Grassley: “2day’s journalists r too elite for ordinary Americans”

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 0 Comment
Six-term senator, man of the people and wizened child Chuck Grassley

Six-term senator, man of the people and wizened child Chuck Grassley

Elitists: they’re everywhere, according to people whose words and ideas are broadcast to millions. Obama was an elitist for saying every American should go to college. Donald Trump supporter Jeffrey Lord told CNN that fact-checking is elitist. Elitism seems concentrated in the journalistic class, particularly when politicians identify it. Just this morning, Senator Chuck Grassley (R–IA) posed this question to his Twitter followers:

You can tell Grassley is a man of the people because he uses chatspeak abbreviations. Journalists are too elite for him, an ordinary American who has served in the Senate for 30 years. But his tweet raises some questions.

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CNN pretty much screws Paladino on “Lynch @Loretta Lynch” typo

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 2 Comments
A screen shot from CNN.com this morning

A screen shot from CNN.com this morning

It’s no wonder Carl Paladino supports the candidate for president who wants to do something about the media. The Buffalo businessman last graced the news in April, when he told NPR’s Morning Edition that he and his fellow Trump supporters wanted an exterminator “to get the raccoons out of the basement” of government. I assume he was referring to waste, fraud, and abuse, for which raccoons are notorious, but some reporters thought he meant black people. In defense of this maybe tenuous reading, Paladino does look like the kind of person who refers to black people in code, constantly. But you can understand why he might consider himself the victim of uncharitable reporting. This morning, CNN comes along with this:

A top Donald Trump supporter drew fire Wednesday for a tweet that he says was a “well-intended mistake,” which seemed to call for the lynching of Attorney General Loretta Lynch. The tweet from New York businessman and former gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino said “Lynch @LorettaLynch let the Grand Jury decide,” according to reports and screen grabs on Twitter. The message was replaced with another that simply said “@LorettaLynch let the Grand Jury decide.” Paladino was apparently weighing in on FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that the bureau would recommend no charges in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

This story appeared under the headline Trump supporter tweet appears to call for lynching of Loretta Lynch. Appears to whom? Speaking as a person who has to go back and delete part of every tweet in which I use Twitter’s @ autofill, I did not at first read Paladino’s as advocating the lynching of the Attorney General.

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This one-star review of The Force Awakens contains a Trumpean “sad”

By Dan Brooks in Rhetoric 0 Comment
Racist

An example of today’s bias against white males wears a storm trooper outfit.

Donald Trump is bad, but so far we have understood him to be bad and special. He is particularly shameless demagogue, and because we live in interesting times, desperate millions have fallen under his spell. But we don’t imagine those people are emulating him. The Republican Party is not full of voters who are like their nominee. The country may be in the grips of Trump mania, but at least the symptoms of our Trumpomaniacal episode do not find us mimicking his behavior. Unless:

Sad

This review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, collected by Amazon Movie Reviews on Twitter, appears to contain a Trumpean exclamation. Granted, there’s no exclamation mark. But it nonetheless ends a declarative statement by ejaculating a single adjective that tells you how to interpret that statement, in the style established by Trump himself. Similar!

At the risk of introducing an element of conjecture, this Amazon customer also seems to echo some of Trump’s themes. In declaring Star Wars “just another anti-white male movie,” he participates in the conceit that America’s dominant ethnic/gender identity is under attack. That notion is absurd—if Hollywood really cared about males, it would have put more of them in its seventh goddamn Star Wars movie?—but so is the reviewer’s ability to reserve for white people cultural touchstones that don’t have much to do with race.

I was not aware that Star Wars was for little, specifically white boys. I guess you can understand it not as the tale of a farm kid called by destiny to grapple with the powerful forces in the universe and himself, but rather as the tale of a white farm kid called by destiny to et cetera etc. But who thinks like that? I heard the funniest joke from a white bartender today. Richard Nixon was the only white president to resign. White people who need white people are the luckiest white people of all.

Anyway, that’s why you see white dads wearing shirts with pictures of Chewbacca on them and black dads wearing Webster. Either that or both Trump and this Amazon movie review reflect the decades of rhetoric that actually did, in the words of the reviewer, make diversity a code word for anti-white male. Since the Southern Strategy, the Republican Party has articulated policies against minority groups not in terms of their inferiority, but in terms of the rights of those who would dominate them. Gay marriage undermines straight marriage. Every black stormtrooper is a white dude who wasn’t. When the sixth sequel to the movie about the brave white boy features a girl and a black man who doesn’t betray us, it’s anti-white males

Like the Trumpean exclamation, that is a trope people can understand. They might even believe it, the same way they might come to believe that blurting out an emotion is how you keep your audience with you. I wrote you this poem for Valentine’s Day. Romantic! To us, these manipulations are transparent rhetoric. But they are ideas to the people who get caught up in them. Politics does not just rally votes. It teaches voters how to think. Probably, we should all get a little more scared and serious soon.

Internet declares Gay Talese sexist, improving lives everywhere

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 3 Comments
Legendary journalist and convicted sexist Gay Talese

Legendary journalist and convicted sexist Gay Talese

Two weeks ago, octogenarian and pioneer of “new journalism” Gay Talese answered a question badly at a Boston University conference. Poet Verandah Porche asked him what women had inspired him most “as writers.” After repeating the question to confirm it, Talese answered:

As writers, uh, I’d say Mary McCarthy was one. I would, um, [pause] think [pause] of my generation [pause] um, none. I’ll tell you why. I’m not sure it’s true, it probably isn’t true anymore, but my — when I was young, maybe 30 or so, and always interested in exploratory journalism, long-form, we would call it, women tended not, even good writers, women tended not to do that. Because being, I think, educated women, writerly women, don’t want to, or do not feel comfortable dealing with strangers or people that I’m attracted to, sort of the offbeat characters, not reliable.

Talese went on to say that women excelled at fiction, possibly because educated women were not comfortable around the kind of “antisocial figures” he had made the focus of his career. It was a cringe-inducing answer. It’s also the kind you might expect from an 84 year-old man. But Twitter went ape.

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Friday links! Why lie? edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 3 Comments

april-fools-day-pranks-19__605

Were it not for Valentine’s Day, April Fools’ Day would be our most resented holiday. That shit divides people. Part of the problem lies in disagreement over what constitutes a prank. Merely lying to us is A) not exactly a holiday feat and B) minimally entertaining for us, the fooled. Now, the prank depicted above: that’s a foolin’. It’s startling, efficient, and—this is important—amusing once we realize we’ve been had. It’s not just a counterfactual statement you followed with “April fool!” Mark Twain recommended the truth on the grounds that the person who tells it has less to remember. Really it’s that invention is unnecessary. Today is Friday, and what has actually happened would strain credulity even at another date. Won’t you peruse the foolish truth with me?

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