Musings on Democrats, Republicans, and the Demonisation of the Media

 

It is fascinating to listen to and read and then analyse the apologetic and polemical rhetoric of many self-proclaimed Republican partisans and many self-proclaimed Democrat partisans. What becomes clear when you dispassionately analyse the discourse or rhetoric of both partisan sects is that both sectarian groups began with similar if somewhat different perceptions of the oligarchic class that rules the United States and that both sects have different if somewhat similar perceptions of the media. What becomes clear, in other words, about this partisan discourse is that on one level, the structural level, the rhetoric of Republicans and Democrats are similar, while on the level of form they are somewhat different.

The Republican and Democrat conceptions of the American ruling oligarchy assume that the ruling class is economically, politically, and culturally the same. They both assume, in other words, that there is only one ruling class when, in fact, there really isn't. As a number of scholars have noted at least since Antonio Gramsci, there are fractions within the ruling elite, fractions that sometimes produce tensions within the ruling elite. The Republicans, for instance, particularly since they adopted so much of the rhetoric of Southern Dixiecrats, have ties to right wing oil elites and their fellow travellers. This is one of the reasons the Republican Party, as it has dixiefied since the 1950s, has developed even stronger ties with right wing economic elites and have helped these right wing economic elites move from the margins to the mainstream of American political and economic discourse since the 1950s. The Democrats, on the other hand, since the 1960s, thanks to the disenchantment with and defection of its Dixiecrats, deindustrialisation and the decline of unions, increasing DixiePublican success among White working class ethnics, and the rise of the new digital media, have aligned themselves with the economically conservative and socially somewhat liberal oligarchs, such as those in Silicon Valley. 

While there is limited economic tensions between these fractions of the ruling oligarchic class. They all are, as Nancy Pelosi noted, capitalist (a fact that makes the wacky right wing's characterisation of them as socialists or communists or anarchists looney). They are just somewhat different kinds of capitalists. While both fractions are neoliberal in their economic ideology--they believe in the free market theology--the new digital oligarchic elite are more open to social liberal or social insurance liberalism than are the Republican leaning oligarchs.

While both Republican and Democrat apologists and polemicists believe the media is biased against them it is clear that they have a funamental misunderstanding of the media. Like the two Jesus's in Dire Straits song "Industrial Disease" one of these groups, one assumes, must be wrong since it would logically seem that "the media, as Republicans and Democrat partisans call it, cannot be out to get both of them at the same time in the same place.

As I have written elsewhere there are several types of media. The first type is corporate and commercial. They are owned and run by for profit corporations. Their reason to be is to sell "copy", and by se;ling you copy they also, because they are commerical, sell you tootpaste and lifestyles the things that allow them to sell copy hence their sensationalism: did you know Marion Morrison wore a toupee and had sex with n, and may have even smoked some Mary Jane?

The US's CBS, NBC, NY Times, Washington Post, Canada's CTV and the Globe and Mail, and Britain's ITV and The Times (owned by oligarch Rupert Murdoch), are examples of corporate media. There are variations in them given the political contexts in which they operate. I think ITV, British commercial TV, still fills 50 minutes of a 60 minute time slot (instead of the 42 minutes on US commercial stations, something that points up the power of corporations and the nature of the commercial media in the US) because of government regulation. With the rise of right wing populist Toryism in the UK, however, regulation has been relaxed and ITV, which initially had something like fourteen somewhat autonomous regional bodies within itself (example: London Weekend TV), is now controlled by two.

The second type of media is public and corporate. They are also supported by advertising revenue in the form of ads at the beginning and ends of programmes. They do, however, tend to be much less sensationalist in their selective journalism and hence often subscribe to parochial ideologies of journalistic practise. They are, in other words, embedded and inscribed within, thanks to sociallsation, certain ideological grounded "realities".

America's PBS and NPR, Britain's the BBC, Canada's the CBC, Australia's ABC, and Denmark's DR, are examples of public corporate media. Some corporate media, like PBS, gets private funding via ads at the beginning and ends of TV programmes. The CBC, in addition to government funding, has advertising. It has a mandate to emphasise Canadian content hence Heartland and Murdoch Mysteries and Schiitts Creek. The BBC is funded a licence fee, that the Tories want to do away with, and has no commercials. All that said, the Beeb has to cowtow to the oligarchic powers that be thanks to their control of the extent or even the existence of the licence fee. Needless to say, the Beeb has been one of the most significant media for years producing things like Doctor Who, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and Fawlty Towers.

A third form of media is the sensationalist and targeted type of media. They are interested in selling product (political and ideological product rather than toothpaste) to an ideologically and sometimes ethnically segmented audience. They tend to influence true believers and their viewing numbers are exaggerated. Like the sensationalist corporate media the politically and ideologically correct media mirrors the lowest common denominator. Additionally, they don't create divisions, they mirror them. Fox and MSNBC are examples of corporate segmented politically and ideologically correct media. UK Murdoch owned The Sun, a host of Murdoch media in Australia, and, though not as much as it used to be Canada's National Post, are examples of politically and ideologically correct newspapers.

A last form of media is independent media which is not corporate. It is widely present on the internet but not widely read. Thanks to their limited sensationalism, their dissident nature (making them more factually accurate), and the fact that Mericans don't read much, independent media are at a significant disadvantage in the early twenty-first century "media market".

As is the case with the ruling class there are, not surprisingly, fractions within the corporate commercial media and the independent media. Some corporate commercial media, like the New York Times, are embedded in the ideology of what used to be called sixpenny journalism, "quality" journalism, "high" journalism. Other corporate media, such as the tabloids, are the heirs of penny journalism. While both depend on sensationalism to sell copy, the type of sensationalism they play on to sell copy are somewhat different. The tabloids tend to emphasise what is now called gotcha journalism, though one can also increasingly find this we gotcha you politicians and celebrities in "quality" journalistic publications like the Guardian as well. Additionally, the tabloids tend to dissolve to some extent the difference between the opinion and news discourses in commercial corporate journalism. Independent media is diverse in content ranging from the so-called far left of the political spectrum, to the far right of the political spectrum. One can find self-proclaimed socialist media in internetland at the same time that one can find self-proclaimed White supremacism media in worldwidewebland.

There are, of course, other differences between the two major strands of corporate commercial media. Sixpenny news organisations are more devoted to the who, when, where, how, and why practise of journalism than the penny news fraternity, which is dominated by rageoholic political and ideological correctness and whinging and whining type of journalism, the type of sensationalism that sells to the lowest common denominator masses these days. The sixpenny press tends to see itself as the fourth estate, as a check and balance on the powerful, though their muckracking or investigative journalism has declined for a number of reasons during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sixpenny press tends to be tied to the neoliberal social liberal elites. Jeff Bezos, for example, owns the Washington Post. Tabloids, be these tabloids Australian, Canadian, or American, tend to be tied to right wing apologists and polemicists like Rupert Murdoch and the political "journalism" they engage in is mostly of the apologetic and polemical sort. What should not be missed here is that both American political parties, as that last sentence indicates, have ties, ideological ties, economic ties, political ties, and cultural ties, to different fractions of the American economic elite. 

What should also not be missed is that both partisan sects, particularly in their true believe form, are equally manichean, seeing themselves as being numbered among the chosen people. They are equally messianic believing that they are on mission from god, whatever or whoever their god happens to be, to to instantiate their version of America throughout the chosen land. They are equally paranoid and conspiratorially oriented thinking the media is out to get them. they are equally utopian preaching that their way is the best way. Both fails to realise that the sixpenny press regards itself (often without reason) as the fourth estate, as a check and a balance on power and thus it sees its mission, at least in part, as expressing truth to power, whoever that power happens to be. Both praise the sixpenny media's speaking truth to power or investigative journalism only if it is speaking truth to its other. Both sectarian groups are, in other words and formally speaking, mirror images of each other.

Speaking of conspiracies, the media, by and large, are conspiratorial. They want to sell you product.

The Books of My Life: A History of the Canadian Peoples

Writing a history of anything, including a history of a modern nation state that arose after the eighteenth century like Canada, is always a tricky task. In order to write such a history the professional historian has to decide what is significant or important in order to keep his or her history from becoming a simple and simplistic litany of necessarily selected historical events, selected historical events that are unfortunately not always recognised as selected, which may or may not be important. Significance, in turn, means, or should mean, that the historian and social science seek out important causes and effects that are thought to impact human life, particularly those economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic factors that impact human life and the things that humans have constructed over the course of human existence.

History as a professional practise, a professional practise formalised and bureaucratised in the core Western world, has, since its beginnings and particularly since the Enlightenment,  been interested in determining causes and effects, in determining what caused some phenomenon and what caused some humans to act in the way that they did. The earliest modern historians tended to focus on great men and the great events, particularly political events that they were thought to be causal factors in the drama and melodrama of life. Many nineteenth and early and mid-twentieth century historians (and their contemporary mythistorical heirs) tended to see these great men, great men who were generally turned by historians into unalloyed saints and sinners, as makers of history and tended, since modern history was deeply embedded within and impacted by the nationalism that arose particularly in the nineteenth century, to see the nation-state as the obvious and proper focus of their studies. Many nineteenth and twentieth century historians (and their contemporary heirs) tended to see the nation-states they studied and focused on in fetishistic, universalistic, or transcendental terms and tended to see the nation-states of which they were citizens in chosen, holy, and messianic terms, as the essence of all that was good and superior in the modern world, in other words.

The problems with such an approach to history should be obvious but they aren't and they won't be to far too many, particularly to far too many amateurs who think that simply by being conscious they know how to do history and how to interpret historical events in the same way that preachers with no background in history, archaeology, and languages think they know and know how to interpret the Bible. First, there is the problem of causality, a problem that became particularly apparent after the rise of mid- and late nineteenth century social theory. Is history made by men or is it made by the forces, the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic forces, within which humans are embedded and within which they act? The second problem has to do with class, gender, and "ethnicity". Is it only great men, great elite men, great Western elite men, who make history? The third problem is geographical and spatial since constructed national boundaries are incapable of acting as spatial barriers. Isn't history really regional and global? 

As post nineteenth century scholars have increasingly recognised, economic, political, cultural, and demographic factors, of course, are regional and often global and are ultimately tied to the economic form that dominates specific societies, specifically hunter-gatherer, small scale agriculture, large scale agriculture, modern, or postmodern. Birth rates, life expectancy rates, and the numbers of women and infants who die during childbirth, for instance, are impacted by economic, political, and cultural factors such as poverty, political policies related to poverty, and cultural notions surrounding poverty.

The late St. John's College and University of Manitoba American born historian J.M. Bumsted's A History of the Canadian Peoples (New York: Oxford University Press, third edition, 2007) navigates the labyrinthian maze between nineteenth and twentieth century great man and mythhistory history and mid- and late twentieth century social and cultural history. Bumsted's history is full of factual tales of Canada's great men and women from William Mackenzie King to Wilfred Laurier to Maurice Dupplesis to Pierre Trudeau and to Margaret Atwood. Bumsted doesn't stop with "traditional" great man history, however. A History of the Canadian People also explores the economic history of Canada from the fur and cod trading era to the industrial and postindustrial or postmodern era. It explores the political history of Canada from French and British colony to a federal Dominion where power is arrayed between the federal government in Ottawa and the various confederated provinces and territories of the nation and where Canadian political and economic power has been impacted by French, British, and American imperialism. It explores the history of Canadian literature, music, and art. It gives us a portrait of how Canada's demographics have changed across time and within space.

Bumsted's book offers a very good if far too brief excursion through Canadian history. Like most late twentieth and early twenty-first century textbooks its tale of Canadian history is rather like a jump cut in a Jean-Luc Goddard film jumping, as it repeatedly does, from politics to economics to culture and to demography in far too brief compass. That, however, is necessitated by the nature of mass education in Canadian society, the nature of the contemporary humanities and social sciences, and the fact that reality is more complicated than a simple fiction like narrative can convey. It is filled to the brim with excerpts from contemporary documents, sidebars about important historical figures and historical events, brief historiographies, brief recommendations for further reading, a lot of black and white and colour reproductions, which raise the cost of college textbooks to astronomic levels (a reflection of twenty-first century economic realities), and questions for students to ponder, should they choose to do so (I doubt if many do), after each chapter. If you are looking for a good, if far too brief introduction to Canadian history, a book written for a Canadian audience yet revealingly printed in the US (occasionally, apparently, imperialism reveals itself in print), you could do far worse than Bumsted's brief A History of the Canadian Peoples. For those looking for lengthier introductions to Canadian history I recommend  Bumsted's two volume The Peoples of Canada and R. Douglas Francis, Richard Jones, and Donald's Smith's Origins and Destinies.

The Books of My Life: An Historical Geography of Modern Australia

 

I don't recall exactly when this happened, but at some point in my intellectual life I developed an interest in comparing and contrasting human beings, human societies, and human cultures. I suspect that my  increasing interest in comparative studies during my undergraduate years initially derived from my work in Biblical Studies, a discipline that required an attentiveness to broader Near Eastern culture and to broader Mediterranean culture in general. 

My interest in comparative studies didn't end with Biblical Studies, however. It seemed to me that an interest in the study of humanity required that one explore human prehistory and history from a variety of disciplinary standpoints including Anthropology, Sociology, History, Culture Studies, Social Psychology, Biology, Environmental Studies, and beyond. As a consequence of this broadening out of my interests, my intellectual life suddenly changed direction and focus sometime in the 1980s as I was entering graduate school. 

My interest in comparative human studies was certainly one of reasons I was drawn to take a master's degree in Cultural Anthropology, a discipline that attempts to look at humans through the lens of biological, cultural, linguistic, and archaeological holism or wholeism. My interest in comparative studies was also behind my growing interest in Comparative Historical Sociology and Comparative History. I became particularly interested in the comparative study of English and British settler societies like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. If one wants to understand these societies and cultures, past or present, it seemed obvious to me, one had to compare them with what they were and are most like. If one wanted to understand the history of the United States, for instance, it seemed obvious to me that one needed to compare it to what it was most like, namely the other English and British settler societies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

Because of these broad interests I had a problem finding a disciplinary box that I could fit into and which fit me. Anthropology limited the comparative study of human society and culture to "exotic" traditional societies and cultures and anthropologists, at the time, looked askance at anyone who wanted to study modern core nation societies and cultures. Atheoretical History made doing comparative studies difficult because it parcelled out humans into little fetishised boxes of states and nation-states that novice historians were supposed to specialise in. Sociology, as taught in the US, tended to focus on, in typical naval gazing fashion, on the US. I did not realise for some time that there was a discipline out there in academialand, a discipline that paralls wholistic Anthropology, that would have allowed me to act on my holistic interests had I been aware of it, Geography. If I had been aware of Geography and specifically of its subdisciplines of Historical Geography and Cultural Geography, subdisciplines that were somewhat comparative and attentive to the five factors that affect human groups--economics, culture, demography, and politics-- I woud have taken my postgraduate degree in it.

As someone attracted to the comparative study of English and British settler societies I finally  got around to reading something I should have read years ago, J.M. Powell's seminal An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Resitive Fringe (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Powell's book, which is more of a series of related essays on the history of Australian environment, the human adaptation to and transformation of that environment, Australian politics, Australian economic history, and Australian cultural history, than your typical textbook history of Australia, allows anyone with a basic understanding of US and Canadian histories, to compare and contrast these three English and British settler societies across time and across space. 

Reading An Historical Geography of Modern Australia from the vantage point of the history of English and British Settler Societies Studies, one quickly fastens on several fascinating similarities between Australia, Canada, and the United States. There is, for example, the fact that all three are the products of European and more specifically English and European geographical imperialism. There is the common federalism that often plays out in tensions between the federal government and the state and provincial governments and sometimes leads to threats of secession. There is the common notions of manifest destiny with its emphasis on settlement from sea to shining sea even when such settlement was and is geographically problematic. There is the common notion of chosenness,  messianism, and exceptionalism (variations on human ethnocentrism) that all three settler societies shared and share, notions that were and are tied to ideologies of progress and to imperialism and racism. There is the common notion of White supremacy amongst all three societies, an ethnocentric ideology that led to limits on who could immigrate to Australia, Canada, and the US until the post-World War II period. There is the shared manichean and binary ideology of bush or frontier good, cities bad. There is the shared emphasis on Lockean individualism and the yeoman farmer. There is the common notion in all three nations that economic growth is a good, something that aided and abetted the massive transformation of the environment that characterised and still characterises all three nations. There were the common gold rushes. There is the common environmental limits on settlement patterns particularly with respect to Australia and Canada, though when Americans reached the Plains and the deserts it too faced geographical barriers to settlement.  Needless to say, some, many, and perhaps most of these similarities can be traced back to the hearth of the mother country.

There are also, of course, differences between the English and British settler societies of Australia, the US, and Canada. Australia, for instance, as Powell notes, has long been, given down under environmental realities, quite urban. Interestingly, despite being an urban nation almost since its beginnings, Australians celebrated and continue, to some extent, to celebrate the macho rural Aussie of the bush as the epitome of Australianess.

For anyone interested in the history and historical geography of Commonwealth Australia and comparative English and British settler society studies, Powell's book, despite its age, is essential reading. Highly recommended.

Musings on Me, Me, Me and Greatest Good for the Greatest Number Liberalisms

 

When looked at dispassionately, something most people are unable to do, of course, there have clearly been two forms of liberalism that have dominated the core nation world of wealthy Northern and Western European states and European settler nations like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand since the Enlightenment: narcissistic or me, me, me liberalism and greatest good for the greatest number liberalism. One of the reasons this obvious fact has been missed and continues to be missed by so many, of course, is because of the dominance of demagoguery faux mass democratic societies.  For the vast majority of masses, fed as they are on the often delusional, conspiratorial, and manichean binary ideologies of the elites, ideology creates "reality" and one of the realities ideology has created is the ahistorical notion that narcissistic liberalism, particularly in its right wing populist form, is actually conservative when it isn't.

Laissez-faire or narcissistic liberalism, whether in its elite, middlebrow, or populist form, has been the dominant or hegemonic of the two, dominating many Western nation-states until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Utilitarian liberalism briefly dominated Western political culture from the Great Depression to the oil crises, deindustrialisation, and globalisation of the 1970s through the 1990s, all of which, in turn, allowed economic oligarchs to regain whatever political and economic control they had briefly and not always cheerfully ceded with a vengeance. While utilitarian liberalism has not disappeared and is stronger in some Western nations like the Scandinavian countries of Europe and in some intellectual circles even today, narcissistic liberalism came to dominate in nation-states, particularly in those nation-states that really mattered like Imperial America, the dominant economic, political, cultural, and geographic power of the post-World War Two era.

There have been and are a host of myths associated with both forms of liberalism. Laissez faire liberals like to talk the free trade talk but have had and continue to have no problem accepting government wealthfare and of engaging in the monopolistic and cartellistic managerial practises associated with corporations pointing up the hyperbole or hypocrisy of their keep the state out of the economy rhetoric. After all, if Adam Smith is right and the economy works best all on its own, managers are unnecessary. Narcissistic liberals have also developed ideologies--one assumes it helps some of them sleep at night--by which they convince themselves, or at least convince others, the demagogued masses, that greed will raise all floating boats despite the reality that only a very few boats actually float, a fetish that points up the theological and dogmatic underpinnings of narcissistic liberalism. 

Utilitarian liberalism, despite its reformist rhetoric, has often been limitedly reformist in practise. Its elite political practitioners, after all, have had and continue to have close ties with economic elites and its political practitioners are hardly, as is true of virtually all politicians and of all humans for whatever reason, immune to the personal "pleasures" of plunder and power and the perquisites that have typically accompanied both. Utilitarian liberalism, in other words, reminds analysts that they need to explore the always present differences between rhetoric and reality. As with the narcissistic liberals utilitarian liberals have developed their own comforting myths that presumably help them sleep at night including the one that they really want to help the poor and American minorities though they have never been really able to clairfy how they can do this by cosying up to the economic elite and doing much of their bidding just like their narcissistic liberal kissing cousins.

One of the fundamental problems for the once seemingly invincible greatest good for the greatest number liberalism  (seemingly invincible from the vantage point of the early 1960s) today is that core nation-states have become too big, too unwieldy, too complex, too one size fits all bureaucratic, too impersonal (at the same time that it is dominated by oligarchic personal networks), too distant, and too consumerist (I buy therefore I am) oriented, to be able to manage the corporation that we call a core nation-state today. This inability of elites to be able to manage large territorial and governmental entities is almost certainly one of the reasons, money and power and the global nature of megacorporations are others, for the revival of political, economic, cultural, and geographic regionalism we have seen in federalist states like the US, Canada, and Australia since the oil crisis, deindustrialisation, and globalisation. 

The solution to this state of affairs would seem to be obvious: core nation-state downsizing, a downsizing that would play out in the development and emergence of smaller nation-states like Quebec or alliances between regions such as that along the west coast of Canada and the US. Of course, there are countervailing forces which make the obvious solution to deal with the multiplicity of problematic "issues" difficult including nationalism with its associated delusions and its inherently manichean and hence binary hallucinations amongst them my cock is bigger and harder than yours militarism and holier than thou populist Big State paternalism.

Further Musings on the Media: Typologising the Media

There are several types of media. The first type is corporate and commercial. They are owned and run by for profit corporations. Their reason to be is to sell "copy", and by selling you copy they also, because they are commerical, sell you tootpaste and lifestyles the things that allow them to sell copy hence their sensationalism: did you know Marion Morrison wore a toupee and had sex with n, and may have even smoked some Mary Jane?

The US's CBS, NBC, NY Times, Washington Post, Canada's CTV and the Globe and Mail, and Britain's ITV and The Times (owned by oligarch Rupert Murdoch), are examples of corporate media. There are variations in them given the political contexts in which they operate. I think ITV, British commercial TV, still fills 50 minutes of a 60 minute time slot (instead of the 42 minutes on US commercial stations, something that points up the power of corporations and the nature of the commercial media in the US) because of government regulation. With the rise of right wing populist Toryism in the UK, however, regulation has been relaxed and ITV, which initially had something like fourteen somewhat autonomous regional bodies within itself (example: London Weekend TV), is now controlled by two.

The second type of media is public and corporate. They are also supported by advertising revenue in the form of ads at the beginning and ends of programmes. They do, however, tend to be much less sensationalist in their selective journalism and hence often subscribe to parochial ideologies of journalistic practise. They are, in other words, embedded and inscribed within, thanks to sociallsation, certain ideological grounded "realities".

America's PBS and NPR, Britain's the BBC, Canada's the CBC, Australia's ABC, and Denmark's DR, are examples of public corporate media. Some corporate media, like PBS, gets private funding via ads at the beginning and ends of TV programmes. The CBC, in addition to government funding, has advertising. It has a mandate to emphasise Canadian content hence Heartland and Murdoch Mysteries and Schiitts Creek. The BBC is funded a licence fee, that the Tories want to do away with, and has no commercials. All that said, the Beeb has to cowtow to the oligarchic powers that be thanks to their control of the extent or even the existence of the licence fee. Needless to say, the Beeb has been one of the most significant media for years producing things like Doctor Who, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and Fawlty Towers.

A third form of media is the sensationalist and targeted type of media. They are interested in selling product (political and ideological product rather than toothpaste) to an ideologically and sometimes ethnically segmented audience. They tend to influence true believers and their viewing numbers are exaggerated. Like the sensationalist corporate media the politically and ideologically correct media mirrors the lowest common denominator. Additionally, they don't create divisions, they mirror them. Fox and MSNBC are examples of corporate segmented politically and ideologically correct media. UK Murdoch owned The Sun, a host of Murdoch media in Australia, and, though not as much as it used to be Canada's National Post, are examples of politically and ideologically correct newspapers.

A last form of media is independent media which is not corporate. It is widely present on the internet but not widely read. Thanks to their limited sensationalism, their dissident nature (making them more factually accurate), and the fact that Mericans don't read much, independent media are at a significant disadvantage in the early twenty-first century "media market".

Examples of independent media include The Guardian (UK), which has its own endowment fund. It, however, as bureaucracies tend to do, has become more like other media over time (isomorphism). The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Albany, Substack, which Chris Hedges and Glenn Greenwald now write for, are examples of independent, independent of corporate and corporate political control. They function largely because of contributions and, presumably, their reporting is sensitive to funding realities.

These are all ideal type forms of the media. Ideal types, a method developed by Max Weber, is a helpful analytical tool that allows one to break down and define similarities and differences in bureaucracies, such as the media, across space and time. In practise, however, as The Guardian points up, there is much similarity between some independent media forms and the corporate and corporate political media forms because they often share the same ideologically constructed understandings of how to do journalism and they exist within and are affected by market and funding realities. Additionally, we should never forget that ITV, because of the Beeb and its monopoly until the 1950s, produced and produces high quality very intellectually oriented shows like Inspector Morse and Lewis.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: More Musings on YouTube Music Criticism

One of the unfortunate aspects of the brave new digital world and its brave new digital media like YouTube, at least for me, is that it seems to provide a forum for those who fancy themselves film, television, or music critics but who are actually apologists and polemicists of the I like it or I don't like it school of "criticism". Ultimately, in other words, YouTube's critics aren't that different from another species of "critic" one finds in multitudes on YouTube, a group of YouTubers who initially seem different from the critics, reactors. 

There are, of course, differences in both quality and quantity when it comes to critics and reactors on YouTube. Some reactors and critics seem, at least to me, better than others in that some of them actually do pay attention to what they are watching and listening to and some, if generally only a few, do actually grasp the various levels of meaning in what they are watching or listening to. SoFieReacts reviews of Buffy, for instance, are, to me, quite impressive. SoFieReacts reactions consistently reveal a reactor/critic who grasps what is going on in a very complex television show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show that works on several different levels, and who can explain quite succinctly what she sees and hears going on in the show. This makes these reactions much more interesting to me than the usual reactions one finds on YouTube, reactions which seem to me to be YouTube's simulation of Gilligan's Island.

My take on most reactions on YouTube doesn't mean that there isn't anything I find interesting about the mass of reactions on YouTube. Most of the mid quality reactors on YouTube are interesting less because of their specific reactions and more because of the nature of reactions themselves. By watching Buffy reactors react to Buffy, for instance, the viewer is able to hold a kind of mirror up to oneself, a mirror that allows one to recall what it was like to see a specific episode of Buffy for the very first time in his or her viewing lives.

YouTube critics, a least hypothetically are a somewhat different species from YouTube reactors. Many of them, well at least the best of them, take the music they are listening to seriously and try to, if not always successfully, analyse it. Here is the rub, however. The problem is that even the best and brightest of these critics seem to me to be latter day versions of critics like Pauline Kael, Lester Bangs, and Robert Christgau from the 1960s and 1970s. I really don't like, for intellectual reasons, the autobiographical and personal form of criticism that characterises the "criticism" of Kael, Bangs, and Christgau as it has always seemed to me a type of criticism that is little more than a form of criticism grounded in the assumption that you deal listener should like what I like because I am Pauline Kael, Lester Bangs, and Robert Christgau, and I am oh so witty and oh so cool.

There are two Kael, Bangs, and Christgau style critics who ply their critical trade on YouTube that I have problems with. I have already discussed my problems with one of them, the two bright College StudentsYouTubers who call themselves Alex and Andy. In this brief essay I want to talk about another clearly bright critic who I sometimes have problems with, JustJP. Now don't get me wrong, I like JustJP and I find almost all his critical reviews interesting.  He is clearly bright, clearly attentive to the music he is listening to, and he often listens to more challenging and less popular genres of music than do mainstream YouTube critics who wouldn't touch this music with one of those proverbial ten foot poles. Additionally, he often brings a degree of cultural capital and of music appreciation to his YouTube videos, something I really appreciate, There are, however, other moments when I  just don't think JustJP really gets it. For instance, in his review of Yes's "Cans and Brahms" and "We Have Heaven", JustJP doesn't seem to fully grasp the intentions and functions of psychedelic head music like that of the British band Yes.

Yes, of course, arose in a popular music scene in which psychedelic music was prominent. There was, for example and perhaps most prominently in this genre, The Beatles "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "I am the Walrus", both songs which experimented with sound, music, and words.  JustJP doesn't seem to get the fact that some late 1960s and and early 1970s psychedelic music was experimental, as was the era, itself, that the psychedelic music of the era, music like "We Have Heaven", played with soundscapes in such a way as to try to expand the minds of its listeners, and that when one listens to "We Have Heaven", Jon Anderson's piece on the seminal Yes album Fragile from 1971, one has to let this consciousness expanding song and its play with words and sound wash over you. When one does, I think, and let me emphasise the I think here since ultimately beauty and value is in the socialised eyes of the beholder, it is absolutely clear how astounding this head song is.

My sense is that many young people, including JustJP and the two college students, Alex and Andy, come from younger birth cohorts and as a consequence of historical distance and a lack of education in music appreciation, simply don't grasp, intellectually or emotionally, how psychedelic art music works and how it functions. This is a pity since, after all, if we want to appreciate music (or anything else for that matter), we have to kind of go native and try to understand the context in which the music was written and the meanings the writers and musicians were trying to convey to the listener, before we can go all me, me, me loved it, couldn't get into it, or hated it on its arse.
 

Musings on Bliblical Studies, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Classical Studies, Social Theory, and Comparative History

 

When I first matriculated at college I specialised in Biblical Studies. As a consequence of specialising in Biblical Studies I inevitably developed an interest in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and in Classical Civilisation Studies, the study of Ancient Greece and Rome. I developed an interest, in other words, in the Mediterranean World because it was this Mediterranean world that was clearly the near or close context in which the Hebrew and Jewish Tanakh came to be.

It quickly became clear to me, as it did to others of my Biblical and Ancient Studies colleagues at the time, as it clearly did to earlier students of modern Biblical Studies, that to understand and comprehend the Tanakh one had to grasp the cultural, political, demographic, and economic contexts of the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean world of which it was a part. It quickly became apparent to me, for example, that Ancient Judea, when it was conquered by the Persians in 538 BCE, was impacted extensively by imperial Persian culture and that the nascent Judaism that developed out of the Ancient Hebrew faith around this time was impacted by the Persian Zoroastrian faith, particularly its dualistic monotheism, its manicheaniam, and its apocalypticism. All of these, of course, became important and central parts of the Jewish faith that developed after the Persian conquest of Judea, the Hellenistic conquest of Judea, and the Roman conquest of Judea. One can readily see these Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman influences not only in the Masoretic Tanakh but in the so-called Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha and in the "scriptures" of other Hellenistic and Roman syncretic religious groups like the Gnostics, the devotees of Mithraism, and the devotees of Early Christianity including Paul of Tarsus.

It wasn't only about the broader Mediterranean contexts of Ancient Israel and later Judea that I learned about. Sometime in the 1970s and 1980s I learned, about Alexander the Great's excursions into Persia and India. I learned about the trade routes between the Mediterranean, India, and China including the famous Silk Road. I learned about the trading and cultural centre of Dilmun in parts of what are today Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. I learned, in other words, that there were economic, political, cultural, and demographic contacts between the Mediterranean, the Indus Valley, and China, and that there was a kind of large-scale geographic area characterised by economic, political, and meaning culture interactions before there was modern and postmodern globalisation, a fact seemingly forgotten by many of the analysts of globalism and the polemists and apologists for globalisation these days.

Eventually, though I don't know exactly when this happened--sometime in the late 1970s and 1980s, I suspect--I learned that there was a period some scholars referred to as the axial age. According to scholars like Karl Jaspers the axial age ran from the 8th century BCE to the 3rd century BCE (and perhaps beyond to Platonism and neo-Platonism). The axial age, I learned, was the era of Zoroaster, the age of samsara and karma, the era of the Buddha, the age of Jainism, the era of the Hebrew Nevi'im or Prophets (that sect within early Judaism that appealed to me), the age of Confucius, the era of the mysterious Lao-tse, and the age of the Greek Presocratics, Socrates, Plato (who, so the argument goes, was impacted by Indus Valley meanings systems), and Aristotle. The axial age was an era of cultural interaction, culture change, and cultural hybridity, a hybridity that is reflected in, for example, Mediterranean Mithraism and Early Christianity in the Hellenistic and Roman eras. It was also an era that some have seen as proto-modern or postmodern given its diversity, its syncretism, and its critique of animism, animatism, and theism, a kind of proto-secularism.

I didn't stick with Biblical and Mediterranean Studies. After a brief fling with the idea of becoming a rabbi, hardly a realistic profession for a misanthropic introvert like me, I moved beyond Biblical and Ancient Studies. I learned a lot from my engagement with Biblical Studies, however. Biblical Studies forced me to ask historical, ethnological, and sociological questions about the origins of the Hebrew and Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible and those questions, in turn, led me to hermeneutics. I will never forget sitting in James Ackerman's seminar on the Tanakh book of Exodus at Indiana University in Bloomington, and reflecting on the many interpretations of that book that revealed themselves in that class of non-Jewish Jews like me, Reform Jews, high church Christians, and evangelical Christians. I was fascinated by the fact that those brought up in largely the same America could interpret the text of Exodus in such a variety of different ways, interpretations I tied, at the time, to the various religious and non-religious cultures of the participants in this seminar. Biblical hermeneutics, in turn, led me to Max Weber, one of the fathers of hermeneutic social theory, and to social theory in general. I was particularly thrilled by and enthralled with the semiological theory and practise and structuralist theory and practise that were at the height of their influence and impact when I was an undergraduate in university. This, in turn, heightened my interest in cultural anthropology--which I had already done extensive course work in--and in sociology and history. All these, in turn, foregrounded for me the necessity of comparative study and research because, as I learned, you can't understand Ancient Israel and Judea without understanding their historical contexts and you can't understand a British settler society like the United States without comparing and contrasting it with other British settler societies like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. 

I learned a lot of things from all these intellectual experiences. One of the things I learned from all this social theorising and comparative research was that notions such as exceptionalism, be it Jewish, Chinese, American, Canadian, Australian, or Pakeha exceptionalism, are more ideologies, are more the products of culture than they are a representation of "reality". Humans do like to fetishise and universalise after all, something that should be apparent to any of those embedded in the examined life in this brave new digital delusional world.