Letters to the Editor

• Not Ready Yet

  [Read the article: "America at a Crossroads" veers to the right]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  As a great admirer of Gary Kamiya, to a certain extent I share his distress at what he believes was a lost opportunity in the PBS series. But I am not surprised at the inability of the network to deal with the subject in a fashion closer to deeper political truths in the manner Kamiya desires. For several reasons.

  The first, and the primary one, is that America in general has shown it is not ready yet, nor may be for quite a while, if ever, for such an evaluation. Americans, as I have noted in other letters, are deeply prone to believe their own mythology. It is extemely difficult for this culture to engage in any analysis in depth about anything that contradicts the prevailing notion of the shining city on thhe hill. Even though I do believe that the best elements of our culture and system CAN act as a beacon for others, to see in some revisionist manner that takes in complex historical, sociological, and political realities is, frankly, beyond the intellectual capacity of the society at this time. As another letter writer alluded to, America has not properly processed the Cold War, (or Vietnam for that matter either), so why would we expect America to be able to do so with a subject still so close to the bone.

  One of Kamiya's latest essays was on the media failure for the Iraq War. Given that even most of who should be the

  "best and brightest" can't come to grips with nuances and the depths of issues, why should PBS be different. I know we expect better of Public Television, but as Kamiya himself points out, PBS has been under assault from the right for a long time, and this series apparently was hatched from conservative vision. Given that perspective, it might be a miracle that as much that was quality made it through.

  Two other points.

  One: As Deborah Tannen pointed out in "The Argument Culture" (dealing primarily with the "Crossfire period" but still pertinent), discourse has been set up, as another LW commented, to reflect polarity. Especially given the conservative assault mentioned above, the proclivity when producing a "liberal" piece is to find "balance" with an opposing one, even if the opposition is fringe. I saw this phenomenon play out recently in my home paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, in which the editor felt somehow obliged to provide a "counter" to an extremely well written essay by a professor in the Op-Ed on the pathology

  inherent in much of Christian Fundamentalism with a straw man argument from Dinesh D'Souza on why Osama Bin Laden really had no issue with Christianity. (Which had nothing to do with anything, much less the previous column.) But "balance" had to be served.

  Two: Although most Americans are clear that the Iraq War is bad and a failure, and seem to be ahead of the Media in understanding the dishonest, even criminal nature of the enterprise, ("Why are we dealing with this guy? Where's Rove, where's Cheney?"-there is little outrage in the mainstream), the larger issue of the legitimacy of our prevailing view of "The War on Terror" is taken as a given and has not been addressed. A viewpoint, for example, such as Andrew O'Hehir's in his excellent review of Peter Beinart's "The Good Fight"

  "Beinart discusses the newly invigorated liberal grass roots of the Deaniac/DailyKos/MoveOn generation with an air of mournful wonderment, writing that "their idealism, and their outrage, is directed almost exclusively against the right." Reading these lefty bloggers, "you could easily think liberals have no enemies more threatening, or more illiberal, than George W. Bush."

  Indeed you could. In fairness, the last chapters of this history have not been written. We can't know whether people a century from now will conclude that the murderous ideology of Osama bin Laden was worse than the policies of our current one-party superstate. But Beinart never even tries, for instance, to address the contentions of British filmmaker Adam Curtis, whose documentary "The Power of Nightmares" presents a compelling argument that al-Qaida was an insignificant cult group representing a failed ideology before the U.S. elevated it to the glamorous status of international supervillain."

  is truly beyond the grasp of America, its pundits, its mainstream Media to truly fathom, consider, contemplate as part of the real national discussion. I pummeled the Inquirer for months to provide a true progressive voice or column inclusions (as opposed to more "centrist liberals) as "balance" to the Smerconish's, Lasts (online editor of the Standard) and others, but to no avail. Yet the Inquirer is better than most. Yes we would want PBS to shine in an opportunity to truly further the discourse, but I am not surprised that it could not or would not happen at this time.

  My hope is that if a more progressive, adult administration and leadership emerges in the next two years, more space will open up and these opportunities won't fall short, but I expect it to be a bumpy process.

  Permalink Wednesday, April 18, 2007 08:19 AM