Proportionality

and the Way Out of the Well

By

Marc Sapir

(1627 words)

I think it is obvious that the struggle against the current Pacifica Board isn’t a local problem. It’s not local to Berkeley, to the Bay Area or to the 6 Standardized Metropolitan Statistical Areas that have Pacifica stations; not any more local than pandering sex and violence on TV, using women’s bodies as the number one marketing agency, or slanting the news to bolster the interests of world finance is local; nor than the not very conspiratorial homogenization which blunts every cultural offensive, substitutes the term "race" for issues of ethnicity, nationality, and cultural diversity, and confronts all challenges to the market-greed-stupid paradigm with the glossy veneer of University bought sophistication.

We live within a culture-eating culture (a vulture culture) consisting of essentially two perpendicular lines or ideas. The horizontal reflects the total leveling of diversity, thought, and debate; the vertical represents the enforced stratification of wealth, and power. This is a culture of mathematical simplicity, or elegance as the academic researchers might say. But its simplistic formula puts it in direct contradiction to human heritage, and to our future as a species. So what? You know this, I suspect. Why am I bothering you with redundancy? For one thing redundancy isn’t always bad; it may help us tease out the nuances in things; it’s food for new metaphors. For another, I suspect that like me you sometimes wonder how "in this hell" one can be a "progressive" or an advocate of justice and progress given an environment so ridiculous that it co-opts our sense of humor with the weight of its own redundant ridiculousness?

I’m trying to write a conceptual piece, hoping not to get too reductionist and simplistic myself, so I ask your indulgence. I think we need to re-create a particular way of thinking to shore up the process of meaningful acting: i.e. collectively understanding proportionality.

I’ll take two hot items of the decade as examples. Gun Control and Tibet. I’m not sure if 300,000 or 300,000,000 Moms marched for Gun Control in Washington on Mother’s day but wasn’t that a mighty day? Actually the same weekend several thousand of us marched for Mumia and against the death penalty and there were no lead articles, though the death penalty is bobbing up to the surface these days as fundamentally anti-democratic. I could be cynical and say our protest speeches in UN Plaza were terribly boring, but that’s not why we’re ignored or caricatured, is it? "Someone" has the idea that the death penalty doesn’t belong in anyway connected conceptually to the Mom’s March unless it’s to advocate for more executions. Though we know different and maybe quite a few of the Mom’s know too, it’s hard to make the connection stand out when those "someones" control the media and even the reporters’ minds.

We also know that the principal executors of systematic (as opposed to individual and somewhat random) violence in the U.S., including cold-blooded murder, are the most heavily armed agencies of State power. No one who is "anyone important" talks about disarming or prosecuting those murderers and thugs, or the unscrupulous leaders who sanction murder by the urban police. The FBI itself reports 9 years of consistently lower violent crime rates, including murder and gun violence. But the Media blares Columbines and so forth. And the FBI does not issue press releases on the thousands of murders and assaults by police, often against unarmed people or "suspects" as we/they are called. The result is that the movement for gun control laws reflects this disproportionality: reduce access to guns except for the out of control police--which is passed off on the American people as a solution to a criminal justice system run amok. It is hard not to comment on the fact that the murderers of Amadou Diallo were absolved because they convinced a jury that an unarmed man in his own home was a legitimate threat to the lives of 4 large cops with their guns drawn. What ever happened to proportionality and perspective as a rational approach to behavior and justice?

And then there’s Tibet. See the thousands of "Free Tibet" bumper stickers? Ironically I’ve even seen them on BMW Sportsters and other vehicles worth more than Tibet’s GNP. When was the last time you saw a bumper sticker that said "Stop Bombing and Killing Iraqis"? There are a few out there but in a good old American "democratic" voter face off the Tibet defenders would inundate the Iraq defenders. I won’t tell you what you already know about the U.S. role in Iraq. You listen to KPFA too.

Over the past 20 years how many hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised to Free Tibet so it can go back to running its own benign feudal theocracy, unencumbered by the Chinese State. Not to say that the Chinese are benefactors of the people of Tibet, but on a scale of national oppressions the world over where exactly would this situation rank? Where is the proportionality in this equation, of this vast outpouring of empathy? And what underlies such disproportionality? I’m old enough to remember Alan and John Foster Dulles and the China Lobby.

Is the Tibet disproportionality important? This spring I gave a talk on Mumia and the death penalty to my daughters’ eighth grade class in Berkeley (she’s a history teacher). In doing my research on the death penalty on the www. I found that (according to Amnesty International) China executed over a thousand people in 1998. Among the industrialized nations the U.S. is, of course, the far worst executioner, now about 100 per year and rising rapidly. 102 nations (and all of Europe) have stopped using the death penalty. How does the Chinese government’s execution of 1000 people compare with China’s overall behavior in Tibet? I’d have to think that Tibet isn’t so bad off given that level of ruthlessness, but I expect I won’t convince anyone to trade in Tibet for an "abolish the death penalty" sticker. Because Tibet remains a major part of the focus on human rights in China, the death penalty here gets special protection. Thanks to a professor at Northwestern, Hurricane Carter, Mumia, Shaka, a lot of us and a Republican Governor of Illinois with some integrity we’re making headway anyway. But imagine if the Media wasn’t "fixed".

If we are going to change things for the better we will have to build a culture and media that help us assess proportionality in politics and history. Because the information systems available to us provide overwhelming amounts of stupid data and serious disproportionality biases aimed at shoring up existing power relationships, this is no easy task. I heard Heather Szerlak on Pacifica National News interviewing a freelancer from Caracas, Venezuela about President Chavez. Her NPR type questions were all based upon skeptical assumptions: for example, that Chavez is nothing but a power happy populist dictator. The freelancer clarified the differences between Chavez and Fujimori in Peru. Czerlak played devils advocate, from the perspective that the corporate media would look at things here in the U.S. Her methodology blocked a deeper assessment of the role of the U.S. and international finance in Columbia, Venezuela, and Peru. The power of Finance’s self interest in that region today re-proportions discourse away from meaningful analysis and understanding. I don’t know Chavez too well personally, but since he’s been willing to take the big political risk of embracing Fidel Castro one might guess that he may be a man worth paying some different kind attention to: what are his goals? And, for that matter, why won’t KPFA pull the plug on Heather and the other PBS lookalikes at the Pacifica National News? That Pacifica Stringers Strike, now to enter its fifth month is for us. How can our Radio station not be taking a few risks for the sake of the unity of this movement?

What I am saying is that we have a lot more work to do than just to rid ourselves of Mr. Ford, Ms. Berry and company. Among ourselves and within our movement for a democratic culture we have to set ground rules that assure in-depth analysis that clarifies differing perspectives on the proportionality of current (even small ones like the PNN Stringers Alternative News network) and historical events. We have to become as dogged and insightful in our KPFA news muckraking as Amy Goodman and Dennis Bernstein (a sub-editorial comment: and maintain a sense of humor and bring back Chuy to KPFA).

I see us in search of the hill to climb to build a new democratic movement in the U.S. I think the media and cultural stage (i.e. platform) is fundamental to that process. It isn’t just a question of throwing the Pacifica bums out even though that has to happen. The best of us have been, and are still being trained, as good Americans, to think and act like dummies, and at times we do, despite our sincerest intentions. We have to learn how to work that through, collectively. It requires a pedagogy, which treasures and endorses the diversity in our real sub-cultures whatever they may be. It includes striving for clear views of perspective and proportionality within the context of acknowledging our own diversity of ages, values, heritages, and class positions.

Until we get to agreement that we are at that pedagogic stage we may have trouble acting firmly in a unified way. That’s because of fears that differences will disunite us and reinforce the perpendicular culture. Once we have achieved a level of open, collaborative, and constructive debate on the proportionality of real events (among ourselves--including KPFA staff) we’ll call a dance - maybe an Alligator ball.