a public determined to render such stories as “those poor people” or “why can’t they pull themselves up by their boot straps like everybody else”. In some ways the media executives know that their bosses and their boards are measuring their success in revenue which is measured in numbers of consumers, and more particularly, numbers of advertising dollars.

It is not secret, and it is clearly not rocket science to mention it, that even health care has been reduced to a for-profit model which by definition and by practice excludes millions from coverage for the simple reason that they cannot afford to pay the insurance premiums. And while the medical profession may continue to provide “care” those who can pay have better access, without lifestyle impediments, to more attentive caring than those indigents who frequent ER’s and walk-in clinics.

It is also not a secret that a culture that worships, literally genuflects to, the most affluent among them, as role models for everyone else, including all American children is so dominated by a self-sabotaging perspective and mind-set that holds as a cornerstone of its creed, money is the almighty measuring stick for human value, human respect, human dignity and human honour. And while fixated on this hollow and rusted brass ring, the willingness and the capacity to have conversations at the kitchen table, the office watercooler, the corporate board rooms, and even the university seminar rooms that would connect the dots, that would as simple acts of patriotism, expose the brutality and the frozen conscience of a culture that has fallen to the idol of Wall Street and the worship of anything and everything that might make more.

 Another head on this two-headed idol of American pseudo-religion is agency…making things happen, the power to construct or tear down. Social scientists once posited various classes in western society. At least three, upper, middle and lower, were the common demographics. Now, demographics is laser-focused on postal codes, neighbourhoods, streets, and the ethnic, economic, academic, religions and political affiliations of that block. Digital technology has enabled this deconstruction all of it for the benefit of selling more- technology  first, as a means to selling more widgets as the primary motive. Measures like GDP, GNP, and ratios of income to population, have come to be deployed as “stick-drawings’ of a  far more complex, nuanced, and whether integrated or segregated ‘community’….

 And the very use of that word has lost most of its original meaning. The language of the public square has been so compromised, and processed, much like too much of our diet’s menu, into microwaveable bites of both information and “analysis”, instantly arrived at, briefly heated, and served through a narrow window commonly known as a television or a laptop or a phone screen. And we all participate in ‘consuming’ without having to chew, because not only is it served in mashed bites, but reflection on the source, the motive of the source, the funding of the source, and the absolute patronizing by almost all of the sources of public information, including political debate and advertising manipulations is considered “too painful”.

It is only if and when some ‘stark’ statement, like the Hasan insight above, that arrests our semi-conscious brain, nearly drugged from a drum beat of repetitions of “trump’s latest lies” or Manchin’s latest obstructions, or, in Canada, the RCMP’s latest fiasco, or the military’s latest embarrassment, that we awake to the potential complexity of a specific story, and then begin to wonder about how long this ‘injustice’ or conflict or extortion or hate crime has been brewing.

Pick your headline, and your messenger (media, political actor, athletic or entertainment talking head, bank or investment guru, and you find one or two themes being drum-beaten as if we were all engaged in a tribal ritual…without either music or artistic imagination.

Ironically, even though we have been reduced to ‘consumers’ of whatever anyone seeks to sell, ‘lower taxes, or banned books, or ending abortion, or fraudulent elections (not) or Putin’s bluffing, or America’s supremacy, or Kim Jun Un’s unpredictability, or Xi Jin Ping’s nefarious cunning, or Biden’s verbosity, or Obama’s citizenship (thanks to defective trump)….we have become far more scrupulous and sceptical of the labels on food products than we have of word-belches from public figures.

Any attempt to embrace the public relationship to public information, including the agents of its delivery, is termed communication theory. And as such, it seeks to deconstruct the process of seeding, searching documenting, verifying, disseminating, receiving, and then digesting the diet being served by the mass media.

Rarely, if ever, is there a concentrated, disciplined, cogent and critical examination of the couch-potatoes we have all become, and the sizzle-droppers that the public figures has also morphed into, much of that dynamic birthed in the marketing slogan, “sell the sizzle, not the steak”….

When I first heard this horrific patronizing, condescending and nefarious buzz, I was  appalled and anxious. The man uttering it was about to open a knock-off to the American Arby’s. Selling glitz, rather than steak, told me more than I ever wanted to know about how low the game of selling had fallen. Having in another life “sold” all of the products Canada Packers then offered, and having trained under their seasoned veteran representatives, most of what I learned in those training sessions could have been delivered, appropriately and professionally in an ethics class in a graduate business school. It was certainly not “sell the sizzle not the steak” but rather:

We have these quality products, delivered on a daily basis, from inspected facilities, at reasonable prices without compromise. If ever there is a problem with our product, we will work diligently to correct our oversight, and offer fair compensation and respect to our customer. Mr. Semple, our trainer, is remembered for his insightful counsel: If there is a customer compliant resulting from a bad side of beef, remember in your addressing the situation to be eminently fair to both the customer and to Canada Packers. You are arbitrating the continued operation and success of both at those moments. How things have changed in sixty years! Partnerships, between customer and supplier, were the norm. Today, partnerships have, at least in too many situations, disappeared. The customer, while warranting respect, is not always absolutely right in his/her assessment of responsibility nor in his/her demands for redress.

Hundreds of horn-honking semi-drivers, currently clogging the main streets of Ottawa, funded in part by American sympathizers (the trump cabal, for instance?) demonstrate not only the absurdity of the anti-vax movement, which inevitably morphs into the anti-government, anti-science, anti-shared responsibility (for curtailing COVID) but the political “coup” mentality that was enacted in January 6 2021 on the U.S. Capitol.

Messages, at least in the public domain, are now delivered through insurrections, traffic and mental-health obliterating behemoths, assault rifles and clubs and ram-rods.

Hasan’s professional, articulate and probing question is like a blue-jay cry in a hurricane, neither heard nor recognized as the blizzard of reductionisms, exhibiting the abuse of power by the self-righteous, self-declared victims wearing the camouflage cry of “freedom” as if their freedom was more restricted by vaccines than the pandemic itself.

And of course, the political class has not shed its French-revolution ironic and prophetic anecdote: The politician in the bar witnesses the crowd marching through the street and says to the bartender, “I’ve got to see where they are going so I can get out in front of them to lead them!” Cynical, perhaps, but highly fitting to this moment in North American history.

Hasan’ question, and the many other questions his question evokes, about access to voting, access to health care, access to disclosure and accountability, and freedom from the ravages of climate change, geopolitical military conflict, income disparity and outright bold and unrestrained lies from too many public figures.

This week’s debacle at ABC’s The View, featuring Whoopie Goldberg’s comments that the holocaust was not about racism, but about man’s inhumanity to man, including her profuse apology, her inviting ADL’s Greenblatt onto the set of The View, and her final suspension “to reflect and learn” in the words of some ABC suit, demonstrates too glaringly how low our public discourse has fallen.

Racism is, after all, one of, if not THE most heinous of human acts, entombed for eternity in the massacre of six million Jews in the Fuhrer’s holocaust. And this act, as well as the hundreds of thousands of acts of violence, verbal, physical, emotional and psychic, that continue to be perpetrated by humans against other humans, of all races, all religions, all ethnicities and all geographic regions comprises man's inhumanity to man. Goldberg herself says, as quoted in a 2011 piece from Wikipedia, “My mother did not name me Whoopi, but Goldberg is my name—its part of my family, part of my heritage, just like being black,” and “I just know I am Jewish. I practice nothing. I don’t go to temple, but I do remember the holidays.” In more recent comments, Goldberg notes the difference between being black, a visible physical trait, and being Jewish not visible to the human eye.

In effect,  it is not Ms Goldberg who needs to reflect and to learn; it is the suit at ABC who needs to pause, take himself away from his desk, take a warranted leave of absence and contemplate his reductionism of what Whoopie was attempting to accomplish with her comment.

Man’s inhumanity to man, which obviously includes the most heinous acts and attitudes of racism, extends far beyond racism….into demeaning encounters based on little more than a metaphoric ‘scent’ from a person’s cologne, or another’s frown, or a power play that squeezes an individual out of office, often permanently and with impunity, without cause or with some modest cause following by a fatal and gossip-fed innuendo  and dismissal.

Ms. Goldberg’s very person, her history of support of the Anti-defamation League and her public sharing of her nuanced, disciplined and highly sophisticated scholarship notwithstanding, are defamed by a public and a network bowing to the idol of both ratings and dollars. And both of these motives arise from a reductionistic, transactional, and minimalistic comprehension of Ms Goldberg’s words. She deserves far better.

And yet, in a culture so devoid of subtlety, nuance, and the connotative aura of language and the multiple meanings and the need to embrace her subtlety and her sophistication, we can only hope that hosts like Mehdi Hasan will continue to ask his questions, as role model and motivator for tiny scribes like this one.