Contrarian Blues - Steve Perry

Contrarian Blues - Steve Perry is the editor of Minneapolis' City Pages. In previous mentions, I'd said the Pages were Minneaoplis' version of the Village Voice. In fact, they are the Twin Cities' subsidiary of the company that owns both papers.

Steve Perry is a gadfly to both sides - he rather famously shredded the DFL after last November's defeat at the polls.

But make no mistake, he's anti-war. Soooo anti-war.

He (along with most of the CP's writers) has a blog, one of the few "out" anti-war blogs in the Twin Cities.

But it was his editorial from last week's CP that caught my attention:

If your viewing habits are anything like mine, you probably did not tune in to Oprah last Tuesday...Oprah taping antiwar show! Developing! Right, I thought. What might Oprah Winfrey--Goddess of All Media, a figure nearly as shining and raceless and apolitical as Tiger Woods--have to say about invading Iraq? ...So I watched, and I am here to tell you: For anyone concerned to know where the fabled silent majority is these days, it was a revelation.

Perry seems to have a problem with accepting numbers; in various articles, he's noted, and even tried to rationalize, the fact that Americans seem to support the war by a 3-1 margin, digging hard for any nugget or bon mot that shows that the 3-1 majority is really a minority.

In Oprah, he thinks he's found it:

From the start the air was heavy and melancholy; Winfrey and her guests (the ubiquitous Tom Friedman of the Times and a Middle East specialist from Sarah Lawrence, Fawas Gerges) all seemed shaken by the quickening of events. Friedman looked especially cowed. The three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner spoke as though he had just wandered in dazed from a particularly brutal Dr. Phil taping. The thing is, he kept saying, America has to come to grips with the way it has hurt the world's feelings. "We've been exporting our fears, not our hopes," he scolded.

Fear is one of nature's means of assuring self-preservation.

Messrs. Perry and Friedman: In 1942, we exported our fear of Japanese invasion, and Nazi dominion over Europe. Seen in this context, Omaha Beach was a firesale of US fears.

Israel was, in this context, the result of gathering together a lot of fears; one wants to ask Messrs Perry and Friedman if fear of mass extinction and genocide is a valid reason to fight?

Yes, we export our fears; it's called "Self-preservation", or "Defense". I see a bunch of drunk bikers throwing beer cans in front of a bar? I step carefully - or, as Messrs. Perry and Friedman would have it, "export my fears".

Yet even the always-dependable Friedman could not exactly endorse Bush's war.

Because he's not, nor has he ever been, a Bush supporter. For a NYTimes columnist, he is as close to balanced as anyone this side of William Safire, but he's never been mistaken for a Republican.

...the mood of the broadcast was quietly and vehemently antiwar. The most amazing segment came midway through, when Oprah lent her seal of approval to a lengthy and fairly devastating bit of Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine--the scene in which shot after shot and caption after caption recount bloody U.S.-sponsored coups and dictators while Louis Armstrong croons "What a Wonderful World." Now first, you rarely see this sort of thing on American television, and when you do it is always followed by a litany of credentialed hacks telling you what hogwash it is.

Piffle. "Columbine" was one of the most lionized movies of the year. It won the friggin' Oscar, for the love of pete.

But after the clip, and Moore's own pointed comments about our bloody empire, no one tried to deny the veracity of the claims. Well, Friedman said wearily, you could make a similar clip about Saddam. Right, said Gerges, and you could make a dozen more about the U.S.! Friedman fell silent.

And this - an exchange between a mild Anti-Bush pundit and a rabid Anti-Bush pundit - proves what? Which Anti-Bush pundit gets more cred with Steve Perry, apparently.

Perry drives toward the crux:

What's so remarkable about this? So Oprah did an antiwar show, you might say. She's not God.

But you're wrong about that. Oprah is the author of the most successful syndicated show in television history. She presides over one of the largest-circulation magazines in the country, launched a scant few years ago. She sells millions of books magically, simply by causing their names to pass her lips. She spins the likes of Dr. Phil into gold. She knows the pulse of workaday America better than you will ever know your spouse, your children, yourself. Where the public taste is concerned, she is God.

Wrong, Mr. Perry.

For that part of the public that watches daytime TV, and lets their opinion be driven by the likes of a pop-psych diva, she's a large female Michael Jackson. For volvo-driving soccer moms that are trying to find personalities of their own, Oprah fills a vaccuum, perhaps.

She is the daytime TV-watching, supermarket-tabloid-reading public what Michael Jackson was to music in the eighties.

And that is all. Her demographic is big - but no bigger than her savvy in marketing to them, in squeezing every last viewer and dollar out of that cachet. But it's not a synonym for "America", or even "Silent Majority".

Ask yourself; do you think Oprah's audience is bigger than Rush Limbaugh's?

She attained this status not just by telling her audience things they already knew, as some of her critics have charged; Oprah's great gift is that she never tells them things they will not want to hear.

So you see what it means for her to step out this way. It says that, at the start of a war that will not end in the present theater of battle and may conceivably not end at all in this generation, the president of the United States is already losing the hearts and minds of the American people.

Perhaps - if you follow the desired story line far enough. I have my doubts that that'll happen.

Mr. Perry proceeds:

A majority--or near majority, depending on the day and the poll--have opposed waging war on the present terms. (Polls since early last week have shown a large and predictable spike in support of the war, but that is an emotional reaction and probably a fleeting one.)

In this, Mr. Perry reminds one of the Adolph Hitler of 1945; not ideologically, of course (I'm not comparing Perry with a Nazi), but psychologically. As the Red Army advanced on Berlin, Hitler stood before his map table, moving division that existed on paper, planning offensives jumping off from places he no longer held.

Perry's numbers in this argument are like Hitler's phantom divisions in 1945 - comforting to those who want to believe in the cause; just not real.

The polls before the war were pro-liberation. Today, the difference is nearly 3-1. That's more than a "spike".

Not only that: A shockingly large and heretofore unseen minority have begun to realize that their country is an iron-fisted world empire that is despised on nearly every corner of the globe.

Note the choice of words; "Shockingly Large" to whom? And how "Shockingly large" is this minority? Who interviewed them? From where did they start on the way to this realization - from the far left? Do you see legions of truck-stop waitresses and ex-Marines switching sides?

If that "shockingly large" minority constitutes Mr. Perry's social circle, it would make sense. Beyond that - let's say I need convincing.

And now the most revered producer in American media thinks that message is ready to go mainstream.

No. It means that America's most successful pop-psych lifestyle huckster feels safe telling her large, but captive, audience what it most likely believes anyway.

And it'll be interesting to see if a "Shockingly large" minority of Oprah's viewers desert the show in coming weeks, in light of her stance.

We shall see. I'm not betting against it.

That would be something new under the sun, indeed.

Posted by Mitch at April 2, 2003 12:39 PM