 Hello there. It's Thursday at noon. I know it is. Do you remember our arrangement? Thursdays at noon on CFUV. Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called first person plural. You make it sound excessively attractive. That's what I have in mind. Read a newspaper, turn on the radio or the television, pull up news websites and internet bulletin boards. It is everywhere. War. Rumors of war. Threats of war. Consequences of war. Protests of war. Counter-protests in favor of war. We are saturated with information about war. We have noted that in spite of this saturated coverage, little information is offered about the Anglo-U.S. Iraqi war including bombings, casualties, and profiles of G.I. Joe. Oh, and there have been some protests around the world and crowds are large. What the crowds are saying, how they critique the war, and what they want isn't important to the corporate media. Just the ever disputed count of their numbers is newsworthy it appears. U.S. General William Westmoreland spoke of the news coverage on the Vietnam War. Quote, Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind. Close quote. Vietnam was the first televised war. The first Gulf War generals took Westmoreland's words to heart and made sure that the press had little coverage, allowing only well-controlled press conferences. The U.S. government took some criticism for this closed-mouth policy. The U.S. press took even more criticism for allowing this to control their coverage. During this Gulf War, a compromise has been reached and now the U.S. military and its press corps are fully in bed with each other. We now have a thing called the quote, embedded journalist, close quote. Each military ground commander has decided how many journalists he or she can accommodate and protect as they proceed in their campaign. These embedded journalists travel with the troops and are given limited access to the action, emphasizing the fighting soldier. On the surface, this seems like a compromise between battle conditions and freedom of the press, but whether intended or not, this kind of coverage has the effect of unmarking the military and political hierarchy that controls the battle. Protesters in the U.S. are being criticized by the government and pro-war activists for showing a lack of support for American troops. This kind of embedded coverage of the war works well with that anti-protest rhetoric. We see the war from the eyes of those troops and we sympathize for getting who put these troops in harm's way and why they are there in the first place. More extensive coverage of anti-war efforts has been left to the activists themselves. Only independent sources carry extensive discussions about activism in the United States. Canada and European presses have been more balanced in their coverage, but they still often concentrate on quantity rather than quality. This discussion of who and how many leaves the messages of the protesters on the back burner. The global anti-war protests have a much more complex relationship to war, the specific conflict and the related issues surrounding this war. We spoke with U.S. sociologist and peace activist Kathy Felty this week about her work protesting the war on Iraq. She is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Akron. Her research areas are homelessness and violence in the lives of women and girls, citizen participation in local communities, and spirituality and social change. She is co-founder of the Campus Community Against War at the University of Akron. She is also active in People for Peace of Greater Akron, a community coalition formed after 9-11. Kathy spoke with us reflecting upon why she feels her anti-war stance is important and on the social interaction aspects of working for peace in a country at war. These issues are important. Consider the words of Herman Gehring, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, president of the Reichstag, prime minister of Prussia, and as Hitler's designated successor, the number two man in the Third Reich. Quote, Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country, close quote. Join us this hour as we examine the protest movement a little more closely and air our grievances with the press that refuses to cover them in an episode called The Made for TV War. I wanted to start by kind of talking about the role of peace activist and why it seems to coincide so often with college students or with academics, intellectuals, so forth. Do you see this... Well, first of all, do you agree with this assessment because this might be more of a stereotype than truth? And also, do you think that there are reasons why more intellectual people tend to be questioning things like war? Well, kind of a two-fold response to that. And I guess the first fold is that since I'm located in academia and so that's the world that I'm kind of operating in and out of, those are the people that I'm talking to and reacting with and all of that. So I guess I'm not in a position to say, no, I think that's an overstatement because from where I am it looks like that's very much the case, that it's people who are in higher education, in academia, doing intellectual work, doing research, teaching that are on the forefront of really a lot of social movements, a lot of forward thinking about social change. And I think that it's because it's really a natural outgrowth of what we do. If you're involved in research and teaching, you spend your time critically thinking about the world in which we live. No matter what your discipline is, you're involved in critical thinking. Certainly in sociology that's true and we're thinking about human groups and how we create a society. And so we're approaching that and taking it apart, putting it back together, thinking about power, issues of power and inequality and social justice. So when that's your subject matter I think it's a natural outgrowth that you would maybe see things a little bit differently, not so readily accept mainstream discourse about any given social situation. So certainly with something like the war that we find ourselves in, the mainstream media is presenting things in a particular kind of way, using a particular kind of rhetoric. And I think for a lot of people if that's their source of information and they're not practicing critical thinking skills, I certainly think everybody's capable of being a critical thinker. But if you're not practicing that on an everyday basis, if it's not part of what you're doing with your life, that might be the most accessible way to learn about what's going on in the world and so that's how you start making sense of the world. But for those of us that are using different avenues and it's our job to kind of get at the story in sociology, get at the story of human experience and human experience in groups, then we're delving beneath that surface all the time. And so I really think it's kind of an outgrowth of doing that, being used to thinking in that way. I remember telling someone years ago when you become a sociologist and you do that full time, you're not all that much fun to go to the movies with. I remember one time driving down the freeway and seeing a woman hanging her laundry out and it was a beautiful day and the wind was blowing and I just had this moment of, I wish I could just be there. Just not having the information, not having the perspective, not having the analysis, just be hanging the sheets on the line. It's just that moment of longing to have blinders back on. Sometimes it's very painful to know. Do you think that governments get away with doing more in spite of the questioning of it because there are a number of people who would just rather be hanging your laundry out and don't want to think about it? My read is from my students that there are students that have an emotional reaction, a very uncomfortable emotional reaction to something like the war, but they don't have a framework for thinking about that. For one thing, they seem to be fairly devoid of history, that they don't have a sense of the history of war, the history of social movement activity about war. I mean, my students were shocked to find out that there were protesters during the World Wars. Their understanding of those wars is that everybody is happy to grow their victory garden and be part of the cause. They were astounded to find out it was for World War II in particular that it was a fairly sizable protest. So I think not having a historical context, not having a framework for thinking about things differently, it makes it difficult to give expression to a different point of view. It's kind of that whole, until there's a language something with, it's a little bit hard to claim that truth or that reality. So I think that's part of it. I think the other part is we had a walk out here at the University of Akron last week and there were counter protesters, pro-war protesters. And what I saw in their behavior was this real adrenaline high fueled by the sense of rightness and power. You're the good guys in the world and whatever it is that we decide to do, it's the right course of action and that's disturbing to me. Actually, that's more disturbing to me than the people who are creating that ignorance. Ignorance I mean, not knowing our path, not knowing the story. The ones who feel uncomfortable but don't have the language for it, that's one thing. But those who find a language that is good guy, bad guy, right or wrong, those are the scarier ones. Absolutely. I think that one of the things that an intellectual does is deals with ambiguity. Deals with the gray areas. And when you begin to get into critical thinking, when you begin to see the world with a critical eye, so to speak, one of the things that mocks it up and makes it more uncomfortable is that you do live in a world where things are not absolutely right and absolutely wrong anymore. Right. And so you scratch your head and go, well, wait a minute, on the other hand, you know, those kind of things. And I think that it is difficult for some people, whether by training or by personality or whatever reasoning you want to give for it, to live with that kind of ambiguity. I think that's true. And in sociology, of course, at the very, from the very get-go in our intro classes, we're teaching versetain, you know, empathetic understanding. And so what that means, if you're able to practice that, it means that you can shift from your vantage point to see the world through the experiences of what we might think of as the other. And once you can do that, it's very difficult to view anyone as enemy. So I think that is a problematic and I would say probably those students who are defining the world in right and wrong, good and evil, don't practice that, maybe can't practice that. I would argue that if they could practice that, it would be very difficult to frame the world in those terms. You're listening to First Person Plural on CFUV, Victoria's Public Radio, 101.9 FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet, cfub.uvig.ca Giving sociology an edge! My experience has been that the sense of rightness doesn't necessarily only show up for those who are for what the government is doing. There is a kind of righteousness that happens sometimes on the left as well. No, I think you're absolutely right. I think of that as a type of fundamentalism. That in a fundamental way, we have the answers and we are the righteous. And I see that as dangerous no matter which direction it's coming from. And I had an interesting experience at the walkout that we organized. There were a number of counter protesters there, and I was one of the speakers, and they were pretty vicious. And it was interesting to watch. Once I kind of stepped outside of my speaking role and just watched some of the interaction that was occurring, because the counter protesters were really, really angry. And I was speaking very personally. I was talking about my own history, and I was raised in the military with a career Air Force officer. He's my father. He's now retired, decorated veteran of several wars and so on. And so I was sharing that history as a way of talking about what I learned about war and some things that my father taught me that actually have guided the development of my values. So whenever you're talking about your own story, it's horrible to be shouted down and told that you should be killed for what you're saying and to shut up. I mean, it's really pretty vicious. So when I finished talking, and I got through the whole thing, kind of kept it together, and when I finished talking and handed over the megaphone to someone else, I started crying. And I cried and cried. And it was really the first that I had cried about it all. I mean, I've been pretty proactive, really since 9-11, in talking about peace and organizing around peace. But it's the first that I really just kind of let it all go. And one of my colleagues who's very, very far on the left and very outspoken came over and he said, You know we're right. You don't have to cry. You know we're right. And I said, I'm not crying because we're not, because of right and wrong here. I'm crying because this is breaking my heart. It is breaking my heart that these young people are so shut down. They're so afraid of what I might say that they can't even hear my story, that they have to silence me, that their energy is going into silencing. And that's where I am. It's not about being right or wrong. It's interesting to watch the news coverage. Of course we do get American television in Canada, but we also have the benefit of coverage that is generated from here or from Europe that I don't think that Americans are seeing as often. Right. But it's been, and the coverage is very different by the way. I don't know whether you're aware of that or not, but I've been amazed at the differences between the coverage that Canada is giving and the coverage that the states is giving. But one of the things that I've picked up on in the discussions about the anti-war movement in the American channels is a sense of that who's right and who's not. Yep. You know, it's black and white, good and bad. I mean, even on the nightly news, the way that criminal behavior is talked about, it's in terms of individuals and individuals being bad guys. I mean, this is just on an ordinary day in the news where there's this polarization of people into... Specific categories. Right, exactly. And so I really do see that being exacerbated here. And I see some of the folks that I know that work in the media having a difficult time trying to capture some of those nuances that people are really struggling with, how they feel and think about this war. And, you know, there's something very significant going on that the anti-war movement has made up. I mean, it's intergenerational. It's cross-class. It's cross-race. It's really quite amazing to go to these rallies and see kind of the diversity of people that are represented there. I have an impression from independent media sources, you know, reading some stuff on the Internet and that kind of thing that these rallies are also being attended by people with diverse causes. That there is a sense that not only is there a protest against the war, per se, you know, against the war as a bad thing that is happening that should end, but also an understanding of the war as something that is getting in the way of issues that need to be addressed. But it seems to me that there are people like, for instance, who are there from the environmental movement or who are there from the point of view of poverty or racism, those kinds of issues who are saying, wait a minute, not only is this war unjust in the sense that it wasn't necessary to do it in order to achieve something in Iraq, but also it's unjust because it is being used to take resources away from these important issues. Is that kind of complexity also available in these rallies? Do you know, at the local level, I'm not seeing that as much. I'm seeing a pretty focused anti-war, pro-peace kind of drawing together of people from different groups that have always, groups that have always existed, you know, the Quakers, for example, and who are now kind of joining in with groups that didn't exist before all of this. So at the local level, I'm not seeing that. At the national level, in D.C., I went to the march in January, and that was very much the case, that you had a range of speakers, political, popular, social movement folks, you know, organizers, talking about and across all of these kinds of issues. So certainly, and tying it back to a criticism, kind of this larger criticism of the current administration, that not only are we upset that this administration is taking us into this war, but they're also making these other kinds of decisions that these political issues are being brought together to create this kind of unified criticism that this administration is making choices that are going to affect us as a population for a very long time to come, and it's kind of on all fronts, the economy, issues of race, issues of the environment and how much we're going to protect it or fail to protect it and in fact, exploit it. I think all of that is true. And so I think that's one way that it's being brought together as this very specific criticism of this particular administration at this particular point in history. But I also think that there's a way that is more sophisticated in that it doesn't necessarily have a specific political outcome, so it's not just a criticism of a current administration, but is more of a theoretical understanding of how all of these things are interconnected and that if we are building military and putting our resources into weapons and into military presence, kind of globally, that that intersects with and shapes environmental policies which intersects with and shapes and is shaped by race and racial inequality. But I think all brought to the global level. We can't stay kind of talking nationally about these things, although that's where our policies are created and played out because it is about this kind of global reality. You're listening to First Person Plural on CFUV 101.9 FM, Victoria. You're a sociologist and you talked a little bit about your childhood and your relationship to your father being part of why you are taking an anti-war stance. But I'm also hearing that sociology has informed this for you and I wonder if you could talk a little bit and I think this relates very well to the global perspective and the interconnectivity of these different issues. How do you think, well, for you personally and maybe for people in general, how do you think sociology adds to this knowledge that helps you take this anti-war stance and also this kind of critical thought? How does sociology help? One of the most important things that I learned from my father was not something that he directly taught me. It was a choice that he made that actually he paid a price for. And that was when he went to Vietnam, he was a pilot and he was supposed to fly bomber, which he was trained to do. And he refused to fly bomber to bomb in Vietnam because by the time that he was sent it was 69 so it was fairly far along in the game and we knew at that point that villages were being bombed and that many civilians were not only being killed it's kind of a side-effective war but it's a direct strategy in this war and it didn't coincide with his religious beliefs. That is he could be in the military and he could fight in a war and he could drop bombs in a war but not when it was women and children who were not in the military who were involved. It had a profound effect because, as I say, he paid a very high price for it. He ended up flying cargo, which is really kind of a low status pilot thing to be doing especially for a lieutenant colonel. And so he's flying in supplies, he's flying in and picking up the wounded and the dead. At the end of the day. And he's never promoted beyond lieutenant colonel as a result of that choice. So that to me said something very important about knowing who you are in relationship to what you do and being willing to experience or make a personal sacrifice to be true to what you believe. So even though I'm politically very far afield from my dad even to this day that was something that weighed in for me at a young age and then throughout. So as a sociologist what I'm grappling with is really understanding how do people who don't have control over the resources make choices, make decisions and survive. And what does that survival look like? So that I guess is a central question for me in the work that I do and so it certainly shapes how I see the world in which we live, the larger world in which we live and then my personal politics in terms of something like war. Where are the resources? Who's controlling those resources and who's benefiting from them? And who's paying the price for the unequal distribution of those resources and what is being used to kind of enforce that inequality. Those are all the kinds of sociological questions that I'm kind of working my way through all of this with. And sometimes it makes a whole lot of sense and it comes together in a way that I think, aha, that's that piece or that's the issue that we need to be thinking about. And then other times, and I think this is the power of ideology, at other times I can feel just as lost as the next person. One of the problems that protesting has just inherent in it because of the nature of protest is that it generally takes a stance against the other. It's the anti-war movement. I'm wondering how sociology would inform any ideas that we might have to present an alternative. Not just an alternative to the war but also an alternative to international relations. Do you see sociology as a source, a resource that might be used to come up with alternatives and have you thought much or do you think people in the anti-war movement think much about how they create these alternatives? I think there's some discussion sometimes about the alternatives but I really think the people that are in the movement and who are very focused in what they're trying to accomplish are putting all of their energy and their resources there. And I met with a colleague who co-founded the Campus Community Against War group that we have here at the university and I met with her today and I said sometimes it's just really hard to cook dinner because we've been going to these rallies and meetings and it's very focused and it's very goal-oriented and I really think that that is how a lot of movements especially those that are going up against the dominant systems that's how they're operating. So that idea of what's the alternative is the conversation that we have in our spare time but it's not where we get to put a whole lot of our effort. I think though that there's a lot of promise in sociology in that way. I'm a big fan of Elise Bolding who for much of her career wrote about envisioning a world without weapons and she worked internationally and orchestrated conversations and workshops for people to come together and to begin the work of imagining as she called it imaging claiming that if you can't visualize it if you can't articulate it then you can't make it real which of course is a very sociological principle that what we define as real is very real in its consequences and so if you can't even articulate or have a picture of what this world looks like then we can't move towards it we can't bring it into being and I think that's the promise of sociology that you have that understanding that we create the social reality so if we create it then there's a whole range of possibilities open if we kind of shift away from our fear and I think that's in many ways fear driven and I think that the media feeds that fear and the government feeds that fear if we can kind of shift away from that and have the opportunity to do some of that work of imaging a different kind of world that's our starting point well that's cool that sort of gives a whole another dimension to the idea of the sociological imagination and you know who I think does this very well in kind of in a popularized way is Michael Moore and in Bowling for Columbine I said wait a minute look here's a society when it goes and looks at Canada and gun ownership and sense of personal safety and all of those kinds of things it says okay well here's an example and I think that's wonderful because what it does is because I think often times we're in denial that there's any other way to be you know when you're talking about being in a particular location and the US is I think operating in a disadvantage anyways in terms of taking in other people's experiences because we're so indoctrinated into the best or the longest where the superior and I think it's a really bad thing to teach our children and to reify over and over in our culture because it shuts it down it certainly limits what can be thought about right limits what can be talked about well I hate to do this because I've really enjoyed talking to you but we really are out of time it's been a pleasure to talk with you I really enjoyed this and I enjoyed your questions and I haven't really talked to anybody about it in this kind of way so thank you so much and I'm sure that our audience will appreciate hearing a little bit more about the movement in ways that they don't get to hear about it often in the press I was home this weekend watching the war on television which is what it's for in my estimation it was made for TV war and I thought to myself this really does not qualify me to speak intelligently about the war all I know about it is what I've seen on television and through the popular media and then it occurred to me that that was probably the best one could do anyway to wit that the sources are being controlled in a way that makes it difficult and extremist for anyone to be better informed about the war watching television, listening to the radio reading the popular press I got to tell you I was going down the road listening to a radio station and it had Donald Rumsfeld who's in U.S. Secretary of Defense and he's complaining well first of all it was kind of humorous because he's complaining about the media coverage of the bombing of Baghdad and how they were comparing it to other bombings in different campaigns in history and how that just wasn't fair and apparently the radio station I was listening to was getting its feed from CNN and while he's saying this in the background you can hear the bombing of Baghdad so much so that a voiceover came over and said we want to explain to you what's going on right now anyway so he's complaining about this and then like two minutes later a general gets on and he starts talking about embedded journalists and I'm like what in the hell is an embedded journalist have you ever heard that term? once I saw it in an editorial cartoon or something of that nature several weeks ago about the same issue but not before this war I've never heard that term before this war either apparently what it is is a decision that since the last Gulf War that I affectionately call the Gulf War version 1.0 since that iteration of the Gulf War was a flop because everybody complained about how little access the media has they've now compromised by including members of the media so they're going out and they're part of which ever advancing force and they're getting up close and personal with the war you see all these G.I. Joe portraits where you get to know the soldiers which are heartwarming and I'm sure very comforting in a way to family members it's so controlled and then on top of it all just a little slice of the war that he gets that's exactly what Rumsfeld was complaining about he's like well you're just getting a little slice of the war well it turns out that they're getting a little slice of the war by design on the one hand he's complaining that the war isn't being covered well and on the other hand it's not being covered well because the only access they're allowing is this embedded thing and one is left to wonder why the way the game is played given that he and his cronies make all the rules what could the purpose have been off his comment well here's an educated guess he wanted to distract attention from the fact that he and his cronies were the ones making all the rules he complained about the coverage to make it appear as if the coverage was something outside their control yeah something independent never mind that in the next nanosecond an army general a U.S. army general was an army or some other branch of the service I have no idea I mean he didn't identify himself other than general got up there and stated that journalists were being combined with the military for the purposes of this exercise quote exercise close quote meaning except he didn't state it let's make it clear he didn't state it he just used the term embedded journalist it was marked with the term embedded journalist without explanation in part because this was just business as usual therefore the inconsistency with the previous remarks just went unnoticed if there were an independent media here I would think that they would have jumped on that I mean there was a question and answer session immediately after that this was a press conference and instead of jumping on the discussion they started asking about tactics it's I don't know mitchesney Robert mitchesney talks about this about the professionalism of journalism and he discusses how this professionalism is an attempt to be objective but in essence it just leaves you reliant upon the so called experts and in this case the so called experts is the American military and they have an agenda and they are manipulating this and so instead of being objective which you know whatever that is it becomes highly biased towards power for some reason I don't know if this is consistent with mitchesney's comments on the subject or not but for some reason professionalism became defined in the journalistic context as meaning reprinting press releases from authority figures some time ago and I was out of the room when that one was put to a vote rest assured not just reprinting press releases but only asking questions that were acceptable when you do have access so you have the same person in place he's approved of as the representative from the news organization you know presidential press conferences have become extremely controlled over the years it used to be that the news organization would send whoever they want and they would just open the door as long as you had your credentials you know where you've been cleared as a member of a certain organization you went in now they you went in as a representative of that organization and the organization had control over who they sent in now they look at the specific reporter and they reject they tell CNN who they can send they tell ABC who they can send they being the white house the white house yes the white house is not happy with a particular reporter's questions they can refuse to give the credentials to the reporter the next time which essentially forces CNN to either fire them or reassign them or whoever I'm using CNN as an example but essentially makes the news organization have to reassign the reporter because he no longer has access and if they're going to have access they have to get the approved person and it also used to be that the reporters would yell out questions and would you know sort of be in the face of the president and now it's in an orderly manner in which the president gets to pick and choose hands so if you ask the question the last time that he didn't like he might not pick your raised hand this time and so if you want a story and you want to be the one to ask the question then you told the line and it doesn't look like censorship but it is I mean it ends up being self-censorship in a way because the terms of the discourse are left unmarked the discourse is presented as if it were a contextual but once one knows the context one can never be so deceived I said deceived again yes suppose for the sake of argument one wanted to address public policy and current affairs from a viewpoint not consistent with that of quote American common sense which is to say American acculturation suppose one wanted to get on the radio or television with such a viewpoint on a regular basis what would one as a practical matter have to do I would say that step one would be leave the United States almost yeah I mean is that there's not a whole lot of venues left there I mean they exist but there's so much competition for them that once again you end up having to fulfill somebody's idea of what is correct alternative media and what is not so even the alternative media because it's so underfunded and has so few venues in the United States becomes highly competitive and therefore self censoring moreover the competition is limited to those who are involved in the media already so few entrants into the less than conformist side of it into the more than conformist side of it are not permitted there are a few people out there who are complaining about what's happening in the United States a few Americans in any case there are many people complaining about it but only a few Americans but the Americans who are complaining about it openly and being heard are all 75 years of age and up oh you're talking about in the media not just the media but other public venues that still exist such as they are Robert Byrd has to be over 100 years old I don't think he's over 100 but I think he might be over 70 yeah and Robert Byrd's been a wonderful voice in the midst of this but one does wonder where the younger voices are they are permitted to enter the game in the first place there's your answer yep the police state is using its phallocentric organ the corporate media to control ordinary people like you and me I think this is interesting too because it brings us to what about the people on the streets there are some huge marches going on but they're going on in the big cities as far as I can tell from the media coverage up here and the media coverage of the marches just kill me because they are not you always hear how many people showed up you hear whether or not there was violence how many arrests were made how many police were there the dispute over the amount of people but where's the message it's just labeled anti-war you know the anti-war or the peace protesters came out but there's no real discussion about what their message is and I've read some in the alternative media on the internet and the message is far more intelligent and far more complex than this little sound bite that you get and discussions over whether or not how big it was and whether or not it was peaceful enough just serve an idea and the other thing is the age thing you would think that no middle aged people were out there at all and that's absolutely untrue it's a fiction that the media has promulgated for I don't know what reason but I can guess this is far from being a children's movement or an older people's movement and it's also far from being a liberal movement I mean there are quite a few people who are out there in the streets who are not necessarily identified as liberals there are some quote-unquote conservatives who are pretty upset with this they don't feel like it's the government's position or place to be policing the world that that's the place of the united nations even if you just talk about the war it becomes complex but it also becomes complex because there's a whole lot of people who are out there in the streets who are saying why do we even have to talk about the war anyway there was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle talking about how one of the earlier peace marches that were happening before the war began was going through a neighborhood that I gathered I didn't recognize the name of the neighborhood but I gathered from the interview the interviews that they did was a predominantly African-American neighborhood and they interviewed a woman who said, oh well it's good to see black faces in this crowd and then they interviewed another person who said, who speculated that the reason that there were so few African-Americans actually going out and protesting at least in San Francisco was because there were other issues that were really important to African-Americans that were not being addressed at all anymore because this administration has used terrorism and has used Iraq to avoid a whole lot of issues and there are a considerable amount of people on the streets who were there to raise those other issues so it not only becomes complex because there are a lot of ways to look at the war but it also becomes complex because there are a lot of other issues on the table that the media is not covering at all as much as I hate to do it I can't blame W for this one this has been a theme that's been recurrent in American politics or at least to the limits of my memory which begins in the 1960s and that is that the discursive function of the US president is to set the topic for public discourse to whatever the president is talking about is what we are all going to be talking about the next day and someone who says excuse me what about this other topic is really going to get a huge groundswell behind him no matter how pertinent or insightful his selection of topic is but what you can blame W for is the topic that he's chosen and he chose this American imperialistic tone even before 9-11 I mean he was backing out of treaties and talking about how America was going to do this that or the other thing in the world in world politics he talked about right after he was fired for being ironic on television talked about how there was a moment in time that America had to immediately after 9-11 in which they could have rose to the occasion and instead they fired themselves in revenge talk and so forth this doesn't surprise me about W and it doesn't surprise me that much about America either I grew up like you did you know you were talking about since the 1960s I grew up during the Cold War and I remember very well the use of war rhetoric in order to keep people under control it's a long tradition now several generations long maybe even longer in the states to use a state of war to erode the protection of human rights I know it's beyond belief isn't it you think they learned after a while but the norm there has always been once somebody says there's a war all recourse all remedies, all legal standing is forfeit except to corporations all the sitting president has to do is pump enough war rhetoric into the public discourse and he is in a unique position to do this and people will fork over all legal standing, not just civil rights or human rights but legal standing itself without so much as a word of complaint I think you're missing an element I don't think it's just what they declare because they tried this in the 80s Reagan tried the war on drugs it didn't work and one of the reasons that I think it didn't work, you know the way that I think he intended it to work is because people were not terrified fearful of drugs, not really everybody made a joke about it and you know there were people who took it very seriously but let's face it it didn't keep you up at night scared to death and the most famous example from the propaganda campaign is the one that's been the most enthusiastically parodied this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs this is your brain on drugs with some bacon bits and a little cheese that we had left over in the fridge from last night's supper yeah it just didn't this is your brain on drugs over easy any questions? yeah can I get some toast with that, is it extra? exactly it didn't work and it didn't work because there needed to be a certain amount of fear there was fear about communism and there is fear about terrorism and that I think has made the job easier for this president the thing is if you really really are afraid of the terrorists then you would want solutions that would work and the solutions that are occurring now are not making the world safer that's the thing that bothers me the most about this I mean it isn't people say oh well you know you're talking about this and well I imagine nobody's really ever said this to me but I imagine that the counter argument is my god you know they're out to get us they hate us, they want to hurt us why wouldn't we protect ourselves I agree that people need to be protective I'm not a blanket pacifist I don't believe that war is never justified I don't believe that violence is never justified I grew up in rough areas of the world in which if you didn't know how to defend yourself you could get hurt oh sure but that's not what this is about certain social classes are a liberty to use violence certain social classes are not this is not a cowboy culture we're talking about and there is a huge difference that's an interesting you don't think it's a cowboy culture? no I think there's a lot of cowboy rhetoric but I think at bottom there's very rigid social order the Americans are not anarchists they are very class conscious so by plantation you mean feudal yes that's exactly what I mean it's all about who you are they either decide you are worthwhile or not and once they have decided which group you fall into everything you do in a rationalized or way or punished everything you do becomes one more reason why you are exactly what they said you were at the beginning and it's all rationalization after the fact it's classism in the extreme it is feudalism in the extreme I think that it belies the whole rhetoric about protection it belies the whole rhetoric about self defense it belies the whole rhetoric about liberation that's what I mean if the world needs to be a safer place which I think it does need to be a safer place the world is a scary place but I have to tell you that a lot of the people who are in control of this on both sides scare me and I think that that probably is why I think the world is is a much more dangerous place than it was two or three years ago not just because there are people in the world who want to hurt English speaking westerners but because the English speaking westerners are being ruled by people who want to fight back in ways that make it more dangerous it's a dance that's going on and I'm not seeing a lot of sanity I think that's because the English speaking westerners some of them anyway have decided that rather than cleaning out the mess they made historically they decided to heck with it we're just going to ride the horse until it drops you say the planet is being depleted fine we'll deplete it faster you say that people are being oppressed in all parts of the world fine we'll oppress them more they just don't want to clean up after themselves they've decided they aren't going to clean up after themselves so in a way it's a most pain avoidance you could say that or they might really think the situation is hopeless they've decided that oh well do what they did with the budget run up the credit card bell and send it to the grandkids you have been listening to First Person Plural because how people get along with each other still matters First Person Plural is a show created for community radio by Carl Wilkerson and Dr. Patty Thomas to examine social and organizational issues music for First Person Plural is performed composed and produced by Carl Wilkerson except where noted for more information about First Person Plural Dr. Patty Thomas or Carl Wilkerson visit our website www.culturalconstructioncompany.com or email us at fpp at culturalconstructioncompany.com