America the Stony-Hearted

America the stony-hearted

It's a moral revolution. Conservatives are pushing aside compassion and transforming the nation's values, ideals and aspirations.

By Neal Gabler
May 22, 2011

When the political history of the last 30 years is written, scholars will no doubt describe a rightward revolution that jolted this country out of its embrace of New Deal, big-government progressivism and into a love affair with small-government conservatism. But this change, significant as it is, has been undergirded by a less apparent but no less monumental revolution that has transformed the nation's values, ideals and aspirations. Over those same 30 years, we have become a different country morally from what we were.

The United States has always had a complex national moral system. On the one hand, there is the Puritan-inflected America of rugged individualism, hard work, self-reliance and personal responsibility in which you reap what you sow, God helps those who help themselves, and our highest obligation is to live righteously. These precepts run from Cotton Mather to Ralph Waldo Emerson to Billy Graham.

On the other hand, there is also an America of community, common cause, charity and collective responsibility. In this America, salvation comes from good works, compassion is among the greatest of virtues, and our highest obligation is to help others. These precepts run from Walt Whitman to the late 19th century Social Gospel movement to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

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But over the last 30 years or so, something has happened to reshape the country's moral geography. Everyone knows about the rise of Moral Majority-style Christian evangelicals as a potent force in right-wing politics. It injected a certain aggressive moralism into our political discourse and led to campaigns against abortion rights, homosexual rights, sexual freedom and other issues perceived as and then framed as moral matters. As a result, our politics became "moralized"; they were transformed into a contest of one set of values pitted against another.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gabler-morality-20110522,0,5036075.story

That Dirty Word, "Liberal."

By Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Miami Herald May 19, 2010

Maybe you remember Pavlov.

For those who slept through Psych 101, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was a Russian physiologist famous for his research into what came to be called the conditioned reflex. Pavlov taught a hungry dog to associate the ringing of a bell with the sight of food. After awhile, that sound would cause the dog to salivate even when there was no food in sight.

Pavlov proved an animal could be trained to respond automatically to a given stimulus. American Spectator is about to prove it again.

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Conservative pols and pundits have done an astonishing job of rendering that word a synonym for a kind of birth defect that leaves one effete and nonsensical, even as they made "conservative" interchangeable with the healthy patriotism of the common folk. If you didn't know better, you'd never know liberals fought to end segregation and child labor — or that conservatives opposed them.

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The byproduct is also evident in American political discourse, which increasingly takes place in alternate realities, spewing forth great clouds of words that say nothing. But if these are hard times for independent thinkers and political discourse, they are boom times for politicians, pundits -- and publishers -- who have mastered the simple-minded Pavlovian politi-speak of the day: conservative, good; liberal, evil. It's telling that even liberals don't use the word liberal any more.

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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/09/93561/commentary-that-dirty-word-liberal.html#ixzz1NDtFIXbK

Murdoch knows best

Rupert Murdoch buys Pat Robertson's fundamentalist family cable network, uniting Bart Simpson with John-Boy Walton at last.

BY JAMES SUROWIECKI
Salon

Rupert murdoch had a tough month of May. His dream of direct-broadcast satellite-TV domination over America -- an odd dream, to be sure -- was crushed. His movie studio announced that the $200 million "Titanic" wouldn't be appearing this summer. And people made fun of his improbable $350 million bid to acquire the Los Angeles Dodgers. But in typical Murdoch fashion, he went shopping, and now everything seems to be better again.

The latest outlet for Murdoch's ambitions could not, on the surface, be more improbable: International Family Entertainment, the cable network founded by fundamentalist Pat Robertson. Murdoch's company, News Corp., bought IFE last Wednesday for $1.9 billion. IFE owns the Family Channel, home to Robertson's own "The 700 Club." Oh, and "Hawaii Five-O" re-runs.

Given Murdoch's record as a purveyor of tabloid television and of vaguely titillating sexual content, News Corp. and IFE may seem to be a strange match. (Murdoch, after all, is the man who introduced the Page Three girls to Britain and "Studs" to the U.S.) From a business point of view, though, there's a certain logic behind Murdoch's decision to acquire IFE. News Corp. wants to break Disney's tight grip on the market for children's and family entertainment, and the Family Channel will provide an outlet for all the programming created by Fox Kids Worldwide. In a larger sense, the fact that the Family Channel is on nearly every cable system in America -- could the audience for old episodes of "The Waltons" and "Rescue 911" really be that large? -- means that Murdoch won't have to beg cable companies to air his shows, as he's had to do for Fox's 24-hour news channel. And since Murdoch has given up on his satellite-TV hopes, having his own cable channel has become even more crucial. Bart Simpson and John-Boy, together at last.

More than that, though, Robertson's brand of cultural conservatism and Murdoch's aren't so very different. Murdoch's hostility to feminism and gay rights, while not perhaps on par with Robertson's equation of feminists with satanic witches, is well-established. His tabloid newspapers mine the same veins of cultural conservatism and hostility to modernity that Robertson's preaching does. And even the sleazy programs on Fox are generally self-conscious about their sleaziness and rather open about the fact that respectable people would never act the way their characters do. (Even if respectable people like to watch people act that way.) Fox, you might say, is the dark side of the Family Channel. But both roam the same cultural terrain.

Still it's probably a mistake to analyze the particular strategy behind any of Murdoch's acquisitions too closely because the most fundamental truth about him is that he is a creature of enormous appetite. Since the early 1970s, Murdoch has bought and sold (and in some cases bought again) Elle, the Star, Metromedia, Fox, the London Times, the New York Post, the Daily Racing Form, the Village Voice, TV Guide, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Boston Herald and New York magazine. He started Mirabella and Premiere. He started a paper in the former East Germany called Super! which spent most of its time attacking the "Wessies" for their decadent and greedy ways. (It folded.) Hell, for that matter, he brought Lotto to New York state, partnering with a company called Mathematica Inc. to win the operating concession in 1977. If it's printed or televised, Murdoch has probably tried to buy it. In that sense, IFE is just the latest course in his endless media banquet.

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http://www.salon.com/june97/media/media970619.html