Think Mystically, Act Disingenuously

On The Media is National Public Radio's media analysis show.

It also tends to be a relentless cheerleader for the media establishment, what Captain Ed calls the "Exempt Media" in their battle against the philistines of the
blogosphere. It has a smug little habit of tittering at out-of-context renditions of conservative criticism of the media, while ignoring substantive complaints. Far from a media "watchdog" show, it is more of a mutual admiration society for the mainstream media.

Last Sunday's broadcast (audio and transcript) ushered them into new territory; blinkered sexism and first-degree murder of context.

The story - a hagiography of Cindy Sheehan and the media event surrounding her - carefully excises any of the political context behind "Sheehan's" stunt.

REPORTER: It started out as a grieving mom on a lawn chair demanding to see the President; now Cindy Sheehan, speaking for the nation's anti war movement. Tonight we're live from Crawford, Texas with Cindy Sheehan.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What should we do about Mother? Discrediting her is frustrating work. You can hear it in Rush Limbaugh's voice.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: Her story is nothing more than forged documents. There's nothing about it that's real. It's, it's nothing more than an attempt. It's the latest
effort made by the coordinated left.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But defending her is as easy as apple pie. Air America's Randy Rhodes.

RANDY RHODES: God forbid the story gets out that Cindy Sheehan is just a mom.

Carefully excised; Cindy Sheehan is "just a mom", but MoveOn and CodePink and Michael Moore? They don't exist!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: As her conservative critics find evidence in past statements to besmirch her name, liberal fact checkers seek to clear it, demonstrating just how the Drudge Report took her word seemingly praising the President when they met last year out of context, how she never said her son died for Israel. [This, we're supposed to accept, unsourced, out of
pure faith in those unnamed "liberal fact checkers". All hail the media! Seriously - was this ever proven?-- Ed.] And as the argument grows louder, those talk show hosts who decline to condemn or canonize her only make it worse by taking the only other available route they know. They punditize her.
MSNBC's Chris Matthews asked her to compare the campaign in Afghanistan to Iraq and she didn't make a distinction.

CINDY SHEEHAN: Well, now, well, then we should have gone after al Qaeda and maybe not after the country of Afghanistan.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: But that's where they were being harbored. That's where they were headquartered. Shouldn't we go after their headquarters? Doesn't that
make sense?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: It would have been better if she'd simply kept mum, and she probably knows that.

CINDY SHEEHAN: I'm not a strategist. I'm not a military strategist.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: She's just a mom.

She's the leader of a huuuuuge movement that is knocking of the gates of the President's ranch! She's the soul of a nation's grief and doubt! Never mind that she's been hijacked by the likes of Michael Moore and David Duke - she is morally untouchable (in Mo Dowd's special little world).

But when the box's sharper tacks call her on her statements...

...she's "just a mom".

And mindful of charges of political exploitation, Sheehan has bid the activists in her midst to take a back seat. She's moving camp closer to the President, courtesy of a kindly Crawford neighbor, and only moms and some dads get to go.

So she's "just a mom" - but the activists were in the front seat, anyway?

And...um..."some dads?"

Some background; to the left, the family is the mother and "her" children. Fathers are, as übersociallefty Margaret Meade famously quipped, "a biological necessity but a social accident" to the not-so-radical left. A look at one system that the institutional left runs from the core outward - the family court and child support systems - are a clear indicator of how the institutional left regards the role of the father.

Brooke Gladstone talks with Jean Bethke Elshtain - a feminist scolar who's taken a lot of flak from the left, as it happens, for her support of the war on terror.

JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN: Why should a mother have more moral authority on a particular issue than a father or the average person on the street?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: It's a cultural thing, a very old cultural thing, the spiritual power projected on the bond between mother and child, a kind of purity that transcends politics and repels partisan attack, no matter how harsh. Jean Bethke Elshtain, author of Political Mothers, says that a mother's moral authority only increases when her child dies.

JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN: And there's something that kicks in when you think mother child. You think of someone young, vulnerable, dependent.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Sculpted by Michelangelo, perhaps?

JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN: Yes, exactly. The image of the suffering mother, the image of Madonna and child. And you don't think of a grownup adult son who re-enlisted to fight a war.

So there's a brief nod to reality, before the report veers back into feminist orthodoxy:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The mothers who finally brought an end to the notorious dirty war in Argentina made powerful use of that imagery. From 1976 to '83, people disappeared off the streets of Argentina every day, many young students, never heard from again. The mothers of the disappeared began to gather on Thursdays in a Buenos Aires square, walking in pairs, because it was illegal to assemble in groups, without their husbands, because it was not safe for them. Diana Taylor is the author of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's Dirty War.

DIANA TAYLOR: There's a deep investment in the
maternal in every society, and that's why it's so
potent, because it's not an attack that's coming from
the outside; it's coming from the very fiber of that
society.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In Argentina, political activism was
strictly forbidden but the grieving mothers, at least
while they stayed in the square, were seemingly
untouchable.

DIANA TAYLOR: They looked like matronly middle aged women. They wore flat shoes, and they started carrying the ID cards of their missing children, saying, these people existed, they've disappeared, we don't know where they are; you know where they are, we want you to be held accountable.

Right. The mothers of the depeparacidos were very effective; not as a matter of some innate power of their gender, but because they were the best means available - the only people who could protest without fear of being disappeared themselves.

Far, far removed from the likes of Cindy Sheehan, whose adult son volunteered for service in Iraq.

But never mind; this isn't about facts. This is about mythologizing the identity-feminists' view of mothers in society, in order to prop up the legitimacy of Cindy Sheehan, facts and context be damned.
Gladstone talks with a series of friendly witnesses:

DIANA TAYLOR: And if you also look at what happened with the families here of 9/11, when they went to testify before the Commission [At least, the ones who went to flog a political agenda - ed], they were also carrying those photographs of their children. So these were a kind of a strategy that they had all taken up from the mother's movement in Argentina.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In 2000, Diana Dees Thomases organized the Million Mom March for stronger gun control regulations, one of the biggest protest marches in U.S. history.

DIANA DEES THOMASES: I wish I could tell you that I was a scholar of women's movements, but I wasn't. What I learned at the Million Mom March, and I really didn't have any background on this until the Million Mom March, that women are natural organizers after they have children. Suddenly you're organizing carpools, you're organizing field trips, you're on the PTA. Suddenly moms are joining the NAACP. Issues that affect them become more important, I think, once you have children.

What of the fact that the "9/11 Families" were, like Sheehan, a front? Or that the "Million Moms" (who href="http://www.shotinthedark.info/archives/005334.html">never fielded more than a 150,00 people, if that, and
whose "innate organizing ability" led them to the brink of bankruptcy) were both ineffective, factually bankrupt and the object of ridicule by people with more basis in fact than ideological alliance?

What of it?

Says Gladstone:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But eventually the mothers, defined in these movements as mothers and only as mothers...

Bingo! There again; the pseudo-mystical claptrap is, once again, about the infantilization of women!

"They're just mothers..."? Go back to the inception of the Million Mom March. They were not "Just mothers". They were women - hear them roar!

Gladstone is trying to reinforce the point that motherhood infers some mystical aura to the woman waving her child's picture about. The disingenuity of the point is apparent when she juxtaposes Bethke Elshtain...:

JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN: Over time, the symbolic appearance of grieving mothers in the public square begins to lose its force, and in a sense you've made your point. Now politics has to take over.

...with the Million Mom March...:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But beware! The gun lobby accused the Million Mom March of playing politics when it found a common cause with political allies.

...ignoring - or perhaps never having known - the fact that the "Million Moms" were a politically-based pressure group from the start, something perhaps the mushy, "journalistic" left wasn't equipped to see or inclined to care about - but the "gun lobby" was! The claptrap about the mystical role of the mother was as much of a smokescreen then as it is with Cindy Sheehan today.

Gladstone, probably unknowingly, tips her hand:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And therein lies the dilemma for mothers and mothers' movements. They are powerful because they are perceived as pure. They grab attention across the political spectrum precisely because they transcend politics.

Why, and to whom, are they "perceived as pure?" And who presents that image of purity - without, as Gladstone demonstrates, any critical question whatsoever?

But the political arena is where change happens. A madonna has no place there. Once she enters, she's no purer than Dad. (GUITAR MUSIC AND SINGING)

"No purer than Dad?"

For starters - do they know how objectionable this is to fathers? People who love their children exactly as much as mothers do?

The idea that Motherhood implies some holy status that transcends logic or honesty or facts is absurd.

Think mystically. Act disingenuously.

Posted by Mitch at August 24, 2005 12:03 PM | TrackBack