60 Years Of Media Milestones

On July 1, 2021 I turn sixty years young. Fun Fact: I was born the exact same date and year as the late Princess Diana. Unlike Diana I never became royalty, though at my best during these 60 years I have been a royal pain in the neck to established powers. In a small way, the Media Rants column serves as a vehicle for that kind of pain delivery. 

To celebrate my 60th, I thought it might be a good idea to summarize what are--for me anyway--the most important media strides made during each decade of my life. The list is purely subjective, but anyone who bothers to look further into the strides mentioned will come to the conclusion that each has had a major impact on the way media is practiced and/or the way we think about media. Some of the strides have had transformative impacts on humanity (for better or worse). 

For purposes of space, I will only list and describe four strides per decade. Also, I don't include anything from the 2020s because we are still too early in the decade. If you don't like my list, please come up with your own! 

Here we go . . . 

1960s: The Birth of "The Media" 

To this very day, if you ask 20 people to define what is meant by "the media," you will get 20 different answers. Though media has been practiced and studied for many millennia, it was not until the 1960s that academic studies of the topic began to proliferate. At the same time, uses of the media--for better and worse--start to become more sophisticated in the 1960s. Against that backdrop, here are four 1960s media milestones: 

*FCC Chair Newton Minow's May 9, 1961 speech on "Television and the Public Interest." Delivered before the National Association of Broadcasters just shy of two months before the birth of Baby Tony, the speech introduced the phrase "vast wasteland" as a description of the quality of commercial television. Though acting in the "public interest" had been a condition of earning and keeping a broadcast license since the 1930s, it really was not until Minow's speech that popular and academic discourse began to grapple with just how far from that standard the networks had strayed. Sixty years later the problem persists, making Minow's words as vital as ever: 

In 1961 Newton Minow called TV a "vast wasteland." Today that phrase can be accurately applied to a range of media. 

When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better.

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

*Richard Nixon's 1968 Campaign For President. The 1968 Nixon For President campaign broke new ground in how it managed to take a profoundly despicable and unpopular politician (i.e. Nixon) and--using techniques then considered cutting edge in the public relations industry--made him just likeable enough to win the race. Joe McGinniss' classic campaign memoir, The Selling of the President 1968, introduced the world to the young Roger Ailes. Ailes marketing savvy on behalf of Nixon was a precursor to the kind of divide and conquer approach to media he would late go on to pioneer for the Fox News Network. I consider Nixon's 1968 campaign a media milestone because it introduced and perfected methods of media manipulation that have been used not only in every succeeding presidential campaign, but most partisan campaigns at all levels of power. 

Joe McGinniss' The Selling of the President 1968 was a classic narrative of how the public relations industry transformed a nasty, paranoid loser (Richard Nixon) into a winning candidate. 

*The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel Boorstin. Professor Boorstin taught history at the University of Chicago for 25 years and then served 12 years (1975-1987) as the Librarian of Congress. The Image, Boorstin's classic 1962 book, was one of the earliest attempts to document the extent to which politics and politicians had become equivalent to entertainment and entertainers. Though the book did not predict the emergence of a Trump White House, its argument that successful politicians now had to be "media stars" certainly suggested the Orange One. 

*The Birth of Free Form FM Rock Radio. Contemporary commercial radio is so goddam awful that it's difficult to believe there was a time when it was vital. The late Tom Donahue, a radio giant who should be a household name, pioneered the "free form" FM radio format in the late 1960s at KMPX and KSAN in San Francisco. In 1967 a classic article by Donahue appeared in Rolling Stone called "AM Radio Is Dead and Its Rotting Corpse Is Stinking Up the Airwaves." His free form alternative made FM radio into a space for creative music, community activism, and youth culture. 

KSAN Newscast 

1970s: The Loss of Innocence 

As the 1960s came to a close, media junkies could with some justification be optimistic. In part as a response to Minow's "vast wasteland" comment, television seemed to be on the brink of developing its potential. FM radio was in a golden age of experimentation and creativity. Even print journalism, as evidenced by the courageous decision to release the Pentagon Papers, seemed vital. Unfortunately, all the optimism turned out to be misguided. In the 1970s media lost its innocence; the contemporary media values of greed, conformity, and clickbait all have roots in that decade. Against that backdrop, here are four 1970s media milestones: 

*The Death of Free Form FM Rock Radio: By 1975, Tom Donahue's dream of the FM dial as home of the free form format was already on the way out, done in by the same surrender to commercial pressures that had made AM radio so horrific for so many decades. Maybe it was never realistic to think that the "underground" vibe of the 1967-1975 free form could last in a commercial environment. A good book on this topic is Richard Neer's FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio (Mr. Neer was a popular DJ on New York's WNEW-FM at the height of its free form days.).  The death of free form FM radio had devastating consequences not just for rock music, but for youth culture in general. I think a good argument could be made that the emergence of the vapid, conformist, money obsessed "yuppies" (young urban professionals) of the 1980s had at least something to do with the dismantling of spaces--like free form FM radio--that encouraged creativity and nonconformity. 

Richard Neer, a popular DJ for New York's legendary WNEW-FM during its high point of creativity and community engagement, wrote a great memoir about the rise and fall of rock radio. 

*Watergate and Scandal Coverage: Without question, Bob Woodward's and Carl Bernstein's Watergate reporting for the Washington Post in 1973-1974 was a rare example of how bold journalism could topple a corrupt presidency. Unfortunately, in the media world Watergate became the template guiding all scandal coverage, some trivial. 

Woodward and Bernstein established the template for covering political scandals. Unfortunately too many of the "gate" scandals have been trivial, badly sourced, or mere partisan propaganda (think "Russiagate," for example). 

*FCC v. Pacifica. This 1978 Supreme Court decision held that the Federal Communications Commission does have the power, in the name of "protecting children," to regulate "indecent" language on broadcast media. The case originated when a man traveling in his car with his 15-year-old son did not appreciate hearing George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" on the air. The Court had the opportunity to say, in legalese of course, that the man could just "change the station or turn the fucking radio off." Instead, the Court made the FCC into our National Nanny, which has ended up stifling legitimate free speech and provoking ridiculous attempts to get by the FCC censor (such as  replacing "Fuck You" with "Forget You" in TV broadcasts of movies or editing out swear words entirely in musical recordings.). 

In one of the worse Supreme Court decisions ever issued, the Court in FCC v. Pacifica endorsed a view of the Federal Communications Commission as some kind of National Nanny empowered to protect our ears from "indecency." 

*The Golden Age of Film. The 1970s were a great decade for film. Directors/Writers Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and many others made groundbreaking strides in narrative development. Scorsese's controversial 2019 claim, that "Marvel movies aren't cinema," is really not controversial at all for anyone familiar with the best movies of the 1970s. Money quote from Scorsese's 2019 op-ed: 

For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.

It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form. And that was the key for us: it was an art form.

Classic Film Clip: You Talkin' to Me? 

1980s: Corporate Domination and Response  

Though media lost its innocence in the 1970s, we left the decade still feeling that for all its faults, media would never become primarily a vehicle for money making. In other words, by 1979 hope remained realistic that "operating in the public interest" was an attainable goal even for profit-driven media. Those hopes were almost entirely dashed in the 1980s, as the Reagan Administration's articulation of profit maximization as THE supreme human value became the value system of a range of institutions including media. Against that backdrop, here are four 1980s media milestones: 

*The Rise of Cable Television. In theory, the rise of cable television should have been the answer to Minow's "vast wasteland" critique. With so many channels to choose from, the crapola should be balanced out with high quality offerings, right? Anyone who subscribed to cable in the 1980s probably ended up feeling the same way Bruce Springsteen did when he sang about "57 channels and nothing on." 

*Music Television (MTV). If you think of music videos as advertisements for records, then MTV in the 1980s became the first network in history to feature ads literally 24-hours a day. Add in the sexism and misogyny of much of 1980s music video and MTV goes from being an interesting experiment to one of the lowest points in the global history of corporate media. 

*The Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. There's been much confusion about what the Fairness Doctrine actually did, and I've written about that here. The caricature of the Fairness Doctrine is that it mandated targets of criticism on broadcast news stations to have some kind of right to respond. The Fairness Doctrine was never that powerful; still, there is no doubt that its repeal contributed to the rapid growth and development of ultra one-sided, mostly right wing talk radio and cable pundit shows. 

*Classic Media Criticism.  From an academic perspective, the 1980s were groundbreaking for the release of some seminal works of media criticism that set the standard for that genre of writing. Some of my favorites include Ben Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly (1983), Noam Chomksy's  and Edward Herman's Manufacturing Consent (1988), Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), and Herb Schiller's Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression.   

The late Neil Postman's 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death was one of a number of brilliant works of media criticism released in that decade. 

1990s: Wasted Opportunities and Dreams Deferred  

In part because of the corporate control of politics, the 1990s was a decade of wasted opportunities and dreams deferred. The fall of the Soviet Union could and should have been a rallying cry for democratic reforms all over the globe. Instead, the United States spent most of 1998 and 1999 consumed with the earth shaking issue of whether or not the President of the United States lied about getting a blowjob in the oval office. Against that  backdrop, here are four 1990s media milestones: 

*The Internet Revolution. Obviously the most transformative technological development since Gutenberg's printing press in the 1400s, the Internet in the 1990s immediately impacted every area of human existence. A number of scholars and pundits treated the new technology with optimism, thinking that the digital age would bring about democratic participation on a scale never seen before. While such optimism might still be justified, democracy activists have learned over the last 30 years that the Internet is more easily coopted by corporate powers and their lapdog politicians than we initially thought possible. 

*Hip-Hop Culture. If we look back to the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, we can see that rock-and-roll exerted a dramatic impact on culture, from language to fashion to gender roles to pretty much everything. Today the same can be said about hip-hop. But whereas rock-and-roll was primarily an American phenomenon, hip-hop from its earliest days had a global reach, in the 1990s becoming worldly in extraordinary ways. Hip-hop at its best, like rock at its best, unifies people at the street level and challenges top-down power structures. The establishment always fights back, which is why hip-hop like rock is always in a position of having to rediscover its most pure form. 

Video Clip: Evolution of Hip-Hop

*Telecommunications Act of 1996. In 1996 the US Congress and President Clinton "updated" the Communications Act of 1934. A whopping victory for big media corporations, the 1996 act set in place a media consolidation mania that has led to more than 90 percent of media content being controlled by six companies (Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Viacom/CBS, Sony, and Fox). Media consolidation has had devastating impacts on journalism, and created "news deserts" in most of the country. Proponents of the 1996 Act laud it for creating the "free and open" Internet, but increasing consolidation and the assaults on "net neutrality" prove that consumer protections in the law were never strong enough. 

President Bill Clinton, joined by VP Al Gore, digitally signs the Telecommunication Act of 1996 into law. The Act opened the door for media consolidation and corporate domination of the Internet. 

*Third Wave Feminism. In politics, popular culture, the workplace, and other areas, women in the 1990s challenged structures of power more forcefully than at any time since the 1960s. Feminist defenses of Bill Clinton during the impeachment probably undermined the progress of the movement by ceding moral high ground on behalf of a slimey but powerful man. Still, there is no doubt that the third wave feminism of the 1990s raised consciousness in a way that continues to impact women's progress as demonstrated by the #metoo movement, challenging gender stereotypes in film and other media, and the election of more women to public office. 

Sparked by the treatment of Anita Hill during the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, activist women announced a "third wave" of feminism. A record number of women were elected to office in 1992, making it forever the "Year of the Woman." 

2000s: The Crisis of Legitimacy 

In the first decade of the new millennium, perceptions of mainstream media (especially news) started to decline precipitously. Some of that was the result of the nonstop media bashing by right wing radio and other "conservative" sources that for years had made "the media" into the ultimate straw man. But I would argue that some media advances in the decade were more responsible for undermining the legitimacy of "the media". Against that backdrop, here are four 2000s media milestones. 

*The War on Terror. George W. Bush's declaration of a "war on terror" in 2001 had terrible impacts on media. Every administration since Bush has applied archaic statutes (like the Espionage Act of 1917) to go after journalists and whistleblowers. Mainstream media's failure to stand up to and call out the bullying of their own has probably done more to undermine media credibility than any so-called "fake news." 

*Embedded Reporting. In the Vietnam era, media for the most part succeeded in covering the war independently. Determined to never again allow the public to see the real costs of war, the Pentagon since the 1980s has slowly but surely co-opted war reporting. In the 2000s, "embedded" reporting on Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in a shameful pattern of Pentagon talking points presented as truthful statements about the conduct of the war(s). During the 1980s, as the Soviet Union was bogged down in Afghanistan, the Russian people received nothing but bullshit from Soviet media about the conduct of and progress of the war. In those days American leaders had no problems labeling Soviet reporting on Afghanistan as pure propaganda. In the 2000s the majority of American reporting on Afghanistan and Iraq--especially in the crucial early years of the wars--came straight out of the old Soviet playbook. Truly shameful. 

Clip: Robert Riggs Embedded Reporter 552ADA Iraq Under Fire in Iraq 2003

*YouTube and Viral Media. The sheer number of hours that people (of all ages) spend consumed with YouTube and other viral media is astounding. In the early days of YouTube, we laughed at how viral videos tended to focus on cats or weird forms of human behavior. As time has gone on, we have seen YouTube become a safe space for conspiracy theories, "alternative" news and various forms of quackery passed off as serious analysis. 

*Wikileaks. Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange has been incarcerated for almost 10 years now--even though he has never been tried and convicted of anything--essentially for the "crime" of releasing information that proves the dishonesty and crimes of the US and other world governments. World leaders may succeed in silencing Assange, and might destroy Wikileaks, but those efforts are like trying to bury water. Truth and transparency, whether it is being put forward by Assange and Wikileaks or similar actors, like water will keep seeping back up at you if you try to bury them. 

BBC News Clip: Who Is Julian Assange? 

2010s: The Era of Tribes, Trolls, and Trumpism 

When I was born in 1961 the White House was occupied by John F. Kennedy and a spirit of optimism animated the nation. As I closed in on my 60th birthday, the White House was occupied by a buffoon (initials DJT) who was followed by a man (initials JRB) best known for almost fifty years of political hackery in Washington. Can we blame the political de-evolution that has taken place in my lifetime on "the media"? Not completely, but there's no doubt that media played a role in making the mess, and will play a role in cleaning it up too. Against that backdrop, here are some media milestones from the 2010s: 

*The Death of Local Journalism. It's hard to exaggerate how destructive the death of local journalism has been not only to communities, but to the entire nation. Where I live in Oshkosh, WI we have to rely on a retired professor of journalism (publisher of The Oshkosh Examiner) to do serious research on critical issues facing the community. Most communities in the country do not have even that much. In the 2020s we HAVE to do something to address the journalism crisis lest we continue our descent into a culture of uninformed, divided tribes more concerned with trolling than teaching. 

*The Rise of Social Media. In the 2010s we saw what happens when a culture becomes addicted to digital communication. Sherry Turkle's 2012 book Alone Together was a clarion call urging more mindfulness on these matters, but even she may have under estimated the extent to which the addictive qualities of digital communication make reform difficult. 

Clip: Sherry Turkle on Alone Together

*Podcasting. Like the Internet generally, podcasting has the potential to make small-d democracy something real. The 2010s saw a surge in the sheer number of podcasts on every topic imaginable. My own podcast (Running on MT with Matt King) tries to discuss serious issues in a way that anyone can understand. Podcasts like that tend to have limited listenership, while sensationalist podcasting hooks millions. Is there a way to reverse that trend in the 2020s? I'm not optimistic, but anything is possible if people of goodwill do the work necessary to make it happen. 

*Hate, Inc. Matt Taibbi's 2019 book Hate, Inc. is not the best work of media criticism that I've ever read, but he did capture the central premise of mainstream news media in the 2010s: if consumers of ideologically diverse media can be trained to despise each other, profits will follow. Playing off of Chomsky and Herman's "manufacturing consent," Taibbi calls this state of affairs "manufacturing discontent." In the 2020s I don't think we need to strive to make everyone love each other, but we should at least be able to consume--and maybe even accept on occasion--the viewpoints of others without being made to feel that we have "betrayed" a tribe. 

Clip: Matt Taibbi on how the profit motive has destroyed the media 

So there you have it. Sixty years of media milestones. What a long, strange trip it's been. For me anyway.

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part XI: Original Tunes That Got The Twist and Shout Treatment

Note. Please be sure to check out prior installments in the Ten Bold Cover Tunes series: 

• Ten Bold Cover Tunes, Part 1
• Ten Bold Cover Tunes, Part II
• Ten Bold Cover Tunes, Part III: Guitar Hero Edition
• Ten Bold Cover Tunes, Part IV: Dare to Cover Johnny Cash Edition
• Ten Bold Cover Tunes, Part V: I Won't Back Down Edition
• Ten Bold Cover Tunes, Part VI: Bring It On Home To Me Edition
• Ten Bold Cover Tunes, Part VII: The Kennedy Center Honors Edition
• Ten Bold Cover Tunes, Part VIII: Classical Music Covers Edition
• Ten Bold Cover Tunes, Part IX: Covering Spoken Words
• Ten Bold Cover Tunes, Part X: Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream Edition

Ten Bold Cover Tunes Part XI: Original Tunes That Got Twist and Shout Treatment

Sometimes cover tunes so completely become thought of at THE VERSION of the tune that the original is forgotten. In fact, the COVER becomes known as the ORIGINAL. Think of the Beatles' version of "Twist and Shout." The Fab Four brought so much energy and excitement to the tune that the fine Isley Brothers version--released not so long before the Beatles' and a commercial hit in its own right--was almost immediately forgotten. To this day few people are aware that the first, original recording of "Twist and Shout" was by a Philadelphia based R & B band known as The Top Notes. 

So this edition of Ten Bold Cover Tunes is not about the cover tunes. Rather, it's about some classic originals that got the "Twist and Shout Treatment;" originals that got lost due to the immense popularity of the cover version(s). My choices of the ten originals riffed about below were based on two criteria: (1) I personally enjoy the original as much as if not more than the better-known cover, and (2) I think the original deserves a wider audience. 

#10:  The Family, "Nothing Compares 2 U."  Sinead O'Connor's passionate and powerful 1990 cover of the Prince-penned tune, which  became one of the most popular and iconic music videos of all time, made the Ireland-born singer an international superstar. 

Prince himself actually recorded the song in 1984, but that version was not officially released until 2018. The first "official" version of "Nothing Compares 2U" was recorded in 1985 by The Family, an R & B band that was a side-project of sorts for Prince. I think this version has a melancholy beauty to it that, in some ways, rivals the cries of desperate grief O'Connor brought to it. Check it out: The Family "Nothing Compares 2 U."  

#9:  Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Proud Mary." Over 100 artists have covered "Proud Mary," but Ike and Tina Turner's funk version became definitive, in part because Creedence disbanded in the early 1970s and writer John Fogerty for many years would not perform CCR songs. Tina Turner, on the other hand, performed the song for 40 years until her retirement from the stage in 2009. John Fogerty has pretty much reclaimed the song since then, but a 2018 movie borrowed the name and used Tina's version. 

CCR's original really is kick-ass. Here it is. 

#8:  Bob Dylan "All Along The Watchtower." Though few people know what "All Along The Watchtower" is even about, Jimi Hendrix's version became a baby boom generation anthem. Dylan himself has said that when he performs the song he experiences it as a tribute to Hendrix. 

Dylan's original was released in 1968 ( 6 months before Hendrix's cover), a time when his fans still weren't sure if he had made the full transition from civil rights movement activist to aloof, offbeat poet. Thus "All Along the Watchtower" has an aura of social commentary to it even though it lacks the moral clarity of "Blowin' in the Wind" or the generational spirit of "The Times They Are A Changin'. Dylan's folk contemporary Dave Von Ronk probably was correct when he said that by 1968 Dylan had figured out that when it comes to songwriting he could "get away with anything." 

Bob Dylan is a critical figure in the history of popular music. His original version of "All Along the Watchtower," probably more than any of his other tunes, represents his uncanny ability to make listeners feel they have been introduced to an earth shaking MESSAGE even as they struggle to figure out just what that message is. 

Here's Bob Dylan's original version of "All Along the Watchtower."

#7: The Sutherland Brothers' "Sailing." Rod Stewart's 1975 version of "Sailing" was an international hit for him and established the song's reputation as an epic love quest. In the early days of music video, established rock stars like Stewart struggled to find a way into the visual space. Video, after all, "killed the radio star."  A 1981 music video for "Sailing" was one of Stewart's first contributions to MTV. 

The Sutherland Brothers' original 1972 recording has a spiritual vibe to it not frequently heard in popular music. That's not surprising when we consider what writer Gavin Sutherland said about it: "Most people take the song to be about a young guy telling his girl that he's crossing the Atlantic to be with her. In fact the song's got nothing to do with romance or ships; it's an account of mankind's spiritual odyssey through life on his way to freedom and fulfillment with the Supreme Being."

Here's the original Sutherland Brothers' recording of "Sailing." 

#6: Tiny Bradshaw's "The Train Kept-A Rollin". There have been a number of great cover versions of this tune, the most popular being Johnny Burnette's rockabilly treatment of it, the Yardbirds' British blues invasion cover, and Aerosmith's 1970s reworking of it into an American metal masterpiece. 

As great as are the covers, I still find myself drawn to Tiny Bradshaw's original. Bradshaw was a bandleader, singer and pianist whose "jump blues" style became a foundational part of the hidden history of rock-and-roll. "The Train Kept-A Rollin" came out in 1951, and while it has never been considered as a candidate for the first rock and roll song, its energy would certainly justify such an accolade. 

Here's Tiny Bradshaw's "The Train Kept-A Rollin." 

#5: The King Cole Trio's "(Get Your Kicks) On Route 66." The Rolling Stones recorded this classic in 1964 for their first album, and their version is probably definitive. They were most likely influenced by Chuck Berry's rendition. John Mayer's outstanding version appears on the 2006 soundtrack of the movie "Cars." 

"Route 66" was written by Bobby Troup and originally recorded by the King Cole Trio in 1946. I love this jazzy version not just because Nat King Cole was one of the greatest singers in history, but because when this song was released the actual Route 66 was an exciting place. It was the "Mother Road;" the "Main Street of America" that ran almost 2,500 miles from Chicago to Santa Monica. 

Here's The Cole Trio's "(Get Your Kicks) on Route 66."

#4: Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog." The early Elvis Presley covered songs originally recorded by African-Americans in a style that was--at that time--so unique for White artists that listeners just assumed he wrote the tunes. In fact Elvis never wrote a song, including one of his signature hits "Hound Dog" which he released in July of 1956. 

"Hound Dog" was composed by the legendary songwriting team of Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller and recorded originally by blues great Big Mama Thornton. Wildly popular upon release, the song provoked no fewer than 10 covers BEFORE Elvis'. But no matter how popular the song was in the early 1950s, post-1956 it became identified almost completely with Elvis. In Jim Crow America, huge numbers of white Americans could only hear Elvis' version, either because of their own unwillingness to listen to black artists, or because racist radio stations would not play the music of African-Americans.

If you want to understand the roots of rock-and-roll, Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog" is a good place to start. Here it is. 

#3: Neil Diamond's "Red Red Wine." UB40's reggae/pop version of this tune was so danceable, and so much fun, that casual listeners would not even realize it's a pretty sad song about getting wasted in order to forget a lost love. Still, the UB40 version became the definitive one. 

I like Neil Diamond's original version because he credibly adopts the persona of a depressed man drinking his troubles away. Actually he sounds like Neil Diamond imitating a drunk dude imitating Neil Diamond in a karaoke version of "Red Red Wine." Classic. 

Here's Neil Diamond's 1968 original version of "Red Red Wine." 

#2: Jake Holmes' "Dazed and Confused." When Led Zeppelin released their first album in 1969, they rewrote most of the lyrics to Jake Holmes' "Dazed and Confused" and then had the gall to take full songwriting credit for it! Holmes reached an out-of-court settlement with Zep in 2010, part of which required the Zeppelin version to be credited to "Jimmy Page, inspired by Jake Holmes." Still, the Zeppelin version will forever be THE "Dazed and Confused" people think about when the the song comes to mind. A good history of the song can be found here. 

Holmes' original version, released in 1967, is one of the most underrated rock songs of all time. It's got the trippy vibe of the best music released in the "Summer of Love," and some of the most creative instrumentation and melody of the period. Ironically, despite the title ("Dazed and Confused") the tune really has nothing to do with drugs; it's about a guy's reaction to a relationship breakup. 

Here's Jake Holmes' original "Dazed and Confused." 

#1: Shuggie Otis' "Strawberry Letter 23."  The most recognized version of this song is the 1977 soul/funk jam by the Brothers Johnson. That version is a dance-era masterpiece. 

Shuggie's 1971 original is a masterpiece too, though more difficult to categorize. Is it rock? Rhythm and blues? Pop? Folk? Or is it also soul/funk? I love both versions, though Shuggie's strikes me as a bit more authentic, especially in terms of his vocal sincerity. The album on which Strawberry Letter 23 appears, "Freedom Flight," never shows up on those "all time great" lists. Perhaps it's time for that to change

Here's Shuggie Otis' original version of Strawberry Letter 23. 

So there you have it: ten original tunes tunes that got the "Twist and Shout" treatment. That is, the cover version of the tune became so well known that the original almost got lost. The purpose of this post was to find those songs again. Hope you enjoyed it! 

Dumb Contemporary Commonplaces, Part 2

In last month's Rant, I identified five contemporary commonplaces that strike me as DUMB in the sense that they do little to improve the sorry state of public discourse in the United States, AND are easily exploited by political hacks and opportunists. The five identified were: 

1. "Literally" 
2. "It is what it is" 
3. "Both sides do it" 
4. "Russian Asset" 
5. "Concerns mount" 

Snopes has verified that President Ulysses S. Grant actually did utter this quote in an 1875 speech. Ignorance is often created or reinforced by the mindless use of dumb commonplaces.  

This rant identifies five more dumb commonplaces. Much more than last month's list, these five are particularly nefarious in how they tend to be employed by bad faith political actors for the purpose of bamboozling the public. These same bad faith political actors willfully exploit commonplaces in an effort to appear like some kind of conscientious or noble public servant. In other words, when you hear these commonplaces come out of the mouth of your local, state, or national officials, be sure to consider the very real possibility that she or he is COMPLETELY FULL OF  SHIT. 

Commonplace #6: "It's Not Sustainable."  In the days when sustainability had a direct and recognizable connection to humans and their interaction with the natural environment, cogently arguing that something was "not sustainable" had the rhetorical force of a wake-up call. Environmental activists, scientists, and even some politicians helped the world to see, for example, how "it's not sustainable" meant that our current methods of creating, consuming, and disposing of "stuff" would make life more difficult for future generations. 

Today, "it's not sustainable" is used just as frequently by bad faith actors to argue against anything they don't like. For example, elected officials who were always against public school budgets anyway--often in hostile terms--now adopt somber tones to tell us that more resources for schools is "not sustainable." Much of the developed world can have health care for all, paid family and medical leave, high speed rail systems, and many other things that are the hallmarks of decent and civilized societies, but for us they are "not sustainable." Ask the same people about bloated military budgets, or about the billions spent annually on the war on drugs and incarceration, or about corporate welfare policies (if you're a Wisconsinite, think Foxconn) that drain public treasuries, and you won't hear a peep about how each program is not sustainable. 

 

Video: The Story of Stuff

The point is that "it's not sustainable" went from being an ethical descriptor of bad planning to a deceptive propaganda device designed to make bad planning sound good and good planning sound bad. Put another way, "it's not sustainable" became a "heads I win, tails you lose" trick. If Mr. Smith From Hell wants something, it's sustainable. It he doesn't, it's not. Fuck him. 

Commonplace #7: "It's not politics, it's math." One of the major responsibilities of government is to pass a budget. Because budgets are less about numbers and more about values, budget discussions are hard. This is true at the local, state, national, and even international levels. Most people don't like hard discussions, and hard discussions about values tend to send them into apoplectic tizzies. 

Over the years I've listened to and even participated in a number of budget discussions. The most educational are at the local level; because local government is non-partisan, government officials don't just fall back on partisan talking points or (as in the Wisconsin state legislature) just parrot the views of party leaders. Instead, officials will often trot out shibboleths seemingly designed to silence opponents: "we have to listen to what the people are telling us" (translation: we don't have to listen to what the people are telling us), or "the people want this" (translation: the people DON'T want this) or "the people don't want this" (translation: the people DO want this). 

All of the above are transparently weasel-like, but this one is my favorite: "it's not politics, it's math." That gem is usually said by someone attempting to position him or herself as somehow being above the fray that we mere mortals mess around in. I'm not sure when I first heard "it's not politics, it's math," but it is the kind of phrase that started to gain currency during Bill Clinton's remaking of Democratic Party rhetoric in the 1990s. Clinton endorsed the "triangulation" strategy, a tactic of framing oneself as the "reasonable" middle ground between polar extremes. So you would end up getting pure bullshit like this (I'm paraphrasing typical triangulated rhetoric): "Partisan politics won't let us get anything done. The Democrats think we can spend our way out of our problems. The Republicans want to starve government while cutting taxes for their rich donors. So both sides just keep playing politics to appease their tribes. But when I look at our budget deficit I want both sides to understand, it's not politics, it's math."  Brilliant, eh? 

Commonplace #8: "It's Just Common Sense." Public advocates framing their policy ideas as "just common sense" is something that has irked me for a long time. In fact in 2013 I wrote an entire Media Rant on it. As noted in that piece, in the public sphere when advocates say their plans are "common sense" they generally mean one of three things: 

• In my experience this is true. 
• I really, really want this to be true. 
• People I admire believe this is true. 

Privileging our experience, privileging our desires, and privileging the views of authorities are three of the major enemies of critical thinking. So what do we do when officials insist their appeals are grounded in "common sense?" Once again I'll refer to what I wrote in 2013: "The good news is we don’t have to be passive victims of common sense appeals. All we need to do is keep asking critical questions, be mature enough to change our minds when the evidence suggests we should, and resist all the pressures urging us to be intellectually lazy."

Common Place #9: "Violence against women." How could anyone possibly be opposed to the "violence against women" commonplace? Everyone's against "violence against women," right? Wrong. As noted most eloquently by University of Massachusetts professor of media studies Sut Jhally, the phrase "violence against women," because it does not identify the agent of the violence, makes it easy to ignore the fact that violence against women is an issue that MEN have the responsibility to do something about. Women of course have a role in ending violence against women, but the failure to clearly and unambiguously identify the agent of the violence has let most men "off the hook" on being part of the solution. 

As noted by Dr. Jhally, we (men) need to "break the silence" and call out our complicity in enabling the small amount of men responsible for most of the violence against women. A huge part of that effort requires changing the language of domestic/relationship violence. So whenever someone in your presence says something about "violence against women," politely interrupt them and ask, "you mean MEN's violence against women, right?" 

Video: Sut Jhally "Breaking the Silence" 

Commonplace #10: "We are better than this."  I was a fan of the late Elijah Cummings, the Maryland Congressman who represented his district for 23 years in the House of Representatives. Rep. Cummings' booming voice and moral tone always brought forth memories of the giants of the 1960s Civil Rights movement like Martin Luther King, Jr. Part of the Cummings brand was to express in vivid and moving terms some atrocity being committed by the government, and then end with "we are so much better than this!" 

Video: Remembering Elijah Cummings Most Memorable Moments 

When Elijah Cummings said "we are better than this," his emotive force made me suspend any attempt to ask if the statement was/is true. Are we in fact "better than this?" When anyone else besides Cummings uses the phrase, it seems as if ALL I think about is its accuracy or lack thereof. And unfortunately, I've come to the conclusion that we are NOT "better than this." In fact, in most areas we are probably a lot worse than we think. Imagine a Roman senator thousands of years ago, surveying the cruelty and greed of the actions of powerful people across the empire and concluding "we are better than this." With sober hindsight, we can reasonably conclude that Rome could never "be better" as long as it insisted on running a cruel and greedy empire. 

Thank you for engaging part II of "Dumb Contemporary Commonplaces." Let us all pledge to be less dumb  by being more mindful of our linguistic choices. To cite another commonplace I hate, "we got this!" 

Dumb Contemporary Commonplaces, Part 1

In the 1950s and 60s the late French scholar Jacques Ellul wrote insightfully about technology, language, politics, and culture. His books The Technological Society (1964) and Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1965) provoked critical conversations in sociology, media and communication studies, political science, and other fields. My personal favorite is the 1966 A Critique of the New Commonplaces. In that work Ellul did something I regard as the responsibility of intellectuals: he exposed the stupidity of much discourse in the public sphere without sounding like an out-of-touch academic elitist. Though Ellul wrote from a French perspective, in urging readers to be more conscious and critical of the language they consume, the book marched on terrain traveled by George Orwell in his classic 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. 

Ellul defines commonplaces as "ready-made ideas which are found in all the newspapers . . . The commonplaces are the excrement of the society." Commonplaces have wide acceptance; politicians, pundits, professors, and really anyone can cite them without having to worry about too much pushback. All cultures have a need for ready-made, "common-sense" ideas; that quality by itself does not make commonplaces comparable to excrement. But when ready-made ideas get hijacked to support vile political agendas, that is when the excremental aroma becomes unbearable. New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman is in Ellul territory when he calls out "zombie ideas." He writes, "A zombie idea is a belief or doctrine that has repeatedly been proved false, but refuses to die; instead, it just keeps shambling along, eating people’s brains. The ultimate zombie in American politics is the assertion that tax cuts pay for themselves — a claim that has been proved wrong again and again over the past 40 years. But there are other zombies, like climate change denial, that play an almost equally large role in our political discourse."

I agree with Dr. Krugman that today's Republican Party is especially prone to exploiting, for hardball politics purposes, commonplaces that should have been put to rest long ago. However, the GOP's linguistic marksmanship is but a subset of a more general dumbing down that's been creeping up on us for quite some time. In the remainder of this post I want to highlight some particularly dumb commonplaces commonly heard in our society. A few have more ominous political consequences than others, but all of them contribute to the sloppiness in public discourse that frustrates mindful citizens while empowering political hacks and opportunists. I'll feature ten dumb commonplaces, five this month and five next.  

*Commonplace #1: "Literally." Pre-pandemic, a student approached me in the hall one day and said, "that article you assigned us was so hard to read that I literally pulled my hair out." My response was, "wow, that's a freakin' amazing toupee you have on because it looks exactly like your real hair!" Of course my student did not mean that he actually pulled his hair out. He was merely trying to emphasize the frustration that comes on when confronted with difficult reading. Lots of English language purists out there react violently (usually not in a literal sense) to the way my student used "literally," though Merriam-Webster claims that using literally just for emphasis is correct too. My student could have legitimately said to me, "Don't like the way I used literally? Go look it up in the literal dictionary, asshole." (He literally looked like he might be thinking that.). 

Recognizing my obsession with the overuse of literally, my sister-in-law Jen got me this shirt! 

My problem with the overuse of "literally" is not that usage of it to show emphasis is "incorrect." Who am I to argue with the word gods and goddesses at Merriam-Webster? My problem is that the overuse has made "literally" into a mindless cliche'. When words or phrases become cliches, they lose whatever communicative power they may have once had. "Literally" has become equivalent to "selling like hotcakes," "avoid like the plague," or "the rest is history;" word choices that peg the user as devoid of original thoughts. As a teacher, I think it's my obligation to encourage students to generate fresh images--to make a literal impression on the brains of their listeners and readers (;-). 

*Commonplace #2: "It is what it is." Dictionary.com traces this mother-of-all defeatist expressions to a 1949 news article trying to describe life in frontier-era Nebraska. Every time I hear someone say the expression I want to say back, "what the fuck is it, really?" 

Politicians use "it is what it is" in what I perceive as a passive-aggressive manner. City councilors will often say something like this: "We can't really do anything about wages at the local level. The state has our hands tied. It is what it is."  Translation: "Working people are getting screwed by the system, but I am not going to do shit about it unless you force me to." 

*Commonplace #3: "Both Sides Do It."  This is a particularly intoxicating commonplace for mainstream journalists. So fearful of being accused of bias, mainstream journalists will go out of their way to show that no matter what horrible thing the Republicans are doing, the Democrats are somehow doing it too. "Both sides" reporting has always been part of what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the "savvy" style of reporting in which the journalist gets to position him or herself as somehow "detached" and without viewpoint, a positioning that is both disingenuous and literally (ha ha) impossible for any person with a pulse to hold. 

Though disingenuous and impossible, the "both sides do it" mantra could make some sense in an era when both major parties believe in representative democracy and argue over legitimate policy differences. In such an era, the journalists can see themselves as a kind of "referee" standing in between both sides. But it's not clear that such an era ever really existed anywhere other than in TV soap operas like The West Wing. More troubling, today's Republican party has openly renounced representative democracy, from suspending their responsibility to construct a party platform in 2020 and replacing it with a blind endorsement of Trump to doing everything in their power across all 50 states to make voting more difficult for constituencies not already in the GOP corner. The Democratic Party is awful and is the place where, as Green Party activist David Cobb once said, "progressive ideas go to die," but they at least do not try to win elections by preventing their opponents from voting. 

*Commonplace #4: "Russian Asset." Here's an example of establishment MSNBC Democratic Party awfulness. In 2016 the Dems could not admit that they lost fair and square to a crass doofus like Mr. Trump, so the narrative for the next four years was a never ending lurid tale of foreign interference and intrigue. Some went as far as to claim that the Orange Man had been a "Russian Asset" since the 1980s. Meanwhile Jill Stein, Susan Sarandon, Tulsi Gabbard, popular podcasters like Joe Rogan, and really ANYONE who somehow failed to sufficiently defer to Hillary was also a Russian Asset. As noted by Matt Taibbi (an independent journalist so frequently accused of being a Putin Puppet that he and his co-host Katie Halper sarcastically named their podcast "Useful Idiots"): 

"Rather than confront the devastating absurdity of defeat before an ad-libbing game show host who was seemingly trying to lose – a black comedy that is 100% in America’s rich stupidity tradition – Democrats have gone all-in on this theory of foreign infiltration. House speaker Nancy Pelosi even said as much in a White House meeting, pointing at Trump and proclaiming: 'All roads lead to Putin.'"

Openly calling dissenters "Russian Assets" has become a norm in US discourse. Shameful. 

To be clear: Vladimir Putin is a thug, but his ascendance to power had much to do with awful policy decisions made by NATO and bipartisan majorities in the United States after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. We failed to support genuine democrat movements in Russia (as we have failed to do all over the world), and as a consequence made the "strong man" more appealing to the Russian people. But instead of examining and reforming our now almost 30 years of crapola policy toward post-Soviet Union Russia, the Democrats would rather revive a kind of Cold War redbaiting, casually and maliciously maligning even sincere critics as "Russian Assets." Trump and Republicans in general have nothing positive to contribute toward Russia policy, but being unimaginative, ignorant trolls does not make them "Russian Assets." 

*Commonplace #5: "Concerns Mount." We need a definitive glossary of all the bullshit terms and phrases that are a result of our politics being held hostage by military-industrial-complex interests for all these years. Take a look at this lead paragraph from a CNN story on Joe Biden's announcement that the US will finally leave Afghanistan: 

"Concerns are mounting from bipartisan US lawmakers and Afghan women's rights activists that the hard-won gains for women and civil society in Afghanistan could be lost if the United States makes a precipitous withdrawal from the country."

So apparently we are supposed to stay in Afghanistan forever. Hey, why not? The US has as many as 800 military bases in around 80 countries and territories around the world, and "concerns mount" any time an effort is made to close any of them. 

It's interesting that we rarely see "concerns mount" when it comes to domestic policy. For example, it's hard to find a story about the pandemic that says something like, "concerns mount that lack of universal healthcare during a time of massive unemployment will enhance the misery inflicted by the pandemic." 

Next Month:  Five More Dumb Contemporary Commonplaces! 

Talia Lavin's Anti-fascism Primer

In early November of 2020 I heard a National Public Radio interview with journalist and anti-fascist activist Talia Lavin. She was discussing her recently published book Culture Warlords: My Journey Into The Dark Web of White Supremacy (New York: Hachette Books). Lavin's story of spending a year infiltrating the Internet chat rooms of neo-Nazi, incel ("involuntarily celibate"), and other anti-Semitic, white nationalist, and misogynist clans almost sounded funny. Her description of how she assumed a white supremacist femme fatale persona as "Ashlynn" to get racist, hate-filled buffoons to let down their guard and reveal their motivations in "love letters" to her had a Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles" quality to it. I ordered the book, but with President Trump's defeat and with still learning how to teach during a pandemic, I did not treat it with much urgency. Surely, I thought, the election results represented at least in part a desire to move toward the national unity necessary to tackle the profound public health, economic, and other crises we are facing. Obsessing over hate groups would just be a huge waste of time and energy. 

Video: Talia Lavin interviewed on CBSN

 

But then as November rolled on it became clear that neo-fascist elements in the country were energized by the Trump/Giuliani "Stop the Steal" rhetoric. On January 6th, 2021 a number of self-described Nazi and white supremacist organizations participated in the Capitol insurrection. The New York Times of January 16th cited law enforcement and domestic terrorism experts warning that the insurrection could "fuel extremist recruitment for years." Meanwhile, Republican legislatures throughout the country--acting on distortions fed them by Trump/Giuliani after the election--are poised to pass a range of ballot access restrictions in what's looking like Jim Crow 2.0. The Brennan Center for Justice has tracked more than 250 bills that restrict voting access across 43 states. Georgia's recently passed legislation actually makes it a crime to give food or water to voters waiting in line. 

Suddenly Talia Lavin's book seems urgent. 

Starting on June 1, 2019 and continuing for a year, Lavin joined more than ninety far-right groups on the Telegram messaging app.  She writes that “My intent in joining these groups was to gain a fly-on-the-wall view of far-right rhetoric, surveilling its violence, racial animus, and anti-Semitism in an environment in which contributors felt safe to speak freely, embracing the new platform on which they found themselves connecting enthusiastically with one another.” The chats she joined ranged from 22 to over 5,000 members, and she estimates that the chats collectively hosted about 32,000. 

Lavin found that people in the chats did not meet the stereotype of the hard working salt-of-the-earth patriots distressed and left behind by neoliberal trade and other economic policies. She certainly came across such types, but there were also huge numbers douchebaggy, secure professionals; i,e. people not struggling in the modern economy. During the Trump Administration, Stephen Miller--a Duke graduate with little personal connection to white victims of post-NAFTA trade wars-- brought white nationalist ideas to the highest levels of power. Lavin found lots of Miller-type individuals in the chat rooms. 

White supremacists on the internet are skilled at finding and sharing anti-Semitic and other hate texts dating from the middle ages to modern times. As stated by Lavin, "Everything old is new again online, and the worst of history, freed from its paper bonds and any context, floats in a void, to be plucked up and championed by hatemongers." Across all chats she infiltrated, she found persistent and disturbing allegiance to fabricated anti-Semitic texts like the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and more modern hate such as New Zealand mass murderer Brenton Tarrant's "The Great Replacement Manifesto". Among hardcore white supremacists she found repeated mentions of the late David Lane's "14 Words:" "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." David Lane was a member of "The Order," a 1980s white supremacist terrorist organization. 

Before setting out to infiltrate the fascist side of the Web, Lavin was already known as an outspoken antifascist. Her Jewish identify made her the target of especially virulent hate, including death and rape threats. In 2018 along with many others on Twitter, she mistakenly claimed that an ICE agent had a Nazi tattoo. The ugly reaction to her mistake was one of many factors that sparked her to investigate the depth hate in networld. In the introduction to the book, she claims that after a year of immersing herself in the dark world of online fascists, she began to feel rage not just at them but at white moderates; "The people who say: Ignore them! Let them march! Let them tweet, let them speak on campus, let them have their say and they will be defeated in the marketplace of ideas. The people who bill themselves as reasonable, who say: Let them air out their arguments. But the effect of these ideas when they are aired out is much like Zyklon B. Studying them as deeply as I have has made me realize no amount of such rhetoric is acceptable in the country's discourse, just as there is no acceptable amount of poisonous gas to let seep into a room." 

Later in the book she revisits the question of whether it might be best just to ignore the haters: "Aren't these just losers pontificating and arguing on the internet? . . . The thing about hate, though, is it metastasizes. The thing about channels that are filled, twenty-four hours a day, with stochastic violence--testosterone filled megaphones shouting for blood--is that, sooner or later, someone is going to take them up on it. From Robert Bowers to Anders Breivik to Brenton Tarrant, racist networks have proven over and over again that the steady dissemination of murderous propaganda leaves a trail of blood behind it. And when that happens, being about to trace, isolate, and identify these ideologies means that racists can't hide behind slippery code words or private vocabularies. In identifying their inspirations, and their ideological and theological motivations, we give them less room to operate in the shadows .  . . The chat rooms would continue without my sock puppet or with it. But if I'm there, I can tell you about it, you can help me strep the shadows away, and disinfect these crusty dens of hate with a blast of much-needed sunlight." 

Perhaps the major value of Talia Lavin's book is that it is an antifascism primer; a kind of "anti-fascism for dummies." In an accessible and easy-to-read format, the book presents a history of hate, making clear links between old school anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and modern versions. She also shows clearly that resistance to hate has a long history. "Antifa," which in conservative media is a nefarious cabal of violent extremists bent on destroying America, is in Lavin's view a foil for real far right violence. Alt-right activists and their apologists and enablers in media need to portray antifascists as violent extremists so that their own anti-social actions might seem tame by comparison. 

According to Lavin, antifascist activity does not usually occur in the streets or in active physical confrontation with alt-right wingers. Rather, much of antifascist activity "takes place in the form of research, infiltration, and perhaps most of all 'doxing'--revealing the names, locations, and occupations of members of hate groups." She argues that "while antifascism itself is roughly a century old, it has evolved, in the twenty-first century, to embrace novel techniques and technological advances. In some ways it has never been easier to participate in everyday fascist work, provided you have a good internet connection, a measure of patience, and the ability to engage in painstaking amateur detective work." She also claims that the majority of active antifascists she has met are women and people of color--quite the contrast with the mainstream media image of antifascists as young, masked middle-class white guys dressed in black. 

There is no easy answer to the question of how to curb the spread and impact of internet hate. The actor Sacha Baron Cohen, in his viral speech delivered upon receiving the International Leadership Award from the Anti-Defamation League, argues that social media companies have been slow to control hate on their platforms because their business models require large scale engagement. Lies, conspiracies, and outrage generate such engagement. Cohen wants to see government aggressively pressure social media companies to do what is necessary to reign in hate. He argues that such action does not offend the First Amendment, since the social media companies are private entities and thus are free to purge hate from their platforms. 

Full Speech: Sacha Baron Cohen Takes On Social Media Companies 

Lavin is on the same wavelength as Cohen, though she is wary of the idea that fascism can be defeated by government action. She believes that the rise of fascism will not ultimately be dismantled by "punitive measures of the state" or by "lone vigilantes" like herself. Fascism will be dismantled by "people working together to stamp out hate wherever it arises." I agree. 

Talia's Lavin's Culture Warlords is in some ways a reminder that, if you claim to be a sincere believer in democracy and human rights, then you are by definition an antifascist. And if you truly are antifascist, then you are obligated to do what you can to support others doing genuinely antifascist work. The challenge is immense; years of propaganda and uncontested nonsense have too many people thinking, for example, that fascists are those who support mask mandates to protect public health. Sometimes what we are up against seems so big that there is a temptation to just want to give up. Yet just in Wisconsin in the last few days we have learned that we've got Nazi statues in Baraboo, while the Jewish Community Relations Council in Milwaukee recently reported that 2020 saw a 36 percent increase in reported incidents of anti-Semitism across the state. 

Clearly now is not the time to give up. 

Anti-Hate Resources: 

*Southern Poverty Law Center's Hate Group Tracker 

*Political Research Associates' Tools For Action

*Hours Against Hate (Milwaukee) 

*We Are Many--United Against Hate

*Lone Wolves Connected Online: A History of Modern White Supremacy by Laura Smith (New York Times, January 26, 2021

*The New Yorker Magazine White Supremacy Archive