Like Vampires near Mirrors

A Question for the American Media:
What’s that you See in the Mirror?

By Greg Moses

ILCA Online

Amidst the rubble of what was the Democratic Party, Nader doesn’t sound like a voice in the wilderness. He’s saying what a lot of Democrats are coming to grips with, that they will be a permanent minority party for the next 20 years if they don’t come up with some compelling ideas.–Eleanor Clift

Allow me to speak briefly for 56 million voters. The last thing we need on this “morning after” is some yapping crapola from a mainstream media mouth about our lack of compelling ideas.

Because, we have compelling ideas. For instance, the idea of a free press. And we wonder if the media refusal to look in that mirror is related to the problem faced by vampires, who have no real lives of their own to reflect?

So, if media mavens want to honestly analyze and reform the effects of their own blatant propaganda, if they want to explain why so many Bush voters believed that Sept. 11 was connected to Saddam, if they want to interrogate their racist patterns of reporting, if they want to explain why they didn’t blare the news of the 150,000 Iraqi deaths reported during the last weekend of the election, etc., then, yes, I think they could contribute something to my own understanding of this bombed out playing field called politics in America.

But when Thomas Frank tells me from the pages of the New York Times that the Republicans are winners because they have spoken uniquely for “the forgotten man without causing any problems for their core big-business constituency” oh please get him out of my face!

Mr. Frank cannot pretend to write for the 21st Century when he learns no lessons from the 20th. This phrase, “forgotten man,” for instance. Does he mean to say, “forgotten person?” Or does he think that eliding the significance of gender is another thing we should do as we seek to widen the Republican path to victory?

And if he doesn’t mind himself forgetting “the forgotten woman” does he notice how he neglects the racial assumptions that he and the Republicans share when they focus on the meaning of “man” as “white only.” Excuse me, Mr. Frank, neither you nor your Republican models seem to be remembering which men voted for whom last week.

But congratulations, I suppose, for placing your “ideas” on the vaunted pages of the New York Times. That’s the same place, is it not, where Thomas Friedman begged us to “give war a chance”? A compelling idea, I guess.

In fine, liberal fashion, Mr. Frank uses the space in the New York Times to purvey an analysis that discards the racist undertones of Republican politics (as if everything the Republicans say they’re doing is only what they’re up to), as if Democrat politicians do not have to survive in a gravitational field of racism, misogyny, and imperial disinformation, too. As if putting together a movement of 56 million voters this year was nothing but a failure.

Sorry to be so cranky this morning. My head is hurting. Let me suggest a pro-active agenda, if I may. If you professional pundits are looking for something to write about, why not go talk to the 56 million voters who, against all the odds of this messed-up system, said, you know, there has got to be another way. And, ask them, do they believe they have been well served by the American press lately?