Archive for May, 2008
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
What Did MLK Really Say About Personal Responsibility?
In his scramble to become Head Babysitter of the status quo in the United States, Barack Obama famously threw his minister, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, under the bus. There will be no “trouble-makers” on his bus, Mr. Obama wants to make clear.
But Reverend Wright is not the only victim of the Obama bus-toss routine. Another major victim has been none other than Martin Luther King, Jr.
As I noted here last month, on the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination, Obama ended a generally picayune and misleading commemorative speech with this conclusion:
One of the forgotten aspects of Dr. King’s legacy is how he demanded personal responsibility as well as societal responsibility.
This, of course, is standard code-talk for saying “Racism is over, so get off your asses, black people, and fuck you if you don’t.”
This is a blatantly wrong and anti-MLK thing to say, but, as my initial disgust wore off, I found myself wanting to return to the issue. What exactly did Dr. King have to say about personal responsibility?
To answer this question, you don’t have to look very hard. In fact, the topic didn’t just arise, but leaped up, in MLK’s very first major speech — which was about — dig it — BUSES!
Having just the night before been chosen to lead the newly-formed Montgomery Improvement Association, the 27-year-old MLK went to the Holt Street Church to explain to the overflow crowd of bus boycotters why Rosa Parks’ arrest a few days prior was a turning point.
King’s December 5, 1955 speech, as reported by Harvard Sitkoff in his marvelous new book, went like this:
Several hundred blacks crammed the sanctuary and the basement auditorium, while several thousand more lined the sidewalks surrounding the church, listening on loudspeakers to rousing renditions of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” to somber Scripture readings, and to pleas for financial support by numerous ministers.
Then an unassuming Martin King mounted the podium. Few in attendance had ever heard him speak, and the short, chubby preacher was hardly a commanding presence in the pulpit.
“We are here this evening for serious business,” he intoned slowly, “and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its means.” In his rich, deep voice, he calmly recalled the history of bus segregation and asked the black community to protest the arrest of Rosa Parks, “not one of the finest Negro citizens, but one of the finest citizens in Montgomery.”
Having captured his listeners with his deliberate enunciation, King quickened his cadence and wagged an admonishing finger. “You know, my friends, there comes a time, there comes a time when people get tired-tired of being segregated and humiliated, tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” Loud applause and shouts forced King to pause, then to pause further as the throng outside added a rising, clamorous approval.
The volume and pitch of the preacher’s words rose. “There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an alpine November.” A wave of clapping hands and stomping feet shook the church and again made King wait.
“We had no alternative but to protest.” King pointed again for emphasis. “For many years, we have shown amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.”
King’s baritone resounded: “The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.” Looking down at his hands on the sides of the lectern, he contrasted that right with those “incarcerated behind the iron curtain of a communistic nation,” and with the violence and lawlessness of white supremacists who defied the Constitution, stirring more shouts of “Keep talking” that momentarily drowned him out.”If we are wrong,” King contended, “the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong!” Straining to be heard above the din, he thundered, “If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to earth! If we are wrong, justice is a lie.”
The preacher waited. “And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight, until justice runs down like water and righteousness as a mighty stream!” The rafters shook. To still the crescendo of cheers, King held both palms aloft and bowed his head. “If you will protest courageously and yet with dignity and Christian love”-his voice lowered-”when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say: ‘There lived a race of people, black people, fleecy locks and black complexion, of people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. And thereby they injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’ [THAT'S RIGHT!] [YESSIR.] [SPEAK. SPEAK!]
“This is our challenge,” he concluded with his head aloft, “and our overwhelming responsibility.”
The rhythm of the words, the power of the rising and falling voice, the bold vision of triumphing over wrong stunned the crowd into sudden silence as King abruptly stepped away from the pulpit, trembling from his effort. Then, rising as one, the congregation shouted its resolve to continue the boycott.
As they say in kindergarten, the wheels of the bus go round and round. Alas, it’s always the wrong people who feel the kiss of the tread…
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
A Dodge Indeed: “Gas Prices” or Carmageddon?
“America is addicted to oil,” but only because the world’s capitalist overclass is addicted to perpetuating the automobiles-über-alles transportation order of the United States.
To any rational observer of current events, this remarkable arrangement is now massively and multiply promising to become perhaps history’s greatest teacher of the lesson “Be careful what you ask for — you might get it.”
Always a capitalist’s wet dream, the reign of the private automobile was always basically inevitable in the United States, where the flux and flow of human and national histories gave corporate shareholders their clearest path to essentially unchecked power and an ensuing paradise of industrial-scale money-making. Contrary to mainstream dogma, ordinary people would never have spontaneously used democracy to demand the wildly expensive, destructive, and dangerous cars-first American situation. Only an overclass that thrives on waste and enjoys extremely deep political dominance could have called it forth, via Promethean assumptions and methods.
So, now that the wheels are undeniably starting to fall off, is the overclass likely to break the historical rule that entrenched elites never voluntarily give up their powers and privileges? Will the powers-that-be admit they fucked up, and start allowing discussion of their fuck-up?
You can judge the odds of that happening by pondering items such as Daimler-Chrysler’s latest avoidance tactic, the “$2.99 Gas Guarantee.”
You can expect no efforts to be spared to keep the impending arrival of Carmageddon to be labeled a problem of “gas prices,” “oil addiction,” “alternative fuels,” etc. — anything and everything but what it actually is: capitalism’s self-dug grave.
Saturday, May 10th, 2008
Economic Blacklisting: Why it’s 570 Channels and Still Nothin’ On
Springsteen’s song in 1992 was “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On).”
Now, it’s 570, of course.
Why?
Why the plethora of themed channels, but the continuing wall-to-wall reliance on pablum, snoozefests, and re-runs? Why is “Spongebob Squarepants” smarter, better-written, wiser, and more relevant-to-real-life than every single new program for grown-ups?
Independent film-maker Lloyd Kaufman explains:
I was recently elected to be chairman of the Independent Film And Television Alliance, and I ran on the platform of lobbying in Washington to educate the lawmakers and FCC that independent art is under assault in this country—and under a pepper, too, but that’s beside the point. Comcast won’t talk to Troma. We’ve been in business for 30 years and have 800 movies, and they won’t talk to us. If we give one of our movies to some middleman at Time Warner or whatever, then they’ll talk to them, so there’s another layer of revenue that we lose.
The limited access to the marketplace is economic blacklisting. If you’re an independent, you don’t get on TV. And in the rare instances that you do get on, you get a fraction of what that very same movie would get if it came in through Fox or Viacom.
Like every other major dimension of market totalitarianism, this one remains unacknowledged in both the mainstream media and the public utterances of the power elite.
Friday, May 9th, 2008
A CT Guarantee
Barring the somewhat early arrival of the world-historic socio-enviro-economic implosion this overclass is courting with all its might, this item from today’s New York Times will very soon sound like the molehill that became a mountain:
American consumers are expected to receive an estimated 1.5 billion unsolicited text messages in 2008, according to San Francisco-based Ferris Research, which tracks mobile messaging trends. That is nearly double what they received in 2006.
Friday, May 9th, 2008
Chutzpah & Delusion: Land Rover VEED
That’s a scan of the “Tread Lightly” ad I clipped from the local alt-weekly a while back.
Yes, folks, this is the kind of thing you can get away with in our glorious culture. Selling Land Rovers, with their 12/18 mpg rating and their $77,675 – $93,325 MSRP, under the idea that this monstrosity among monstrosities could have anything whatsoever to do with ecological concern.
The level of chutzpah, deception, and delusion involved among both the peddlers and the over-privileged purchasers of these things would make Orwell gag in surprise. The dealership — Land Rover Portland/Land Rover Oregon — says it cleans up after itself, so that somehow excuses the massive wastefulness and destructiveness of the product? Sure, yes, right.
The depravity of this is multiple. For now, though, I’ll simply repeat Robert L. Heilbroner’s words:
How strong, deep, or sustaining can be the values of a civilization that generates a ceaseless flow of half-truths and careful deceptions?
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
The Marketing Race: Straight from the Horse’s Mouth
Every once in a while, a top corporate capitalist operative will publicly spill a deep truth about the system.
This time, it was J. Walker-Smith, President of Yankelovich, Inc., a subsidiary of the WPP Group, which employs over 100,000 people in its various marketing services operations:
“All of this marketing saturation that’s going on is creating this kind of arms race between marketers where they have to up the ante the next time out because their competitors have upped the ante the last time they were out,” Walker-Smith told CBS News. “And the only way you can win is to have more saturation — be more creative; be more outrageous.”
That is exactly correct. Its monumental implications are also still barely perceived, let alone combatted.
Corporate business normalcy spurs the huge firms that dominate the domestic and international economies to keep expanding and refining their marketing efforts.
One result is ever-increasing commercialism. Walker-Smith himself estimates that phenomenon in these terms:
“Well, it’s a non-stop blitz of advertising messages,” president of the marketing firm Yankelovich, Jay Walker-Smith said. “Everywhere we turn we’re saturated with advertising messages trying to get our attention. [There's] a kind of super saturation of advertising that [people] are exposed to on a daily basis.”
Walker-Smith says we’ve gone from being exposed to about 500 ads a day back in the 1970′s to as many as 5,000 a day today.
My own educated guess is that big businesses are now spending around $2 trillion a year on their marketing operations in the United States alone.
And we know that the sheer number of people employed in “sales engineering” is also huge and growing.
Advertising Age recently reported that:
U.S. media employment in December fell to a 15-year low (886,900), slammed by the slumping newspaper industry. But employment in advertising/marketing-services — agencies and other firms that provide marketing and communications services to marketers — broke a record in November (769,000) [of 2007].
That record 769,000 number is important but also a serious under-estimate. It counts neither in-house corporate marketing personnel nor the huge number of freelancers not technically employed by agencies.
And, given that almost 100 percent of the US media are corporate, their central function is to serve as marketing platforms — eyeball and eardrum attractor/conditioners — for their corporate sponsors. Hence, it would only be proper to add those 886,900 media workers into whatever the real number of laborers in the marketing juggernaut may be.
