Civil rights marches versus the right to puke

It was a day of vivid contrast. One the one hand, tens of thousands marching through the streets, angry over a lack of justice and appalling inequality; on the other hand, the arrogance of privilege distilled in an alcohol-fueled invasion.

The Week of Outrage did meet SantaCon in the streets of New York City. “Taking the streets” has seldom meant such different things.

Despite the raw anger still felt in the wake of the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner (and so many others), the December 13 Week of Outrage march in New York City was a model of peacefulness. A multi-cultural multitude, there was a real respect shown toward others throughout. Time and again, when somebody accidentally bumped into someone else — regardless of who bumped who — both would quickly say “excuse me.” I was even thanked for being there after gently bumping into someone else. I appreciated that, but I was only doing my duty as a human being.

Marching in the streets of New York City

Then we have SantaCon, where yuppies and other privileged White people in their 20s act out their “right” be as drunk as possible, to overrun neighborhoods and vomit on the sidewalk. In past years, New York’s edition of this annual spectacle of drunken obnoxiousness took place in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a neighborhood that has become the poster child for gentrification — once a center for artists and non-conformists, it is now completely overrun with bars and chain stores.

Even there, bar owners and bartenders were fed up with it, and faced with a community unified in its opposition, SantaCon decamped for the Chelsea and Flatiron neighborhoods to the north, at least based on the numerous sightings of drunk Santas as the Week of Outrage march passed through those areas.

The SantaCon revelers were frequently encouraged to join the march; the reaction was almost invariably a slack-jawed uncomprehending look as if they couldn’t conceive of doing such a thing. Likely they couldn’t. The one notable exception I saw was when I suggested to one frat boy-looking character who probably works on Wall Street that he forget about SantaCon and join the march. He responded with a fusillade of expletives. Ah well, the stock market had just had a bad week; perhaps he wasn’t able to throw any grandmothers out of their homes and was in a bad mood because of it.

Claiming drinking as a “creative” activity

The flavor of SantaCon participants was captured by the Village Voice:

“Doug Bunton, owner of [a Lower East Side tavern], says he allowed Santas into his bar one time and quickly vowed never to do so again. ‘A guy poked me with a candy cane and said, ‘Santa doesn’t pay,’ and from then on I make no exceptions. I think their purpose is to take over the bar and make you do what they want,’ Bunton asserts. ‘I think they should try doing it in the Bronx, and see what they get there.’ ”

That would be interesting. But as one can not have privilege without an ideology justifying it, an anonymous SantaCon representative offered this nonsensical gem in the same Village Voice article:

“SantaCon’s New York organizer, the one who gives his name only as ‘Santa,’ feels SantaCon is merely misunderstood. He says outsiders are uncomfortable with such an unconventional and creative celebration. He insists the event is not a bar crawl, but rather an excuse to dress up, go caroling, and spread holiday cheer. ‘It draws criticism very easily from people because it’s rare to see so much unbridled joy and optimism outside,’ the man called Santa tells the Voice.”

There you have it: Getting drunk and vomiting in the streets, and doing so while wearing corporate products symbolizing consumerist excess that were almost certainly manufactured with sweatshop labor in a poverty-stricken corner of the world is “unconventional” and “creative”!

It is impossible not to see links with the runaway gentrification washing over one New York City neighborhood after another. SantaCon goes naturally with this. Gentrification is part of a process whereby people are expected, and socialized, to become passive consumers. Instead of community spaces, indoors and outdoors, where we can explore our own creativity, breath new life into traditional cultural forms, create new cultural traditions and build social scenes unmediated by money and commercial interests, a mass culture is substituted, a corporate-created and -controlled commercial product spoon-fed to consumers carefully designed to avoid challenging the dominant ideas imposed by corporate elites.

Undoubtedly, the SantaCon revelers, dressed alike and pursuing the same activity organized by someone else, believe they are rugged individualists, boldly displaying their “creativity.” That is what the corporate media tells them when they add a personal flourish to a corporate consumer product. Gosh, the corporate media wouldn’t lie, would they?

Corporate media get cold feet

The corporate media has begun turning against the fightback against the systematic police killing People of Color sparked by the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. That is a sign of its effectiveness. The ludicrous under-counting of the size of the December 13 marches and the “reporting” of a Brooklyn Bridge incident later that evening by local newspapers that read like police department press releases indicate that those authorities who had hoped the ongoing demonstrations would have died down by now may be preparing more repressive approaches.

We’re not talking about mad-dog Murdoch media outlets, but rather newspapers that had reported on continuing unrest in Ferguson and elsewhere with minimal malice. The New York Daily News, for example, breathlessly declared: “Police said Sunday that they had arrested a hooligan who assaulted two police officers during protests on the Brooklyn Bridge overnight.” The paper made sure to stress that the arrestee had written poems containing “disdain for the cops.” Quelle horreur!

And lest we are tempted to chalk that up to tabloid excess, The New York Times, although too genteel to use a word like “hooligan,” dutifully presented the police version of the incident as undisputed fact, making sure to note the police allegation that the arrestee’s backpack was found with a sack of hammers a day after uncritically citing the police department’s obvious under-counting of the size of the main march.

The Brooklyn Bridge activists wound up marching to the Brooklyn housing project where another young Black man, Akai Gurley, was recently killed by police in a stairwell. (The officer who shot Mr. Gurley, instead of calling for help, texted his union representative.) A moment of silence was held for him. Although no time was lost in condemning activists as “guilty” following the incident on the Brooklyn Bridge, the murder of Mr. Gurley was swiftly declared an “accident” by the corporate media and by Mayor Bill de Blasio without even the pretense of an investigation.

I was not on the Brooklyn Bridge, so I can not definitively say what did or did not happen. (A two-minute YouTube video shows a struggle underway, but not what might have precipitated it.) But the use of provocateurs by police to justify crackdowns is hardly unknown, so newspaper reports ought to be read with considerable caution. The uniform use of police violence against peaceful Occupy protestors and encampments should be borne in mind.

I will note that the sole example of anything violent I witnessed was when one person slapped the side of a police wagon with a hand, and several people immediately admonished that person not to do that. And this was on a spontaneous march after the main march in which the very point was to walk in the street to bring traffic to a halt in a symbolic gesture of “no business as usual.” Dozens of motorists stuck in traffic nonetheless honked their horns in solidarity, several putting their hands out their windows for the marchers to slap a “high-five” in support.

Besides a demonstration featuring parents and other family members of people killed by police in Washington, there were demonstrations in Boston, Nashville, Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles, among other places. In Oakland, anti-racist activists followed up by chaining themselves to the city police headquarters.

Taking aim at systems of repression

The continuing nature of these protests — they have been nearly non-stop since August and the December 13 events likely saw the biggest single-day total of demonstrators yet — has led some people to ask if this is the beginning of an uprising. It is far too early to say, but the ongoing willingness to disrupt “business as usual” through civil disobedience tactics certainly merits serious attention. Any movement serious about effecting a change has to aim squarely at the system in which individual police officers, or district attorneys, or courts, operate.

As Angela Davis said in a lengthy interview with The Guardian, the recent police killings are part of a long chain of repression. She said:

“There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan. There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice. … The problem with always pursuing the individual perpetrator in all of the many cases that involve police violence, is that one reinvents the wheel each time and it cannot possibly begin to reduce racist police violence. Which is not to say that individual perpetrators should not be held accountable – they should.”

Capitalism was built on slavery and the “triangular trade” in which which European manufactured goods were shipped to the coast of western Africa in exchange for slaves, who were shipped to the Americas, which in turn sent sugar and other commodities back to Europe. The North American plantation-owning aristocracy feared that Black slaves, White indentured servants and those former servants who were nominally “free” would unite, putting an end to their rule. Instilling anti-Black racism in poor Whites was the solution to this threat, a process facilitated by the racism justifying the genocide of Native Americans.

Racism began to be developed as an ideology to counter solidarity between Blacks and Whites and to counter poor White settlers who left the colonies to live among Indigenous peoples, whose non-hierarchical society was more appealing to thousands of them. To facilitate this process, freed servants were given small privileges not available to slaves to give them the illusion of having a stake in the aristocracy-dominated social order; Whites who rebelled were not punished as severely as Blacks; and poor Whites were forced to move inland due to the monopolization of coastal land by elites, thereby exacerbating tensions with Native Americans.

Divide-and-conquer techniques, whereby we are set at one another’s throats for the scraps left to us by capitalist elites, are indispensable to the maintenance of massive inequality. No police officer says to him or herself, “I’m going to shoot this Black man to keep capitalism in place.” Nonetheless, the mixture of fear and loathing of Black men and women on the part of a White police officer from the suburbs with no connection to the community being patrolled is a product of structural racism. That racism, along with sexism, national hatreds, anti-Semitism and other backward ideologies, are propagated through a variety of social mechanisms, and survive partly because some people receive benefits from them and/or enjoy believing themselves superior to others through supremacist ideologies.

As long as working people allow ourselves to be divided, pointing figures at designated scapegoats, the economic structure that locks in inequality will remain untouched. That will require many people to examine and question their privileges. It would be unrealistic to expect SantaCon participants to do that, but the number of civil rights marchers greatly outnumbered SantaConners. We should not under-estimate the length of the task ahead, but that is a good start.

Rogue newspapers or part of a continuum?

You’ve got to hand it to the old pirate, Rupert Murdoch — he’s still at the top of his form. His performance at the “Leveson Inquiry” in London last week was, in its own way, something to behold. Denying he seeks favors for his businesses, denying he has any influence, denying he knows anything that is happening within his company.

And Fox News is “fair and balanced.” There must be much unease within News Corp. these days, considering the number of old hands — some of whom worked there for decades — Murdoch so casually threw overboard. Before The Guardian last summer broke open the still unfolding News Corp. scandals, we were told hacking was the work of a single “rogue reporter.” Then it became the work of a single “rogue newspaper.” Next a “rogue country” perhaps? One can see where this might be headed, so Murdoch, in his two days of testimony last week, sought to head off the possibility that the, uh, whole company, might be “rogue” and so fell back on blaming his executives for keeping he and son James in the dark.

This week’s declaration by a British Parliament committee that Murdoch is “not fit” to run a major company does catch one’s attention. I don’t believe that extraordinary declaration can be separated from Murdoch’s appearance before that committee last year. The most common commentary then reduced his performance to personalized notions such as “doddering grandpa” in light of his long pauses and lack of answers offered.

What I saw in last week’s testimony was a boss used to being unaccountable to anyone — his crisp “no’s” and clipped phrases to the questions reflected someone used to giving orders and being in charge. His own manner betrays his role as the person in charge, whether that is tightly managing his properties or creating and encouraging a distinct corporate culture.

I should note that all Murdochs and the company’s representatives have consistently denied condoning e-mail hacking, phone hacking, paying off police and other accusations. We will have to wait for the legal systems and the parliamentary investigations to run their course to gain better understanding. But we can examine Murdoch’s newspapers.

Buy first, demand legality later

Take the New York Post. The Post wouldn’t exist it weren’t for special favors granted Murdoch. The United States used to have laws prohibiting “cross ownership” of media — you could own a television station and two radio stations in the same city, but no more, and no newspapers if you owned a TV station. When Murdoch decided to branch out into television in the U.S., he bought a television station in New York, despite already owning the Post, and had similar conflicts in other cities. Solution? He sought and was granted a waiver from the law, and eventually the law was rescinded.

News Corp. shareholders aren’t necessarily pleased with the arrangement as the New York Post loses money by the tens of millions of dollars annually. But it exists as a platform for Murdoch’s extreme Right viewpoints and as a bully pulpit. A good example of the latter could be made out of the Post’s attitude toward Hillary Clinton.

The paper for years consistently attacked Clinton in every manner possible, going out of its way to publish the most unflattering photos of her they could find, and sometimes doctoring them to make her look worse. (Fox News is often accused of doing that as well.) But in 2000, Clinton was a shoo-in to win a seat from New York in the U.S. Senate, and Murdoch thought it might be good to get on the good side of a powerful senator. Suddenly, Clinton was a hero, routinely lauded in the Post while her Republican opponent was mercilessly attacked. As soon as Clinton became a part of the Obama administration, she immediately reverted to her pre-Senate status.

Not altogether different from Murdoch’s British tabloids suddenly deciding that Labour was not the devil on earth, and backing Tony Blair when it was obvious he would become prime minister in a landslide. Not that any of these papers’ far Right rantings slackened for a moment. Business is business, no matter how well Murdoch can keep a straight face.

How much influence does Murdoch truly wield? Over the political process, evidently plenty, considering how British politicians all feared his considerable wrath, and how cravenly Republicans in the U.S. seek the favors of Fox News. Media outlets that are wielded as weapons of destruction with no regard for reality are coercive to democracy.

Influence or reinforcement?

But do such outlets truly change minds and shape public opinion? Here I have my doubts. When the “news” that is presented is so obviously biased and so obviously carries a political agenda, I don’t see that many minds will be changed; at most a minuscule number. The highest audience total I can recall hearing for any Fox News broadcast is perhaps three million — that sounds like a lot, but nonetheless represents only one percent of the U.S. population. An outlet such as that provides reinforcement for zealots unaffected by reality. That is poisonous to rational discourse, but is most unlikely to convert anybody not already predisposed to extremist rantings and bizarre conspiracy theories.

Sometimes it is suggested that the rantings of Murdoch properties makes comparatively less extreme Right-wing bias more presentable and thus making it sound reasonable. But I don’t think that is the case, either; such bias on its own is not necessarily persuasive. Propaganda is ineffective if it is recognized as propaganda; getting significant numbers of a society to support policies not in their interests has to be accomplished in diffuse and subtle ways.

What I believe moves public opinion is repetition, and not repetition in a handful of obviously biased publications or networks, but rather repetition of viewpoints, reporting angles and underlying themes and assumptions, across the entire corporate media. There are a vast array of institutions, including corporations, “think tanks,” schools and armed forces, to suffice a society with the viewpoints of the dominant, which in a capitalist society are its industrialists and financiers.

That there is sometimes fierce competition among media outlets not only doesn’t militate against uniform assumptions and story lines, it actually reinforces those tendencies. Corporate-inspired ideologies pervade capitalist societies, and corporate ownership of the mass media ensures that decision-making positions are filled with those who hold to some variant of prevailing ideologies or are inclined to “play it safe” by cautiously remaining within “acceptable” boundaries. The mass media will then simply reflect these dominant ideologies, and continual repetition through multiple outlets reinforces the ideologies, making them more pervasive until (and if) a significant countervailing pressure arises.

The very competitive nature of mass media ownership helps dominant ideologies prevail — if so many different outlets report the same news item in a nearly identical way, that “spin” can easily gain wide acceptance. Or if stories are reported differently by competing media outlets, but with the same dominant set of presumptions underlying them, those dominant presumptions, products of ideologies widely propagated by elite institutions, similarly serve as ideological reinforcement.

It’s what they don’t say as well as what they do say

The persistence with which stories are reported is another reinforcement — stories that serve, or can be manipulated, to uphold dominant ideologies can be covered for long periods of time with small developments creating opportunities to create fresh reports at the same time that stories that are ideologically inconvenient are reported briefly, often without context, then quickly dropped.

Ideas that directly challenge corporate orthodoxy can be excluded from public debate at the same time that a debate among two or more “acceptable” ideas rages. To provide an example, at the end of the 1990s a strong debate played out in the mass media outlets of the United States concerning the Vietnam War. This debate had all the appearances of a serious dissection of a bloody, deeply divisive blot on U.S. history. But although the debate was heated and lively, it was only between two “acceptable” viewpoints — an honorable effort that tragically failed or a well-intentioned but flawed effort that should not have been undertaken if the U.S. was not going to be “serious” about fighting.

Left out were the widely held views that the war should never have been fought because it was a war to extend U.S. hegemony or that the U.S. simply had no business fighting in someone else’s civil war. Further, the first “acceptable” viewpoint implied, and the second explicitly stated, that the U.S. didn’t really fight hard to win the war, ignoring the actual intensive level of the U.S. war effort in which North Vietnam’s urban and rural infrastructures were destroyed and three million Vietnamese were killed. (And lest that media debate be seen as a backlash from the Right, it was the liberal New York Times that led it.) Thus there was all the appearance of a free and open media at the same time that the media obscured.

Not covering certain news can be as important as covering news. The New York Times, to use it again as an example, regularly gives heavy coverage, often on the front page, of demonstrations in Moscow, yet published only a tiny article buried far inside the paper on the May Day demonstrations, some of which occurred only two blocks from its office. That is simply a different, more sophisticated method of marginalizing a mass movement than the crude, politically motivated attacks in the New York Post.

In countries in which the media is controlled by the government, it is easy for people to disregard what they read or hear because it is all coming from the same source, even when there is room for different opinions. A system in which the mass media is believed to be independent is far more effective at suffusing a society with an ideology — such a system is not the result of some sort of conspiracy or a conscious plan, it is simply a natural outgrowth of corporate institutions growing so powerful at the expense of all other institutions.

We laugh at Murdoch properties declaring themselves to be “fair and balanced,” but as much as that laughter is deserved they are less an anomaly than we often think.