Pity the Fool
Press Action
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/cummings01112005/
By Jordy Cummings
Everybody plays the fool sometimes, as the old song goes, there’s no exception to the rules. And today the fool is Armstrong Williams. Liberal and conservative, even some leftists are up in arms, shocked, just shocked, really, that the White House pays people to push their policies. While it’s unclear how the story was broken, to those unaware of the viscitudes of the American spectacle, Williams, a Black conservative pundit with his own PR firm and currently representing Michael Jackson, was paid near a quarter million dollars to push the “No Child Left Behind” program in the Black community. Williams is an archetype, a postmodern tragedy as comedy, and a scapegoat. The real culprit here is the system itself. Who can blame a worker for maximizing his gains, and those about to bitch about “taxpayer money” can only do so if they are equally, if not more pissed off about the far more egregious wastes of taxpayer money. One assumes anyway that the money to Williams came from an RNC slush fund.
The other day I caught a few minutes of Steven Soderbergh’s DC TV series, “K Street,” featuring “real” political figures like James Carville, Dick Armey and Howard Dean, alongside actors. While aiming to be a critique, one presumes of the Hollywoodization of Washington D.C., it is complicit, indeed celebratory of the status quo, not unlike Soderbergh’s horrendous film “Traffic,” which included every WASP bourgeois’s racist fantasy of his cute little daughter getting turned out to coke by a Jew, and then raped by a needle-toting Black man, along with something that no self-respecting “indy” filmmaker should do, give prominent roles to the likes of Orrin Hatch.
This can be contrasted with another series that starred “real” political figures, Garry Trudeau and Robert Altman’s 1988 mini-series and its recent television sequel, respectively “Tanner 88” and “Tanner on Tanner” in which a progressive Democrat, who wants Ralph Nader as his attorney general attempts to fit into the society of the spectacle, but his Mr. Smith-like good nature prevents him from doing so. Many political figures, mostly on the left, have parts—Nader has a small but important acting role, as does Jesse Jackson, who the white progressive Tanner, played by Altman regular Michael Murphy realizes he is being set up to destroy. Implicit in this, unlike with Soderbergh, is a specific and radical critique of corporate control of the political process and with it, turning Washington into a Hollywood like spectacle.
This is why I’m not gonna get tremendously pissed off about Armstrong Williams, whose main job was working with Rod “Teachers unions are terrorists” Paige to push the “No Child Left Behnd” act—partial privatization—in the Black community. Since Kennedy stole the election from Nixon, the techniques of PR, of advertising and manipulation and propaganda have been the archetypal vehicles for political communication. As the “liberal” theologian and master cynic Reinhold Neibuhr wrote at the time, the public needs “necessary illusions.” So it goes, creating a tertiary industry of political PR hacks like King David Gergen, and in turn, like with other government related industry, the privatization of propaganda, as shown in Williams’ case.
Those who actually get caught are scapegoated, and it seems quite convenient to scapegoat a relatively untalented Black man, as opposed to say, Judy Miller. So the guy got paid to be a propagandist for a relatively minor transgression, manufacturing a little consent for partial privatization. In fact, after telling a Nation reporter that “this happens al the times...there are others” (Nation online 1/10/05) one assumes that before he does more damage (though he certainly must be getting well paid as Michael Jackson’s spokesman) a Black man like Williams will be hung out to dry like John Rambo or Joseph Wilson, by the White House and conservative pundit community, fearful that one of their own will soon be found out to be a paid agent of Rove.
White House spokesmen Scott Mcllellan was startlingly artful and in fact honest, if one grasps the inner logic of his statements: “Questions have been raised about that arrangement, it ought to be looked into, and there are ways to look into matters of that nature....The government certainly has a responsibility to help when it comes to providing accurate information and helping to adhere to that principle....There are also questions about whether or not this commentator should have been disclosing the information publicly” (see AP story or White house transcript)
In other words, there’s nothing wrong, in the eyes of the White House with paying PR hacks to push their programs covertly, as long as they are pushed honestly. McLellan also seems to be saying the press shouldn’t be reporting on this, except Fox News (in another line he uses Fox News’ slogan “fair and balanced") perhaps where we have tons of sympathizers. Finally, he subtly threatened any other propagandists to keep their mouths shut. Yet Williams, a PR man before a political hustler has moved onto other business, and should be forced to name names, in fact, it would probably be a rewarding experience for him.
I was mostly unfamiliar with Armstrong Williams upon the breaking of this pseudo-scandal, except having seen him a few times on Phil Donahue’s brief, cancelled due to McCarthyism and sometimes excellent MSNBC show, which FAIR founder Jeff Cohen produced and later stated that they were forced by network brass to have guests like Williams, lest Donahue dominate the proceedings with his salaciously radical views.
Williams struck me as a genuinely mediocre man, such a transparent spin doctor that often Donahue was actually able to intimidate him with actual information. Before the Iraq war, he was reduced to stating that he supports the war “because I support our president,” the fallback position for an intelligent PR man on the ropes, not unlike Wall Street executives who when asked about Elliot Spitzer simply say “great American,” and leave it at that. Williams’ body language betrayed his seeming patriotism, perhaps, one assumes, he realizes he was wrong. I was reminded of an old piece by pre-911 Christopher Hitchens in which he notes how uncomfortable Alan Keyes seemed to look when arguing, back in the eighties, with Hitchens on television, that in Keyes’ words, “Nelson Mandela is a terrorist.”
Compare this to other right wing hacks. Take Daniel Pipes, who gets a government paycheck as an appointee at the US institute for Peace, a government think tank. Pipes, as anyone knows, is the most prominent and visceral racist in American public life since George Wallace. Pipes may not be making a quarter million from the government, but since they, according to Juan Cole “tacitly approve” of his Campus Watch/gloating about public support for “detention"/Anton Lavey mannerisms, he surely is raking in that kind of money through his being pushed by a government, not unlike David Horowitz and other fascists, most egregiously Michelle Malkin.
Malkin threatened in an e-mail to sue me for describing her, in a Press Action piece, as in favor of “concentration camps,” pointing out that on the back of her book—which is titled “In Defense of Internment”—she says that not all Muslims should be “rounded up.” Sorry, babe. A perusal of her hilarious weblog (michellemalkin.com) gives the humorous notion that she is a very slick political prostitute, approving of a White House decision to ban Kid Rock from performing at the Bush inaugural, since he has lyrics about oral sex, which good moral Americans disapprove of, while affecting the Ann Coulter “right wing sexpot” look. The blowjob as Satanic ritual, with Clinton as Baphomet, plays a great role in the right wing imagination.
Take Judy Miller, for a more egregious example. With a NY Times star reporter salary, she didn’t need government ducats, but she clearly was—and this is most disturbing—a voluntary propagandist for the murder of Iraq. As the chips clear, and the NY Times even apologized for its shoddy pre-war Iraq coverage, and Miller being the stove-piper of Chalabi’s WMD bullshit, Miller is still a front page reporter at the Times, even while being objectively complicit in dishonesty as well as the campaign to discredit Joseph Wilson and put his undercover CIA operative wife in harm’s way. Miller, who one assumes is one of the people that Allen Dulles was referring to when he called the press as the “great wurlitzer” (Wurlitzer being a brand of piano), interestingly had the exact same nonsensical “oil for food” scandal story in both Sunday and Monday’s New York Times. As Alexander Cockburn put it quite some time before everyone else was on her case, Iraq was “Judy Miller’s war.”
Outside of warmaking areas, the spin process is privatized in a manner as well. Take the entire manner in which much of the mass media, particularly since 9-11, but since the advent of mass media, reports government decisions. Take the term “Death Tax” for “estate tax” which was introduced by George H. W. Bush’s team, and is now used interchangeably by reporters. As many historians and others have pointed out, corporate propagandists for free market policies have been trained and sold to the TV networks since the early seventies, when Sam Huntington wrote about there being a “Crisis of Democracy” in America, fearing the multitude of social movements that were achieving mainstream status, not just antiwar and civil rights, but environmentalism and Nader’s PIRG movement.
Armstrong Williams is, while it may strike some as offensive, simply a worker, and a creative one at that. He has no control over this system, and as a Black man, most ofay folks with not half his wealth wouldn’t trade places with him, as Chris Rock reminds us. One would not be entirely speculative if the fact that Bush failed in his projected goal of gaining more of the Black vote, and probably (and rightfully) sees Black America as the folks most uniformly opposed to his policies at home and abroad. So it was time to hang the n----r out to dry. Rove probably had a few laughs over Scotch and eggies about Williams. I pity the fool.
Jordy Cummings, editor of Pure Polemics, lives in Toronto and can be reached at yorgos33ca@yahoo.ca.