Cross-posted from the “Arguing the World” blog at Dissent magazine.
Effective celebrity activists use their fame to bring attention and credibility to legitimate representatives of social movements.
That, in a nutshell, is my standard of celebrity activism done right. Ineffective celebrity activists…well, they do all sorts of things wrong. But, most fundamentally, they approach issues without any awareness of or connection to social movements. They might still have noble intentions, but they can end up being a net negative for social change efforts.
Coinciding with the thirtieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death, Bill Easterly has published an interesting article in the Washington Post comparing the ex-Beatle’s antiwar activism with the social engagement of U2’s front man, Bono. Easterly writes:
For so many of my generation, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Lennon was a hero, not just for his music but for his fearless activism against the Vietnam War.
Is there a celebrity activist today who matches Lennon’s impact and appeal? The closest counterpart to Lennon now is U2’s Bono, another transcendent musical talent championing another cause: the battle against global poverty. But there is a fundamental difference between Lennon’s activism and Bono’s, and it underscores the sad evolution of celebrity activism in recent years.
Lennon was a rebel. Bono is not.
Given our age of commodified dissent, I’m not interested in trying to determine who counts as truly rebellious and who doesn’t. But I think Easterly makes some important points.
First, he notes that Lennon paid a real price for his antiwar stances. The FBI tracked his activities, and he fought for years with immigration officials in the Nixon administration who were set on deporting him from the United States. Bono, on the other hand, has turned up to dine in the White House, schmoozing with elites even while encouraging them to do more for the poor. In other words, his activism hasn’t cost him much.
To me, this isn’t a problem in and of itself. But it is a symptom of much larger shortcomings in Bono’s approach. Rather than putting his focus on publicizing and legitimizing social movement leaders (those in the Jubilee debt relief movement, for example), Bono has put himself in a leadership role. He acts as a spokesperson, brandishes his supposed expertise, makes demands, negotiates, and accepts compromises. All these are things that should rightly be done by social movements and by representatives accountable to democratic structures within those movements. Ultimately these people should be accountable to those directly affected by the issue at hand. Absent any such structures, Bono has left himself vulnerable to cooptation.
Easterly describes Bono’s model of activism as that of the “celebrity wonk”:
[Lennon] was a moral crusader who challenged leaders whom he thought were doing wrong. Bono, by contrast, has become a sort of celebrity policy expert, supporting specific technical solutions to global poverty. He does not challenge power but rather embraces it; he is more likely to appear in photo ops with international political leaders—or to travel through Africa with a Treasury secretary—than he is to call them out in a meaningful way….
The singer appeared onstage with Bush at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington in 2002 as the president pledged a $5 billion increase in foreign aid. In May of that year, Bono even toured Africa with Bush’s first Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, fully aware that the administration was capitalizing on his celebrity.
“My job is to be used. I am here to be used,” he told the Washington Post. “It’s just, at what price? As I keep saying, I’m not a cheap date.”
While Bono calls global poverty a moral wrong, he does not identify the wrongdoers. Instead, he buys into technocratic illusions about the issue without paying attention to who has power and who lacks it, who oppresses and who is oppressed. He runs with the crowd that believes ending poverty is a matter of technical expertise—doing things such as expanding food yields with nitrogen-fixing leguminous plants or solar-powered drip irrigation.
These are fine moves as far as they go, but why have Bono champion them? The technocratic approach puts him in the position of a wonk, not a dissident; an expert, not a crusader.
In celebrating Lennon, Easterly doesn’t allow for the agency of social movements. Instead he valorizes the figure of the “dissident” who helps to shake things up and discourage “groupthink” among experts. “True dissidents claim no expertise,” he writes; “they offer no 10-point plans to fix a problem. They are most effective when they simply assert that the status quo is morally wrong.”
This is a pretty limited view of how activism functions, as well as of how art can contribute to the creation of critical social consciousness. But, putting that aside, Easterly correctly notes that Lennon was more successful than Bono in using his art (in this case, music) to directly support a cause. He writes, “In 1969 ‘Give Peace a Chance’ became the anthem of the movement after half a million people sung along at a huge demonstration at the Washington Monument…[T]wo more songs released [in 1971]—‘Imagine’ and ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’—expanded his antiwar repertoire.”
While I appreciate Lennon’s artistic contributions, he would still not be my model for celebrity activism. That would be someone like Harry Belafonte, who was a steadfast supporter of the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements, among other causes. Even at the peak of his fame, Belafonte could be relied upon to turn out at rallies and lend his magnetism to events. In just one of many notable instances, he played an important role in bankrolling the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during 1964’s Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Not only did his funding provide a lifeline for activists in the South, his ongoing presence with the civil rights movement helped make it a fashionable cause for other donors, volunteers, and public figures.
Now in his eighties and less well known than he was in the 1960s, Belafonte nevertheless remains active, advocating for the people of Haiti and speaking at the recent One Nation rally. All this has earned him a page of scorn on David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks.org, a site dedicated to tracking and defaming the Left.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but looking at Horowitz’s site, I notice that he didn’t make a page for Bono.
Today marks the tenth anniversary of President Clinton’s signing of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA). At passage, the bill was said to establish “legal certainty” for derivatives. In other words, the bill assured bankers that they wouldn’t face any legal consequences in the United States when they manipulated, defrauded, and colluded their way to billions in profits using financial derivatives that no one understood.
The CFMA led to serious consequences for the rest of us, including the exacerbation of the housing bubble and the subsequent bank bailouts and foreclosure crisis; the California electricity crisis; periodic food and energy price spikes that have hit consumer pocketbooks hard; and, of course, the continued reign of an unaccountable shadow banking sector over the economy.
This week sees the 150th anniversary of the secession of South Carolina—the beginning of the U.S. Civil War. And of course, the anniversary brings with it the predictable repetition of myths: the South seceded because those Northern elites wouldn’t let them govern themselves! It was about states’ rights and freedom. Right?
Author Edward Ball, who comes from a slave-owning southern family, reminds us that that’s not exactly the case. Simply read the states’ secession declarations: from Georgia to Mississippi, and of course, South Carolina, they all name continuing slavery as their top concern.
In a recent op-ed, Ball noted that just as the Southern states flattered themselves that they were enacting a new American Revolution, so too, the Tea Party crowd evokes that same revolutionary imagery around state freedom.
And it’d be funny if it didn’t pack such political punch. When Governor Rick Perry wonders aloud whether Texas could secede if it didn’t like laws of Congress, you can sit back and wonder how long it’ll be before he comes back to Washington for help with his ballooning state deficit.
But it’s not necessarily what happens that’s as important as what’s said. Some of the people pushing lawsuits against Obama’s health care plan, are also pushing for a constitutional amendment that would give states the right to overturn federal law. They too call it a strike for freedom.
And while it’s tempting to laugh at Washington politicians grandstanding about Washington power while they run for DC office, it’s hard not to important to remember that states’ rights as a rallying cry has a long and nasty history, and one based more often than not in race. From secession to integration to busing schoolchildren, politicians and public figures have trumpeted the idea of “states’ rights” to keep those pesky liberals from telling them how to treat people of color.
And now once again the specter of nullification raises its head, and though it’s unlikely to pass, it’s worth asking whether this has more to do with the color of the skin of the man who passed the bill than any contents of the health care legislation.
The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv and editor of At The Tea Party, out now from OR Books. GRITtv broadcasts weekdays on DISH Network and DIRECTv, on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter and be our friend on Facebook.
By Andrew Grant-Thomas, Deputy Director of the Kirwan Institute, Race-Talk Contributor,
A couple of weeks ago the US House of Representatives approved the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, better known as the DREAM Act. This past Saturday, almost 10 years after its initial introduction, a minority of Senators used the threat of a filibuster to end all hopes of its passage.
The DREAM Act would allow young immigrants brought into the country illegally before age 16 to stay, apply for permanent residence, and eventually apply for US citizenship. There would be strict conditions. Beneficiaries would have to be younger than 30, have lived in the US five or more years straight, and have earned a GED or high school diploma. If they completed at least two years of college or military service and passed various background checks, they would then be able to apply for permanent resident status.
Before the critical vote, Republican Senator Jeff Sessions denounced the Act as “a reward for illegal activities.” Senator Lindsey Graham insisted we pass border security before moving the DREAM Act. Given these gentlemen’s status as protectors of the national interest, this stance is also known as cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The US Department of Defense strongly supports the DREAM Act. The offer of military service as a path to citizenship would have led tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of immigrants to enlist. With the US military stretched to the breaking point by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, top officials saw the DREAM Act as a key recruiting tool. Indeed, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness refers to the DREAM Act in its 2010-2012 strategic plan as a “smart” way to draw good recruits to military service.
The Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, called on Congress to pass the Act.
So Senator Graham yelps about the need to enhance US national security through border security, on one hand, while blocking the use of a key military recruitment tool and thereby undercutting national security, on the other. Just politics, I guess.
Who else besides the military supports the DREAM Act? Just in the business community alone, we see such weak-kneed, namby-pamby, liberal do-gooding luminaries as the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Microsoft, Pfizer, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, American Express, and Con Edison petitioning the Congress to do the smart thing.
Why? Because Big Business knows that immigrants who took the higher education route to citizenship would mean billions in additional tax revenue and greater national competitiveness in the global economy. They know that the US is now seeing a slight out-migration of educated talent headed for greener economic pastures in India, China and elsewhere. As New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg put it, if we can’t keep the best and the brightest in the United States, and attract more of them to the United States, all the next big business innovations will happen outside the United States.
Unlike many of the young entrepreneurs now leaving the United States, the young people embraced by the DREAM Act are American in everything but name. Their talent, nurtured here, would remain America’s talent.
I wish I could say “wait ‘til next time” and shake my fist with respect to the prospect of passing the DREAM Act sooner than later, but with the Republican opposition gaining strength in the new Congress at least two years will pass before we can reasonably hope to hope again. Oh well. At least somebody – if only the nation’s military and economic competitors – will be pleased.
Written by Jodi Jacobson for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.
A study published this fall in the leading journal Social Science and Medicine found little support for the “abortion-as-trauma” framework pushed by anti-choice advocates who claim that a woman who chooses to terminate an unintended and untenable pregnancy is at higher risk for mental health problems because of the procedure, including everything from depression to suicide.
In fact, authors of the new study, conducted by Julia R. Steinberg (Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences, Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, University of California) and Lawrence Finer (Guttmacher Institute) attempted–and were unable–to replicate results from an earlier study by Priscilla Coleman and colleagues (2009).
Using the US National Co-morbidity Survey (NCS), write Steinberg and Finer:
Coleman, Coyle, Shuping, and Rue (2009) published an analysis indicating that compared to women who had never had an abortion, women who had reported an abortion were at an increased risk of several anxiety, mood, and substance use disorders.
But, Steinberg and Finer continue, “[Coleman's] results are not replicable.”
That is, using the same data, sample, and codes as indicated by those authors, it is not possible to replicate the simple bivariate statistics testing the relationship of ever having had an abortion to each mental health disorder when no factors were controlled for in analyses.
Replication involves the process of testing research results and is a critical factor in developing evidence because it helps assure results are valid and reliable, helps identify the variables that may play a role in research findings, can be used to test the application of results to the real world, and may suggest new avenues of research to further refine scientific findings.
“We were unable to reproduce the most basic tabulations of Coleman and colleagues,” says Steinberg, postdoctoral fellow at UCSF, in a statement.
“Moreover, their findings were logically inconsistent with other published research—for example, they found higher rates of depression in the last month than other studies found during respondents’ entire lifetimes. This suggests that their results are substantially inflated.”
(See another article debunking anti-choice mental health claims on which we reported in November.)
The authors carefully examined the question of whether abortion is a causal factor in mental health outcomes or whether pre-existing mental health conditions may be co-factors in unintended pregnancies leading to abortion. Read more
Seventeen years after Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” compromise, the institutionalized closet in the military should soon be gone. With the Senate vote to repeal, lesbian, gay and bisexual Americans have won the right to serve openly without fear of losing their jobs. Next it should be all workers. Congress needs to pass a comprehensive Employment Non-Discrimination Act. And then we all need to think about coming out.
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has cost more than 13,000 trained troops their jobs. In addition it’s cost some activists their health and well-being. Lt. Dan Choi, a tireless crusader, who chained himself to the White House fence for repeal, was involuntarily committed to a Veterans Hospital earlier this month after a breakdown.
No activist should be portrayed as superhuman, Choi wrote to friends. The failures of government and national leaders carry consequences, he said, that go far beyond the careers and reputations of corporate leaders, and elected officials. “They ruin lives. “
With ruined lives in mind, before the vote on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, last Thursday, 131 demonstrators–many of them veterans–were arrested outside of the White House, protesting war. Among them were GRITtv guests Chris Hedges and Daniel Ellsberg. Hedges wrote eloquently of what drove him to act: the horrors of armed conflict and the cost of militarization to civil society and its citizens.
This Friday, Bradley Manning spent his 23rd birthday in a six-foot by twelve foot cell, accused of the crime of revealing information about this nation’s wars in the hopes of stopping them. He’s been there for seven months. In solitary. Manning may have acted alone, but he’s not alone. Militant action helped change Don’t Ask Don’t Tell—and militant action is needed to get him out of solitary.
And then, it’s time to take a tip from those LGBT service members. As they came out for their rights openly to serve in our wars, are wars’ opponents as willing to come out, loud and proud — leaving no-one to stand alone — against our nation’s waging of them?
The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv and editor of At The Tea Party, out now from OR Books. GRITtv broadcasts weekdays on DISH Network and DIRECTv, on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter and be our friend on Facebook.
The holiday season is a good time to take stock of where we are, what we’ve accomplished and where we hope to go. Our team at Brave New Foundation would like to share with you what we are wishing for this holiday season.
Take a minute to watch our holiday video and see what many of us are hoping for as we move into 2011.
And once you have seen our holiday wishes consist of more than just iPads and smartphones, we want to hear from you.
Click here to share your holiday wish with us.
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For some, the need to stigmatize the lgbt community based on their constant desire to remind folks about gay sex never goes away.Robert Knight of Coral Ridge Ministries has made a career out of spreading anti-gay propaganda and lies, even to the point of citing the discredited Paul Cameron in front of Congress. And in a recent piece in The Washington Times – one of the only places that will publish his nonsense - Knight is claiming that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed because Republicans refused to get nasty about homosexuality:
Instead of using the military debate to bring to light many suppressed facts that could cripple the homosexual juggernaut if Americans only knew, they played by their opponents’ rule book.
In “After the Ball,” a 1989 gay-strategy manual, two Harvard-trained public relations experts warn that “the public should not be shocked and repelled by premature exposure to homosexual behavior itself. Instead, the imagery of sex per se should be downplayed, and the issue of gay rights reduced, as far as possible, to an abstract social question.” Elsewhere, the authors say, “first, you get your foot in the door by being as similar as possible; then and only then … can you start dragging in your other peculiarities, one by one. You hammer in the wedge narrow end first … allow the camel’s nose beneath your tent, and his whole body will soon follow.”
For the record, the majority of lgbts never heard of After the Ball, but for some reason, the religious right continues to claim that the lgbt community is using this book as some sort of manual to take over America by utilizing tactics, i.e. planning groups, money, secret organizations, that the religious right themselves are guilty of.
Knight then proceeds to catalog a bunch of things he feels Republicans should have brought up:
* Flawed science has been misused mightily. From Alfred Kinsey’s fraudulent research in the 1940s to UCLA Prof. Evelyn Hooker’s cooked psychological studies in the late 1950s to misreported “genetic” studies of the 1990s, the public has been browbeaten into ignoring biology, common sense and thousands of years of moral teaching about human sexuality.
* The obvious threat to the military blood supply. According to the Centers for Disease Control, men who have sex with men are 44 times more likely to have HIV and 46 more times to have syphilis. Even if gay men enter the services testing negatively, they’re going to have sex in the most likely pool in which to become infected.
* Data compiled by the Family Research Council showing that homosexuals commit a disproportionate number of sexual assaults in the military, even with the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
Notice how he never says just how the studies of Kinsey and Hooker were flawed, how he gives himself an out in talking about the blood supply by the “even if” addendum, and how he cites the Family Research Council’s useless study, which no one else cited. Knight conveniently forgot to mention the “coincidence” of the discredited Paul Cameron coming out with the same type of study a week before FRC did.
The irony of Knight’s position is the realization that 17 years ago, Republicans and those who didn’t support gays and lesbians serving openly in the military did pull out the horror stories. They talked about “gay sex,” “the gay agenda,” “fisting,” and even pulled the “gay assault” card.
But things have changed. Homophobia still exists but for the most part, more of us are out and unashamed of who we are despite the efforts of those like Knight. Americans know more of us and the lies about us being an invading horde of Godless creatures just isn’t resonating like they used to.
The sad thing is that no one told Knight. But I don’t think he would care if anyone did tell him. He seems to be willfully stuck in the past.
In the Southern Poverty Law Center’s profile of anti-gay hate groups, Robert Knight’s name comes up many times.
A scenario. Will Americans one day turn on the news and discover that Right-wing domestic terrorists have exploded bombs all over the country and killed hundreds if not thousands in the name of “liberty” and “freedom?”
This sounds morbid and dark. But, when you take the words coming out of the New Right’s horses’ mouths seriously–with their talk of States’ Rights, secession, nullification, and Obama as a closet Manchurian candidate Socialist–the reality of what could be (and has happened: see the Beck, New Right inspired murderers) is painfully clear.
A new survey reveals that Fox News viewers are grossly misinformed about current events (even by standards of the mass public), and quite frankly believe the lies that Fox News offers as “news.” I am unsurprised by said research.
That having been said. Yes, this new research is important and should be greeted with a warm embrace. However, some big questions regarding causality and causation hang over the findings.
Are Fox News viewers primed for ignorance, a rejection of facts, and a binary world view that rejects differing points of view? Are Conservatives oriented this way more so than Liberals or Progressives? Is there something about the Conservative personality type and its overlap with authoritarianism that makes Fox News an especially effective venue for the dissemination of Right-wing talking points to its public and a clouding of reality?
As I tried to get at with “When Stupid People Don’t Know that They are Stupid,” this new research by WorldPublicOpinion.org and the University of Maryland is especially troubling for the body politic because it highlights the power of the propaganda model of the news. If a healthy, functioning democracy is prefaced on responsible elected officials, a public that both believes in and works toward the common good, and is given fair information by the Fourth Estate in order to facilitate political decision making, the power of Fox News is truly frightening because their viewers are quite literally operating from a different set of facts, reality, basis of reason, and understanding of the today.
In short, we cannot talk across the divides of partisanship and ideology because the basic facts of the matter are in such disagreement.
By implication, if one is immersed in the Right-wing, Fox News, circle of epistemic closure it makes perfect sense to oppose the Democrats at every step, to believe in “death panels” and that President Obama is a closet Muslim, Anti-American, white folks hating, Socialist. To not do so would be unpatriotic and anti-American.
There is also a second narrative operating within the Right-wing media. Coming full circle, if one listens with any care to Conservative talk radio or television news there is a meme, almost daily, where those on the Left (and Progressives in general) are portrayed as a cancer, something toxic to be eliminated from the body politic. This is the evil of eliminationism, a belief that consists of the following elements as offered by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his monumental book, Worse than War:
Transformation is the destruction of a group’s essential and defining political, social, or cultural identities, in order to neuter its members’ alleged noxious qualities.
Repression entails keeping the hated, deprecated, or feared people within territorial reach and reducing, with violent domination, their ability to inflict real or imagined harm upon others.
Expulsion, often called deportation, is a third eliminationist option. It removes unwanted people more thoroughly, by driving them beyond a country’s borders, or from one region of a country to another, or compelling them en masse into camps.
Prevention of reproduction is a fourth eliminationist act. It is the least frequently used, and when employed, it is usually in conjunction with others. For varying reasons, those wishing to eliminate a group in whole or in part can seek to diminish its numbers by interrupting normal biological reproduction.
Extermination is the fifth eliminationist act. Radical as it is, killing often logically follows beliefs deeming others to be a great, even mortal threat. It promises not an interim, not a piecemeal, not only a probable, but a “final solution” to the putative problem.
My worry is that while those grossly misinformed by Fox News are also bathed in the light of these assumptions. It may not come tomorrow. It may not come next week. But trust, the streets is watching. Sadly, some (or is that many?) on the New Right have internalized the logic of eliminating Liberals and Progressives if not only in spirit or metaphor, but rather in fact and deed.
This post is by Afton Branche and originally appeared on the DMI Blog.
Today’s immigration hard-liners are characterized by an almost religious devotion to proposing draconian immigration laws; even when these policies plainly conflict with our nation’s economic interests. In a recent interview, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) gave a preview of his legislative priorities should he become chairman of the House’s immigration subcommittee next year.
One of King’s top priorities would be passing a bill that requires the IRS to share immigration status information with the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. In other words, King wants the IRS to rat out undocumented immigrants who file tax returns to DHS and have them deported.
Since 1996, the IRS has given nearly 14 million Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) to individuals without Social Security numbers, most of whom are undocumented immigrants. One IRS official estimated that ITIN filers have paid nearly $50 billion in income taxes to date. All of this hinges on the assumption that the IRS doesn’t share personal information with DHS or other agencies. Ending this firewall between federal agencies all but guarantees undocumented immigrants would no longer pay federal or state taxes, and retreat even further into the underground economy. In addition, undocumented immigrants would probably stop using ITINs to open bank accounts and establish credit histories needed to buy homes or open businesses.
Given the state of our economy, this is a ridiculous policy proposal. But it seems Rep. King is willing to pass any law that serves the interest of his restrictionist agenda, even if there’s no broader benefit. Not for nothing did he receive an A+ grade from NumbersUSA, an anti-immigrant organization that aims to reduce the number of immigrants—including legal immigrants—in the United States.
Immigration restrictionists are blind to the massive economic contributions immigrants make to this country, so blind that they can only support costly enforcement-only policies. The 2011 Congress needs to instead pass immigration laws rooted in the reality that we all rely on immigrants’ economic activities, regardless of their citizenship status. Unfortunately, with Rep. King and his cronies at the helm in the House, we’ll likely get nothing more than far-fetched enforcement schemes.
