(To the right, Norman Mailer in 2006)
The late novelist and journalist Norman Mailer, somewhere in
his large body of work, once said something about modern-day journalism that
was never truer than today. The media, he said, help “keep America slightly
crazy.”
Maybe America has never been crazier than today after four
months of quarantine as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Bereft of
leadership with little hope for relief, facing a November presidential election
that will pit a narcissist demagogue against a sleepy-eyed neoliberal
chameleon, they remain largely hunkered down in their homes, many of them
jobless, watching their televisions as anti-racism protesters go beyond
condemning Confederate statues to tearing down or calling for the removal of
statues of Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln.
They hear report after report about peaceful protests
against police brutality and racism, but then there’s the burning and looting, the
government-tolerated encampment in Seattle known as CHAZ or CHOP that
considered itself during its brief and violent existence a patch of cityscape
decidedly not part of the United States of America.
Meanwhile, the economy flounders and sinks into another
Great Depression. Workers are ordered back to the assembly line regardless of
the lack of safety conditions. Millions have lost their health insurance and
have no means of paying the doctor if they get sick. Ballyhooed government
assistance, they learn, has gone to friends of politicians and favored
corporations rather than those who lost their jobs or their small businesses.
On the New York Times
Best Sellers list is a book called White
Fragility by a corporate consultant named Robin DiAngelo, who travels
around the country and for big bucks tells white people they’re essentially
hopelessly racist and their only hope is to listen to black people with a
nodding acknowledgement of their own sinful natures. They can’t argue. They
can’t even remain silent. They can only acknowledge and passively submit to the
greater wisdom of DiAngelo and her ilk.
Even the arts provide no guaranteed refuge for truth and
reason. The most-touted Broadway play in recent years has been Hamilton, which turned a pro-monarchy
elitist into some kind of common folk hero, a book and a play based on a lie.
Mailer knew why the media keep America crazy. They tell
half-stories with little context or well-grounded perspective. They react in
ways that reflect a long-held American style of anti-intellectualism. Truth can
be so inconvenient. They wet their fingers to see which way the wind is blowing
and act accordingly. And today, even more
than in Mailer’s day, they’re corporate-owned, so they see life and America
through corporate lens.
Corporate America does not want Americans to see the
horrific legacy of decades of corporate hegemony in this country that the
pandemic has exposed—the shameful divide between the wealthy and everyone else,
the patchwork private health care system that has failed as miserably as
politicians in stemming the spread of COVID-19, the raw exploitation of
migrants, prisoners, and the working class of all races in the relentless
search for cheap labor and profits, a Wall Street that no longer reflects the
nation’s economy but only the growing wealth of non-producing hedge fund
operators.
So what does Corporate America do? It does what it has
always done. Divide us and take our eyes off the thousand-pound gorilla in the
room. It tells us white Americans are hopelessly racist, that we have made little or no real
progress in race in our nation, and our only solution is a lifelong wrestling
match with our individual souls while Corporate America continues to run
things. Are there race problems in this country? Yes, of course. Has the
militarization of the police contributed to the hiring of thugs in uniforms who
take special pleasure out of beating up and killing blacks? Yes. Is race
America’s biggest problem? NO, for all the reasons above, but we’re simply too crazy
these days to see it.
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