Musings on "America's Great Divide", Frontline, PBS

There were a several fundamental problems and fatal flaws with the interesting Frontline documentary, "America's Great Divide". First, the US, apart from a very brief period from the Great Depression to Nixon, and then only on a surface level, has been disunited. I give you the Revolutionary War with its loyalists and revolutionaries. I give you the Civil War with its "free states" and slave states. I give you the battles over Jim Crow, the civil rights movements, the counterculture, and I give you White evangelicals to note a few examples.

Second, there is the blame the Russkies  nonsense. I don't doubt that Russia, like every great power before them, is engaged in several forms of subterfuge against the US just as the US is engaged in several forms of subterfuge against Russia. And while "America's Great Divide" recognises that the Russians are simply playing on the faultlines already evident in American society and culture it doesn't explore the role mainstream mass media has played in the great American divide, let alone the great Australian and British divide. In reality, in fact, it has been the media, with their limited historical memories and their penchant for sensationalism, that has played a more central and important role in dividing the US, Australia, and the United Kingdom than the evil godless commie Russkies. I give you the penny newspaper, Hearst, Murdoch, the Sun, News of the World, page three girls, Hillsborough, right wing radio which arose after the demise of the fairness doctrine, and Fox. And I give you PBS's News Hour. The News Hour, with its moronic practise of giving us demagogues on both sides of the issue, has not only helped divide America and Americans but undermined notions of facticity.

Third, the notion that the post-truth era started with Sarah Palin and those of her ilk, is rubbish. Apparently, the talking heads on "America's Great Divide" who make such arguments have never heard of William Randolph Hearst and his post-truth Spanish American war and the various delusional conspiracy theories that stretch back very far in European and Western history and culture. Post-truth sensationalism, particularly of the mass media variety, has, in other words, been around long before Sarah Palin, Barak Obama, and Donald Trump came on the scene.

Fourth, Obama did indeed reflect and symbolise for many Americans a changing and more diverse America. He was not the first symbol of this culture war, however. I give you nineteenth century American nativism and its impact on late nineteenth and twentieth century immigration policy, restrictive policies that were not overturned until 1965. 

This "great American divide", which has been around in some way, shape, or form, and has often moved around issues associated with race and ethnicity, is not going anywhere. America was and is divided and those who are currently living in this divided America are living out a bad marriage. It is, in my opinion, time to end this abusive marriage before it is too late.

The Right Wing Bullshite Machine and the Australian Bush Fires

In their demagogic delusional state, right wing wackos are trying to blame the Australian fires on arson and the Greens. What is remarkable about the first claim is that it simply doesn't explain the drought in Australia, the fact that fires have grown worse in Australia since the late 2000s, and the fact that temperatures have steadily increased in Aus. Australia has had record setting temperatures over the last two years.

As to the second, right wingers are attempting to argue that a lack of controlled burning is the reason for the increasingly intense fires. Again, however, while there may be a bit of truth to this argument, it does not fully explain increasing temperatures, the years of drought, and the intensity of the 21st century bush fires in Australia.

By the way, according to reputable sources, namely Australian police and fire services, while there have been arrests for arsons (as well as for looting) arsonists are only responsible for 1% of the 5.2 million hectares of New South Wales and 0.03% of the 1.2 million hectares burned in Victoria during the 2019 and 2020 bushfires. According to the New South Wales Rural Fire Services it is lightning that has been the cause of the majority of the fires in Australia. Perhaps right wing nuts will argue at some point that lighting is part of the great left-liberal-commie-nazi conspiracy to take over the world. But then they are truly delusional.

The Books of My Life: Seeing is Believing

In the modern and postmodern eras the media has become an important if not the most important secondary socialiser particularly in core Western countries. Peter Biskind's Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Henry Holt, 1983) explores how the films of the centre (corporate liberal or pluralist and conservative) and those of the left and the right fought over the ideological terrain of 1950s America.

Drawing on and supplementing such seminal texts of the era as William Whyte Junior's The Organization Man, the Daniel Bell edited collection The Radical Right, and David Reisman's, Nathan Glazer's, and Reuel Denny's The Lonely Crowd, Biskind explores the 1950s ideological battle in films like the corporate liberal Twelve Angry Men, war films like the conservative centrist film From Here to Eternity, Science Fiction films like the right wing Invasion of the Body Snatchers, corporate liberal public enemy films like On the Waterfront, juvenile delinquent corporate liberal films like The Blackboard Jungle, left wing American Indian films like Apache, right wing Nietzschean romances like The Fountainhead, and left wing romances like All that Heaven Allows.

In order to ascertain the ideological terrain of fifties films Biskind asks a series of questions about the films he writes about. Who, he asks, is happy in these films? Who falls ill? Who dies? Who recovers? Who looses everything? Who pays and why? Who is in the driver's seat, men or women? Do women wear their hair up or down? Do women have a career or do they run the house? Is the family broken or whole? Who is absent, mom or dad? Is the family matriarchal or patriarchal? Who knows best, mom or dad? Who educates the kids, mom or dad or do the kids tell their parents what's what? Is junior a mama's boy of a daddy's boy? Is junior following in mom's footsteps or dad's? Which is dominant, culture or nature? Who dominates the coalition of the centre, scientists or soldiers/police? Is society portrayed from the top down or from the bottom up? How are reporters and citizens treated? Who saves the world, groups or individuals? Are the scientists Tellers or Oppenheimers? Who is the alien? Does the alien come to cities or rural areas? Is the alien animal, vegetable, or mineral? Is the alien us or is it them? What and who does the alien stand for? Are the aliens external or internal, are they from outer space or are they gangsters, communists, juvenile delinquents, or  minories within? Who deals with the alien, the government or locals? Is social control used to control the alien or not?

Once we have answered these questions, Biskind argues, we can then categorise and classify films, particularly western and science fiction films ideologically, as films, in other words, of the consensual centre (corporate liberal or pluralist and conservative), the right, and the left. Corporate liberal or pluralist films, Biskind argues to take one answer to the questions posed, emphasise science and technology and make heroes of its scientists. Conservative films, one the other hand, tend to, and again to take one answer to the posed questions, praise the forces of order and make heroes of its professional soldiers and cops. Left wing films, to take one answer to the questions posted, tend to break down the us versus them binary and side with and try to understand the alien, us, while right wing films, to take another answer to one of the questions posed, tend to make heroes of those seeking revenge and to valorise individualism.

Many may appreciate Biskind's contention that the age of consensus, 1950s America, was not as consensual as some polemicists and apologists, and even some scholars, have made it out to be. Some may be concerned that Biskind focuses almost exclusively on the films he explores and does little in the way of archival work. Some may be concerned that Biskind does little in the way of trying to ascertain how contemporary audiences and critics reacted to the films they saw. Still Biskind's book is fascinating and enlightening and I recommend it to anyone interested in politics, ideology, and American film. Highly recommended.