Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Now joining the Un-History channel is Non-Animal Planet with its feature on mermaids

By Marc Jampole

We’re used to the History Channel running pseudo-historical and non-historical shows. And the only thing it seems you can discover on the Discovery channel nowadays are fantasies and fiction.

Et tu, Animal Planet?

This past weekend, the cable channel built around accurate, if sometimes overly cloying or dramatic images and narratives about animals, took the plunge into pretend truth. It ran what it called a speculative documentary about the possibility that mermaids and mermen once existed, and in fact were hominid-tending apes that returned to the sea during a period of massive coastal flooding.

Mermaids: The Body Found unfolds as the typical documentary that most people associate with facts and factual presentations.  Think of Ken Burns, Fog of War and The Sorrow and the Pity.  For that matter, think of almost all of Animal Planet’s programming.  The film has all the techniques of the documentary. Excerpts from newscasts. Shaking video from amateurs. Expert interviews. Except it’s all fake: fake anchors, fake amateurs, fake experts.

As Ed Stockly of the Los Angeles Times pointed out, most fake documentaries are satires which use a variety of devices to wink “just fooling” to the audience. Stockly mentions several examples like Zelig and Spinal Tap, to which I want to add Luis Buñuel’s 1933 masterpiece of satire, Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread.). FYI, some of the most often employed “winking” techniques include exaggeration, patently absurd statements, music with comic tones, or putting words into the mouths of obvious fools.

 But Mermaids: The Body Found never winks. In interviews the filmmaker, Charlie Foley, has preferred to play it coy, with statements about “some interesting questions on whether mermaids might be plausible.”

I would like to be gentle with both Animal Planet and the film itself. After all, speculation about mermaids, unicorns and other fictional beasts is harmless fun. In theory, a fiction that unrolls like a documentary has no moral flaw in it, that is, as long as everyone knows it’s a fiction, a piece of speculation with no basis in reality.

That’s in theory. In the real world, the film minimizes the disclaimer almost out of existence. Moreover, the very fact that the documentary appears on Animal Planet gives it the air of truth.  Run the same show on the comedy channel between reruns of Harold & Kumar and Cheech & Chong and you could get a lot of laughs. Run it on Animal Planet and you are putting a lot of nonsense into the heads of a lot of viewers, many of whom are under age.

For the most part, the news media has accepted the documentary not as describing truth, but as describing a possibility for which evidence may exist; for example, see “Mermaids are real! At least that's what Mermaids:The Body Found wants us to think,” “’Mermaids:The Body Found’ Explores The Possibility Of Real Life Mermaids” and “’Mermaids: The Body Found’ stirs speculation that the sea creatures are real”

In this readiness to open a debate on the past existence of mermaids we find the most negative impact of Animal Planet running this fiction. We are living in an age in which lies parade as truth. How many pseudo-scientific documentaries and books are out there purporting to prove that the world is not getting warmer or that intelligent design ignited the universe and guides it through its evolution? How many politicians claim that raising taxes slows economic growth or that Social Security is in dire straits, even as study after study demonstrates otherwise?  Sending forth yet another fiction parading as truth makes it all the harder for people to learn how to ascertain truth.

With as many as 8.7 million species of animals on Earth, you would think that Animal Planet would have enough topics for many decades to come and wouldn’t have to resort to anti-scientific, anti-rational bunkum.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Is the mainstream moving left or just reacting to right-wingers behaving badly?

By Marc Jampole

The main stream seems to be taking a hard look at some of the more radical ideas of the right wing. Over the past week or so, we have seen a number of signs that the mainstream is beginning to push back against the constant bullying by the right-wing on such issues as women’s reproductive rights, tax policy, global warming and gun control:
  • The latest Economist reports that the Heartland Institute, a think tank that promotes skepticism about global warming, lost an estimated $825,000 in contributions after it posted a billboard in which Unabomber Ted Kaczynski says ”I still believe in global warming. Do you?,” which followed the revelation that it had been planning on sending teaching materials denouncing global warming to American primary schools.  That sent PepsiCo, BB&T Bank, Eli Lily and other donors out the doors.
  • Today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that 15 Pennsylvania state legislators have cut ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), joining hundreds of legislators nationwide and such large corporations as The Coca Cola Company, PepsiCo, McDonald’s Corp. and software giant Intuit.
  • Over the weekend, Washington Post reported that an increasing number of Republicans running for Congress are declining to sign the Norquist pledge not to raise taxes. Of the 25 candidates this year promoted by the National Republican Congressional Committee as "Young Guns" and "Contenders" at least a third are saying they won’t sign the pledge.
  • A few weeks back, when one of the wealthiest men in the world, Joe Ricketts, agreed to finance a scurrilous series of ads against President Obama built on the fact that he went to a church whose pastor made a number of outrageous statements, the outrage in the mainstream was immediate and thunderous.
With the exception of the repudiation of the tax pledge, these repudiations of the right all come after particularly obnoxious events: Ricketts really did want to go beyond the pale. ALEC is still suffering from its support of “Stand Your Ground” laws. The Heartland Institute has crossed the truth line often enough to begin to embarrass the more mainstream of its corporate masters. Add to these, Rush Limbaugh’s awful remarks, which led to him losing massive numbers of national and local sponsors, and the dipping of the Komen Foundation into the waters of the extreme right by temporarily defunding Planned Parenthood. (I can see why Republican candidates are starting to inch away from the no-tax pledge.  No matter who wins the presidential election, it is likely that part of the legislative deals after the election will be tax hikes.)

Because most of these instances of mainstreamers coming to their senses come as a reaction to truly obnoxious events, there is no telling if these are signs of a sea change in American politics, a movement by the mainstream back towards the progressivism of 1930-1976.  We do see the limits of the right-wing finally, but those limits have less to do with what is being advocated as it does with how it is advocated.  Call someone a slut and you’re going to lose your sponsors. Tell outright lies to children, and even purveyors of consumer illusions will desert you.

Latest Parade Magazine begs question: has eating replaced buying stuff as the way to celebrate in America

By Marc Jampole

Most of us have heard of twice baked potatoes and those who frequent Chinese restaurants often see twice cooked pork on the menu.  And home brewers sometime pride themselves on their twice fermented beer.

But today’s Parade Magazine one-ups all double-cooking by presenting a menu of delights that has been homogenized not once, not twice, but three times.  Let’s call it thrice-homogenized cuisine.

The basic starting ingredient in Parade’s recipe is Memorial Day.

In the past, Parade has often had special articles, sections and whole issues dedicated to Memorial Day. Today there was not a trace of the holiday, originally meant to honor the members of the United States armed forces who fell while fighting in the Civil War and long ago expanded to include American soldiers who died in any war (which thankfully leaves out the immoral traitors of the Confederacy who fought for slavery and against their own country).

What Parade did feature for its Memorial Day issue, on both its cover and the main story covering 3.33 of the 12 pages that did not have full-page ads, was an article about 12 foods they called “All-American classics.”

The largest of the several cover headlines gives a hint to how Parade’s editors cooked up the notion of an issue essentially dedicated to American food classics.  The headline reads: CELEBRATE SUMMER FOODS! 

The jump from Memorial Day to American food classics “Celebrate Summer Foods” is a simple matter of homogenizing three times. Each homogenization involves the reduction of a complex experience to a single attribute shared with other experiences:
  1. Memorial Day is homogenized until it becomes not a holiday to honor fallen soldiers, but the beginning of summer.
  2. Summer activities homogenize into eating summer foods.
  3. Summer foods homogenize into American food classics.

Thus, Memorial Day serves as the unspoken rationale for an article that tells us the origin of and one great place to buy 12 food products that all originate in the United States.

Parade arranges its menu of American classics into four categories, as follows:
  • Crispy: Corn dogs, fried clams, granola, cob salad (iceberg lettuce topped with lots meat, eggs and a creamy dressing)
  • Creamy: Ice cream cones, California dip (dry soup mix stirred into sour cream), whoopee pie (two circles of chocolate cake with vanilla cream in between)
  • Chewy: Hamburgers, chili dogs, saltwater taffy
  • Cheesy:  Muffulettas (New Orleans cold cut sandwich), chimichangas (deep fried fritters).
As usual, Parade scraps any pretense of healthy eating from the start. The only real vegetables are the crudities you bathe with dip and use to line the iceberg lettuce. The only real fruit is the dried stuff you mix into the high-calorie granola.  Parade could have provided balance and supported the movement for better nutrition by substituting many healthier American dishes such as fruit or sweet potato pie, green bean casserole, collard greens, baked beans, clam chowder and pot roast with root vegetables.  I have saved for its own sentence the quintessentially healthy American dish, one that other than hamburgers and hotdogs symbolizes Memorial Day/summer picnics: corn on the cob!

Parade is probably the most widely-read publication in the United States by virtue of being a freebee found among the coupon offers and advertising circulars of most Sunday newspapers.  The Parade website has no reference to Memorial Day except for an article by Martha Stewart on her favorite Memorial Day recipes and another giving 20 recipes for a Memorial Day cookout. Looks to me that as far as Parade is concerned, all its readers want for Memorial Day is a good home-cooked meal.

Since beginning OpEdge almost three years ago, I have written often about the commoditization of all emotions and human interactions in contemporary America. To express anything, we buy.

I’m wondering now if food consumption—eating something—has replaced the economic consumption represented by buying something as the central way to express oneself, at least in groups.  Today’s Parade made me realize that we now reduce Memorial Day to a barbecue; that’s pretty much what July 4 is, too. My Mother’s Day blog built a case that the primary means to celebrate Mother’s Day is to bring her breakfast in bed (with a nice restaurant meal a close second).  We’ve always had Thanksgiving and the candy elements of Valentine’s Day and Halloween.  A few years back, the news media reported on the trend of every childhood activity, even a simple practice, to be accompanied by a snack.  Do we see reality reflected in situation comedies, in which a lot more of the action takes place over food nowadays? Compare “Big Bang Theory” and “2.5 Men” to “All in the Family” and “The Jeffersons” (or even to “Seinfeld” and its dependence on a local restaurant booth as a regular set.)  In the contemporary sit coms I cited, the actors spend much more time chowing down than in older sit coms.

At the end of the day Parade’s triple homogenization is based on the double consumption of raising food to the primary expression of celebration: you have to buy it to eat it, which means you are consuming twice, once as an economic entity and once as a celebrator.

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Selections from the June 15, 2012 issue











Tuesday, May 22, 2012

What Facebook does in first few trading days is meaningless. Media coverage is a form of celebritiosis

By Marc Jampole

The major business news story this morning was the fact that Facebook fell four points or a little over 11% in its second day of trading.  It led the business pages of The New York Times and Yahoo!, Google and National Public Radio’s business news.  Here in western Pennsylvania, the political cartoonist Rob Rogers shows two kids doing their homework and their father shouting, “Why aren’t you on Facebook?...I bet your future on that stock.”  

All of this posturing and conjecturing about a complete non-event, a sure sign that the business media are suffering from celebritiosis, the disease that makes sufferers read gossip columnists, go to expensive restaurants in New York or Los Angeles looking for celebrities, and use the same brand of shampoo as their favorite athlete.

Here is the pattern that the prices of virtually all initial public offerings (IPO) of hot concept and techy companies follow:

1.      The day the stock opens it either goes higher, stays the same or declines.

2.      The stock goes down significantly in the three to five days immediately following the first day.

3.      Sometimes the stock starts to climb, sometimes it stays the same, sometimes it drops more, but…

4.      Within a time period of the first 3 to 6 weeks, the stock drifts down significantly. The reason I think this precipitous early decline occurs is that people who want to buy an IPO the first day have another form of celebritiosis, and so pay up for the stock.

Let’s compare the end of the first day of trading to a low point 3-6 weeks later for some prominent recent IPOs:

Stock
Opening Date & Close
Date & First Big Low
Groupon
11/4/11: $26.11
11/28/11: $15.24
LinkedIn
5/19/11: $94
7/20/11: $63.71
Angie’s List
11/17/11: $16.26
11/30/11: $11.56
Zynga
12/6/11: $9.50
1/9/12: $8.00

But there’s a fifth stage called everything after that in which some of the stocks do great and some fade into oblivion. Check out what happened to these four stocks and you’ll see that this early showing predicts nothing.

In other words, what a stock does in its first day doesn’t matter. It’s going to go down, after which anything can happen.

Thus, after one day of trading, all we can say about Facebook is that so far it’s behaving like every other stock and that means that the stock is probably going to lose a good part of its value in the short run, like every other IPO does. 

And none of that is any news.

Let’s face it. Facebook, like Apple (and Microsoft years ago), has become a celebrity company, the business version of Cher, Justin Bieber or Snooki.  There is no doubt about it: celebrity culture has invaded the business sections of our mainstream media. The business media also extensively covered Zuckerberg’s marriage.  It makes perfect sense that the Gossip and Celebrity sections of the newspaper cover the marriage of a young and glamorous billionaire. But the front page of the business section ? And a follow story on the pre-nup the next day?

One function of celebrity news is to distract us from real news, and we couldn’t find a better example than the Facebook IPO. Media focus on whether Facebook’s stock price would have a hot run over a short and meaningless time frame crowded out coverage of what’s happening to the Facebook IPO money: it’s making a lot of people rich, which is different from providing capital for expansion and job creation.  Some of the money will be invested in the business, but a good chunk of it just pays off Zuckerberg and his early investors and employees.

But that’s not where the money stream ends.  For making Zuckerberg and his associates enormously wealthy, those who buy the stock will only have to pay 15% capital gains tax on any money they make when they sell the stock, and if they lose money they get a tax deduction.  Moreover, the people who buy the stock from its first owners contribute nothing to either Facebook or its founders; yet they get the same tax break as the first purchaser of every share of public stock. Why do they get these tax breaks when no real jobs are created, certainly by the second buyers of the stock?

But the media never gets into these issues because it focuses on the triviality of the IPO’s stock price.    

The bogus stock price story not only squeezes out coverage of more interesting aspects of the IPO and Facebook’s financials, it also squeezes out other, more important stories.  Neither NPR nor The Times in the national hard copy edition covered the announcement that text book publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy. (The Times did have an article online on May 21.)  The bankruptcy was never a feature business story for either Yahoo! or Google news the dozen or so times I have checked since the Chapter 11 announcement came out. The reason I found out about it was because I read it in a small paragraph in the round-up column of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

It’s an interesting story because it’s a pre-packaged Chapter 11, meaning that before the filing, the publisher cut a deal with the creditors (the ones to whom the publisher owes money), who will get total ownership of the company in return for agreeing not to get paid for $3.1 billion they are owed.  Creditors go for this kind of refinancing as the only way to get their money back: if it keeps operating, Houghton Mifflin has a chance to make enough money to repay the new owners. If it went out of business, everyone would lose.

The $100 billion IPO of Facebook deserved the extensive coverage it got, but the second day coverage of Facebook’s stock price following an ordinary pattern was less important than a text book behemoth handing itself over to the banks and bondholders to whom it owes billions of dollars.  Zuckerberg’s marriage—that nonsense deserved zero coverage in the business pages.

Monday, May 21, 2012

Save 'The American Prospect'

While checking blogs, I noticed at TheNation.com a post, "Save The American Prospect" by Katrina vanden Heuvel, noting that The American Prospect might be forced to cease publication if it is unable to raise $500,000 by May 31.  As Katrina wrote:
"In this age of consolidation and conglomeratization, when Citizens United has unleashed tens of millions of dollars to excessively influence our politics through brutish and misleading ads, we need the Prospect’s truth-telling independent journalism more than ever. 
"Founded in 1990 by Robert Kuttner, Robert Reich and Paul Starr as a response to the intellectual ascendancy of conservatism in the 1980s, The American Prospect offers up intelligent liberalism, smart reporting and coverage of movements, progressive thought and policy. It also offers incisive reporting on labor and the progressive infrastructure—of which the Prospect has been an anchor."
The Prospect not only publishes a monthly magazine covering politics, culture and policy from a liberal perspective; it also has developed a robust website at prospect.org and blog at prospect.org/blog/vox-pop.  It has good people working for it and that work costs money. 


There are few enough publications on the left to offer a voice to progressive ideas, and we can't afford to lose any of them.  I join Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation in urging you to support our friends at The American Prospect. Here's how to help. — JMC.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Movies from comic books are one more sign of the infantilization of American adults

By Marc Jampole

My generation read comic books growing up: Superman, Batman and their various ancillary Supers and Bats. Green Lantern and Green Hornet, Archie and Jughead. And then most of us stopped at about 12 or 13, and moved on to other literature.

In those days, any movie based on a comic book was a Sunday serial or a cheaply made B movie, or a TV show made especially for children. Even Batman with Adam West was for children, although like Rocky and Bullwinkle, Mad Magazine and now The Simpsons, adults could also enjoy its tongue-in-cheek satire.  Again, at about 13 or so, we stopped watching the movies and TV shows based on comic books.

Or most of us did.  Some of us, especially men, stayed in the juvenile world of comic book heroes.

That was the baby boom generation. More kids from the next generation kept their comic book habits into adulthood.  And even more from Generations X and Y.

Something else happened, too, in the late 70s (okay, it was 1976!), about the time the country took a turn from its commitment to economic equality to the harsh social Darwinism that now rules.  Star Wars showed the new Hollywood of the late 70s and 80s the possibilities of presenting what was formerly low budget B material as first run high gloss features. The new Hollywood also quickly learned the value of sequels and of both appealing to and cultivating the growing market for adult versions of juvenilia such as science fiction. Disney had already introduced the concepts of branding and merchandising. The recognition that comic books were the mother lode came quickly to Hollywood. Superman started it in 1978, followed by Batman movie franchises, and now the recent run of Marvel comic book hero films.

My son, a PhD student in structural engineering at Stanford, asked me to review Marvel’s The Avengers, which is well on its way to becoming the most financially successful film in the 120 some-odd years of the cinema. I told him I’d take a pass.  It’s not my kind of movie, and as a social critic, I consider its very existence res ipsa loquitur, which is Latin for “a thing that speaks for itself.” The thing, in the case of The Avengers is the infantilization of American adults, which means that instead of graduating to adult-level entertainments, many adults today keep their childhood pleasures such as comic books and video games.  The ultimate mass market symbol of adult infantilization are the scientists in The Big Bang Theory, who live for comic books and video games and never crack a book open, volunteer, go to the theatre, or serve on the board of an organization.

I’m not saying the film isn’t well made. It has the brilliant-but-always-seems-to-be-slumming Robert Downey, Jr., which means that whenever he’s on screen, there is at least something interesting to watch and listen to. And it looks as if he may have issued one of Hollywood’s lasting lines.  Fine movies sometimes produce great lines such as “I could have been a contender,” but they are more likely to produce great images, like the girl waving to Marcello at the end of La Dolce Vita or Jack Nicholson playing classical music at a piano on the back of a moving truck in Five Easy Pieces. But it seems as if many of the most remembered movie lines are from schlocky movies such as Schwarzenegger’s “I’ll be back” and “Hasta la vista, baby” or Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry saying “Do you feel lucky today punk?” and “Make my day,” which our Actor President Ronald Reagan resurrected when hard-balling Congress about taxes.

The magic line for Downey is in every ad for The Avengers that I have seen, and despite not watching that much TV, I have seen a slew of ads for the movie.  A bad guy says “We have an army,” to which Downey replies with an arrogant insouciance, “We have a hulk.”

Great line that may prove to be timeless.

But it reminds me of what my father once said about a sappy middlebrow costume drama starring the A list of British actors at the time in which a churchman sanctimoniously defies a King on religious grounds. My father’s words, sanitized here: “If you take a piece of crap and you polish it, you have a polished piece of crap.”

Monday, May 14, 2012

By going from commercialization to ritual, Mother’s Day reverses pattern of most holidays


By Marc Jampole

Mother’s Day dominated the news media yesterday. Every newspaper had a Mother’s Day story on the front cover and every television and radio news show ran a Mother’s Day feature. The New York Times Book Review started reviews of two books about mothers on its front cover. The Wall Street Journal weekend edition touted men as the new mothers because they are doing more of the household chores and child-rearing nowadays; of course the Journal plays the old “better but not good” game, as surveys reveal that men are doing more but not coming near a 50-50 split with their working wives.

My epiphany about Mother’s Day came reading the colored funny pages in the Sunday local newspaper, which for me is The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. There are 24 comics in all, but two are puzzles for kids and two are narrative series, leaving 20 comics that have a relative freedom of choice in topic.

Of these 20, 10 had a Mother’s Day joke. That’s 50% of all the possible comic strips, which suggests how ingrained Mother’s Day is in the American consciousness.  Of course, it helps that the holiday takes place on one day that is always the day the Sunday comics appear.

But here’s what caught my eye: 5 of the comics, or 25% of all the comic strips of the day had a joke about the same topic: bringing mother breakfast in bed. The five strips include For Better or Worse, FoxTrot, Mother Goose & Grimm, The Born Loser and Dennis the Menace. The common theme to the joke is the ineptness of the rest of the family to cook the morning meal, except for FoxTrot in which the joke is the competition between two of the children. Family or fatherly ineptness also ruled Blondie, in which the family has to ask Blondie what to do to celebrate (answer: restaurant) and Drabble in which the dad gives a card he hasn’t even read.

Ineptness of father is a staple of American comedy since 50s situation comedies. Moreover, mother as the glue of the family is a central part of American mythology since Victorian times and part of the glorification of the stay-at-home mom, who, BTW, is nowadays primarily wealthy or near-wealthy.

But let’s look beyond the structure of the jokes to their common subject:  bringing mother breakfast in bed. Not a purchase, but a ritualized personal act of devotion and caring.

Remember that Mother’s Day started as a retailer’s holiday, a holiday fabricated by marketing departments to increase sales of flowers, stationary, perfume and other products and services.

But when people think of what to do for their mother on Mother’s Day, they think most often of breakfast in bed, at least in the mythology of comics. And Yahoo! seems to agree: In the survey today on its home page, making breakfast in bed comes in third place out of the three choices to the question, “What is the best Mother’s Day gift?” But the other two choices are “Homemade gift from child” and “Saying I love you.” In other words, taking mom out for a great meal, buying flowers or getting her another bauble or bottle of scented liquid doesn’t even enter into the equation. (And note that a homemade gift only applies when children are 12 or under.)

Thus a holiday whose primary ideal means of celebration started as shopping has developed into one whose primary ideal means of celebration is ritual, in this case the ritual of breakfast in bed.

This shift goes against the trend in the celebration of traditional holidays in the United States. Most holidays started in old world or long-ago rituals and then declined into debauched celebrations of consumption in which the buying of material goods and services serves as the primary means of expression.  We know about Christmas, so consider All Saints' Day, which used to be a day of church going and charitable offerings, but today is celebrated on its eve by getting dressed up in scary or funny costumes and going door to door asking for candy and other treats. As a quick look at the mass media each December proves with crushing certainty, the idea that these holidays are about buying dominates both the celebration and the buzz about the celebration by mass culture.

The real world, however, differs slightly from the mythic world of popular culture inhabited by Yahoo! surveys and comic strip families. In that real world, candy, chocolate, flowers, spa treatments and fancy restaurants still predominate.  Infact, those adults who celebrate Mother’s Day intend to spend an average of$152.52 this year.

But it is promising to note that on the barren landscape of a commercialized holiday, some flowers of authentic ritual have grown.

Let’s not get too joyful over the development of breakfast in bed as a mainstay of Mother’s Day, though.  In a way, bringing her breakfast in bed symbolizes the fact that the burden of food purchase and preparation still falls on mom’s back. If it didn’t, then the one day’s break from making breakfast wouldn’t be seen as such a pleasant and loving gift. One of the key images of oppressed womanhood in American mass culture has always been “being chained to the stove.” The connection between “chained to the stove” and “breakfast in bed” is direct and obvious: breakfast in bed serves as symbolic reminder of mom’s role and her oppression in many traditional (and some contemporary) households. 

Virtually all religious ritual entails a symbolic subservience to the religious institution or its preferred deity. Think of taking a sacrament, saying a prayer over wine or bread, receiving a crown from the Pope, facing East for prayer. It only makes sense then that the rituals of our secular religion would also remind us of the role we have to play in that religion.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Selections from the June 1, 2012 issue














Thursday, May 10, 2012

President’s support for gay marriage is great, but the battle isn’t over yet

By Marc Jampole

Civil rights activists and those who believe in the separation of church and state have reason to rejoice at President Obama’s decision to come out of the closet and support gay marriage.

But that one deed does not give gays the right to marry.  It will still require a great deal of effort at the state level both to fight legislation and ballot initiatives banning gay marriage and to support legislation and initiatives enabling two people of the same sex to join in legal wedlock.

Notice that I write “legal wedlock” and not “holy wedlock,” because not all marriages are sanctioned by a religion.

As far as the state is concerned, marriage is a legal contract between two people granting each party to the marriage a set of rights and responsibilities.

Now virtually all religions consider marriage a sacrament—a religious act—to one degree or another.  Religions will prescribe restrictions and rights on both parties in addition to those mandated by the state.  No one has to follow those additional commands, only those who profess the religion.

As a convenience, most states allow religious officials to perform state marriages at the same time they are giving the religious nuptials. But that does not mean that the additional mandates of a religious marriage carry any weight in a court of law.

At the end of the day, the issue of gay marriage has always come down to the concept of the separation of church and state. If the state enforces religious proscriptions against two people of the same sex getting married, it is endorsing the religion or religions that have that belief.  I have no problem with priests, Orthodox rabbis or any other religious official refusing to perform a gay marriage ceremony, nor do I have a problem with any religion excluding anyone for behavior the religion considers immoral or unethical.  But a secular state like the 50 state and one federal governments of the United States shouldn’t.

Obama risked nothing by his move and probably gained votes.  Polls suggest that those who are vehemently against gay marriage weren’t going to vote for Obama anyway, while many of those in favor of gay marriage now have a big reason to go to the polls and vote for the President.

It is Romney who is risking a lot by remaining adamantly opposed to both gay marriage and civil unions. The latest polls show that more people now approve of gay marriage than are against it, with the attitudes of the youngest generations most supportive of the right of two people of the same sex to wed.

One does have to admire Romney for his consistency, though. Other than a vehement opposition to raising taxes on the wealthy, Mitt’s opposition to gay marriage has been the one issue through the years about which he has not flip-flopped around like a lapdog wanting the approval of whatever hand was extending the treats.

Romney is consistent in his argument as well, opposing both civil unions and gay marriage.  To make a distinction between the two involves a patronizing word game that makes one think of corporate board rooms with wrap-around picture windows in which executives in thousand-dollar suits are trying to figure out a better way to say “layoffs,” “recall,” “spill” or “multiple deaths.” 

Those who propose civil unions but not marriages for gays insult the intelligence of both the general public and the many people who want to pledge their troth to someone of the same sex. Civil unions waddle and quack like the duck of marriage, so why create a special word?

Romney, who is so ready to employ pseudo concepts such as “business confidence” and “job creators,” reveals clear-headed thinking when it comes to marriage and civil unions.  They are the same thing, so let’s get on with the fight!

A fight, I might add, that I believe Mitt Romney will lose, both in the short and long terms.  In the short term, Mitt is giving young people and a minority representing somewhere between 5% and 15% of voters a reason to register and then vote for President Obama.  And in the long term, gay marriage will prevail in the United States, although it may yet take another 10 years or more.

Fighting Bob Fest North Coming Up May 19


“We are the 99%” will be the theme for the 2012 FightingBobFest North as it returns to the Northern Wisconsin State Fairgrounds in Chippewa Falls on Saturday, May 19, 2012 for a full day of speakers, music and entertainment, along with artisan-style food and beverage.  The public is welcome to attend this important organizing event! The event gates will open at 8:30 am. 

“FightingBobFest North” follows a longstanding festival tradition held in Baraboo and Madison, WI that brings today’s best progressive speakers to the Midwest to inspire local people to speak and act on critical problems that endanger important democratic principles. Dave Zweifel, Editor Emeritus of the Cap Times says that Bobfest is “a perfect place to remember Fighting Bob [LaFollette], who specialized in speaking at fairgrounds and parks around the state, urging the people to take their democracy back from the special interests.” Ed Garvey, the founder of the original Fighting Bob Fest, adds, “During this momentous time in Wisconsin politics, the need for conversations and clarity about how money influences elections, campaigns, and government in our state is greater than ever.”

In 2011, this festival tradition took a trip up north, attracting over 700 people to the gathering. This year’s event promises to be even larger, drawing on the enthusiasm for fighting back that Wisconsinites demonstrated to all Americans. The theme for FightingBobFest North 2012 is “We are the 99%” which will spotlight the growing awareness and understanding of how wealth and power increasingly divides the American people. 

FightingBobFest North hosts speakers and breakout sessions on topics of democracy in Wisconsin and the Midwest, environmental policy, corporate free speech, sexual politics, and more. Ed Garvey, labor activist, and John Nichols, MSNBC commentator, journalist, and author of Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, From Madison to Wall Street, will both speak on the relevance of Wisconsin politics to 21st century social movements. Journalist and speaker Ruth Connif, Mike McCabe of the Wisconsin Democracy Foundation, and activist Tony Schultz will also speak about how the 99% movement affects Wisconsin. Kristen Dexter, Kathleen Vinehout, Bob Kincaid, Nino Amato have also joined the speaker lineup. In addition, Breakout Sessions will be given by Molly Swank of Planned Parenthood and Gerry Lausted of Save The Hills. Updates on speakers and breakouts sessions will be posted at  www.fightingbobfestnorth.org and on the Facebook group page.

FightingBobFest North also brings informational booths from the region’s best progressive organizations and businesses. A large number of booths will fill the Fine Arts Building at the Fairgrounds, allowing attendees to network, learn, and purchase products from a variety of motivated, forward-leaning groups.

Local beer from Valkyrie Brewery, freshly prepared Jamaican, Indian, and American food, and gourmet coffees will be available for purchase.  The Beer Garden at the Fairgrounds will provide convenient, accessible seating and feature musical entertainment by Hey Joe.

FightingBobFest North is open and accessible to anyone who wishes to attend. A tax-deductible donation of $20 is suggested but all donations are welcome.  
Those traveling to Chippewa Falls for a weekend of fun will find Irvine Park, Leinenkugel Brewery, the Old Abe Bike Trail, and historic downtown in close proximity. Camping is available on the fairgrounds proper. Campsite reservations, maps, travel, and accommodation information can be found at the Fairgrounds website.

Attendees can find videos from FightingBobFest North 2011 as well as updates on speakers, performers, vendor and booth opportunities and driving directions can online at fightingbobfestnorth.org and on the Facebook group Fighting Bobfest North. 

FightingBobfest North
Saturday, May 19, 2012
8:30 am- 5:00 pm
Northern Wisconsin State Fairgrounds
Chippewa Falls, WI 54729
Contact: Jim Dunning, (715) 839-0039

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Soft drink advertisers want us to think that “smaller” means “small” and “fewer” means “few”

By Marc Jampole

Four large manufacturers of processed beverages—The Coca Cola Company, the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, Pepsico and SunnyD—have joined forces to fight a common enemy: those small-minded people who worry that Americans are taking in way too many calories through the consumption of the sugar- and chemical-loaded concoctions.

Their weapons of choice are the typical rhetorical devices of advertisers around the world: false comparisons and misleading statements.

These four and the American Beverage Association have been sponsoring full-page print ads that tout how healthy and low calorie many of their products are compared to a few years ago, meaning that collectively, they’re selling fewer calories per container

The headline expresses the theme line of the campaign: AMERICA’S BEVERAGE COMPANIES ARE DELIVERING. Embedded in the text, each line of which is separated from the next by very wide ledding, are the three things that the beverage companies are delivering, in green caps so they stand out:  MORE CHOICES… SMALLER PORTIONS…FEWER CALORIES…

The copy brings to life this assertion by describing actions that the sodapop-mongers have recently taken to make portions smaller and provide lower calorie beverages.

At the bottom are three white delivery men and a black delivery woman, each standing behind a hand truck loaded with beverage products of one of the four sponsoring companies. Pepsico, by the way, has the black woman deliverer. Below that, in the same order as the deliverers, are the four company logos.

As usual with attempts to manipulate the public, the print ad’s call to action is to visit a website: DeliveringChoices.org, where you see the same image of deliverers united below the following legend: “America's Beverage Companies Are Delivering For You, Your Family And Community. We're making it easier for people to choose a beverage that's right for them with more choices, smaller portions, fewer calories and clear calorie labels.” Actually, I saw the ad in the New York Times and it told me to go to DeliveringChoicesNY.org, but it’s the same website as DeliveringChoices.org.

The website gives more details on how those who deliver soft drinks are helping to reduce obesity by offering beverage products with fewer calories and in smaller portions.  

The obvious rhetorical problem is the use of the comparative: smaller, fewer. They don’t say small. They don’t say few. And with good reason.  Soft drinks are for the most part empty calories, except those that don’t have calories, but instead provide chemicals, about which we know little except that they probably create the craving to eat more calories. In other words, no soft drink is good for you. Smaller is still bad, and so is fewer.

I’m not excited about the choices that the beverage behemoths are offering to children—fruit and vegetable juice—either! The fruit and vegetable drinks are spiked with sugar, while the real juices, healthier than the other fare offered in vending machines to be sure, are not as healthy as eating a piece of fruit or a vegetable. There’s that comparative—healthier—again! They’re also selling water, but I understand that most tap water is pretty healthy for you, and the money saved from buying the bottled water could buy a real piece of fruit.

Subtler even than the use of the comparative to make soft drinks seem healthy is the ad’s focus on “more choice.”

On the narrative level, the pop purveyors want us to thank them for adding smaller sizes, diet versions and juice drinks to their mix of offerings.  Below the surface, however, lies a message we have seen before from people wanting to foist shoddy goods on the American public: People should have the choice to smoke in public or not.  People should have the choice of buying unhealthy foods.  People should be able to have an unlimited choice in doctors even if, by limiting that choice a little bit, we can cut healthcare costs by 10% or more.  People should have the choice of charter schools, even if they have been proven in many studies to do a worse job of educating children than the public schools they replace. Employers should be able to choose if they can impose their narrow views on birth control on their employees.

Of course, more choice applies to television stations available in a cable or satellite TV package, beers on the menu and types of phones sold at your neighborhood electronics store.

Through the steady drum beat over decades of advertising that touts the benefit of more choice, we have come to think of more choice as a benefit in and of itself. When the beverage barons tell us they are offering more choice, they are depending on this association to rub off on the other messages.  In its barest form, the thought process I think they want to engender goes like this: More choice is good. Healthier beverages are good. More choice therefore makes for healthier beverages.  It’s a false syllogism, but the world of propaganda is filled with such creatures.

Let’s take the more choice principle one step further. Every single time we eat a meal or snack, we exercise choice.  We are told and have come to believe that exercising choice is good. Therefore we have done something good whatever choice we make, even if the choice is to have a 12-ounce can of Coke or Pepsi for breakfast, with or without the side of toaster tart.  It is this thought process that the beverage companies want you to have. They want you to feel good about eating their crap. If you have that can of pop and feel guilty about it enough times, pretty soon you’ll stop. 

Unless, that is, you like to feel guilty, in which case we have a lot of products for you to buy.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Yahoo! poll suggests what’s really wrong with American politics—not many people really care enough to get informed

By Marc Jampole

You would guess that most senior citizens and those approaching retirement will have heard of Wisconsin Republican Congressional Representative Paul Ryan. After all, he is the architect of the budget that proposes to radically gut Medicare and Social Security.

And wouldn’t you think that most single mothers would have heard of Ryan, who after all has been an architect or loud supporter of every recent proposal to cut food stamps and medical aid to children.

And employees who currently get tax-free health care benefits from their employer—surely most of them have heard of Ryan, who has advocated ending that tax exemption on income and benefits.

And I imagine that among those 98% of Catholic women who defy the Catholic Church and use artificial birth control, there are still many who listened when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said that Ryan’s budget plans would disproportionately cut programs that serve the poor and vulnerable.

I’m guessing that the majority of people in the United States should have a reason to dislike Ryan, who currently serves as leading spokesperson for the right-wing’s low-tax, no-government social philosophy.

That’s why I am so completely floored by the results of yesterday’s poll by Yahoo! on its home page asking if Paul Ryan will boost or hurt Mitt Romney’s chances of unseating President Obama.

As of 3:30 pm yesterday afternoon, more than 100,000 had voted. Here’s what they said:
  • Yes, he'll boost Romney's chances: 24%
  • No, he'll hurt Romney's chances: 22%
  • I don't know who he is: 53%

That’s right, a majority of the people who voted in the survey had never heard of Paul Ryan. The news is depressing, even if we assume that people who respond to Yahoo! home page surveys are dramatically different in their reading of the news from the general electorate. But I’m guessing that people reading the Yahoo! home page get more news than the average person, because Yahoo! puts news on its home page. In fact, it has plastered photos of Ryan on its rotating box and put his name in many news headlines over the past two years.

And yet, more people have never heard of him than have formed an opinion about him, negative or positive.

And therein lies the biggest problem facing American society: the complete ignorance and apathy of a large number of voters and potential voters.

We can complain about the way that real news gets drowned out by non-news such as celebrity news and gossip, political bloopers, features about stuff and services to buy, sports and reductions of issues to personality spats. After all, a Google search reveals only 3.7 million hits for “Paul Ryan budget” and 400 million hits for Lady Gaga, who is only one of many celebrities fueling celebrity mania. Or take Delmon Young, a semi-decent baseball player who got crocked and issued some anti-Semitic slurs, thereby producing 5.7 million hits in a Google search.  

But we can’t just blame the news media. There are still many stories about Ryan and most of them make the top of the news. We have only to blame ourselves for becoming so distracted by earning bread and watching circuses that we don’t even realize how much into the muck of ignorance we have slipped.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Ryan's Budget Soaks the Poor and Middle Class

Click on image to enlarge. Graphics by Kevin Kreneck

President Obama's Budget

Click on art to enlarge. Graphics by Kevin Kreneck

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