|
|
Appendix B |
|
SOURCE: Telephone interview with The Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison. DATE: August 6, 2004 TEXT: MORRISON: Well, first of all we need to do something about defining journalism. And I think that has been a problem in the 1990s. MARRIOTT: How would you define journalism traditionally? MORRISON: Well, traditional journalism, as I think I.F. Stone, um, said something like, “yes there’s freedom of the press as long as you have a press.” That obviously has changed. Pretty much anyone with a computer can call himself a journalist. As we have seen people with blogging websites and their own websites. And in consequence there has been a broadening and in some sense a coarsening of the definition of a journalist. Traditionally a journalist is someone who wrote for a recognized journalistic organization whose only goal, ideally, was putting out information. It was supported by advertising. That at least has not changed. And also was not there, in recent times in this country, certainly since Watergate and probably since WWII, the idea of objectivity has come in. It wasn’t there to grind any particular axe. Now you have with the computers and the internet, people define themselves as journalists and these are people whom I do not consider journalists because they have not done the journalistic equivalent of working in the minors in baseball. They haven’t covered fires. They haven’t written obituaries. They haven’t had to interview political figures or gone to murder trials or done profiles of people of some accomplishment. And all of those things make you qualified to put forward opinion and judgement and tell you how to find out facts and how to verify them and cross check. The modern blogging website-type journalist generally does not have that, but still calls himself a journalist. You have Mummia, the death row prisoner in Pennsylvania, who calls himself a journalist because he writes from death row. So the definition has broadened and cheapened somewhat. And I think because of the nature of some of the practices of some of these new people, the perception of journalists has both broadened and cheapened somewhat. Mainstream journalists are certainly having to deal with that. That having been said, you also see in the 1990s the kind of trivializing of the phrase of the 1960s that the personal is political. What it meant in the 1960s is that you couldn’t beat your wife at home and then go vote in Congress to throw wife beaters in jail. What we have now done is to obsess on the idea of the personal as political. That everybody knows about the Clinton haircut on the runway at the airport, but nobody could tell you about his social security policies. They know about Bush cutting brush in Texas, but they can’t tell you that the ranch was bought just before he started running for president. They can’t tell you about the cost of the Iraqi war. Things like that. And to some extent I think that it had its roots in kind of the People magazine phenomenon. I think People magazine began publishing in 75 thereabouts. And everything now of even substitive discourse can be and often is reduced to these personal, which is to say trivial, subjects, topics, facts. MARRIOTT: Do you think People magazine set a precedent with gossip being… MORRISON: Well, it kind of celebritized everything. And it certainly wasn’t gossip in the sense of the old 50s Tapler(?) and Confidential type of magazine. But it showed you the real person. Well, to some extent I think that’s a good idea, but now we have a circumstance where the real person, if you want to call it that, has obscured the real politician. The real policy. The real governance. And so I think that because people are fascinated by this, like Gresham’s law of money as bad money drives out good, bad journalism, trivial journalism, can drive out substative journalism. MARRIOTT: How do you feel about larger media hiring people who aren’t really qualified journalists. Ann Coulter is the first name that comes to mind. MORRISON: Well, she’s not a journalist. There are people who are talking heads. Who are opinion-shapers. But I don’t think I could trust her to send her to go cover a fire. She wouldn’t know what to do. Unless she could politicize the fire. But these people, because television is the medium that it is, these people rub two sticks together and make a fire. In a way, they crowd out the viewer. They make the opinion for the viewer. Where as real journalism leaves room for the viewer, the listener or the reader to come to some conclusion. This new type of commentary is very hot, is very overheated, and it leaves really no room for debate or discussion in the minds of the people who are either watching or listening to what’s going on. It does the deciding and the thinking for them. MARRIOTT: Would you say in a lot of the large media… MORRISON: How are you using the word media. MARRIOTT: Like the nightly news… MORRISON: You mean the mainstream? MARRIOTT: Yes. The mainstream news outlets. The big three and Fox. Austin-American Statesman, L.A. Times. Would you say they give the impression of objectivity when there isn’t much objectivity these days as say there was in 1960? MORRISON: I think, well, in 1960, too understand that part of the genesis of this kind of journalism, which I think has gone too far, this personal or trivial journalism, is the fact that in 1960, we weren’t writing about people’s real lives. If you look at the newspapers of that era, the people who were in print and were quoted were male, white, power figures. They did not compose the entire world. If you wrote about some other people that might’ve been criminals, this is an era where even reporters and cops referred to black on black crime as misdemeanor murder. And so you didn’t see real lives and real thoughts of people and in that journalism of that era failed. But I think we’ve gone so far the other direction that we’re at risk of crowding out the fact that there are substitive things going on in the world. That a column not just about, you know, what movies you see and what clothes people wear and how they decorate their apartments and who they date. So the mainstream media, the established media, have in some senses tried to react by making the distinction, and rightly so, that they are the people who have checks and balances. Who have fact checkers. Who double-check their material. Who source it. As opposed to the opinion people who just slingshot stuff out there. And maybe they’re right and maybe they’re not. So that’s one consequence. You have people like Jason Blair who make that harder. But for every Jason Blair there are no doubt a dozen bloggers, website people out there who are consistently careless with their facts, who are not called on it, and who are not held to be at fault because of it. The other problem is that with the rise of um. We don’t have here as people do in England the daily tabloid. The tabloid here is generally electronic. It’s talk trash television. It’s talk trash radio. We don’t have it in print in that fashion. We do have the supermarket tabloids. And with the big celebrity trials say of the 1990s like O.J. Simpson, you had those publications breaking news and forcing other mainstream publications to try to catch up. The distinction, and nobody in the public made it clear, or understood it, because my mainstream media types did not point it out often, was that these people pay for information, which we will not do because we think it colors the objectivity and whether people will or will not make things up in order to get money by making a story juicier. Americans, because they don’t seem to know this, don’t seem to care and look upon The National Enquirer as just a different form of The New York Times with better color pictures perhaps. I think that’s dangerous, that it enhances certainly The National Enquirer, it’s dangerous for The New York Times. [It] ultimately becomes dangerous, if you think a democracy is dependent on a flow of reliable information, if that information isn’t available or if people think all sources of information are tainted because some of them are so obviously so careless and reckless. MARRIOTT: Would you say the established press has been influenced and has had to change their practice in recent years by the rise in popularity of information entertainment? MORRISON: I think there is certainly not so much in the news sections but as in the film coverage or things like that, I think there’s a lot more space. And you look at the television networks, and this is beyond doubt, a lot more space is devoted to things like the O.J. Simpson trial whose ultimate impact on the country is comparatively insignificant rather than to things like weapons control talks or medical research issues that aren’t particularly glamorous. And moreover because television has become more and more picture driven as the length of broadcasts became longer on networks, as 24-hour television took over. If you’ve got a picture-driven story, that again, Gresham’s law is going to drive out a more substitive, non-photo story. In local news here in Los Angeles, you may see the case that if there’s a spectacular-looking garage fire, or a police chase on a freeway, they’re going to bump political stories that are just talking head stories about changes in tax structure for city homeowners. Those stories are not going to get on the air or are going to get significantly reduced so they can put on pictures of someone driving down the freeway with a police car behind him. It is utterly ridiculous and it does not serve the interest of democracy and I’m waiting for the day that the Federal Communications Commission says, “Hey look! We’re holding up your license as a television station or a radio station because whatever this crap is you put on the air, it isn’t news.” MARRIOTT: Do you ever see that happening? MORRISON: I would like to see the FCC do some more license enforcement on this because political content in local television, and to some extent networks, when in non-political years is virtually non-existent. It gets less time by far than sports. Certainly than weather when there’s no real weather to report in Los Angeles, they still insist on putting a weatherman on the air. And so, you figure here are people who have only one source of public information once they get out of school that they’re going to share with other members of a democracy. And instead of seeing issues that affect the democracy, they get two and a half minutes of the fact that some latest starlet is getting a star on the Hollywood walk of fame or putting her hands in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. If you’re not going to vote about that, if it’s not going to influence the kind of education your children are going to get, it’s not going to govern whether or not the transportation systems get improved, but because it gets ratings, that’s what happens. MARRIOTT: What do you think of the current case of Howard Stern? With Clear Channel dropping him from ten stations after he’s become critical of Bush? And also about the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which led to now there’s six big conglomerates who own pretty much… MORRISON: Well, let’s take the second question first. When the FCC moved forward on media consolidation last year, it was inundated with what I gathered to be 200 to 500,000 letters and communications from Americans saying, “Don’t do this.” In the early 1960s, when there were maybe three papers in Los Angeles, The Los Angeles Times owned television station channel 11, KTTV. The call letters were K Times Television. The L.A. Times was ordered to sell that television station because it constituted, to the mind of the federal government then, a kind of monopoly even though there were more newspapers in Los Angeles. Now that there is one chief newspaper in Los Angeles, The L.A. Times is owned by Tribune, which also owns channel 5 which is the leading television station here. Both news radio channels are owned by the same broadcasting company. And so all the interests of diversity of voices, as the country has gotten more diverse, have become more unified. And so we see fewer and fewer owners with more and more reach. In fact, Rupert Murdoch became a United States citizen chiefly so he could own more television stations. MARRIOTT: I don’t think he would have to do that at this point in time. MORRISON: Well, they still limit on, the law limits, ownership of certain percentages of broadcast outlets to Americans. And if you are not an American, you hit a ceiling on that. And in fact, I wrote a rather snotty column about it when Murdoch became a citizen. Thinking of all the people who crossed the desert here so they can earn $50 a day instead of $10 a day where they come from and very tongue-in-cheek refer to Rupert Murdoch’s flight from the tyranny of Australia. MARRIOTT: After Clear Channel dropped Howard Stern, what do you think about the FCC raising the amount it can fine a station and now that it can fine per indecency instead of per broadcast? MORRISON: Well, Clear Channel is also very conservative. It also, I think, owns Billboard franchises. And this is worth your looking into a little further. Who owns Clear Channel and I believe one of its executive officers is close to the Bush campaign and the Bush family. So there may have been some kind of op-priory(?) agenda already. They also carry Limbaugh, etc. So you really ought to look into that. And I am not sure whether the politicizing of Stern’s show came before or after the fines and his dumping from Clear Channel. That too you would have to check. But Howard Stern clearly mobilizes the young testosterone crowd to do things. Now, certainly after this, he’s mobilizing them to vote against Bush. Whether that was the case before? I tended to think of him as virtually apolitical. He’s certainly not a journalist and to his credit I don’t think he’s ever claimed to be. Unlike other people who say they’re journalists when it suits them and then retreat into the shell of commentary when they don’t want to be held accountable for being factual. Certainly Rush Limbaugh is among those who says, “I’m an entertainer,” when he is found to be stretching the facts beyond their limits, but purports to put out journalistic quality information at the same time. MARRIOTT: What’s your opinion on Armed Forces Radio carrying the Limbaugh show but not the Stern show? MORRISON: Well, I think they also carry NPR. So the question is not carrying the Stern show so much as carrying things like Air America, or Amy Goodman’s show Democracy Now, where you’ve got political content versus political content not political content versus the radio equivalent of Penthouse magazine. MARRIOTT: Do you think things that are very overtly infotainment, things like The Daily Show and Politically Incorrect, are necessarily dangerous for influencing people’s opinions? MORRISON: Actually, no. I think those are probably more useful, insofar as so many people say they get their information exclusively from television. That sometimes these places, in trying to make a joke or an entertaining point, put on bits of information that you may not find otherwise. Certainly the people who only watch television may not find otherwise. There are so many people, certainly in the younger demographic, who say they get their news from comedians, which I find dismaying but it means that there’s some heft, there’s some weightier substance to the comedy that’s coming out. Unfortunately, what it does in the long run is make fun of all politics of all public policy, which corrodes the sense that any of this stuff really matters. And unfortunately, it does matter. If you don’t take it seriously in the long run, it’s going to get away from you. MARRIOTT: What would you say about Christopher Hitchens who just had a very nasty article come out dismantling Fahrenheit 9/11? Would you qualify 9/11 as infotainment as well? MORRISON: No. I would qualify it as political – polemics. And polemics in a good sense. Hitchens is a polemicist. These are people who take factual material and use it to make a point. I think that, of course, Hitchens is a journalist. He does his research. I don’t know that Michael Moore would ever call himself a journalist. He’s not responsible for the categories of film definition that has put his in the category of a documentary. What you were asking – basic question – whether anything that is put on film becomes entertainment? And I think that’s a larger question that neither of us is prepared to address right now. When Woodrow Wilson first saw Birth of a Nation, a film whose historical validity has certainly been attacked, he said, “It’s like writing history with lightening.” So he understood the power of it. But the very power of it is what obliterates, in some sense, its accountability. MARRIOTT: Have you seen a correlation between a change in journalism and changes in political campaigning over the last decade and a half? MORRISON: Ever since the Berlin Wall came down, it seems to me that Americans, particularly the American political right, had been searching for a new enemy. And they found it within. They won the Cold War. We won the Cold War. The West. And so started fighting the culture war. And in the culture war, the other guy is the bad guy. And we saw the Clinton business, the draft dodging; were the 60s, in your opinion, a part of American history that opened up the culture, that made it creative, that made it inclusive, that made it inventive? Or was it about America going off the rails? And I think that campaigning, virtually every campaign you have seen since then, has come down to that kind of definition. It all seems to be having something to do with elements of the 1960s. Are women uppity? Are blacks too powerful and out of line? Do we now have a relativity of values, that there’s no such thing as good or bad? You see everything in a political context, in some sense, I think it comes down to a reaction to that. And that makes it very mean. There’s nothing nastier or bloodier, as we know the world over from our own history too, than a civil war. And this is an extension of a kind of civil war. MARRIOTT: Would you say this makes it more difficult for more leftist politicians to campaign or would you say that just makes them resort to cutthroat tactics as well? MORRISON: I think to some extent it’s. What the left learned, certainly out of Vietnam, you attack the war not the warriors. Their big mistake was being seen as anti-soldier and I think that they learned from that. The problem is now that the right has kind of picked up on that tactic. That you go after the individual. That you stage a personal attack, like John Kerry’s wife, does she have a funny accent. Is he a foreigner. George Soros is a foreigner. Of course, so is Arnold Schwarzenegger and I don’t hear a lot of criticism on that score. What the liberals were doing in the 60s, I think the conservatives are now doing in the 90s and the turn of the century. MARRIOTT: Would you say the neoconservatives, or the entire conservative group? MORRISON: Well, it’s done to a different degree and with a different degree of skill in much of the party. You see people like John McCain, who was himself a victim of that in the 2000 primaries, finds it reprehensible. Who also wants campaign reform to address some of these issues. But then you see the Karl Rove on the other side whose tactic in the year 2000 was not to counter Al Gore on the issues, which is what a campaign should be about, but to mock and ridicule him. And this seems to be the plan to go after John Kerry as well. And so you have a public that has been flighting around saying, “Oh, no we don’t like negative campaigning,” but of course that’s so much of what they base their decisions on. And to some extent they say, negative campaigning is anything that mentions the other guy. Well, you can’t run a campaign without saying, “My policies are different from the other guy’s and better.” So it’s kind of mushed up a lot of politics, but it has made it extremely nasty and extremely personal and very much, in some cases, off point. MARRIOTT: How would you say the Republican candidate running up to the 2000 elections was aided by the press as opposed to say Al Gore being called a liar for making statements like, “I helped invent the internet…” MORRISON: But he never said that. He helped fund research and so did other people in Congress who voted for it. What happened is the campaign, the Republican campaign, extrapolated that because we have to rely on bumper sticker politics because the average sound bite, The New York Times did a study of this, in 1972, I think the average sound bite for a network news coverage of a presidential candidate was something like 48 seconds and by 1992 that was down to 9 seconds. So you don’t know what the chicken and egg relationship is, but campaign managers understand they have to simplify, simplify, simplify and in doing so you lose truth. Because truth is in the details. And if you can extrapolate from Al Gore saying, “I led the fight for funding to underwrite the development of research of the Arpanet, which led to the internet,” and you reduce that to, “I invented the internet,” which is the nature of politics. The problem is the candidate, and to a certain extent the press, have to spend time countering that. Somebody throws out that claim and Al Gore has to say, “Well, no. This is what I said.” Instead of getting to other issues. So the very nature of reduction, just like journalism itself, a headline is not the whole story. And even the whole story is not the whole story. People write to me and say, “Well, your column didn’t say this. And your column didn’t say that.” And I say, “Look. I write a column. I write 800 words. I don’t write the Encyclopedia Britannica. I am trying to give a glimpse and an idea from which you as a citizen are responsible for finding out more.” MARRIOTT: My original question was do you think possibly Bush was aided with the attacks on Gore in the mainstream presses? MORRISON: Again, I wouldn’t call them attacks. I would say that the Bush campaign set an agenda, which succeeded in some extent in distracting the mainstream press. And we’re talking about THE mainstream press. You’ve only got so much space. You’ve only got so many reporters. And if you send one or two reporters out running down the truth of the love canal or the internet thing, that’s time and manpower you’re not spending on other elements of the campaign. And in that, it did succeeded in making him look ridiculous because the follow up never has as much impact as the original story. Just as a correction never has the impact of the original. Especially now with this echo chamber of internet and talk radio, which didn’t track this stuff down, which took it at face value. I think it was very destructive for the Gore campaign and they were not prepared or ready to counter this effectively. Which is their failing because they should’ve known it was coming. MARRIOTT: How effective do you think the echo chamber has been in setting the news agenda for more mainstream media? MORRISON: What I think has an effect is that the quandary of mainstream journalism again is how you address this echo chamber effect. Do you dignify gossip by responding to it? This is a problem of anybody who lives in society. If your neighbors are whispering something about you, do you try to set them straight or do you just ignore because you know it’s untrue? And so this is a great quandary for mainstream journalism. You’ve got this parallel universe of faux news, the gossip that we spoke of, going on on the internet, going on with bloggers. And if it’s something you know to be not true, or you know to be distracting, do you address it? Do you have a reporter write about that? And I think we have gotten to the point where we really need to have someone who just addresses what’s out there in the either. And addresses the voracity of it. MARRIOTT: Perhaps just a segment in each paper? MORRISON: Well, yeah. And you can do it in fairly readable fashion. MARRIOTT: Call it rumor control or something? MORRISON: Yeah, rumor control. Today’s blog spot. Or something like that. But to ignore it just leads to accusations that the paper or the television or radio station in question is biased. But again, the quandary is just by addressing it do you dignify it, to give it some credibility it wouldn’t otherwise have? But this is so pervasive. I get email from a relative of mine, and all this bullshit about all the people that Clinton murdered, and the drugs he’s smuggling, and I finally just blew my top and sent back an email knocking down point by point and putting in footnotes and sources and everything else. But that’s not what this echo chamber thrives on. It doesn’t thrive on facts. It doesn’t thrive on research. It thrives on mongering. So I think at some point all of us in the mainstream press will have to say, “Look. We have to acknowledge that it’s out there. And we have to be in a position to say yes this is true or no it’s not true.” There are a couple of sites. We heard this in the 1940s and 50s, there were all these urban legends. Somebody knew somebody who had driven this car, which turns out to have been an experimental model from Ford which got 80 miles to the gallon and the didn’t know how he got it but they came back and stole it one night because it shouldn’t have left the showroom. Because Ford doesn’t want cars to get 80 miles a gallon. You know all this stuff was around as urban legend in the 30s, 40s, 50s. Once the internet was created it’s all getting recycled. And it’s all getting amplified. And there a couple sites on the internet that do this kind of cross check of urban legends. Somebody the other day emailed me and said, “My friend said that the American press is ignoring the fact that a sculptor who worked for Saddam Hussein under threat of torture made this statue out of gratitude to the Americans and donated it to them. And the American press isn’t reporting it because their so pro-liberal or whatever.” Well, you check it out and you find out that the guy did make statues for Saddam but he was paid and the Americans hired him to make a statue, paid him a lot more. He didn’t do it out of gratitude. He in fact charged a lot of money. And they melted down a statue of Saddam Hussein in order to get the bronze to build this statue. And the guy asked them to please bring the statue to his house under cover of night because he was afraid if a friend said he was working for the Americans they would kill him. But this poor man had a tool at his disposal to check the voracity of this and didn’t do it. He just didn’t know how to answer his neighbor. And so, if information is power, we are not giving people information. MARRIOTT: What would you say to the proposition, I think it was by David Brock but don’t quote me, where newspapers would go back to the condition as before the 20th century where papers were overtly biased and would argue their points openly without attempt to appear objective? MORRISON: We certainly talked about that before David Brock did. By any means this had been a subject of journalism and journalism schools for years. It’s possible. Those papers were funded in large part by political parties and certainly into the early 1960s The L.A. Times was without question a Republican newspaper. If you go back and read it, it endorsed Richard and everything Richard Nixon did. It helped to get Richard Nixon elected to the Senate. It helped get him elected to Congress. It helped to get him elected to the vice presidency and then to the presidency. But newspapers didn’t so much go liberal as they went, tried to go non-partisan. I think the right-wing, when it saw that it had lost the press immediately concluded that you can’t be in the middle you’re either for us or against us and therefore it had to be liberal. It may go back to that. Certainly the parties would be in a position to fund them, but you’ve got major corporate people like Rupert Murdoch whose political preferences are well, well known who owns newspapers, radio, television stations that can put forth his agenda. I was watching a local Fox, I think it was a Fox news channel last night, their first story on a day when they’d arrested these people for supposedly trading in shoulder held grenade launchers, their first story was about this commercial regarding John Kerry being criticised by people for being a liar about his Vietnam war experience. People who had not served with him. People who had in fact written glowing reports about him in the past who are now being funded by a friend of George Bush to put on this anti-Kerry political commercial. And that was their idea of the top news story. I would be very, very sorry if it went back to that. But at this point Americans think that every journalist has a political agenda, and that nobody is interested in discussion of information. MARRIOTT: What do you say to the argument that journalists have so many constraints on them now, in that they have to answer to editors, who answer to editors, who answer to owners, that they really don’t have the freedom to report accurately? MORRISON: When newspapers were family-owned, which so many of them were and The New York Times still is, a couple of them still are. A family in a way is monarchical in that it dictates a law. But by the same token as a financial institution a family, let’s take for example Otis Chandler of The L.A. Times when he took over in the early 60s. He could afford to say, “Look. This is my newspaper. This is my family’s newspaper. I choose to invest X million dollars to make this a better paper. The stock holders I have to answer to are chiefly my family so they can bitch and moan but they’re not starving.” When you have a corporatized media, you have to answer to stockholders. And in this country, unlike Japan, if you don’t show a profit every quarter your head is on the chopping block. And so these people are definitely are worried about their own asses. And you’ve got investors who don’t care whether you make widgets or newspapers, they want to show profit with their stock. And they’re not going to listen to some high falootin’ explanation about the First Amendment. They should. They should be investing in a newspaper because of that but that’s not why they do it. And so you get a cycle that feeds on itself, only short-term business practices in this country, which I think are destructive in any business. Coupled with the accelerated pressure from non-legitimate, non-journalistic sources let us say. Like the internet. Like this echo chamber of talk radio. That put pressure on what you produce and how much money it makes. And that’s where the argument that journalists are liberal is ridiculous as any corporation by nature is conservative. And it’s out to make the most money possible as a publicly traded company. I think there’s always conflict in a news room because what you want to get to cover the news sometimes you need to spend money, sometimes you need to piss people off. And the people above you, the corporate management people are saying, “Well, no. We have to lay off X number of people. We can’t spend X amount of money.” Since the Tribune took over The L.A. Times in the year 2000, we’ve had the most contested election in American history. We have had the Iraqi war. We have had 9/11. We had a recall. TAPE ENDS SIDE B MARRIOTT: Would you say the idea has been successfully forwarded of ‘liberal’ meaning ‘un-American’? MORRISON: Oh, sure. This goes back to the thing about the end of the Cold War, which launched the culture war, the civil war here in this country that you have to be either for us or against us. It comes out of the movies. The good guys. The bad guys. We’re not very good at subtlety in this country. And traditionally this country has been mentally distressful of anything that smacks of intellectual or really even something given to some thoughtful prolonged back and forth. People want yes and no. They want good and bad. They want up and down. And are not tolerant of any sort of intellectual, prolonged, what they would see as dithering. So I think the idea of liberal has been attached to the idea of intellectual. In the 1950s, the word egghead was attached to Adlai Stevenson because he was smart and he didn’t care who knew it. Again I don’t understand in this country if you play basketball well, we’ll pay you millions and praise you. If you start a company that makes a billion dollars worth of widgets, we’ll praise you. But God forbid you’re smarter than other people because then they say, “Oh, you’re just an elitist.” Well, some people ought to be smarter. Those are the people I want operating on me. Those are the people I want inventing my computer. And just because they’re not rich doesn’t mean they’re not doing a good job of it. And because they stop and think of things in a way you don’t, that becomes a suspicious activity in this country. MARRIOTT: I admit the first thing that came to mind when you said that was Chris Rock’s Bring the Pain. MORRISON: Well, we converse in song lyrics and advertising slogans anymore. And if anybody doesn’t do that, they’re considered. If you have a sentence with dependent clauses in it, I mean my God. Why kind of a snob are you? It’s like when I was teaching, my female students in particular. Are you a feminist. Oh, no, no, no. Well, do you believe this? Do you believe in that? Do you believe in that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you’re a feminist by definition. It wasn’t the content they were afraid of. It was the label. And because we’ve become a labelling culture commercially and politically, we’ve succeeded in driving a lot of people away from things they might want to do. They might want to sit and think. They might want to talk at length. They might want to see I’m a Republican when it comes to this but I’m a Democrat on this issue. We don’t allow people to do that anymore. MARRIOTT: Do you think the extent to which Americans bifurcate all issues, in that there are only two answers to any problem, has to do with what a religious country we are? MORRISON: I think the public arena and the political arena have forced our hands into that when in fact, when it comes to a lot of issues Americans, as I said, would not align themselves wholly with one side or the other. They all think of themselves as good. And to some extent if it’s something they feel strongly about, they’ve been led to believe, or urged to believe, that the other guy is bad. But it’s easy to think of the other guy as bad when he’s across the country. If it’s the guy next door, you think, “Yeah he doesn’t go to my church but he has a scout troop that he takes care of. You know he’s a good guy.” And so I think that Americans are willing to square the circle in their daily lives a little more than their allowed to do in the public arena. We like clarity in this country. This is a very young country. If you look at this country compared to others, we are on a historical scale like a fourteen-year-old. And fourteen-year-olds are troubled by some complexities. They’re impulsive. They want things to be right or wrong. They want things to be good or bad. They want clarity in their lives. And Americans want that too. They don’t like being troubled by some of these subtleties and complexities, but they live them out everyday. My mother and father have slightly different political viewpoints, and yet they were married. And that’s why when I see the cynicism of politics that is deliberately divisive, for example, you know it’s a presidential election year because you hear somebody come up with a flag burning amendment. Well, for Christ’s sake, how many flags have you ever burned in your life? Do know anybody who’s ever burned a flag? Yet that’s one of the things that’s thrown into the mix to prove whether you’re a real American or not. END. |
|
|