Beyond Imus

-- by Dave

Like Sara, I welcome the firing of Don Imus as a significant blow in the ongoing battle to beat back the rising tide of open bigotry that has been creeping into our public discourse, particularly when broadcast over the national airwaves.

But I'm probably not as optimistic about how significant a step forward it actually will be, mainly because the underlying problems are so deep-rooted and systemic. Considering the course of the discussion in the wake of Imus' firing, it feels more as though we've just tossed a bucket of water back into the ocean.

As Media Matters has already observed, the problem is hardly relegated to Don Imus -- who has been getting away with wink-and-nudge bigotry for many years now, but is hardly the ugliest nor the most prolific purveyor of this garbage. Leading the list are right-wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and Michael Savage.

It's worth noting, though, that there is a structural difference between most of these hate purveyors and Imus (Beck being the exception): they operate in a different sphere in terms of the funding that keeps their voices on the air. Limbaugh, Coulter, and Savage are syndicated, and Coulter makes most of her living through speaking appearances and books. Most of all, they operate within a right-wing bubble that ensures the money will keep coming regardless of what outrageous thing they say, a bubble Imus never was really part of.

What did Imus in, after all, was that in the end he was much more vulnerable to pressure placed upon advertisers. Eleanor Clift actually had it about right:

I thought Imus would survive because of money. He's been a cash cow for low-rated MSNBC, bringing in advertising dollars for three hours of broadcast time and costing the network relatively little to produce. ... Instead, he got canned because of money. Advertisers bailed out, forcing NBC's hand. Though the head of the NBC news division cast it as a moral decision and looked anguished as he made the rounds of the cable shows Wednesday night, if the advertisers had stuck by Imus, the outcome would have been different.

...The difference with Imus is that he's on the public airwaves. It's not a question of whether he can say all the outrageous things he says -- it's where he says them. The marketplace has spoken.

This is an important distinction, because much of the right-wing and even mainstream response to the Imus firing has been to make him out to be a free-speech martyr, sacrificed on the altar of political correctness while hip-hop gangstas still roam free at your CD store; the preferred characterization, ironically, is to call it a "lynching." It's an argument that purposefully confuses privileges with rights.

As Clift notes, first of all, Don Imus' free speech rights were not under attack here: he remains free to go stand on any street corner and spew the same nonsense to passers-by (though he might find it considerably riskier to do so). Hate speech may be deplorable, poisonous, and profoundly irresponsible, it is also still legal. It's a right.

However, working in mainstream media is not a democracy or even a meritocracy. Being one of the select who are given the precious few slots available to talking heads and pundits of various stripes in the press, TV and radio is purely a privilege. It is a privilege granted by publishers, editors, producers and network poobahs who operate with an often idiosyncratic set of criteria that have little to do with actual substance or merit, but usually comes down to whether or not you can make them money.

Mostly this is a privilege that is extended to whites generally and males especially; while a handful of minorities can be pointed out as exceptions, their presence among the ranks of the pundit class is in no way reflective of said minorities' actual presence in society at large (this is particularly true of Latinos and gays and lesbians). So it's no surprise, perhaps, that resulting discussion of a case like Imus' reflects a perspective prone to ignoring the serious ramifications of racial issues and reducing them to zero-sum nonsequiturs that form a narrative friendly to defending white privilege.

That certainly been the case with Imus. Figures on the right, from Michelle Malkin to Ann Coulter, have been eagerly pointing to the misogyny and racially charged language endemic to hip-hop and rap music, by way of suggesting that liberals are hypocrites for attacking Imus while ignoring these musicians. But rap musicians, whose lyrics indeed at times wallow in the execrable, are simply exercisizing their free-speech rights, and operate within the same free marketplace the right in most cases studiously defends. Imus, by contrast, was speaking from a position of unique privilege.

In demanding Imus be fired, the underlying reason for doing so is that, because of speech that could not be described as anything but callous and irresponsible, he was no longer worthy of the privilege of holding such a powerful and influential position.

It is, after all, deeply irresponsible in a diverse democratic society to engage in nasty and ugly stereotyping, racial, religious, sexual, or otherwise. We have the right to do so if we choose as individuals. That doesn't mean, however, that any media outlet is obligated to broadcast that kind of speech.

Generally speaking, media outlets have traditionally understood that the extraordinary power they possess also entails a certain responsibility to the public well-being. Condoning, publishing, or broadcasting irresponsible speech that poisons the public well has generally been understood to be grounds for losing, or being barred from, holding elite positions within the media.

That is, until recent years, when a coterie of right-wing ideologues has repeatedly engaged in profoundly ugly, threatening, and bigoted speech, topped with a heaping helping of misogyny, and it has consistently rebuffed any efforts to hold them accountable. The Imus firing, should the public manage to come to grips with what the matter really is about -- namely, the flagrant use of the public airwaves and national broadcast media to foster an ugly and bigoted public discourse -- really does pose a threat to what many right-wing ideologues have built their entire careers around.

The bubble that encircles the rest of the right wing somewhat insulates them from this pressure; after all, there seems to be an endless stream of money to keep people like Coulter and Limbaugh busy hawking their wares to a variety of audiences and ensuring their continued status as pundit-class elites. But make no mistake, the Imus firing was indeed a shot across their bows as well -- a clear sign that the endless hatemongering that has been their red meat and potatoes for the past decade is reaching its limits with the public.

That, no doubt, is a large part of what's fueling the almost hysterical response from the same crowds over this, particularly the Imus=rappers bloviation that keeps coming 'round like a bad hairball. Another favored theme is to compare Imus' incivility to that of liberal bloggers. Phoenix Woman at Firedoglake has done a nice job of explaining the coded language at work here.

In the case of Limbaugh, the response was predictably paranoid, prompting a rant blaming the incident on a vast left-wing conspiracy to shut down people like him:

Let me just ask you a question. Did America, did this country hear what Don Imus said on the Imus show? They didn't. When Imus said what he said, was there a national uproar? Forget the fact his ratings are insignificant and tiny, which that fact is now starting to trickle out. The fact is, guests on the show, people who listen to the show, nobody said a word. Nobody could have cared less. It wasn't any big deal. America didn't hear it and America didn't hear what he said on the Imus show. No, you know where America heard it? They heard it on YouTube, and they heard it on MoveOn.org, and they heard it on cable TV. They heard it on network TV. They heard it on the early news, the evening news, the late news. A combination of all these places said what Imus said thousands of times more than he said it, and that's where America heard it. The Imus audience couldn't have cared less, I don't care how small that it is. So these pretenders... By the way, all of this was set up by Media Matters for America, and everybody thinks of this group as "a liberal media watchdog" out there surveying the media airwaves and making sure that those who say these so-called outrageous things are held to account.

It's nothing more than a Democrat Party front organization! It's George Soros-funded. It is staffed by people that used to work for elected Democrats -- and it's tax exempt. It's a tax exempt group, but they're purely political, and all they are is an arm of the Democrat Party. They're part of the Democrat machine.

[Factual note here: Media Matters has never received funding from George Soros.]

... [A]nd the interesting thing about that to me is that these are the same people who are scouring this country for any sign of racism or any sign of bigotry, any sign of homophobia, and when they find it, they pounce on it! They have shown themselves to be insincere hypocrites. They have shown themselves to be agenda-oriented, here. They have shown themselves to only care when certain people say these things, because, you see, Sharpton and his gang are out there now supposedly targeting the rap industry. But let me ask you a question: When's the last time they picketed an urban radio station? When's the last time they picketed Viacom, which owns MTV? When's the last they picketed Hollywood for putting out movies with these kinds of characters and lyrics?

Zero, zilch, nada, and you know why? Because they're minorities and they don't have "hate in their hearts." Only right-wingers, only conservatives have "hate in their hearts." They couldn't contain the Imus thing. Remember, what happened on Imus' show took two days to hit, much like what I said on ESPN. There was no outrage for two days after my ESPN comments until the Philadelphia print media, all five or six, had the same column on the Tuesday following the Sunday show. That's when people were supposedly outraged and offended. By the way, the same thing happened in that case. Well, worse things happened. What I said was totally distorted. I was making comments about the media, not Donovan McNabb, yet it got totally distorted. Michael J. Fox was the same scenario -- and there is this group. The only reason for last week, Sharpton, these guys are out there supposedly targeting rap music, but that's just to give themselves some street cred. Everybody's asking about that now. So if they go out and they target rap music and say they're going to try to clean it up and the urban radio stations that play it and all these corporate interests that broadcast it and produce it, they hope to have street cred for the next talk radio guy they go after.

Which is, believe me, their aim. That's their desire. The only reason for last week is that it is an excuse to assault conservative talk radio, even though conservatives had nothing to do with what happened last week, even though talk radio is far cleaner than urban radio, far cleaner than television, far cleaner than movies and books. This is a politically directed attack by Democrats and their media outlets.

He's right in one respect -- people have had enough of the bigoted bullying that has dominated the discourse presented by the likes of Limbaugh, and are ready to begin reining it in.

Unfortunately, the larger bubble surrounding the right -- namely, the one inflated by the supposed "liberal media" that rules the roost from the Beltway -- has also largely remained intact. Nearly every discussion of the Imus affair I've seen on cable since has focused not on the real problem it raises -- the spread of bigoted rhetoric through supposedly mainstream media outlets -- but has instead seized on the right's nonsequitur spin: it's really the fault of black people and their culture. The underlying narrative has once again become, predictably, all about defending white privilege.

Perhaps the worst of the lot was CNN's Howard Kurtz, who came to Imus's defense with an incredibly lame but-everyone-talks-this-way argument:

"Journalists like me who have gone on Imus's show have done so because we enjoyed the opportunity to talk about politics and media without the stuffiness of so many other programs. And it's probably true that too many of us looked the other way when he went over the line with some of his cruder comedy bits." Yet, as Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting documented, Kurtz wrote in his 1996 book, Hot Air (Crown) that "Imus's sexist, homophobic, and politically incorrect routines echo what many journalists joke about in private."

As Roger Ailes notes, Kurtz's obliviousness to the problem with this defense would be hilarious were it not so revealing. It's obvious that one of the reasons Imus felt free to indulge such bigotry so freely is that he felt he was just giving voice to what others would only say privately; indeed, that's the excuse nearly all of the right-wing hatemongers give when called on it. It never seems to cross the imaginations of the cocktail-weenie crowd that these attitudes very much embody the institutional racism that is the real target of the anti-Imus pushback -- the same kind of racism they blithely dismiss as nearly nonexistent, and concerns about which are just so much "identity politics".

These attitudes have been the fuel for a lot of what I've been calling the "new racism" -- a regurgitation of old white-supremacist myths about the innate inferiority of other races, couched as a kind of "street realism" aimed at knocking down "political correctness." Limbaugh peddles it about blacks; Savage and Coulter like to target Muslims; and the whole gang of them blithely slime gays and lesbians.

Meanwhile, Glenn Beck poses as a "sincere fellow" who's just asking ordinary, folksy questions that in the end reflect an extraordinarily narrow and bigoted framework that, surprise, favors whites and looks down on anyone "different." And on Fox, the entire cast runs "news" commentary that just coincidentally makes black Americans out to be thugs and moral lepers.

A crystalline example of the way right-wing apologists for this kind of racist creep operate is John Derbyshire's recent piece in NRO reflecting on race:

In the U.S. today, the most glaring differences between black America and white America are in education and in crime. The terrible academic statistics for young black Americans, and the equally appalling statistics on black crime, are well known to everyone. Wishing, as most of us do, to live in a more harmonious country — or, as President Clinton’s 1997 advisory board urged the president, “to build one America” — we’d like to do something about this. The first step is of course to identify causes. What are the causes of those disparities?

Americans have come up with two broad categories of answers to that question, what I shall call the Folk Biology and Social Science categories. The Folk Biology explainers all assume that there are innate and intractable differences between populations that are descended, or mostly descended, from different, small founder-groups in the remote past, inhabiting different environments. Social Science explainers deny such differences and assume that all group disparities arise from social mechanics.

In the particular case of black-white disparities in education and crime here in the U.S., Social Science explanations are spread across a spectrum according to how much, or how little, importance the explainer assigns to the malice of white Americans -- i.e. to racism -- as opposed to cold impersonal or historical factors.

Derbyshire, somewhat typically, sidesteps explaining exactly which view -- Folk Biology or Social Science -- he gravitates toward, but it's clear over the ensuing column that he falls well into the former camp. And he explains why he thinks they are right:

White liberals who would rather pluck out their eyeballs than let their kids attend a majority-black public school nevertheless protest indignantly about the supposed racism of Don Imus. A presidential candidate who subtitled his autobiography A Story of Race and Inheritance will tell you (I am sure) if you ask him, that race is a figment of your imagination, a "social construct," while inheritance is of no importance whatsoever in human affairs, and never has been, and never could be. White Americans, a scattering of bohemians aside, beggar themselves to buy homes as far as possible from big concentrations of their black fellow-citizens. Inside those concentrations, black Americans stew in dependency and hopelessness. When, as happened with Hurricane Katrina, the dependency and the hopelessness decorate our TV screens for days on end, we turn away in embarrassment, having no real clue what to do about any of it.

It seems not to occur to Derbyshire that the behavior of the "Folk Biologists" that he describes here is in fact profoundly racist -- and that this racist behavior, being widespread, deeply systemic, and largely unremarked, might in fact have a profound causal effect on those same hopeless urban blacks for whom he seems incapable of finding any clue about what to do.

James Loewen's book Sundown Towns (explored in some detail here) is a careful historical and demographic examination of deliberate racial residential segregation in America, a balkanization imposed by whites beginning in the late 19th century and continuing through today. As he explains:

What could make living in an all-white town right? The old idea that African Americans constitute the problem, of course. In 1914, Thomas Bailey, a professor in Mississippi, told what is wrong with that line of thinking: "The real problem is not the Negro, but the white man's attitude toward the Negro." Sundown towns only made the problem worse. Having driven out or kept out African Americans (or perhaps Chinese Americans or Jewish Americans), their residents then became more racist and more likely to believe the worst about the excluded groups.

That's why the talk in sundown towns brims with amazing stereotypes about African Americans, put forth confidently with nary an African American in their lives. The ideology intrinsic to sundown towns -- that African Americans ... are the problem -- prompts their residents to believe and pass on all kinds of negative generalizations as fact. They are the problem because they choose segregation -- even though "they" don't, as we have seen. Or they are the problem owing to their criminality -- confirmed by the stereotype -- misbehavior that "we" avoid by excluding or moving away from them.

Of course, such stereotypes are hardly limited to sundown towns. Summarizing a nationwide 1991 poll, Lynne Duke found that a majority of whites believed that "blacks and Hispanics are likely to prefer welfare to hard work and tend to be lazier than whites, more prone to violence, less intelligent, and less patriotic." Even worse, in sundown towns and suburbs, statements such as these usually evoke no open disagreement at all. Because most listeners in sundown towns have never lived near African Americans, they have no experiential foundation from which to question the negative generalities that they hear voiced. So the stereotypes usually go unchallenged: blacks are less intelligent, lazier, and lack drive, and that's why they haven't built successful careers.

As I noted then, sundown towns and their continuing legacy have also had a profound psychological impact on blacks, including the internalization of low expectations, and the exclusion of blacks from cultural capital [pp. 353-355]:

Confining most African Americans to the opposite of sundown suburbs -- majority black, inner-city neighborhoods -- also restricts their access to what Patterson calls cultural capital: "those learned patterns of mutual trust, insider knowledge about how things really work, encounter rituals, and social sensibilities that constitute the language of power and success." ...

Making the suburbs unreachable for nonwhites similarly restricts them from making the social connections that are critical to forming networks that help us find work and move ahead in the workforce. Loewen notes that "the trouble is, these networks are segregated, so important information never reaches black America. ... Sundown suburbanites know only whites, by definition, except perhaps a few work contacts. Thus sundown suburbs contribute to economic inequality by race."

Loewen also notes [pp. 369-370]:

In his famous book An American Dilemma, written as World War II wound down, Gunnar Myrdal noted that residential segregation has been a key factor accounting for the subordinate status of African Americans. Separating people geographically makes it much easier to provide better city services to some than to others, and indeed to label some people as better than others.

It's much easier, and certainly well within the tradition of white response to such challenges, to ignore the larger underlying issues and instead blame the victims -- in this case, by assuming that all blacks are responsible for the behavior of some blacks. (That line of argument too has a grand tradition in American history, particularly when it came to justifying lynching.) It's blacks, you see, who are responsible for the excesses of gangsta culture, not a broader materialism and toilerance for violence that is in fact rampant in all corners of society.

As Pam Spaulding notes, the way the whole affair has played out so far suggests we've taken two steps back along with one forward. No doubt the time came and went long ago that the ugliness of gangsta rap should have fallen into disfavor with the public, and for obvious reasons -- embracing mindless violence and soulless misogyny is bad for us all simply as human beings. Talking about it openly might have helped, but eventually such talk seems to come around to moralists who then embark on efforts to legislate and regulate, and that's a ship many of us will not board, for good reason.

Moreover, gangsta rap, like all pop music, only reflects the environment that created it. If you want to know why hip-hop is violent and misogynistic, consider the hopelessness that Derbyshire describes as endemic to black culture. And then consider that the roots of that hopelessness in fact lie in those mostly white enclaves he celebrates.

It then finally becomes time to examine the reasons for the public's slowness to reject the violent ethos present in so much hip-hop -- including, it must be noted, a large chunk of young white suburbia. And you can't do that without addressing the real culture of viciousness, bigotry, and misogyny that has infected our discourse from above. Don Imus, really, was just the tip of that particular iceberg.

Doing the right thing

[From left: Fred Korematsu, Minoru Yasui, and Gordon Hirabayashi in the 1970s]

-- by Dave

It is always a bitterly telling commentary on any government when the only people who seem capable of standing up and stopping them from doing something that nearly everyone with a sense of basic decency understands is wrong are just plain, ordinary citizens -- the kind willing to stand up in the face of immense social pressures, as well as the sheer inertia created by bad leadership, and say no.

But it says even more about those citizens, because standing up in this fashion requires a special kind of common-sensical courage, the kind we often take for granted. Over the history of the United States, individual citizens -- the people who made up the ranks of the abolitionists and the suffragettes and the civil rights movement, and all the Walt Woodwards and John Henry Faulks in between -- have done a duty the rest of us have shirked, and we all owe them an immense debt. Even when they did not succeed at the time, their legacy has shaped us and, in the end, played a critical role in preserving democracy in America.

The contemporary versions of these civic heroes can be found among the Japanese Americans who recently filed an amicus brief filed on behalf of Muslims detained by the federal government after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001:

Holly Yasui was far away when a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled last June that the government had wide latitude to detain noncitizens indefinitely on the basis of race, religion or national origin. The ruling came in a class-action lawsuit by Muslim immigrants held after 9/11. But Ms. Yasui, an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, had reason to take it personally.

Her grandparents were among thousands of Japanese immigrants in the United States who were wrongfully detained as enemy aliens during World War II. And her father was one of three Japanese-Americans who challenged the government’s racial detention and curfew programs in litigation that reached the Supreme Court in the 1940s.

Now, Ms. Yasui, along with Jay Hirabayashi and Karen Korematsu-Haigh, a son and a daughter of the two other Japanese-American litigants, is urging an appeals court in Manhattan to overturn the sweeping language of the judge’s ruling last year.

The ruling "painfully resurrects the long-discredited legal theory" that was used to put their grandparents behind barbed wire, along with the rest of the West Coast's Japanese alien population, the three contend in an unusual friends-of-the-court brief filed today in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

As it happens, the attorney leading the charge in filing the brief is a familiar one -- our friend and colleague from Is That Legal?:

Prof. Eric L. Muller, a legal historian at the University of North Carolina School of Law, said he contacted Ms. Yasui and the others after reading about the decision by the federal judge, John Gleeson. Both sides in the case, known as Turkmen v. Ashcroft -- a lead plaintiff is Ibrahim Turkmen -- appealed parts of the decision by Judge Gleeson. He let the Muslims’ lawsuit continue, mainly on their claims of unlawful detention conditions, but dismissed key elements of their discrimination claims.

... Professor Muller said he drafted the brief on behalf of the three grandchildren to try to persuade the Second Circuit to reject what he considers the needless breadth of Judge Gleeson’s opinion. "Judge Gleeson's decision paints with such a broad brush, there isn't really any stopping point," he said.

The judge held that under immigration law, "the executive is free to single out 'nationals of a particular country.'" And because so little was known about the 9/11 hijackers, he ruled, singling out Arab Muslims for detention to investigate possible ties to terrorism, though "crude," was not "so irrational or outrageous as to warrant judicial intrusion into an area in which courts have little experience and less expertise."

The brief counters that the ruling "overlooks the nearly 20-year-old declaration by the United States Congress and the president of the United States that the racially selective detention of Japanese aliens during World War II was a 'fundamental injustice' warranting an apology and the payment of reparations."

And, it adds, the district court's deference to the government "ignores the tragic consequences of such deference" for 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

Muller himself posted a brief commentary on the filing, which is available in PDF here.

I observed in the epilogue to Strawberry Days that the attacks of September 11, 2001, elicited a singular response from the older Japanese American community, particularly those who experienced the so-called internment camps:

When United Airlines Flight 175, the second of four jetliners hijacked the morning of September 11, 2001, slammed into the World Trade Center, Tosh Ito was watching it on television, like many Americans. But what he thought about in those moments was very different than most -- except perhaps for his fellow Nisei. The images on the television made him think of internment camps.

"It didn't take very long," Ito said, for the memories of the evacuation to come flooding back. "It was almost instantaneous, I'd say. By the time the second plane hit, why, I was thinking about what happened."

Ito recognized the immediate similarities between September 11 and Pearl Harbor, raising the specter of a similar reaction against the domestic "enemy," a recognition he shared with most of his fellow evacuees: "It was kind of a surprise attack, and totally unexpected," he said. "I think for most of the Nisei that are still around, it didn't take us very long for it to bring back bad memories."

Rose Matsushita, watching on television at her home in Bellevue, had the same thoughts. "9/11, yeah, I thought: Uh-oh. We're at war," she recalled. "Some of them are here. And they were probably going to go through the same thing we did."

They were hardly alone in thinking this way. John Tateishi can tell you, for instance, about his dream callers.

The calls began a few days after the September 11 attacks. "I got a call one day --this was probably about four days after September 11 -- from a Nisei who just started talking, and basically just rambled and rambled," recalled Tateishi, the national director of the Japanese American Citizens League, at his Bay Area office. "And, you know, Japanese Americans, we're raised to be very respectful of our elders. So this man just kept going on and on, and I just sat there and listened to him, waiting to find out, you know, what he was calling about. And then he just said, 'Well, OK, I'll see you.' And he hung up.

"I didn't know this person. And I thought, 'Well, that's a strange call.' I mean, it was about two hours of phone call."

"And then a day or so later I got another call, and the same thing happened. And it was, I think, on the fourth call I got, when this gentleman was talking to me, and he says, 'You know, I can't sleep again. I'm having bad dreams.'

"I thought what he was referring to was the image of the World Trade Center being hit and collapsing. And as he kept talking I realized what he was talking were dreams about camp. Of the experience going back sixty years.

"And then after that call, it kept happening, and every time I got a call, I would ask, 'Are you having problems sleeping?' And invariably, the answer was, ‘I’m having nightmares again.' I would ask very specifically whether it was about the World Trade Center or about camp, and they would say, 'Oh no no no, the nightmares are about camp, that I had after we left.' "

The Nisei elders' nightmares -- replete with barbed wire and machine guns and guard towers -- are not mere ephemera. They are, after all, the only American citizens ever to have been herded en masse into concentration camps by their own government, not for having done anything, but because of who they were. For many of them, the scars of that experience were revived by the trauma following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington: "This is something that has provoked a very deep psychological response among Nisei," said Tateishi.

Some of this probably was due to the similarities between Pearl Harbor and September 11, at least as traumas to the national psyche. Having lived through the aftermath of the former, when they were publicly attacked, by government officials and politicians as well as by the press, as potential "fifth column" traitors, it probably was only natural that the latter produced concerns that history might repeat itself. Yet the fears touched on something deeper as well.

"I didn't have any bad dreams, but it surely brought up bad memories," said Tosh Ito. The specific memories it engendered, he said, were not so much of the camps but of the outpouring of naked racial hatred that followed Pearl Harbor.

"There was a lot of mass hysteria, a lot of discrimination, and it was not subtle at all. It was right out there," Ito said. "Now, in later years, as things got better for minorities, there was still a lot of discrimination, but it was quite subtle. I think some of us thought maybe it was pretty much gone. But 9/11 brought all of it out again."

It's clear that Ms. Yasui and her cohorts share those feelings, no doubt informed their personal family legacies. Ms. Yasui's father, Minoru Yasui, was a particularly remarkable figure. The son of a successful orchardist who was the first Japanese American to graduate from the Oregon School of Law, he tackled the government's discrimination against the Nikkei head-on:

On March 28,1942, Min deliberately violated Public Proclamation No. 3. He left his law office at 8:00 p.m. that evening and walked the streets of Portland, Oregon, in clear violation of the curfew imposed by Public Proclamation No. 3. Min had instructed his secretary to call the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Portland police to let them know that he would be out on the streets that evening. After wandering around for a couple of hours, he finally spotted a policeman and approached him. Min insisted that the patrolman arrest him for the curfew violation and showed him a copy of the Public Proclamation. The patrolman refused. Min finally went directly to the Portland police station, where he was arrested.

Even more remarkable was the case of his father, Masuo Yasui, and the Army camp detainees, which I described in Chapter 4 of Strawberry Days -- a case that still rings bells today:

Fort Missoula nearly became the focus of an international incident when word began emerging that internees were complaining of mistreatment at the hands of INS interrogators. Records later revealed that the sessions in question involved the INS’s efforts to determine when a number of the Issei entered the country; if they had arrived after 1924 -- when the Asian Exclusion Act was passed -- then they were in the country illegally and could be deported. The inspectors didn't believe many of the Issei accounts and, according to numerous witnesses both inside and outside the chambers, resorted to violence to wring "the truth" out of them. Several witnesses said the inspectors verbally and physically abused the internees, calling them "yellow-bellied cowards" and "liars," shoving them against the wall, yanking their hair, and punching them in the stomach. After the Justice Department investigated the charges, two Korean interpreters were fired, and the three inspectors responsible for most of the abuse were suspended for 90 days, and one was demoted.

Even men in positions somewhat similar to Tom Matsuoka's encountered difficulties with the hearing board. Possibly the most striking case involved Masuo Yasui, an Issei businessman from Hood River, Oregon, who had been prominent in town too—co-owner of a thousand acres of farm and orchard land, member of the Rotary Club and the Apple Growers Association, and a leader of the local Methodist Church. Yet when he went before the board, only his past associations with Japanese civic organizations, including the award he received from the emperor for promoting American-Japanese relations, were considered relevant.

"The proceedings were a complete farce," recalled his son, Minoru, himself a Nisei activist who had challenged the curfew laws in Portland and attended his father’s hearings. "The most incredible thing was when they produced childlike drawings of the Panama Canal showing ... drawings of how the locks worked. The hearing officer took these out and asked, 'Mr. Yasui, what are these?' Dad looked at the drawings and diagrams and said, 'They look like drawings of the Panama Canal.' They were so labeled, with names of the children. Then the officer asked my father to explain why they were in our home. 'If they were in my home,' my father replied, 'it seems to me that they were drawings done by my children for their schoolwork.'

"The officer then asked, 'Didn't you have these maps and diagrams so you could direct the blowing up of the canal locks?' My father said, 'Oh no! These are just the schoolwork of my children.' The officer said, 'No, we think you've cleverly disguised your nefarious intent and are using your children merely as a cover. We believe you had intent to damage the Panama Canal.' To which my father vehemently replied, 'No, no, no!' And then the officer said pointedly, 'Prove that you didn't intend to blow up the Panama Canal!'" Masuo Yasui was remanded to the custody of federal authorities and kept in army prison camps until the spring of 1946.

There also were recent revelations about the extent of government misbehavior in pursuing these inhuman policies -- namely, as the L.A. Times reported, the participation of the Census Bureau not merely in providing general information to the authorities overseeing the evacuation and incarceration episode, but also in providing specific information about individuals, including American citizens:

The Census Bureau turned over confidential information, including names and addresses, to help the U.S. government identify individual Japanese Americans during World War II, according to government documents released by two scholars Friday.

The documents validate long-held suspicions among Japanese Americans that information about them collected under confidentiality pledges was released to the government.

In 2000, the Census Bureau acknowledged and apologized for its role in sharing aggregate data with the U.S. military to help relocate Japanese Americans from the West Coast to inland camps after Japan's 1941 Pearl Harbor attack.

But Friday's disclosure represented the first confirmation that the bureau also shared information about individuals -- in this case, the names and addresses of Japanese Americans in the Washington, D.C., area. A list of 79 names was handed over to aid a Secret Service investigation into possible threats to the president.

The combination of secret lawbreaking, brutal mistreatment, and a Kafkaesque bureaucracy are the unmistakable hallmarks of a government careening out of control, consumed by the omnipresent temptations of authoritarianism. And the echoes of the wartime internment episode of 1942-45 not only can be heard today, they seem to be amplified -- not merely in the mass sweeps that followed the attacks of September 11, but continuing through the abuses of detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the bizarre treatment of Jose Padilla, the legalization of torture under the Bush administration.

The Congress and the press -- both ostensibly the bulwarks against a rampaging executive branch -- either actively enabled this behavior during its years of Republican dominance, or continued to sit on their collective hands in the months since. So it has befallen average citizens -- in this case, the descendants of the same people who stood up and fought the government when it followed a similar course during World War II -- to stand up and remind us all of what America, home of the brave and the free, is supposed to be all about.

In the end, it is always going to be incumbent upon ordinary citizens -- engaged, informed people who take their citizenship seriously -- to act as the stewards of good government and to rein in the powers of authorities, particularly when they become excessesive. And the more of them there are, the greater their chances of success.

We all had better hope that the efforts of Eric Muller and the descendants of the Japanese American internees, as well as the entire Turkmen legal team, succeeds -- because if they fail, we face the grim prospect of repeating one of the real tragedies of recent American history.

A Good Day

by SaraRutgers center Kia Vaughn, All-Met Division I Women's College Basketball Player of the Year

Don Imus is off the air -- not for a two-week slap-on-the-hand, but for good. It's a good day.

What Imus said about the Rutgers women's basketball team is hardly the most offensive thing we've heard from a right-wing talker over the past 20 years. In fact, looking his long record of past gaffes (including calling Gwen Ifill "a cleaning lady," and NYT reporter William Rhoden "a quota hire,") it's not even particularly out of line for him. What happened this time? Why is today different from all other days?

For 25 years, the dominant radio format in America has consisted of rich white conservative boys filling the national atmosphere with their putrid bloviations about people who were not rich, white, conservative, or boys. What started out as outrageous bad-boy shock-jock shtick in the 80s curdled into self-righteous rebellion against "political correctness" in the 90s, as a growing number of trash talkers and professional potty mouths joined a national race to the rhetorical bottom. Radio stardom was easy. Forget rock'n'roll -- all you had to do was be willing to spew a little more hate against minorities, foreigners, women, the poor, and liberals than the guy on the next band over, and you could have a mansion in Palm Beach, too.

But something is changing in America. I'd like to think it started with Spocko -- just a guy with a recording device and the addresses of the hate talkers' advertising sponsors. Spocko's assault on KSFO was a local skirmish, but it was stunningly well-organized; and, perhaps more importantly, it took on one of the biggest stations in one of the country's biggest markets. Spocko simply asked the hate jocks' advertisers a few straightforward questions: Is this what you endorse? Is this what you believe? Does this convey the kind of image for your product, or your station, that you want to project?

It seems likely that, even as ABC's attorneys were trying to bully Spocko into silence, these questions also gave radio execs across the country a long moment of pause (probably while they were letting a big slug of Maalox settle). You could hear the echoes of that pause in the voice of NBC president Steve Capus tonight on Countdown, as he emphatically explained that he was the guardian of the NBC brand, and that all a network has is its own credibility. Furthermore, he noted, "There has been a trust placed in us. We must honor and respect that trust." It was like the man had a sudden attack of conscience, an up-close and personal encounter with his network's critical role in maintaining the high level of civil discourse that makes democracy possible. You have to wonder where the hell Capus and his scruples have been vacationing for the past two decades; but at least they finally made it to the party. Which makes it a good day for corporate responsibility.

Let's hope it's a big party, too. Imus's guests in recent years have been a veritable who's who of the nation's political and entertainment elite. His shit never stuck to them before -- but it's sticking now. Which means all the other hate talkers are also having that long Maalox pause tonight. They've got a stark and nasty choice here. On one hand, ugly is what they do. It's how they got famous. It's really all they know. But, as of today, they're either going to have to clean up their act, or risk losing the hot bookings...and, perhaps, their jobs. What's clear is that ambitious celebrities will think twice before being seen in such gutter company after this. Which makes it a good day for civility.

Another thing I found striking about this how deeply Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson understand the concept of the transmission belt that moves anti-democratic ideas and behavior from the fringes to the mainstream -- and how tightly they seized on this as a prime opportunity to educate the nation about it. I've seen both of them on several news shows over the past few days; and in every case, they explained, carefully and clearly, that allowing Imus to get away with a mere hand-slap this time would only loosen the standards, and open the door for more mainstream expressions of racism and sexism in the future. It has to stop here, they said. Otherwise, we're going to see it everywhere. Which makes it a good day for decency.

One of the things Dave and I have said (over and over) here is that when it comes to hate crime and hate speech, we get exactly what we're willing to tolerate. Stopping it is as simple (and sometimes, as hard) as standing up and making it clear we don't approve. 24/7 hot-and-cold running hate speech became the national radio norm because too many of us were willing to listen, and not enough were willing to put pressure on those footing the bill.

In that sense, Don Imus' firing says far less about him than it does about us. And what it says is that we have finally begun to count the heavy cost of 20 years of on-air denigration of everything that is not white, male, rich, and conservative --
and are realizing that it's a price we're no longer willing to pay. Which makes it a good day for democracy, and everybody who wants to see it thrive.

My Regent Semester

by Sara

Well, the entire left blogosphere seems to be up in arms this morning, having finally discovered -- courtesy of Monica Goodling -- that Regent University exists, and that one-sixth of its grads have networked themselves into with jobs in Bush's government.

Since I am almost certainly the only tuition-paying Regent student on earth who's also a lefty blogger, I suppose it's incumbent on me to say a few words. I was going to wait until the end of the semester, three weeks from now, to say anything publicly about my Regent semester; but events appear to have overtaken that plan.

First, a recap of how I came to be at Regent in the first place. I'm a graduate student in Futures Studies at the University of Houston, working toward an MS that will be granted sometime in late 2008 or early 2009. In 2005, Regent's School of Leadership and Management (its graduate business school), instituted a Futures program that was built very closely on the UH model, and with the help of UH's faculty. This spring, they offered two classes -- "Religionists & Futurists" and "Images of the Future" -- that fulfilled my elective requirements at UH, while allowing me to pursue a couple subjects that really interested me as a futurist specializing in the social implications of authoritarianism.

It should go without saying that I approached the entire enterprise with massive trepedation. Having escaped this community once already, I was not at all thrilled about the prospect of going back. Furthermore, the fact that Regent -- a school whose very name reflects its Dominionist aspirations (Robertson's vision for his graduates is that they are God's "regents," being trained to rule the planet until Jesus returns to take his throne) -- was building a serious Futures program alarmed me. This is a school with a very specific anti-democratic agenda, I thought. And they're going out of their way to equip their a new generation of futurists the strategic planning, foresight, and change management skills that will allow them to implement that agenda. Should partisans of constitutional democracy feel some consternation about this? (The answer is yes. And no.)

Still, I forged ahead. With the blessing of my UH dean, I arranged to take a semester off, and enter the belly of the beast. And so it happened that I've been a visiting student at Regent since January -- visiting in the virtual sense, of course, since I'm an online student who lives over 3,000 miles from Virginia Beach, and haven't gotten any closer to the place since school started. (I had to sign a solemn pledge that I wouldn't bring alcohol, tobacco, or drugs onto the campus. I can say with great confidence that making good on that pledge has not been a problem.)

The no-substances pledge was one of several I had to sign in order to complete my registration. Regent is the fourth university I've attended in my academic career; but it's the very first to require me to sign a long, detailed online contract governing all manner of behavior. Most of it was pretty trivial (I was waiting for a Bob-Jones-style dress code contract, which fortunately never materialized). But, stepping through the web pages, I finally came to one that absolutely stopped me cold.

The page asked me to affirm that I understood and accepted that I would be educated by faculty who adhered to the following principles (the following is a direct cut-and-paste):

* That the Holy Bible is the inspired, infallible and authoritative source of Christian doctrine and precepts.

* That there is one God, eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

* That man was created in the image of God but as a result of sin is lost and powerless to save himself.

* That the only hope for man is to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, the virgin born Son of God, Who died to take upon Himself the punishment for the sin of mankind, and Who rose from the dead so that by receiving Him as Savior and Lord, man is redeemed by His blood.

* That Jesus Christ will personally return to earth in power and glory.

* That the Holy Spirit indwells those who receive Christ, for the purpose of enabling them to live righteous and holy lives.

* That the Church is the Body of Christ and is comprised of all those who, through belief in Christ, have been spiritually regenerated by the indwelling Holy Spirit. The mission of the Church is worldwide evangelization and the nurturing and discipling of Christians.

On first reading, I thought that they were asking me to affirm these things personally -- which, as a non-Christian, I simply could not do. But then, on second reading, I realized that they were simply making sure that I was willing to cooperate with professors who were coming from that place. And (since I already knew the professor who would be teaching both courses), I knew I could do that. So I signed -- and, in the process, almost certainly became the first pro-gay pro-choice howling-at-the-moon San Francisco Pagan Unitarian heathen student in Regent history.

Fortunately, as an online student dealing with one faculty member who knew right up front what he was getting, I haven't felt the need to be anything but honest about my own religious leanings. Indeed, our class discussions, both in real-time lecture and e-list posts, have been surprisingly wide-ranging and non-doctrinaire. I've cherished my interactions the young Southerner who turned me onto the whole gestalt of the Emerging Church movement, who is also active in voluntary simplicity and global anti-slavery movements. And I've been delighted to catch our professor in the act of challenging his students -- from the very first day, in fact -- to move beyond dogmatic biblical literalism, and resist the common fundamentalist impulse to hide from the present by either retreating to a mythical past, or staking it all on an absurdly overdue Revelation-based vision of the future. He seems determined that tomorrow's evangelical leaders move away from positivism and toward critical realism -- a switch that's going to change both the theological structure and the practical priorities of the movement. In this department, at least, "because the Bible tells me so" is not accepted as a good enough answer.

As a futurist, what I've taken away from my Regent Semester is a deeper awareness of how the stories we tell ourselves about How It All Began and How It Will All End create tremendous implications for the courses of action we choose. (For most of the past 2000 years of western history, these images of the past and future were almost entirely dictated by the Church, until the Enlightenment came along and offered new visions based on human agency -- and kicked off a culture war that has raged to this day. Make no mistake: the struggles over the historical and scientific past are really about whose story gets to determine the future.) These stories can make us optimistic and confident in our ability to create change; or utterly discourage us from making any attempt to plan the future at all (either it's all in God's hands; or else humans are simply too wicked and corrupt to do anything right). We've looked at the ways these foundational myths and metaphors have varied over the course of Western history, and where they've taken us over time. And we've considered the ways in which our cultural and religious stories are now serving us -- or disserving us -- as we approach the great challenges of the coming century. All of this is the stuff of future blogging; but, as you can see, it's definitely not the kind of stuff you'd probably hear from the televangelists on The 700 Club.

I'm sure if I’d spent the past three months hanging out in the faux Federalist stage set of the Virginia Beach campus, I'd have had better, funnier stories to tell on my classmates. Still, given that roughly one-third of Regent's student body consists of online students, my experience of Regent can hardly be dismissed as atypical. It's clear from the syllabus that the professor was expecting more garden-variety evangelical students -- and he probably would have had them, had there been students from the law or government schools in these courses. Instead, he got some older, wiser, more flexible and open minds who had already vaulted the rigid walls of fundamentalist dogma, and had integrated traditionally liberal issues like peace, justice, human rights, and the environment into their devoutly Christian worldview. They're not my grandmother's prayer group. But they are people I'd be glad to make room for on the political front lines of the various interests we do share.

Regent and its fellows -- Bob Jones, Patrick Henry, Wheaton, and similar evangelical universities -- are an important and gathering force on the landscape of evangelical America. For that reason, we on the left absolutely need to track their activities with careful and persistent attention. At the same time, we do ourselves, our readers, and the institutions themselves a great disservice if we allow ourselves to take everything we hear and see at face value, or interpret it through our own filters without really listening to what's being said. Because, in my experience, what's being said by the official spokespeople doesn't always square what's going on in the faculty lounges, libraries, coffeehouses, and classrooms.

It's so very tempting to stereotype and demonize. After all, the religious right has done it to us for years. But accuracy and fairness -- the only two true allegiances of any journalist -- demand that we take the time to take off our own ideological filters, wander into their communities, stay awhile, and commit to listening to them on their own terms. When it comes to the emerging evangelical elite at places like Regent, we will often have our prejudices more then confirmed. But we may also be rewarded with more friends and allies than we might have imagined.

Blog Against Theocracy: A Look Ahead

by Sara

As Orcinus' contribution to the excellent Blog Against Theocracy blogswarm, I'd like to take a look ahead at the evangelical movement, and discuss some of the trends that will be affecting its theocratic fringe in the years ahead.

The good news is that there's mostly good news.

1. Age will take its toll. While there's no shortage of young evangelicals filling the churches, the theocratic core is found among people middle-aged and older. They're the ones who put up the money, do the organizing, and attend the seminars. And, while these people may get angrier and stranger with age, the good news is that they won't be around forever.

2. The Galloping Gertie Effect, already noted here, is creating an ongoing series of PR nightmares for the various theocratic movements -- and we've now got the liberal media chops to maximize those missteps. Time was that fundamentalist leaders could stand up and say any fool thing, and it was like tree falling in the forest. Now, they're likely to find themselves in the running for Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person In The World." Since previous Evangelical uprisings in America have always ended with the faithful beating a retreat from widespread public derision, there's reason to believe the theocrats may finally have cleared the far side of the shark.

3. The Emerging Church. The younger generation of evangelicals has begun to flee the theocratic movement in droves. Among my fellow students this semester at Regent, the talk is of the Emerging Church -- a loose but growing "conversation" that is completely re-thinking evangelical Christianity, and coming to some radically different conclusions about its meaning and mission. (A great summary can be found here.)

There's a lot about the Emerging Church movement that rings familiar to those of us who remember the Jesus Movement of the early 1970s -- or have read up on the communal communities of Christianity's earliest days, after which many of these groups consciously model themselves. EC groups tend to organize themselves along communal or tribal lines, often sharing their material goods, forming tight support networks, and conducting lay-led services in homes. Most remain anti-choice; but now, this position is put into a larger context, integrated with deep social justice and ecological concerns. Organic food and voluntarily simplicity abound. Gender relations vary from extremely liberal to conservative beyond anything current would-be patriarchs would dare promote. The movement has many threads and factions -- not all of which are benign -- but it seems to be drawing the best and brightest of Gen Y's theological talent, suggesting that we will be dealing with a very different flavor of evangelicalism in the decades ahead.

And, most importantly, while these kids are out to save the world, most of them have absolutely no interest in ruling it. There's a lot more to say about the Emerging Church, but perhaps the most important point is that it's hard and deliberate turn away from the feel-good homogeneity of the suburban megachurches; and a conscious step back from the right-wing evangelical juggernaut of the past 30 years.

Of course, there's bad news, too. As we've often said here, American culture is brittle now. One good shock to the system, and there's no telling what authoritarian horrors could be unleashed. But while those are valid and serious worries, they're still in the realm of what could happen. What is happening is an ebbing tide, with signs that the theocratic threat to our culture is, finally, in slow retreat.

Based in reality

Gavin at Sadly, No! has a little fun with Michelle Malkin's latest demand that local government officials adhere to right-wing dogma in education. What's Malkin outraged about? Well:

Here's an update to the whitewashing of jihad at Burlington Township High School. The district has released a statement about its mock terrorism drill, arguing that it really didn't mean Christian terrorists when it used "right wing fundamentalists" to portray the hostage-takers:

[…]

The fact that other public school districts have conducted similar mock terrorism drills, devised by emergency management officials singling out right-wing Christian fundamentalists, suggests that the district's statement is disinge[n]uous at best.

It’s not "insensitivity" that's the problem. It's willful ignorance. If the school district is truly committed to preparing its students for a terrorist attack, base it on reality, not P.C.

Actually, Malkin is just acting out the right-wing version of political correctness here: the only real terrorists, in her book[s], are foreign ones.

The "reality" that Malkin directs us to is a feverish Investor's Business Daily editorial imagining that Muslims are even now plotting to kill our children in their schools -- without even a shred of evidence that this is the case.

In the meantime, one might direct Malkin and the IBD to some actual reality:

In the 10 years since the April 19, 1995, bombing in Oklahoma City, in fact, the radical right has produced some 60 terrorist plots. These have included plans to bomb or burn government buildings, banks, refineries, utilities, clinics, synagogues, mosques, memorials and bridges; to assassinate police officers, judges, politicians, civil rights figures and others; to rob banks, armored cars and other criminals; and to amass illegal machine guns, missiles, explosives, and biological and chemical weapons.

As I explained awhile back:

It's true that, generally speaking, domestic terrorists are neither as competent nor as likely to pose a major threat as most international terrorists, particularly Al Qaeda. And the belief systems that feed the domestic terrorists have not become pervasive in popular Western culture the way Al Qaeda and Wahhabism generally have insinuated themselves in the Islamic world (though there has been an increasing blurring of the lines between the mainstream and extremist right in recent years).

Nonetheless, given the right actors, the right weapons, and the right circumstances, they remain nearly as capable of inflicting serious harm on large numbers of citizens as their foreign counterparts. This is especially true because they are less likely to arouse suspicion and can more readily blend into the scenery.

Most of all, what they lack in smarts or skill, they make up for in numbers: Since the early 1990s, the vast majority of planned terrorist acts on American soil -- both those that were successfully perpetrated and those apprehended beforehand -- have involved white right-wing extremists. Between 1995 and 2000, over 42 such cases (some, like Eric Rudolph, involving multiple crimes) were identifiable from public records.

Some of these were potentially quite lethal, such as a planned attack on a propane facility near Sacramento that, had it been successful, would have killed several thousand people living in its vicinity. Krar's cyanide bomb could have killed hundreds. Fortunately, none of these plotters have proven to be very competent.

The rate has slowed since 2000, but the cases have continued to occur. And someday, our luck is going to run out. Certainly, if we are counting on their incompetence, the fact that the anthrax killer (whose attacks in fact were quite successful in their purpose) has not yet been caught should dampen any overconfidence in that regard. Likewise, if Al Qaeda attacks again, that will likely signal a fresh round of piggybacking.

Of course, confronting this reality severely undermines the Islamophobic populist campaign that Malkin has specialized in recent months, and the conservative approach to the "war on terror" in general:

Making the public aware of the threat from domestic terrorists, especially as part of a real war on terrorism, would require getting the public to confront the reality that the "axis of evil" comprises not merely brown-skinned people with turbans and fanatical gleams but also that surly white guy next door with the pipe-bomb arsenal in his basement.

No wonder Malkin wants schoolkids to have terrorism drills about evil Muslims -- that makes recruiting for the "John Doe" movement that much easier.

It won't do a damned thing to make us safer. In fact, by blinding kids to the real nature of terrorism, it will just make them more vulnerable to harm.

[More on domestic terrorism here, here, and here. Also, a gallery of right-wing terrorists.]

[Lightly edited at ending.]

The Neiwert Awards for 2006

It's been a little slow coming together this year, but the Northwest Progressive Institute has finally announced the winners of the 2006 David Neiwert Awards. (For an explanation of the awards, and a list of last year's winners, see here.)

Here's the entire rundown from NPI:

THE HONORABLE MENTIONS

Since virtually all of the outstanding 2005 honorees continued to toil away last year without pause, we'd like to take the opportunity to recognize alumni for their accomplishments before presenting the 2006 recipients.

Michael Hood (Best Monitoring of Right Wing Media, 2005) has continued his impressive work at blatherWatch, chronicling the latest developments in talk radio both locally and nationally tirelessly throughout the year, whether that was sharing amazing tales of Mike Webb's legal troubles, critiquing the KTTH morning guys, or covering the memorable Eyman/Carlson feud from last summer and the Sims/Hutcherson debate comparing the civil rights movements of blacks and gays. Those of us who don't have the time nor the patience to follow conservative talk radio remain especially appreciative of his valuable work.

General J.C. Christian, Patriot (Best Humor/Satire, 2005) [of Jesus' General] has kept the snarky letters, storyboards, and graphics coming, much to the delight of progressive readers both inside and outside of the region. Highlights from 2006 included the "Give 'Em Zell, Joe" series egging on the arrogant Connecticut senator, the Howard Kaloogian foibles, and The Propagandists video taking aim at the people who made Disney's ridiculous "Path to 9/11" possible. The General fortunately shows no sign of weariness - so here's to another great year for the Official Online Organ of the Glorious Conservative Christian Cultural Revolution.

Lynn Allen (Best Interviews, 2005) continues to offer her thoughtful perspective at Evergreen Politics, and fortunately, new interviews were not in short supply. People Lynn interviewed this year included Jim Davis, the President of Washington Farmers' Union, Congressman Jay Inslee, State Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, and Democratic legislators victimized by the GOP's unsuccessful sex offender postcard scandal. Lynn also helped out with Back to the Roots in 2006, a public discovery and networking program organized through the Institute for Washington's Future consisting of blog conversations, in-person forums, and other activities.

Daniel Kirkdorffer (Best Series, 2005) [of On the Road to 2008] put his incredible energy to work in 2006 in the 8th District race, tracking the vote, gaffes, and U-Turns of the district's clueless congressman (Dave Reichert) and supporting Darcy Burner, his Democratic challenger. Especially memorable was his outstanding, detailed coverage of the October candidates' debates in Bellevue and Newcastle. Darcy came closer than any Democrat ever has come to winning, but unfortunately lost a very, very close race, to the disappointment of many. Nevertheless, Dan has resolved to continue tracking a vulnerable Dave Reichert with the same vigor as before. His commitment is inspiring and admirable.

Carl Ballard (Best News Digest, 2005) quit writing the Washington State Political Report midway through 2006, but luckily he didn't quit blogging for good. Carl, along with a few friends, now snickers at the local right wing from the cleverly named EFF'in Unsound (a play on words mocking the state's most visible right wing blog and think tank). Carl's posts have gotten longer (on average) and his focus has changed somewhat, but it's been a good thing. EFF'in Unsound is guaranteed to be a fun read throughout 2007.

The folks behind BlueOregon, 43rd State Blues, and Washblog (Best Community-Driven Blogs, 2005) have continued to focus on community; each added more contributors in 2006 and increased the amount of content. Early in 2006 Washblog transformed itself into a site based on the Scoop platform, complete with a graphical redesign, and began allowing users to post their own stories. BlueOregon, meanwhile, has more frontpage bloggers than ever and has been visually restyled slightly to reflect the changing times. To the east, the increasingly larger crew of the 43rd State Blues continues to soldier on, blue-shifting the Gem State, one blog entry at a time. Their "Spud State Rundown", a regular feature summarizing the best posts from other Gem State blogs, is undeniably one of the best digests or roundups to be found across the Northwest. Alll three sites will undoubtedly remain popular in 2007.

Jim McCabe (Most Valuable Local Coverage, 2005) had a busy 2006. He retouched McCranium's appearance, brought aboard guest posters, and broadened the scope of his blogging. He closely followed the Wright and Goldmark for Congress campaigns all year (interviews were a highlight!) and ensured that Central Washington's voice would be heard. McCranium promises to be indispensable in 2007.

David Goldstein (Best Muckraking, 2005) [of Horses Ass] is the recipient of a new Neiwert Award tradition -- the LEAP Award for alumni. The LEAP Award recognizes bloggers who successfully make the leap from blogging to traditional media. In 2006, David's dreams of becoming a radio host became reality when 710 KIRO gave him a regular weekend show after just one appearance as a guest host. These days, he hosts the David Goldstein Show weekends at the station from 7 to 10 in the evening. At the end of the year, he was asked to fill in for fellow weekday KIRO host Dave Ross over the holidays. When he wasn't bringing liberal political talk back to 710 KIRO, Goldy was fundraising for netroots candidates or posting regularly at HorsesAss. His impact has been immeasurable and we're sure he'll have a very busy 2007. (For those who love acronyms, LEAP can stand for Liberals Earnestly Applying Potential ... or something like that.)

And now....here's the 2006 winners!

Best Guest Blogger

RECIPIENT: DARRYL OF HOMINID VIEWS

When local progressive writers needed a vacation or break from blogging last year, a surprising number of them turned to one trusted individual to keep their blogs fresh: the multi-talented Darryl of Hominid Views, who held down the fort at HorsesAss, Jesus' General, and even blatherWatch in 2006 when their owners were away or unavailable. He was seemingly everywhere, and yet he still managed to keep Hominid Views updated! (A particular reader favorite from Darryl's own blog is his Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza, which features links to audio and video clips of interest.)

Given his creative flair, gift for humor, and his willingness to help his tired fellow bloggers, we're sure Darryl will be doing plenty of guest posting in 2007.

Most Valuable Faith Perspective

RECIPIENT: CHUCK CURRIE

A leading American advocate for the homeless, the Reverend Chuck Currie of Portland is the ardent author behind a fascinating blog focusing on the United Church of Christ, ecumenical issues, faith, and politics. He thoughtfully presents a progressive viewpoint on controversial issues such as immigration, prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and stem cell research. Commentary on current events is integrated with useful references to Scripture, and multimedia is frequently embedded (such as videos and podcast sermons). The seamless blend of Christian teachings with progressive values is refreshing and invigorating. Chuck's perspective as a minister is invaluable and his words of wisdom are uplifting to progressives of all faiths. Besides writing his own blog, he participates in an offshoot of the DailyKos community (Street Prophets). We're thankful that Chuck takes so much time out his life to share his spirituality through the revolutionary medium of the Internet.

Best Campaign Blog

RECIPIENT: JULIE FANSELOW OF GRASSROOTS FOR GRANT

A leader in Idaho's netroots community, Julie Fanselow is one of Idaho's most capable progressive bloggers (there are quite a few of them in the Gem State now!). Along with Jim McCabe of McCranium, she received the 2005 Neiwert Award for Most Valuable Local Coverage for her writing at Red State Rebels. Julie spent a good part of 2006 working on the Larry Grant for Congress campaign and writing Grassroots for Grant, perhaps the best campaign blog in the country. Her boundless enthusiasm and tireless pursuit of victory helped ensure Larry was nominated and chosen as a Netroots Endorsed candidate for the midterm elections. Larry didn't manage to capture Idaho's 1st District, but he came very close, and tied up Republican expenditures in a district that wouldn't normally be competitive. We hope Larry runs again -- and we hope Julie has no plans to quit what she's been doing. Idaho needs both of them.

Most Valuable Explanatory Reporting

RECIPIENT: STEVE ZEMKE OF MAJORITYRULES

The regional blogosphere continues to grow at a rapid pace, and in 2006, the Northwest netroots community was fortunate to be joined by an experienced activist who is a veteran of many past campaigns for progressive policy solutions. Steve Zemke, who in 2003 founded MajorityRules, launched a new blog early in 2006 and found a key niche covering issues not receiving prominent exposure on other blogs. Most significantly, in the summer of 2006, Steve maintained a consistent and unyielding focus on judicial races targeted by the right wing Building Industry Association of Washington. He profiled the incumbent justices and judges under attack, urged readers to donate to help their campaigns, dissected campaign expenditure reports from the Public Disclosure Commission, and explained how judicial races work (if there are only two candidates running in the primary, the election is decided in the primary and only one candidate goes on to the general). The right wing effort to pack the courts was ultimately a failure and we commend Steve for his efforts to mobilize the community and inform the public.

Best Series

RECIPIENT: SHAUN DALE OF UPPER LEFT

One of the oldest progressive blogs in the region ended a long and thoughtful series in late 2006. Upper Left's "Sunday with Speaker Sam", posted nearly every Sunday by author Shaun Dale, featured musings and observations on politics from Texas Democrat Sam Rayburn, who ably served as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives for 17 years... and is considered by many experts to be the most effective speaker in American history. The series began in July of 2005 and ran regularly until on December 17th, 2006, with over seventy installments, each featuring a quotation next to a portrait of the famous Speaker. It had a philosophic, contemplative, and even meditative quality that made it enjoyable. Though the cherished "Sunday with Speaker Sam" has been retired, it has a successor - Passages from the Prairie Populist (William Jennings Bryan). We look forward to future chapters of the new series.

Most Innovative Post

RECIPIENT: MOLLIE MARTIN OF THE LIBERAL GIRL NEXT DOOR

Mollie Martin's Liberal Girl Next Door, which offers thoughts on politics from an American girl, was already a fun read well into 2006 when its author decided to introduce her readers to the Democrat challenging Cathy McMorris Rodgers in the eastern part of the Evergreen State. In an innovative post entitled "Meet Peter Goldmark, The Next Congressman From Washington's 5th District", Mollie furnished a background of the district (once held by Speaker Tom Foley), a brief biographical sketch of the candidate, and finally a transcript of the instant message (IM) exchange from her conversation with Goldmark the morning before. It was a unique, informal, and cheery interview. If the past is any indication, we're bound to see more creative and original posts from Mollie in 2007.

Best Local Party Coverage

RECIPIENTS: STEVE AND JPEG OF WASHINGTON OUTSIDERS

Though most of the bloggers and activists that comprise the regional netroots community consider themselves Democrats (or align Democratic), there remains a lack of coverage of party activity at the local level. Washington State has forty nine legislative districts and thirty nine counties - almost all of them have an active, organized membership of precinct committee officers and activists meeting regularly to elect Democrats and influence public policy, but not many are well covered online. Filling this void in a northern corner of the state are the contributors of Washington Outsiders, who closely follow the 42nd LD Democrats. Throughout 2006, Steve and "JPEG" extensively disseminated the local party's events and meetings as well as the campaigns of Jasper MacSlarrow (who defeated Republican Doug Ericksen) and Jesse Salomon (who challenged incumbent Republican senator Dale Brandland.) Their photoblogging was particularly well done. We hope to see other activists following in their footsteps in 2007.

Most Valuable Partnership

RECIPIENTS: TJ AND CARLA OF LOADED ORYGUN

TJ and Carla, who we recognized last year (for Best In-State Political Coverage from Out of the State, 2005) decided to take their activism to the next level by jointly starting a new blog with a mission of providing strong advocacy based reporting and opinion from the left -- Loaded Orygun. The site launched on February 1st, 2006 with a press release that mentioned the Neiwert Awards. LO has grown a lot since then -- today it's a must read that the Beaver State political establishment can't ignore, with reporting on the Oregon Legislature, the consequences of Measure 37, right wing corruption, and a wide range of top issues. LO has also helped hold prominent Oregon Republicans like Gordon Smith and Karen Minnis accountable. TJ and Carla are a terrific, very dedicated team ... to call them the regional community's most valuable partnership is really an understatement.

Best Electoral Commentary

RECIPIENT: ALAN OF IDABLUE

Idaho's progressive blogosphere grew by leaps and bounds in 2006, and one of the new faces was a senior staff officer in the Idaho Army National Guard, who founded a new blog called Idablue in March. It quickly became notable for its thoughtful electoral commentary on federal, state, and local races. Whether Alan was speculating on Idaho Speaker Bruce Newcomb's retirement, recounting experiences meeting progressive Gem State candidates, crunching campaign finance numbers, critiquing Bill Sali and Dirk Kempthorne, or analyzing the Risch/Otter contest for Governor, IdaBlue stayed informative and even entertaining throughout 2006. Alan's perspective is unquestionably valuable -- he is a great Idaho netroots resource -- but what's truly remarkable about his writing is its depth. We're very glad he's blogging and we foresee his impact will be even greater in 2007.

Best Neighborhood Newsgathering

RECIPIENTS: THE OLYBLOG TEAM

OlyBlog is an online destination "devoted to hyperlocal news and discussion" with a focus on the city of Olympia. Run by volunteer citizen journalists, it is an exemplary example of successful neighborhood newsgathering. Its slogan says it all -- "We Are the Media". (An older, more humorous slogan was "This ain't CNN"). The site not only allows users to post stories or entries, but also encourages inclusion of video and imagery as well. It features chat, links to local artists, events, and forums. Posts range from politics to dining to theater reviews. There's even an advice column and court reporting. A significant number of residents from the from the state's capital city have joined the site since it was initially founded in 2005. It will be exciting to watch OlyBlog continue to evolve as 2007 progresses.

Best Topical Blog

RECIPIENTS: THE RADICAL NOESIS TEAM

The tremendous environmental challenges faced today by humankind require out of the box, inventive thinking as well as vision and action, say the contributors of Radical Noesis, who are committed to facilitating a discussion about the Earth and two major threats to a sustainable future -- global warming and the end of oil as an accessible resource. In 2006 the authors explored a multitude of issues -- green building, electronics recycling, organic farming, biofuels, changing energy consumption habits, conservation, and the feasibility of rapid adoption of renewable sources such as solar. One of the most interesting posts, from October of 2006, was a recap of a "town hall" event put on in Portland, Oregon, by Shell Oil, a subsidiary of the European fossil fuels giant Royal Dutch Shell. The complete lack of entries about the "horse race" aspect of electoral politics makes the blog a soothing, no-nonsense read. Highly recommended for those concerned with our ability to live ... which, as Al Gore has said, is what is at stake.

Finally ... A Word of Encouragement

Obviously, it's impossible for us to honor every single blogger in the regional progressive blogosphere at once ... there are just too many good blogs with good people behind them. The Regional Blogs Directory on Pacific Northwest Portal currently stands at 242 progressive blogs from five NW states. That's a lot. And the directory is only going to get bigger, because there are good blogs out there that we haven't listed yet, and new blogs will be created.

If you didn't get recognized with an award for 2006, there's no reason to feel disappointed. If you're a progressive and you're blogging, you're already a winner, because you've taken your activism to a whole new level. Stay committed. Pick an issue or a campaign in the new year and resolve to work as hard as you can to change this nation for the better. Let us know what you're up to - tell us what you're doing to make a difference. The more involved you are in these next twelve months, the more likely you'll be recognized with an award a year from now. Remain focused and keep blogging. Your nation, your region, your state, and your community need you.

Congratulations to all the winners; be sure to check them out. The awards are terrific reminder of all the blogs working hard out there in our neck of the woods, and just the process of watching the awards has tuned me in to the excellence of their work. I'll be adding to my blogroll those award winners not already on it.

And just remember: I'm not dead yet!

Populism, Malkin style

Among the many egregious flaws of Michelle Malkin's In Defense of Internment, the foremost is unquestionably its overt support of a government policy that cannot be described as anything but racist -- that is, the forced incarceration of an entire bloc of the American citizenry (some 120,000 people, in fact) based solely upon its ethnicity.

But what undergirds her entire thesis is a historical approach that would be kindly described as shoddy, though more properly it would be called profoundly mendacious, the kind of outrageous lie that belies the very real suffering of thousands of Americans. She achieves this by using the methodology of other historical revisionists -- namely, by carefully omitting the mountain of evidence that contradicts the thesis. (This is also, I've detailed previously, the methodology of her liberal-bashing book Unhinged.)

In this case, Malkin argues that the race-based internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans was entirely justifiable based on a handful of diplomatic-cable intercepts whose import was vague at best, while ignoring the broad array of evidence that the entire enterprise was driven by a longstanding racial animus. As I've explained before:

One of Michelle Malkin's major themes -- her chief claim on the flyleaf -- is that racism was an insignificant factor in the decisions that led to the internment. (Her trump card is the MAGIC cables, the significance of which Robinson thoroughly debunks; but even then it seems to have eluded her that racism might have played a role in how government officials interpreted that intelligence.) And as you can see, there is an abundance -- an overabundance, really -- of evidence that racism played a decisive role in the internment drama at nearly every step of its unfolding.

How does Malkin deal with this evidence? By ignoring it, of course.

I describe this in more detail in the epilogue of my book Strawberry Days:

Peculiarly, Malkin's book dismisses racism as a proximate cause without spending even a sentence addressing it; there is no mention of the Alien Land Laws, the Asian Exclusion Act, or the "Yellow Peril" anywhere in her text, nor even a brief passage alluding to the mountain of evidence regarding the role of racism in the internment.

That sort of omission amounts to a grotesque distortion. As this book has detailed, at every step of the long unfolding drama that led to the internment, racism played a significant if not decisive role. These steps included:

-- The anti-Japanese agitation and resulting disenfranchisement of Japanese immigrants in the 1912-24 period (which included their being denied the right to citizenship), steeped in overt racial hatred and a belief that "oil and water will never mix."

-- The passage in 1924 of the Asiatic Exclusion Act, an explicitly racist law which so angered the Japanese nation that it instilled an implacable anti-Americanism and empowered the military authoritarians who eventually took the nation to war 17 years later. This may not have been, as Pearl Buck later argued, the fatal step leading inevitably to war (there is, after all, no evidence that the nascent campaign to establish democracy in Japan, snuffed out by the act, would have succeeded in any event, as Buck supposed). But there is little doubt it played a fateful role.

-- The decision to intern the Japanese, predicated in large part on the predispositions of the key players in the policy, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Lt. Gen. John DeWitt to Col. Karl Bendetsen, to believe prewar "Yellow Peril" stereotypes regarding the loyalty of Japanese Americans, and the unmistakable influence those biases played in their policymaking.

-- The public agitation for evacuation and incarceration of Japanese Americans, featuring an explicit racial animus, much of which was clearly predicated on prewar anti-Japanese agitation, as well as explicit white-supremacist ideology. (This public racism was most concretely manifested in the refusal by Western governors to admit Japanese evacuees within their borders unless they were placed under armed guard in concentration camps, a demand that brought a screeching halt to the plans for a "voluntary evacuation," and forced the decision to incarcerate the evacuees.)

-- The anti-Japanese agitation that greeted the returning Japanese at the war's end, much of it explicitly commingling racial bigotry with economic interests. This agitation played a major role in the permanent decline of the Japanese in Pacific Coast agriculture, since most Nikkei farmers gave up any hope of returning to their former lands, as was the case in Bellevue.

The fourth of these -- the wartime hysteria directed at people of Japanese descent -- is especially germane these days in light of Malkin's promotion of a populist "John Doe" movement that promotes a kind of paranoid campaign to "keep an eye" on the terrorist Muslims supposedly operating in our midst (even, apparently, indoctrinating children in our schools).

Probably the definitive commentary on Malkin's "movement" comes from Chris Kelly at HuffingtonPost, who observed:

All you have to do to join is report everyone you see who seems to be a foreigner. Or who seems to tolerate foreigners. Or who may be thinking foreigner-tolerating thoughts.

It's like the Junior Spies in 1984, only totally fun.

It's called The John Doe Movement and it's got an oath and everything. And if you join not only will you fight Islamofascism, but you can also come to Michelle's house after school, have a healthy snack, and play with her Breyer Horses. Well, not play with them. But, you know, look at them.

The ethos of fear-driven "watchfulness" that Malkin's movement would, if successful, engender is also a familiar one: it is remarkably similar in nature to the extraordinarily bigoted popular sentiments that drove the internment episode. As I explain in Chapter 3 of Strawberry Days:

For a war-happy press anxious for a local angle on the conflict, the prospect of a West Coast invasion made great-selling copy. The Los Angeles Times ran headlines like "Jap Boat Flashes Message Ashore" and "Caps on Japanese Tomato Plants Point to Air Base". Pretty soon, everyone was getting into the act. Reports of "signals" being sent to unknown, mysterious Japanese boats offshore began flowing in. One report, widely believed at the time, came from someone who heard a dog barking somewhere along the shore of Oahu, and believed that it was barking in Morse code to an offshore spy ship.

In the Seattle area, the stories were almost as ridiculous. "Arrows of Fire Aim at Seattle" shouted the Seattle Times' front-page headline of December 10. It told of fields in the Port Angeles area, between Seattle and the Pacific Ocean on the Olympic Peninsula, that had been set afire by Japanese farmers in a shape resembling an arrow when viewed from the air; ostensibly, the arrow pointed to the Seattle shipyards and airplane-manufacturing plants, a likely target for incoming bombers. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer blared a similar front-page story the next morning. Neither paper carried any subsequent stories about the fires -- which investigators soon determined had been set by white men who were clearing land.



[A Seattle Post-Intelligencer cartoon from February 1942.]


... By late February the removal of all Japanese from the West Coast had become a favorite topic from Los Angeles to Seattle, led particularly by politicians. One of these was Rep. Andrew Jackson Hinshaw, an Orange County Republican, who demanded in early March that the Roosevelt administration “stop fiddling around” and begin removing all Japanese from the coast. According to the Associated Press, Hinshaw “said he had word that Japanese plans call for a major attack on Hawaii and West Coast sabotage next month. His information, he added, came 'from a source which has been heretofore reliable, though unheeded by our government.' "

... The press became the chief cheerleaders for removing the Japanese. The Seattle Times ran a news story alerting its readers: "Hundreds of alien and American-born Japanese are living near strategic defense units, a police survey showed today. ... There are Japanese in the neighborhood of every reservoir, bridge and defense project."

The Times also ran columns by noted conservative Henry McLemore, who frequently attacked the presence of Japanese descendants on the West Coast. In one column, headlined, "This Is War! Stop Worrying About Hurting Jap Feelings," McLemore fulminated: "I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don't mean a nice part of the interior, either. Herd 'em up, pack 'em off and give 'em the inside room of the badlands. Let ‘em be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it. . . . Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them."

His sentiments were shared by many of the locals. Wrote W.M. Mason of Seattle, in a letter to the editor of the Post-Intelligencer: "If there be those who would say we can't do this to citizens, let them remember that we took this country from the Indians, killed thousands of them, arbitrarily moved other thousands from their homes to far distant lands, and to this day have denied them the rights, duties and privileges of citizenship.

"If we could do that to the Indians, we can do something about the Japs.

"Let's do it now!"

You can hear the echoes of this hysteria ringing throughout Malkin's "John Doe" manifesto, which is replete with McLemore-like exhortations to ignore issues of "sensitivity" and other mushy nonsense, as well as the insistence that such issues as people's rights are inconsequential before the "national security" banner they erect on their bulldozer.

Even more telling, perhaps, is the echo that Kelly observes, namely, the almost bizarre choice of "John Doe" for the name of Malkin's movement, given the iconic position of Frank Capra's great film, Meet John Doe, and the cultural significance of its message:

Frank Capra's Meet John Doe is a minor but muddled classic of '40s cinema. It concerns a journalist who creates a populist movement, only to discover that she, and her creation, are being manipulated by a right wing media empire.

... Capra said Meet John Doe was about, "contemporary realities: the ugly face of hate; the power of uniformed bigots in red, white, and blue shirts; the agony of disillusionment, and the wild dark passions of mobs."

I like Meet John Doe better than Kelly does; it's beautifully shot and has, like most Capra films, sparkling dialogue. The film features great performances by Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, though I loved Walter Brennan in it too. It turns preachy at times, but in the end its raw emotional power rings true.

So you have to ask yourself: Before naming this movement after "John Doe," couldn't Malkin or her husband have availed themselves of a copy of the film, just so they would know exactly what kind of populism under that name they were proposing to embark upon? Don't they care, really, that Capra's film was a warning against home-grown fascism, very much in the spirit of Sinclai Lewis' It Can't Happen Here? Don't they care that they are adopting in name a movement that, in our culture anyway, is synonymous with pseudo-populist fascism, manipulation of the masses by a mendacious right-wing cadre?

In examining Malkin's proposed populist movement, I'm also reminded of the definition of fascism proposed by Oxford Brookes scholar Roger Griffin in his definitive text The Nature of Fascism:

Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism.

(For an understanding of palingenesis, see more here and here.)

So far, the "John Doe" movement is clearly both populist (practicing, as in all fascist entities, a highly selective brand of populism) and ultranationalist. It is not, as yet, particularly "palingenetic" -- that is, it isn't driven by a myth of a national rebirth fueled by a purifying elimination of corrupting elements.

But it's only a step away. When we hear Malkin's "John Does" talking more about "taking the country back from the multiculturalists who are endangering our lives" and demanding that Muslims be rounded up, they'll have metastasized into full-fledged little brownshirts. Just like the people who wanted to round up the Japanese Americans sixty-five years ago.

Virtual Hate Crimes

by SaraThe Kathy Sierra episode has been weighing on my mind over the past week. While there's been some excellent commentary on it (Joan Walsh's take at Salon, which I quote below, may be the best of the bunch), I'd like to take a bigger step back, and look at the episode in the context of what we know about misogyny, hate crime, and authoritarianism.

What happened to Kathy Sierra is a hate crime. Let's be very clear about that. Sending death threats via the Internet is a criminal offense. And a hate crime, by definition, is a crime that's committed with the intent of "sending a message" that will intimidate an entire group, and change their behavior in ways that will ultimately marginalize and silence them. Whether or not Sierra would actually be able to use hate-crime law in a court case is a matter of jurisdiction; but by the definition and intent of hate-crimes law, that's what this was. Sierra was threatened because she was a woman -- and the purpose of the attack was to silence any woman who dares to raise her voice in a blog.

It's not news to anyone that misogyny is alive and well on the Web; but what we're reckoning with now is both the number and the ferocity of the men who seem committed to silencing strong female voices in this medium. The Sierra debacle has prompted concerned bloggers, both female and male, to stop and consider the totality of its sheer pervasiveness. Walsh describes her moment of epiphany:

Once I joined Salon I started receiving the creepiest personal e-mails about my work. Anything I wrote that vaguely defended President Clinton or criticized his attackers, in particular, would get me a torrent of badly spelled e-mail, often from Free Republic readers and posters. There were themes: A significant subset tended to depict me in a Monica Lewinsky role, often graphically. Like Kathy Sierra, I endured too many references to "cum" in those e-mails. I'll forgo other details for the sake of brevity and discretion.

But it was hard to know for sure how much had to do with my gender. David Talbot was regularly attacked by wingnuts as a Clinton "butt-boy," so it was impossible to say it was all about my being a woman. It still seems that when a man comes in for abuse online, he's disproportionately attacked as gay -- and if he is gay, like Andrew Sullivan, who wrote a column for us for a while, his hate mail at Salon is likely to be comparable to mine: heavy on sexual imagery and insult, sometimes bordering on violence. Yuck. I couldn't see into anyone else's in box to be sure if the abuse I was getting was disproportionate, but I suspected it was. Mostly I just ignored it.

When Salon automated its letters, ideas that had only seen our in boxes at Salon were suddenly turning up on the site. And I couldn't deny the pattern: Women came in for the cruelest and most graphic criticism and taunting. Gary Kamiya summed it up well in a piece on overall online feedback, noting "an ugly misogynistic aspect" to the reaction to women writers. One thing I noticed early on: We all got nicknames. I'm "Joanie," Rebecca Traister is "Becky," Debra Dickerson is "Debbie" and on and on. There are lots of comments about our looks and sexuality or ... likability, to avoid using the f-word, a theme you almost never see even in angry, nasty threads about male writers. Most common is a sneering undercurrent of certainty that the woman in question is just plain stupid; it's hard to believe we have jobs at all. (But then, since a woman is, unbelievably, the clueless, incompetent boss of Salon, it makes a certain kind of sense.)

Hate crime is a low-level form of terrorism designed to disenfranchise, stifle, and ultimately remove certain people from the public sphere by forcing them to erect imaginary boundaries of fear in their own heads. It causes people to change their behavior, shrink their horizons, and stop participating fully in their own lives. Suddenly, there are places -- the synagogue, the clinic, downtown after dark, professional conferences, the comments threads that form the living rooms of their own online homes -- that they can no longer approach with a feeling of acceptance, belonging, and safety. Walsh notes that the hate mail she gets has definitely had this effect on her own writing, and that of her other female writers.

But it coarsens you to look away, and to tell others to do the same. I've grown a thicker skin. I didn't want skin this thick. And what does it mean that women writers have to drag around this anchor every time they start to write -- that we reflexively compose our own hate mail, and sometimes type and retype to try to avoid it? I can honestly say it's probably made me more precise and less glib. That's good. But it's also, for now, made me too cautious. I write less than I would if I wasn't thinking these thoughts. I think that's bad. I think Web misogyny puts women writers at a disadvantage, and as someone who's worked for women's advancement in the workplace, and the world, that saddens me.

Sierra herself has come to similar conclusions. From a BBC report:

Since describing the campaign against her, [Sierra] has been shocked to discover that cyber-bullying is widespread.

"As well as around 900 comments on my blog and hundreds of comments on other blogs, I have received around 300 personal e-mails and about 70% of them say they have been through a similar thing," she told the BBC News website.

Among the messages is one from a blogger Ms Sierra described as "far more prominent than me" who has been avoiding industry conferences because of persistent online threats.

Men have always used the threat (and, too often, the actuality) of violence to keep women in line. Perhaps we were naïve to think that Web culture would somehow be any different. But what we're seeing in the Sierra episode also violates some essential meat-world community norms in ways that we should find particularly disturbing.

Back in the bad old days, in most Western cultures, abusive men were protected by a sweetheart deal with the rest of society. The line was clear, simple, and firm: Within the privacy of your home, you could abuse the women of your household in any way that pleased you. That was your right as lord of the castle. As long as you kept it behind closed doors, the community would take your word over hers about what happened, and look the other way rather than notice her bruises. A man's right to abuse women was absolute and protected -- as long as he kept it out of the public eye.

But -- and this was the catch -- if a man abused a woman in public, where other people would be forced to acknowledge the brutality, all bets were off. Once there were witnesses, it became everybody's business. Of course, the sanctions focused less on the welfare of the victim, and more on society's perception of the perpetrator: a man who lost emotional control in front of others lost status and deniability (from then on, those bruises might be noticed after all) -- and was at risk for losing his job, his money, and his freedom as well.

There was, however, one place this contract didn't reach. In war zones, even "civilized" men were excused from any accountability for their actions towards women. In wartime, even "civilized" nations have regarded the public rape and slaughter of women as just another act of war.

And that's what concerns me here. Metaphorically, the Web is analogous to a public street or meeting hall, and most of us adhere to the same social conventions that we'd use in real-world public places. Women may get whistles and cat-calls (which are every bit as annoying online as they are on a city street -- and, fortunately, as ignorable as well); but by and large, we reasonably expect that men will let common courtesy govern their interactions with us.

But if you read her blog, it's obvious that Sierra's attackers weren't adhering to anything like the town square behavior code. (To make the point: if a gang of men had surrounded her and threatened her with rape and murder on a city street, she could have called the cops and had them put away for a long, long time.) Instead, everything about these attacks suggests that those responsible assumed they had a war zone exemption, which suspends accountability for even the most extreme forms of violence against women. Which tells me that, somewhere in their minds, these guys no longer recognize the Web as a community, or the women they meet there as legitimate and equal members of that community. Instead, they see it as a battlefield, where violence is the expected norm. In this imaginary war zone, any woman who's out in public without male escort has already forfeited any claim to dignity or life.

Where did they get this idea? Sierra's blog was a downhome tech blog, not a political free-for-all. Her readership was largely male, and she'd served them well for over four years. The vast majority of men would never allow themselves to be seen treating a woman (or anyone, for that matter) this way in public; but these guys figured they could brutalize her, in broad daylight in front of hundreds of other people, with impunity. Why?

Most likely, it was because the men who put up the most heinous comments were right-wing authoritarian followers (RWAs), whose high-social-dominance (high-SDO) leaders given them permission to unleash their violent impulses, and encouraged them to direct it toward high-profile female targets. They did it because someone they regarded as an authority figure told them that the community rules don't apply any more. America is a war zone. The President has told them so. Their leaders have given them the formal go-ahead to behave accordingly. And that has very specific implications for how they're allowed to treat women they see as standing outside their own in-group.

The transmission belt Dave writes of carries not only ideas from the extreme right to the mainstream; it carries behavioral norms as well. The targets may have been limited to politicians and political blogs at first; but the now the stated targets include liberals, the educated, minorities, and (increasingly) women. And the venues are expanding, too, to include places far outside the original arena.

Given that, it seems possible that Kathy Sierra may have been collateral damage in the right wing's continuing escalation of hostilities, both in the real world and on the Web. Years of acrid bile form Coulter and Malkin and Rush have corroded the tenuous bonds that keep these people civil, and given overt sanction to outrages that any serious civilization would regard as barbaric. It's hardly surprising that all those years of misogynist hate speech from the right have congealed into eliminationist threats against a woman who did nothing more than show her face in virtual public.

Which leaves us with the question: What can we do? Tim O'Reilly points out that:

"The fact that there's all these really messed-up people on the internet is not a statement about the internet. It is a statement about those people and what they do and we need to basically say that you guys are doing something unacceptable and not generalise it into a comment about this is what's happening to the blogosphere."

Dave and others who've worked against real-world hate crimes have told us that RWA followers only turn violent when they believe their actions are sanctioned by their leaders, and express unspoken community norms. While female bloggers will no doubt have a great deal more to say about those norms in the months ahead, the sad fact is that RWA followers won't hear any of it, because they have no respect for women. It galls me to admit this -- but the only way the message will get through is if it's delivered in an authoritative baritone command voice. They need to hear, in no uncertain terms, where the boundaries of civilization lie. And they need to hear it from other men.

Misogyny has always been a core piece of authoritarianism; and so many of the issues feminism addresses -- sexual violence, silencing women's public voices, respect for female authority -- depend, utterly and completely, on how effectively we can identify and reduce the authoritarian impulse in our culture. When women like Joan Walsh and Kathy Sierra are tempted to stifle their voices or hide their faces to shield themselves from a never-ending onslaught of male rage, we all feel a measure of exhaustion at how very far we have left to go.






Red State Blues

by Sara
A gorgeous and poignant short piece by Michael Ventura from the Austin Chronicle on the state of rural America.

These people are watching their towns die. Watching their way of life die. They are living the end of their dream, and they didn't believe that could happen. Like their ancestors, they've worked hard and hard and hard. They've played by the rules, believed the right things, worshipped the proper God, lived as they deeply felt life should be lived, and they're losing everything that matters to them. And there's nothing they can do about it except to keep working hard, because that's all they know. They're losing a way of life because of forces beyond their ken. Giant agribusiness, globalization, politicians selling them out, a tidal wave of history sweeping them away. Republicans and right-wing demagogues play to them, so they vote for Republicans. But it doesn't help. Liberals and Democrats rarely come to talk to them, and still more rarely talk with them – why, then, would they vote for liberals and Democrats? "Blue state" snobs make jokes about the stupid "red states." These rural people are not stupid. They're furious. Time has passed them by, and they don't know why. They've done and been everything that they were taught to do and be, and it's come to nothing. That's what liberals don't get. These people are furious, and they've got something to be furious about, however much their fury may be misdirected. They want somebody to blame – a useless but human need.

So I walk into their Kansas diner, and in my differentness I become an instant symbol of what's pulling them down. Their kids are leaving town, their towns are dying, their leaders are failing them, they're helpless to stop it. They expected to live prosperously in these places for centuries – their courthouses were built to last centuries. They're losing it all, and there's no one to give a damn. They didn't believe this could happen – could not conceive that their time would be so short and that their toil would be futile and that their dreams would die so hard.

You can't understand the rage and the reasons until you've spent some time in towns like these, talked to the people, and considered the widening gap between their dreams and their reality. Until then, it's all an intellectual exercise, the kind of abstraction that liberals pride themselves on.

We're not going to be able to change anything until we start hearing the stories of these people and their vanishing places first-hand. Which reminds me: What are you doing with your summer vacation?