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TechnoratiAmerica's Political/Media Kabuki
Kabuki is defined as a highly stylized form of classical Japanese dance-drama in which actors often wear elaborate makeup and engage in precisely dictated movements, a useful metaphor for the current American political process which can't seem to break out of old patterns even as the nation hurtles from crisis to crisis.
Although Barack Obama won the presidency on a platform of "change" - and millions of Americans are tired of Washington's destructive habits - U.S. politicians, the news media and significant parts of the electorate refuse to transform how they have operated over the past several decades.
Like a kabuki performance locked in a stale past, the various players interact in predictable ways, moving about each other with elaborate yet tiresome maneuvers: the Republicans and the right-wing media posturing as bullies, the Democrats cowering in fear, the mainstream press obsessed with the superficial, and many on the Left carping from the fringes.
A good example of how this kabuki continues to play out was in the criticism of President Obama's plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison.
His judgment - though shared by former President George W. Bush and key members of that administration - was viewed by Republicans and right-wing talk radio as an inviting new "wedge" issue. They sounded the alarm about the supposed danger of transferring detainees to U.S. super-max prisons or resettling some, like the Chinese Uighurs, who have been judged no threat to the United States.
As the "not in my backyard" furor built - and some Americans panicked over scary fantasies about Islamic terrorists breaking out of super-max prisons and roaming the countryside - congressional Democrats retreated rather than stand their ground. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid joined a 90-6 vote in deleting $80 million that Obama had requested for closing down Guantanamo.
The U.S. press corps also bought into the Republican exaggerations of dangers - much as occurred in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. The New York Times again played a key role with a misleading May 21 article touting a Pentagon report done in the last month of the Bush administration claiming that one in seven of 534 previously released Guantanamo prisoners had "returned to jihad."
The evidence in the report turned out to be flimsy - with a later examination by two terrorism experts putting the percentage of former detainees later connected to violent activities at about one in 25, not one in seven.
"Bizarrely, the Defense Department has in the past even lumped into the recidivist category former prisoners who have done no more than criticize the United States after their release," analysts Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann wrote in an op-ed.
Nevertheless, the fear-mongering worked. Former Vice President Dick Cheney's complaints about Obama putting America at risk were treated with respect by the U.S. news media despite Cheney's long history of exaggerating and misrepresenting terror threats. The press billed the dueling addresses by Obama and Cheney on May 21 as a heavyweight match-up.
For his part, Obama appeared defensive, reacting to the harsh attacks from "no-middle-ground" Cheney and other right-wingers.
"My single most important responsibility as president is to keep the American people safe," Obama said in his May 21 speech. Using a passage reminiscent of former President Bush, Obama added: "That is the first thing that I think about when I wake up in the morning. It is the last thing that I think about when I go to sleep at night."
Like many Democrats before him, Obama avoided hard truth-telling: that the American people must show courage today as their forebears have done so many times in the past, that the United States must never be a nation of cowards ready to trade its founding principles of freedom for cheap -- and likely empty -- promises of greater security. Instead he talked of a new program for "prolonged detentions" without trials.
Yet, as the Democratic congressional leadership cowered and Obama wavered, the kabuki played out predictably.
As New York Times columnist Frank Rich noted, "the déjà vu in the news media was even more chilling. ... Most of the punditocracy scored the fight on a curve, setting up a false equivalence between the men's ideas. Cheney's pugnacious certitude edged out Obama's law-professor nuance." [NYT, May 31, 2009]
Despite last year's election results - and despite the news media's abject failures during the Bush years - the Washington press corps remains remarkably stagnant. With only a few exceptions, the media is dominated by the same talking heads on TV, the same high-profile commentators in the Washington Post and other major newspapers, the same neocon alarmists and talking-point political strategists.
As with the terror debate, the kabuki also is playing out in Obama's Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor as Republicans and right-wingers yank some quotes out of context to denounce her as a "racist," leading Obama and other Democrats to start backtracking and pleading with the Right to be nice.
The Kabuki's Origin
Essentially, today's Washington kabuki was set in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the rise of the right-wing media and the political clout of the Reagan-era Republicans. Those forces went on the offensive and made it clear that anyone who got in their way would be smeared as a "blame-America-firster," become a target of 30-second attack ads for politicians, or face accusations about "liberal bias" for journalists.
As the right-wing media grew and the Republicans became more powerful, many Democrats and most mainstream journalists learned that to survive they had to accept their assigned roles. Democrats became practiced at apologizing, equivocating and seeking accommodation; mainstream journalists mastered the skill of bending over backwards to appease the Right.
In that sense, the early Obama era continues to look a lot like the early Clinton era. In 1992, the voters also reacted to a recession by handing the government to the Democrats, but Clinton and other Democratic leaders then shunned any serious investigations of past Republican crimes, saw their extended hand of bipartisanship swatted away, and soon were cowering again in the face of GOP belligerence and the right-wing media's scandal-mongering.
By then, the mainstream news media knew its role, too. Tired of right-wing accusations about "liberal bias," the major news outlets, included the New York Times and the Washington Post, chose to be tougher on a Democratic administration than they had been on Republicans, especially during the Reagan era when the national press corps did its best to look the other way on Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate, contra-cocaine trafficking, etc., etc.
By contrast, the U.S. news media transformed even minor "scandals" about Bill Clinton, like his Whitewater real estate investment and some firings at the White House travel office, into breathless front-page news.
The American Left also played its own negative role, albeit a mostly passive one, by avoiding any significant investment in media infrastructure - opting to excoriate the "corporate press" - and telling voters that there was "not a dime's worth of difference" between Al Gore and George W. Bush when the two faced off in 2000.
After eight disastrous years of President Bush - and another nasty recession -- American voters again threw the Republicans out of the White House and elected a strong Democratic majority in Congress. President Obama also made clear that he intended to be a transformational leader who would address many of the deep systemic problems that three decades of Republican dominance had left behind.
But the U.S. political/media system remained remarkably static. With the exceptions of Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and MSNBC's experimentation with a few liberal hosts during its evening hours - and some under-funded Web sites and radio outlets - the American media still functions under the old rules, with an inordinate amount of time and space given to Republicans despite their weak minority status.
If anything, Fox News and right-wing talk radio have escalated their rhetoric; CNN, the Washington Post and other "centrist" outlets have pandered to Republican voices; and the premier business network CNBC behaves as if its treasured "free-market paradigm" had not been shattered by the ruinous behavior of Wall Street banks and major corporations, like AIG and GM.
But this pro-Republican bent of much of the news media had a predictable impact. Congressional Democrats and the Obama administration shied away from confrontations, refusing to hold the Bush administration accountable for its crimes and playing defense, whether in foreign affairs ("weak on terror") or on economic policy ("socialist!").
The American Left also stayed true to form, still unwilling to engage seriously in the political/media process. As it did during the Clinton-Gore years, the Left spends its energies criticizing Democratic failures (a reprise of the Bush-Gore "not a dime's worth of difference" chant) rather than investing in and building media and other institutions that might help change the dynamic.
So, more than four months into the Obama era - with the United States staggering through a major economic crisis and with global challenges mounting - the political/media kabuki continues.
The same ornately costumed characters - snarling Republicans, angry right-wingers, cringing Democrats, careerist media personalities and an ineffectual Left - maneuver around each other in a stylistically choreographed dance of national failure.
25 Comments so far
Show AllThis is one of the best threads I've see in a while. A lot of good, detailed and insightful macro analysis. I would add a few things: It's difficult to ascribe motives to people you don't know. I sometimes wonder if the debate over whether Democrats are cowards or simply greedy power-seekers as contemptuous of democracy as Republicans seem to be is really worthwhile. Whether you believe option 1 or option 2 the effects are pretty much the same.
Now when it comes to Parry's criticism of the Left, I don't completely agree with his viewpoint on the Left's claims of Gore=Bush. Writers like Chomsky have done the hard work and analysis to present pretty convincing arguments about how fundamental power relations in the U.S. tend to remain static no matter which party is in power and I think it is in this respect that many Progressives or members of the far Left see an equivocal relationship between mainstream Dems and Republicans. However, I have to agree with Parry that the American Left has not made significant strides in communicating with the public at large and gaining any measure of support or even just discourse. I think the Green Party is a case in point. In 2000, although Nader did not get a lot of votes, he did gather large crowds. These crowds represented an amazing opportunity for the Green Party to involve those folks in some seriously helpful discourse that could have allowed them to build their party support and infrastructure on local levels over the past 8-9 years. In my estimation, this failure to act is kind of a microcosm of how unwilling the American Left has been to really engage fellow citizens. If we are to ever break the political and societal stasis that Parry identifies, this will have to change.
Sioux Rose
Interesting and evocative posts: JERRY D. ROSE, CHERENKOV & MARGALO. Thank you for sharing them.
I write as an unabashed admirer of some of Robert Parry's work, especially his Lost History which richly describes the script of the original Kabuki U.S. theatre/media drama that he says originated in the Iran-Contra scandal, and the radical transformation of the media in the few short years between Woodward/Bernstein and the lapdog media of the 80s. With truly due respect for him, I think he left out a big component in the theatre of power politics that now dominates our country.
What he left out was a grotesquely-costumed actor in the form of a group of people---in Congress and much of the rest of the government---and in nearly all of the mainstream media and most of the "alternative" ones. This figure would have to be represented by a god-like figure---maybe like one of the multi-armed ones of Asian religious mythology. This figure would have dancing around it any number of acolytes that would cater to his every word and wish and would resolutely close their ears against anything negative coming from the Old Right, Old Democrats or Old Left figures and would exalt their Leader to the pinnacle of a high throne set upon the stage while the other figures grovel in contention one with another on the floor of the stage. This collective would be known as Obama and the Obamats or alternatively, the acolytes themselves would be known as Progressives for Obama, and their role in the Kabuki drama would be to divert audience attention to the ground level, where the contentions of these other figures would totally dominate audience "political" consciousness: as when they would contend angrily about "wedge" issues like guns, gays and abortion in relation to an impending Supreme Court nomination; and ignore the role of the Court in protecting or challenging the executive privileges of the one sitting on the throne. Maybe Robert Parry did not assay this Kabuki figure becase he himself has been in and out of harmony with the cast of acolytes.
To make the Kabuki theatre complete and realistic, it might be necessary to move outside the art form of Kabuki itself to that of the puppet show, the figures of which are manipulated by a single puppet-master as he pulls the appropriate strings of each. This puppet master, as described by several commenters on this article, would be an agent of the military and industrial masters who pay all of the actors to play their roles; even, sad to say, some of the Green Party old leftists whose 3rd party campaigns they helped fund in order to promote the electoral success of the old Republicans. As Ron Wyden, for example, executes his dance of "the American people are not ready for single pay," the puppet master pulls the strings from the health care industry to Wyden and the other acolytes among the Progressives for Obama.
All in all, it's quite a "show" though it exists only in the mind of Robert Parry and myself. But if the full cast of characters and manipulators along with all the stage crafting could ever be shown to an audience still alive enough to recognize the horror show they were viewing, it hopefully just might move this audience to throw any available rotten tomatoes at the whole tableau and leave the theatre in searcfh of a better "show."
we have to become our own leaders and policemen and teachers and farmers and doctors and parents...professionals need not apply...
I unpluged my TV - last year, and it's still unpluged.
Media Kabuki or Punch and Judy, it all seemed like "ten minutes of hate"
followed by 20 minutes of propaganda to me. Who is John Galt anyway?
Today's progressives (myself included) do sometimes remind me of the punchline of an old joke, somewhat altered:
The banksters call a poor schmuck and tell him that they are taking his bank account and foreclosing on his mortgage and he better not cause them any trouble. So they go drain his bank account, foreclose on him and get the sheriff to force him to move out, and even repossess his car. A few weeks later the banksters run into the schmuck on the street and when he sees them coming, he breaks out in uncontrollable laughter. The banksters are perplexed, even shocked, and they approach him and ask "We took all your money, your house, and your car, so why are you laughing?" Then he gathers his composure and while slapping one of them on the back, he says "I ignored your warning and struck back against you and you never knew it. While you were doing all that I voted third party, wrote a very sharply worded blog, and signed some on-line petitions!"
After kabuki comes kamikaze. George Wanker Bush, with Borax Obysmal in the bitch seat behind him, will next crash the jet onto the deck of the aircraft carrier which will explode violently and sink within minutes, taking down all hands. This is called Good Governance.
There is a huge flaw in this article, which is the assumption that the media are the 4th Estate, a watchdog on government, when in fact they are intentionally the propaganda arm of the government, which is controlled by the military-industrial-CIA and now Wall Street corporatocracy.
During the Vietnam War, as all previous wars, the media supported the government's actions. When they realized that television broadcasting of the large antiwar demonstrations encouraged more people to join the demonstrators, they made the decision to stop covering any demonstration, no matter the issue. Recently, demonstrations of over 1,000,000 people in DC are reported as less than 1/4 million and given no more than 10 seconds of air time. Local demonstrations are not covered at all.
I saw the change occur in 1977-78, while I was a student working part time at WCBS-TV in NYC. They fired their award-winning investigative journalists, insisted that no "liberal" spokesperson for any issue could appear on a so-called public affairs program without the right wing opposition spokesperson, no matter that the right-winger represented less than 1% of the populace, and began the scripting on the teleprompters of the anchor chit chat to discourage civic participation, such as "Oh, you can't fight city hall." and other phrases to get people to go home and stop protesting anything.
The decision-making clearly came from the top corporate offices to the news and public affairs departments, and every radio and tv broadcasting station followed even before the Reagan era consolidation of the media and the changing of the FCC rules to eliminate the Fairness Doctrine. It was also the Reagan era that brought us a change in corporate dominance from the manufacturers to the financial corporations.
It is nonsense to expect the MSM to do anything different. We only have the power of our purse to turn it off and boycott the advertisers. Anything else is compliance in our own continued destruction. Though, media activism to revive the Fairness Doctrine should increase and, if there is no change in the system by Obama (which he never promised and never will do,) then more radical action is required to take back our Constitution and re-create a better democratic Republic.
Where is our Gandhi? Oh that's right, he was murdered in April 1968. How about each of us being the next Gandhi and leading others to civil disobedience against our fascist government.
Yes. You have hit the bulls-eye. The corporatacracy in all its manifold departments--legal, corporate, media, and law enforcement--is now the enemy. They have overthrown the United States and now run it as a stealth dictatorship.
At some point in the years following WW II, the powers that be came to realize that a weak inefficient democracy was the exact sop the people needed to keep them from causing real change. Supported by a weak school system that produced only cogs for the capitalist machine, the corporatists put out stupid, banal, weak-minded entertainment and great dollops of disinformation to keep the average citizen worried about any issue other than the real issue, their corporate overlords.
As the wingnut revolution gained speed with Ronny Raygun, the right infiltrated the news media from top to bottom, buying up the outlets and filling the journo schools with ideologues. By the time Clinton (of the Republican lite party) got hold of the reins of power, the transition was complete--no more fairness doctrine, no more investigative reporting unless it pursued dubious political stories that, once again, did not touch upon the true story of the corporate takeover, and no more small media outlets with diverse views unless marginalized in the ever noisy Internet train station.
Now we see the end game. The right, not satisfied to let their republican lite compatriots of the Democratic party rule under a shower of corporate donations, have now grabbed the NAZI playbook. The first chapter is headed, "FEAR AND ALL ITS MANIFESTATIONS."
They seek nothing less than the jack-booted takeover of the country with death camps (Sorry, detention centers) for dissenters.
We are at a turning point in the history of this country. We are at that same point the Germans faced in Weimar Germany when a fear-mongering corporal (like that? corporal, corporate) named Adolf began to demonize segments of the population like homosexuals, intellectuals, socialists, communists, certain christian sects, and Jews. We are at that same point. Obviously, in this stealth dictatorship, Obama is not a direct one-to-one stand in for Hitler, but that only means we must dig deeper.
While Obama claims to be for change, we must look only at his actions. Ignore that he plays for your team. Ignore the emotional manipulation. Look at the actions. Has he closed GitMo? Has he ended indefinite detentions? Has he brought to heel the very entities which crashed and looted the world's economy? Is he using the largest party majority in many, many years to put through the desires of 70 percent of the population? Universal healthcare? Environmental protection? Etc.
How long do we let him continue the work of the corporate fascists before we take to the streets? Do we wait until we are in the camps? Do we wait until the environment is damaged beyond repair? How long are we going to allow a tiny, infinitesimal group of very wealthy people ruin the planet and enslave the people for their short-term profit?
Derrick Jensen uses a great metaphor, the picket pin. This pin was used by Native American dog soldiers, in normal times, to stake their horses. In a desperate battle, they drove their picket pin into the earth and tied themselves to it in order to fight and to state that this is as far as they would be pushed. That soldier remained there fighting until either he or she was killed or relieved.
Where will we stand and fight?
I, for one, am making a stand.
Slowly right to left
stocking feet creak the pine boards—
my sleeve soaked in tears.
smipypr
Why, indeed, are the troops still deployed? Why the fatally picayunish deal for the auto industry? Why is mountain top removal coal mining still approved? Obama appears to have been either co-opted or was just hosing us. And the Democrats in Congress are behaving as if they are getting pantsed in the Cloak Room, and having their lunch money stolen.
Parry is correct, as he so often is. However, as a leading member of the establishment left, he needs to outline specific proposals to fund an independent progressive media.
One place to start is the U.S. union movement, which shovels tens/hundreds of millions of dollars into the shallowest and most ineffective forms of propoganda imaginable -- and tens of more millions of dollars into a political system that deleivers absolutley nothing to workers and society.
Heck, we're even going to lose the so-called Employees Free Choice Act, an extremely weak piece of legislation that gets watered down even more by the day and now has lost OB's tepid support because he says the economy cannot afford workers to have the right to choose unions.
Anyway, Parry's voice is heard by union progressives and he needs to tell them that workers' money needs to be spent in the workers' interests. It's not not like the rest of us have access.
From the epilogue of Peter Dale Scott's "Deep Politics and the Death of JFK" (University of California Press, 1993), Speaking of the Roman Empire, "...the Senate continued to meet. Tribunes and Consuls were elected. Historians wrote about decadence, and moralists vowed to revive the old family virtues. A class accustomed to participate in civic institutions continued to do just that and no more, for generations. People found it preferable to ignore the fact that real power had migrated out of these institutions, into an imperial regime, the armies and the courts of the army commanders. The self-respect of the senatorial classes depended on this denial."
Tony Vodvarka
Jim Shea
Robert Parry's analysis is, as usual, right on.
The Democrats in Congress are a truly disgusting, spineless group.
Unfortunately, the Democrats probably read voter sentiment accurately.
The voters are misinformed and hopelessly ignorant, with no sense of
history.
The Republicans become more ridiculous every day.
Shea 10:37 ------ Everybody reads voter sentiment correctly and then ignores it.
The most obvious and glaring current example is Single Payer, not even on the Democrats table.
Ah, yes, this author wrote for Newsweek.
The left is "ineffectual" because they do not have the money, and the money runs the political system and the press.
Why would the left "invest in a media infrastructure" that is owned by the Fortune 500? How could they? Become corporatists?
It is true that the left should never say, "there's not a dime's worth of difference between the democratic and republican parties." There could very easily be a quarter's worth of difference, or even a whole dollar's worth of difference between them. But we would have to audit very carefully the donations that they each received from the corporations.
I agree, the author does not question the status quo of the two-parties (and the coroporate interests behind them) stanglehold on the political process. He writes within the safe bounds of the mainstream left.
As you and Glenn Ford point out, the unregulated, Big Money, Corporate-run system makes it almost impossible for any alternative (Left or Not) viewpoints to be aired. It is indeed a dilemma: how can we expect any change when the Congress will never pass any law that curtails Corporate power?
The corrupt electoral system is another factor that contributes to the stanglehold. It is no wonder the Left has not been able to be successful, they have been shut out, marginalized, blacklisted, and ignored -within the Democratic Party as well as the media. This aint just about the Right Wing Media Monopoly, it is about the Democratic party itself. There is simply no place for the Left to go... short of real substantive reform, change, alterations or revolution.
Good analysis except for criticizism of left.
Certainly not a dime between Gore and Bush was incorrect.
But as are Bush et.al. the greatest recruiters of violent attacks against USAans so is Obama(with Pelosi and Reid) the greatest recruiters for third party votes.
Even voting for third Parties or better a coalition, is an extreme form of optimism.
Mr. Parry there can be no basic change to the script until one of the major players are removed and that is corporate Personhood.
Do you honestly believe the Personhood of the jugular sucking
corporations will ever be revoked?
The Nation is in an undeniable Catch 22 situation.
The Nation gave its best shot and has been sold out once again.
Insanity: Doing the same thing and expecting different results.
The body Politic is dead it is time to clear the road and create a meaningful world for USAans.
This is why I've watch the television less and less. Just like music where I prefer to listen to CDs instead of the radio, I'd much rather watch social movies on DVD and BluRay without the porn or violence.
Sioux Rose
CARLA: Me, too. I've turned both off and in the same way I selectively choose what goes into my body (food and the occasional lover), I make use of the same scrutiny with respect to what enters my mind through open ear canals.
Actually the chickenhawk Cheney is correct. Barack Obama is making the country less safe because the presence of U.S. troops, not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in other parts in the Middle East, has been the biggest recruiting tool that the terrorists could ever have wished for. The inflammatory presence of the United States military has been the primary cause of so much of the violence in Afghanistan and Iraq while the bogus war on terror has been one of the largest frauds ever perpetrated upon the American people.
Why has Barack Obama, the [alleged] antiwar president, not brought ALL of the U.S. troops back to this country post haste? For that matter, why is not Congress, and especially the pusillanimous Democrats, not urging Obama to do the same?
Cowards and deceivers, the whole lot of them.
Oregoncharles
They are not cowards! They're sold out. There's a big difference. We have town halls here in Oregon where these traitors, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden for one, try and explain their positions - in favor of corporate run health care, for example, as opposed to what the majority of Americans really want: single payer.
I went to a Ron Wyden Town Hall meeting where I asked our courageous Senator why he doesn't bravely support single-payer healthcare, considering the huge majority of Oregonians do support it and desperately want it. His dishonest, yet courageous answer:
"I don't think Americans are ready for a single-payer system," said the bold and courageous Senator Ron Wyden.
Can you wrap your mind around that? If that doesn't take cajones, to stand there and tell a bold face lie like that in front of an educated, rather liberal crowd, then I don't know what does. Needless to say, my brave Senator $profits$ as a result of his absolute disgust for We The People. He will, again, receive enough money to convince voters not to vote for the honest candidates that are preparing to run against him. All it takes to do that is money!
When they lie right in front of your eyes, it's so blatant, you can't believe it's happening so you make up some excuse or parrot the Democratic Party apologists: "They are frightened puppies! They need to be loved and we need to make them do the right thing!" Get this: they don't want to do the right thing by us. They want to do the right thing for themselves, they're selfish, egotistical, ladder climbers. Can we get that straight, finally? There will always be Ron Wyden types willing to screw people for money. And they almost always win.
Millions voted for Obama because he promised change. He promised transparency. He knew very well that he was telling a big fat lie. He knew very well what he was hired to do and it has very little to do with helping ordinary Americans or bringing peace to the world and everything to do with enriching the already super rich. Innocent people and young bewildered soldiers die in the process, but hey, that's the price that's "worth it." Are people blind? Is something in the water?
It's the voters who lack courage. The politicians are way ahead of them in this regard.
Oregoncharles
Unfortunately Wyden has about as much desire to stand up to Obama and the MIC as does the congressman who is in my district in Washington state, Brian Baird.
A superb analysis!
Dittos!
In the end there will probably be a violent and civil war because of what passes for the "Left" were lazy-a**es who didn't do their jobs.