By George Sibley
There’s a certain kind of a high school punk you probably all remember – the guys (or girls) who were always picking fights – between other people. They would exploit misunderstandings, momentary irritations, whatever, egging a couple people into making a big deal out of nothing; then – “Let’s you and him fight it out,” was the line. They took as a kind of profane obligation the spreading of chaos and violence in the world around them.
As one who spends quite a bit of time in the often futile pursuit of actual information from the mainstream media (MSM), I begin to realize that some of those punks never grew out of that; they just went into the “communications” field.
Here is an example from the good gray lady, The New York Times, June 3, 2011, under the headline: “Between Young and Old, a Collision.” The story was set up as prime punk media: let’s you old farts and you young studs fight it out. Over, uh, well, the future of the nation, or the economy or whatever.
The story was set in Colorado’s own Lakewood in Jefferson County, described as a “rapidly aging suburb of Denver.” Its focus was what the writer claimed to be “a collision of interests, and perhaps even more crucial, of generation. On one side are younger voters who are championing cuts in spending; on the other, older ones who want to retain the services they counted on getting when they retired.”
The writer may have had no control over the headline, but he must have written the lead paragraph cited above that introduced the idea of a “collision … of generations.” So one wonders why the story that followed contained not a whit of support for the implied allegation that “the younger voters” really want to duke it out with “the older ones,” presumably over spending on things like Social Security and Medicare. The story contained not a single interview or quote with any person younger than 56, nor a spokesperson for any group representative of “the young,” nor even the results of a poll showing that Colorado is breeding a generational war over public spending for seniors.
I have no doubt that many “young voters,” at this point do want to see spending cut, perhaps dramatically, at the national level – especially after the massive bipartisan tsunami of top-down support for same. And probably some of them are philosophically inclined to believe that providing minimal old-age security for the parent generation is part of the problem.
But wait a minute! In getting into that argument, I’m missing my own point. The point here is not to critique a poor piece of journalism that provides no evidence to support its head-and-lead thesis. The question I want to raise is this: Is this alleged “generational collision” truly a major front-page news story (especially if it is not documented)? Or might it be a comparatively minor conflict that the journalist – and the newspaper that prints the story – is trying to pump up to be a story?
It is evident that the MSM is hard at work these days trying to set up the issue agenda for a presidential election that is a year and a half in the future. These are the concerns and questions you are going to want your presidential candidate to address – correct? But are the media playing square with us? Or, are they sending out the media punks to stir up a lot of diversionary conflicts of the “let’s you and him fight” variety?
There are other examples. Mercifully, the story above did not take another tack that has been observable in the MSM recently, that is, the “greedy geezers” story. (The story in question did, in fact, treat the two or three seniors interviewed and their troubles with consideration and sympathy; it might have been better headlined, “No kidding: many older Americans are struggling.”) But seniors in general have, over the past year or so, been targeted by the “let’s you and him fight” media punks. The “greedy geezers” tactic tries to paint the whole AARP generation as a selfish faction looking out for its own interests and to hell with the workers who are supporting it all. After all, “I got mine, Jack.”
Again – there are undoubtedly some geezers who are scamming the system, double- and triple-dipping, cheating on what means-testing there is. But there are also a lot of geezers who are staying right where they planted themselves, and who are trying – freed up from the subtler tyrannies of job and family – to tackle some major community problems they’ve been living with all their productive lives. The point again, are the “greedy geezers” such a huge faction that we need to make them a campaign focus?
There’s also the effort to paint all unionized public employees, along with unionized service employees, as greed-heads out to squeeze the system into bankruptcy. The Upper Midwest has been especially aggressive in this. Republican administrations in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan have worked hard to demonize the unions of – teachers, janitors, policemen and firemen – as selfish factions out to bankrupt their states for personal gain. And the MSM has dutifully reported it all as though “official sources” somehow rendered further critical analysis superfluous. Only an occasional columnist in the MSM has questioned this aggressive effort, or at least pointed out the desirability of a more discriminating brush for the tarring. But on the front page and the 10:00 news, the undermining and demonization of public service unions goes on.
The point here, again, is not to chew over whatever kernels of truth might exist in these MSM efforts to identify the cultural conflicts that the election will be about. The first question to ask is whether they are really identifying the right conflicts. Is stirring up the young people against the old people really going to resolve any of our substantial economic dilemmas? Or, turning our teachers and janitors and public-safety people into cultural villains?
A second question to ask quickly, before getting hung up in economic analysis on that question, is – who benefits by default if we let those be the issues of the campaign? Who or what will be off the hook if “you and him” are getting into it over pension plans and senior “entitlements”? Well, one faction that gets off easy are the individuals and corporations (super individuals) that own the MSM – print, television, radio (and closing in on the Internet). These happen to be the same individuals and corporations that basically own the majority of the wealth of the nation. If we are kept busy enough watching a war between the young and the old over Social Security and Medicare, then we will not be spending that time asking candidates if they are going to get the wealthy owners of America to pay their fair share in maintaining the public infrastructure that enables their wealth.
Another – closely related – entity that gets off the hook is Dwight Eisenhower’s infamous “military-industrial complex,” now probably more accurately the military-industrial-governmental complex. (Which of course is all pretty much wholly owned by the aforementioned wealthy class.) The economic benefits of not fighting three or four foreign wars (that cannot be won) simultaneously ought to be obvious to even the most obtuse – yet this issue is not really even on the table at this point. (I include the “war on drugs” as a foreign war, at least partially – and every bit as unwinnable as the wars on terror.)
If you start adding up the nickels and dimes that could be squeezed out of Medicare and our remaining social spending programs without a thoroughly heartless abandonment of any concept of “the general welfare” and human decency, then match that against the money that would become available if we stopped sending so much to Middle East and south-of-the-border wars, and added in the revenue from a reasonably progressive income tax, it becomes very clear how we could best resolve our national fiscal problems.
But we are not going to hear about those suggestions for equity and decency from the MSM because the MSM is a wholly owned subsidiary of the individuals, super individuals and government institutions that would have to pay that piper.
So will we just sit by, facing the screen at the back of the cave, and accept the flickering “let’s you and him fight” images the media punks are starting to flash across the screen?
And much as it hurts to say it – the answer is: Yeah, probably we will. When it comes down to it, we seem to be an increasingly malleable people, easy to frighten (“The terrorists are coming! The terrorists are coming!”), gullible for outrageous lies (“Social Security is bankrupting America”), and easy for the masters of the universe to set against each other, young against old, native against immigrant, un- or under-employed non-unionized against unionized employed, etc. Let’s you and him fight – a generation past high school, we are still falling for it, rather than all turning around and facing them down, the ones who are truly manipulating the system, and us, for their own benefit.
George Sibley was born in Western Pennsylvania, but was conceived in Colorado by Colorado natives, and thus considers himself to be a native Coloradan.
