Kyle Schmidlin's Open Salon Blog

Limbaugh off the radio is a good thing for the wrong reasons

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:05:31 -0400

If Rush Limbaugh never had a popular radio program with millions of viewers, the world would undoubtedly be a happier, sunnier place. All that he brings into it fosters resentment, regression, confident ignorance, fear, and woe. So why am I skeptical amid reports that he may be losing his contract with Cumulus radio?

Last week, Limbaugh enjoyed renewed prominence in the headlines over the scandal which embroiled him last year: calling Georgetown pro-choice activist Sandra Fluke a “slut” and, in the embarrassing nature that is the hallmark of ‘conservative satire,’ unhumorously characterizing her as a prostitute whose fairly routine request to Congress that Obamacare cover contraception was tantamount to taxpayers paying her to have sex. This is actually far from the most inflammatory thing Limbaugh has ever said, even if it is horrible, tasteless, vindictive, chauvinistic, and barbaric. Such is par for the course for Limbaugh. By comparison to his comments on black America, foreign policy, and the poverty-stricken, though, it’s almost tame. But Sandra Fluke is a white girl with no small amount of privilege and using a no-no word on one of them in America can get a person in serious trouble, and Limbaugh well knows it now.

The internet buzzed with speculations that now enough advertisers dropped out of supporting his show to prompt Cumulus to ditch it altogether. It’s difficult to know what to trust when so much of the information, as it so often does in cases like these, comes from unscrupulous organizations quoting anonymous sources. On the reliable end, we do have Cumulus CEO Leo Dickey accusing Limbaugh-led controversies from last year of costing the company millions. I’ve heard more extreme reports that nearly all of Cumulus’s biggest advertisers requested not to be aired during Limbaugh or Sean Hannity’s shows and read a long list of specific advertisers that included Exxon/Mobil, McDonald’s, and Wells Fargo. Limbaugh’s take on the story has, of course, been aired, but is entirely valueless.

But if even the worst of the rumors are true and Cumulus drops him, Limbaugh still isn’t going anywhere. He is far too commanding a figure in the right wing. Advertisers may be dropping out of the radio show, but Limbaugh will never be at a loss for corporate sponsorship. For the sake of argument, it’s necessary to imagine a world in which the worst (or, maybe, best) anti-Limbaugh rumors are true. Because while I am all for removing his voice from the national discussion, I am not particularly in favor of doing so because a company like Wells Fargo decided his is a message they just don’t want to be associated with.

It’s hard to deny it’s a positive thing that enough people are applying sufficient pressure on advertisers that they drop from as influential an agenda-setting show as Rush Limbaugh’s. We’re certainly making steps toward a more civilized majority when there are enough people to make that happen. I find it a little cynical, as always, that it’s the word and not the substance of his statements getting Limbaugh in such hot water. But either way, what’s happening is not a conscious, well-intentioned, good-faith effort on the part of corporate America to steer the country in a responsible direction.

Cumulus still carries Mark Levin, Michael Savage, and others. Just because they may be prudent enough not to use a dirty word, or not prominent enough for it to matter if they do, doesn’t make the content of their message any more constructive or any less vicious. There is nothing praiseworthy about what is happening with Limbaugh; it is corporate damage control. It is still the same tired case of wealthy, business-minded Americans offering modest reaction to a loud public outcry for basic decency.

This is what it’s like to live in a society where freedom of speech is regulated by market principles. Those with the most access to speech and control of the dialogue are those with the most significant market shares. If an advertiser feels their profits might come to jeopardy by associating with a certain program, they will stop supporting it. They don’t do it because it is the right thing. Corporations are not moral actors, and even if the free market occasionally guides them to moral decisions the ends work too slowly and often don’t justify the means.

Limbaugh being off the radio means a significant deterrent to world peace and healthy national unity goes away. That’s no exaggeration. It is not an unimportant point, though, to mention that the people who actually made the decision are not interested at all in doing so for the sake of those things. They don’t even pretend that’s the case. The Rush Limbaugh Show isn’t going to be replaced by Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!”

But it isn’t as if there is no room for optimism. It is something of a democratic achievement to think that just a few years ago Limbaugh signed the biggest radio contract in history for an astonishing $400 million and now the rumors, however wishful or unlikely they may be, hold that he is in danger of being dropped. Corporations see him only in terms of dollars, but the country now sees him in such a negative light that he’s become a toxic investment. And that can’t help but represent some kind of progress.

The baby steps of Republican 'evolution' on gay marriage

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 11:03:00 -0400

Republicans stared a hard reality in the face during the 2012 election. Four years of lockstep, highly proliferated, extremely venomous, and nearly apocalyptic rhetoric proved insufficient to win them the Presidency. Whether Republicans come along for the ride or not, America is younger, more progressive, and far less hung up on petty bigotries and ancient superstitions than Republican strategists assumed going into 2012.

So it surprised me perhaps less than others when, on Sunday’s “This Week,” Karl Rove made the statement that he could imagine the next Republican presidential candidate being a supporter of gay marriage. Far from being a praiseworthy transformation of character, or an “evolution” as the Huffington Post put it, this is a quite transparently cynical decision motivated entirely by politics. If 2012 proved anything, it is that Republicans cannot win if all they have is the elderly and/or white vote. Acquiring votes from other bases requires becoming a “party of inclusion,” as their leaders have said. It’s truly fascinating to read their statements because they are so transparently cynical. Now that it’s politically necessary to treat people fairly and decently, Republicans have jumped on board with the idea.

Gay marriage, I’m sad to report, is a pretty insignificant distraction issue. I’m not saying it isn’t important for society to recognize the rights of two people who are in love to consummate that bond with a contract and receive the associated perks. It isn’t a bad thing to have the country unified on an issue as morally obvious as marriage equality. But surely such a victory is only very minor considering the monumental terrors of environmental collapse, private takeover of the world’s resources and supposedly democratic infrastructures, drone assassinations, invasion of privacy, militarization of the streets through excessive police presence, and other grave concerns.

This is why Rove acquiesces on the issue of gay marriage. It doesn’t really matter to policymakers what gay people can or can’t do. If catering to religious people’s bigotries is costing Republicans votes they feel they could otherwise have scored, they will “evolve” on the issue. There’s nothing for Republicans to gain by continuing to resist it and everything to lose; they won't allow the issue to break them. The religious bloc will still be theirs in any general election anyway.

According to the newest Washington Post-ABC poll, more than half of Republicans under age 50 support same-sex marriage. Rove’s party jumping on board with the rest of public opinion just goes to show their opposition was never based on ideology in the first place but on political convenience. Since it’s now proving inconvenient, they must change tack, and aren’t even shy about putting their party’s sudden transformation in those terms more or less exactly.

With a large number of Republicans who oppose gay marriage likely to die between now and the next election, and the majority of those taking their place supporting it, this can’t be the issue of divide between the parties. At this point, it seems probable that gun control will be the number one issue of the next national election. According to most polls, Republicans are well behind the rest of the country on this issue as well. But unlike gay marriage opponents, who increasingly sound ridiculous against the current cultural and religious landscape, gun proponents have a lot more ammunition and an easier time manipulating the dialogue.

For one thing, profits are at stake. It makes sense for Republicans to support gay marriage, given all the enormous economic stimuli associated with weddings. It makes sense to support guns for the same reason. The NRA doesn’t spend millions of dollars on lobbying and propaganda because they’re altruistic defenders of liberty, it’s because they have even more millions of dollars to make in profit if they can keep the dialogue favorable.

Many people are under the impression that gun control means federal agents going door-to-door collecting the firearms of law-abiding citizens. To my knowledge no one in a position of any real power actually has proposed this and never would if he or she valued electability. But just like the boogeymen of gay marriage was depicted as homosexual couples turning the whole nation queer and destroying our values (whatever those are), the boogeyman of gun control is an entirely fictitious creation and one against which the GOP is rallying in full force. Rove does it in the exact same interview in which he gives up ground on gay marriage.

The Republican Party has not wised up or evolved, they’ve just chosen their battles more carefully. Truly important issues will probably never come up, or at least won’t be seriously discussed, in any mainstream coverage leading up to the 2016 (or 2014) elections. Petty (relatively speaking) social issues drive our national elections: abortion, gay marriage, gun control, and so on. If the nation wants gay marriage, they can have it. The entire GOP has egg on its face from the debacles of 2012. Sex should never be a political issue in the first place, and thankfully Republicans are now a wholly irrelevant voice on the subject thanks to pastors like Charles Worley and politicians like Todd Akin and Richard Mourduck.

Steps are being made toward equality and decency, but they are only very small baby steps and motivated by a burning foot rather than a desire to meet the crises of the future in a responsible and moral way. There is plenty of time for something else to stick in some uptight simpleton’s craw between now and the next election, and you can bet that it will become the new political focal point and a primary source of embarrassment for thinking people the nation over.

Are sidewalks really for pedestrians?

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 11:03:14 -0400

I am a very conscientious bicyclist. I use the sidewalk often because the street is simply far too treacherous, but I watch for pedestrians all the time and, when I see them, slow down significantly, ride in the grass if there’s room, or use the street for as long as it takes to pass them.

The sidewalk I rode on last week measured about four feet wide. The road had no room for bikes and buzzed with four lanes of rush hour traffic. Ahead of me rose one of the steepest hills in downtown Austin, in the medical district. I had forgotten about that when I chose this path. I braced myself, just hoping I wouldn’t encounter any obstacles.

Fifty feet ahead, a woman walked toward me, very petite and wearing scrubs. She was walking slightly to the left, so I veered as far to the right as I safely could. We should have passed without incident. I gave her too much credit. She moved about ten inches toward center, leaving me teetering precariously on the very edge of the sidewalk and forcing me to stop my bike in the middle of about a 40-degree incline.

She did it on purpose. The sidewalk allowed more than enough room for us both to travel it comfortably. And I knew she did it on purpose when, as I rode by, genuinely fearful for my life, she said, “The sidewalk is for pedestrians!”

Austin, for all its supposed liberal tendencies, is not especially bike-friendly. The roads are overcrowded by impatient drivers who hate bicyclists and bike lanes, if there are any, are often tiny and subject to being cut off by turn lanes, parked traffic, and stopped buses. Granted, there are many cyclists who act insane on the roads. A reckless driver of any vehicle deserves whatever violence befalls them.

Riding on the sidewalk does pose many risks to the cyclist. Most harrowing is the fact that cars aren’t paying attention to you if you’re up there, so they can easily turn into you as you’re crossing a street or run into you as they’re pulling out of a driveway. In fact, for this reason, the consensus appears to be that riding on the sidewalk is more dangerous.

But a little discretion is in serious order. This woman, a nurse, practically shoved a person into traffic, because “It’s a ‘sidewalk,’ not a ‘side bike path!’” or some other snotty, entitled maxim. The sidewalk I tainted with my dirty bike tires was plenty wide for a pedestrian and a bicyclist. The pedestrian could even have had a dog. And in the event the sidewalk was not wide enough, several feet of grass grew alongside of it. Would it have been such an indignity, or such an indecent thing of me to ask, that she travel that perfectly safe land and we both arrive at our destinations without crashing into one another or spilling into the street?

Laws vary, and sometimes there are signs posted that prohibit bicycles on the street. Really, what it comes down to is just not being jerks to one another for no good reason. Nobody is entitled to the entire sidewalk. Nobody is even entitled to not getting out of the way for another human being. Accidents happen when people are too aggressive, too passive, or not paying attention. You make little concessions here and there and society gets along. Some pushier people get their way more, but so what? Acquiesce to the reasonable. Don’t push people into traffic because bikes on the sidewalk are your hot-button pet peeve. We're all just trying to get along.

Like anything else, a little situational awareness helps. Bicyclists take their lives into their own hands every time they go out. Many of them behave like jerks. Many of any sample of people you can name behave like jerks. But many of us are simply trying not to do anything dangerous. As a bicyclist, I am always on the defensive, looking in ten directions at once. I know I don’t speak for everyone on a bike, but the last thing we need are little reminders that everyone wishes we (who, incidentally, practice the most sustainable, ethical vehicular commute) would just go away.

I don't plan on doing that. There is a real need for wide, safe, enforced bike lanes in every big city. Until such a lane designated solely for bicycle traffic is on every road, I will continue to use the sidewalk to avoid the two-ton machines barreling at me non-stop from every conceivable angle.

The police are becoming a problem

Fri, 1 Mar 2013 10:03:45 -0500

If you care to follow stories about police brutality in America, you will see a disturbing trend emerge: it is routine; daily; even hourly.

In January, three off-duty police officers filling in as mall security killed a man for refusing to leave his theater seat. The fact that the man, Robert Saylor, had Down syndrome makes the incident all the more repulsive, but the officers’ actions are unconscionable regardless of the victim’s handicap.

After officers put Saylor in handcuffs and pressed him to the ground, he began to have trouble breathing. He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead of asphyxiation. The case has been ruled, rightly, a homicide, but it’s worth noting the frequency with which victims of police brutality are ruled to have died of a hospital’s failure to treat them and not a police officer’s decision to bludgeon, shoot, suffocate, or taze them is worth noting. One way or another, a man is dead as a result. His life: less valuable than a theater ticket.

Consider also the recent brutalizing of a Queens man, Robert Jackson. For a little bit of weed they allegedly found on him, police beat the crap out of a man in broad daylight. The widely publicized cell phone video of the incident begins with Jackson already on the ground. I’m not sure what happened before this point, but for at least a minute after the start of the video police continue pummeling Jackson and calling for reinforcements. I guess yelling at police to get off of you so you can move your arm out from under your body, which they’re telling you to do all along, constitutes resisting arrest.

Like the military, police enjoy immunity from real public scrutiny. They have a dangerous and difficult job; we entitle them to make mistakes. Like the military, the unpleasant incidents, when publicized, are written off as the actions of a few bad eggs under undue stress, if they’re addressed at all. Such incidents are, I would argue, far too frequent to be written off so dismissively. When it is eventually revealed, as it so often is, that the bad eggs were following direct orders, the media never makes as big a deal about it. By then, the story has largely moved off the front pages.

But I happen to think the story is deeper than the liberal media giving all the focus to a few bad eggs while the vast majority of good guys are ignored. It may or may not be the case that most police officers are good people who want to help out. It could just as easily be that most police officers are uncouth hayseeds with a childish and untempered urge to exert force. There’s no powerful screening of this kind in police training as far as I know.

Either way, there’s a mix. The problem isn’t the few bad eggs; it’s the very nature of the work.

Police are obliged to base their enforcement and doling out of justice on the key question: whose property or monetary interest is being threatened? The ultimate reason police took the tack they did in the theater case was because letting Saylor remain in his seat meant letting him rob the theater of the price of a ticket. This is illegal. It’s a minor infraction, I’d say, but once you’ve committed a crime, police get to call all the shots from there. Anything else that goes wrong is your fault, whether they call it resisting arrest or obstruction of justice, and even if you are unable to comprehend, like Robert Saylor.

In a case like this, pinning all the blame on the officers doesn’t get us far. They were doing their jobs. I’m not saying they don’t lack the judgment to properly serve and protect society. They clearly do. But decommissioning them just gets rid of a “few bad eggs” and makes slots for some more “bad eggs” to come in. Maybe the eggs aren’t bad after all. Maybe the whole carton stinks.

Police are trained to accost would-be troublemakers; this is called “crime prevention.” Once police have stopped you, you are automatically in the wrong regardless of what you’ve done and must tiptoe your way around, crossing your fingers in hope the encounter will turn out OK. In New York especially, the much-criticized “stop-and-frisk” policy allows (many would say requires) the NYPD to question anyone who might look suspicious. Robert Jackson is a young black man, and was dressed in casual, loose-fitting clothes when police attacked. In other words, to police he looked like a troublemaker. And in this case, he did have a little dope on him. But there was no way of knowing that besides the color of his skin and manner of his dress, and in any case it hardly warrants the use of excessive force. Is Robert Jackson a dangerous criminal who had to be tackled like a runaway rhinoceros, or just a kid carrying a little weed?

The job of being a police officer brings out the bad egg in anybody. It entrusts average people with too much authority and encourages them to view their fellow citizens as potential threats to be contained. You are the enemy of police. When you notice a patrol car perform a U-turn and follow you to the end of the street, it’s because you’re a suspect and police want to nab you if you do anything wrong, not because they want to protect you if anything happens. If only such attention on unlawful and illicit activity were focused on society’s upper ranks.

It’s not a matter of who or what is right or wrong; it’s a matter of whose interests are at stake. The elite in a city like New York want young, sketchy people off the street. There goes Robert Jackson, based on their definition of sketchy. The owners of the theater in Maryland want nobody getting anything from them for free, not a dime, not a piece of popcorn, and certainly not a movie ticket. Trespass on either of these lines and you’re going to find yourself in a confrontation with police, and from there it doesn’t much matter what type of egg the officer is.

Police should be called upon to resolve disputes, retrieve stolen property, and stop violent lunatics. They should not instigate disputes by probing everyone on the street or be violent lunatics who kill a man over not paying his theater ticket. This antagonism has led to an untold toll of deaths, injuries, ruined lives, broken communities, and undeserved and unhealthy paranoia. We’re building a cowering society in which no one who drives a car worth less than $50,000 ever truly feels comfortable. The job itself is what stinks, not just the few rotten eggs. It’s time to put police on the side of the people or else live in ever-increasing fear not of criminals and muggers, but of falling on the wrong side of those sworn to protect us.

Hysteria deadlocks the gun debate

Fri, 1 Feb 2013 10:02:58 -0500

Today, I did something I’m not especially proud of. I participated, with two flippant comments, in a Facebook debate. Specifically, it was the comment thread of a photo on the National Association for Gun Rights’ Facebook page with this caption: “Grassroots pressure is the only force that can Stop the Feinstein Gun Ban! Sign your Emergency Second Amendment Protection Directive RIGHT NOW!”

My comments were these:

“Grassroots pressure, as can only be coordinated by massive billion-dollar industries whose profits are at stake.”

“Also, the founding fathers believed in well-regulated militias, not madmen with messiah complexes housing munitions depots in their basements.”

Nearly three hours later, I checked back on the thread to see if anybody had addressed me directly. Only one person had. His comment was this:

“Kyle Schmidlin <-----good argument for abortions”

At first I forgot what I said and wondered if the comment was a compliment. Did I say something applicable to abortion? But like I often do, I gave him too much credit. What he’s saying is that I’m a big enough idiot that I ought to have been terminated in the womb.

Well, I can abide that comment. I even “liked” it. But I did find it a little disheartening, because the truth about guns is: it’s not easy. It’s a debate well worth having. Like abortion, it’s a rightly contentious issue.

Abortion is a little easier to solve. It’s a morally unpleasant scenario, but a necessary evil. In a perfect world, I don’t believe people would willfully terminate pregnancies. But in a perfect world, we’d have free and simple access to contraception. In a perfect world, people would have the means to raise a child. A perfect world is one people might want to bring a child into. We do not live in a perfect world. It’s crowded and miserable, and dragging a defenseless, screaming fetus into it is about the worst thing you could do.

Guns are a different story. The whole debate has been hijacked by outright demonstrably insane hysteria. I’d rather not even bother going into why it’s crazy; that’s so easy to do you could read it in the Washington Post or worse. And it is mainly the pro-gun supporters who are guilty of perpetuating the more out-there theories. Very few people are saying every gun needs to be taken away and none shall ever be sold again. But that’s the position pro-gun enthusiasts are arguing with anyway.

The typical pro-gun narrative holds that the day a gun ban is instituted, good guys will surrender their weapons in compliance with the law and the bad guys will keep theirs and have a field day. This scenario seems, to me, highly unlikely. I pity those who live in constant fear of having their homes broken into and looted and their families killed. These things do happen, but they aren’t anything that I’d call common, and I don’t think a more heavily armed population is going to save more lives at the end of the day than it takes.

There are always going to be outliers. Madmen and serial killers have been around for all-time. Even since Hitler, the world’s inhabitants have been plagued by Suharto, Pol Pot, Pinochet, and the CIA. Not the worst mass murderers in history combined can have a prayer of competing in that league. But as far as defending yourself against your neighbors is concerned, the world is occupied primarily by reasonable, moral people who you aren't likely to be in a position to have to shoot most of the time (contrary to the fiery, unpleasant feeling you might have when the Best Buy won’t return your open DVD or some other instance when you’re convinced you’re the only sane one left).

The problem, as usual, is who’s guiding the conversation. The media are so hung up in their quest for the fabricated standard of objectivity that gun control becomes a he-said, she-said sort of debate. People who cry that we’ll all be murdered or enslaved by the government if we surrender our guns are given as much or more airtime as the modest reform proposers they alarmingly overreact to.

Now, fear of the government is really no hysteria. Just because they aren’t formally proposing something doesn’t mean society is in no danger of it happening. Obama’s plan is as tame and moderate as could be devised. But I understand the resonance of not believing it’s the whole story. The reason I can’t come to that side completely, though, is that the federal government really has very little to gain by coming after firearms. The popular backlash – and the armed people backlashing – presents far too risky a proposition. Obama can’t even say that the criminally insane should not possess firearms without gun enthusiasts freaking out about their own weapons cache. Imagine if he proposed anything serious about collection programs, or started knocking on doors. The country would erupt in war.

You can tell that the pro-gun side of the argument is being fueled by the billion-dollar gun lobby. It used to be that guns were defended as a useful tool; now they’re defended as a symbol of liberty itself. Silencers, large clips, and automatic firing are synonymous with freedom and security. Such nonsense is quintessential American marketing. It’s gotten so ridiculous that you can actually hear people saying they need their guns to protect themselves in case the government comes and tries to take their guns away. The fetishistic fixation on the object itself has got to be more than a simple manifestation of male inadequacy. It’s driven by careful propaganda that prevents ordinary people from seriously discussing how to run their society.

This is what’s so unfortunate about the gun debate. People come equipped with an arsenal of facts and one-liners and the other person’s presence is a mere formality. The guy who said I was a good argument for abortions doesn’t offend me by making such a comment, nor does he address my points (crassly made as they were, though intelligent, I feel, and at least relevant). He simply keeps the conversation locked in the same place it was, with two fingers in his ears and “La la la la la” coming out of his mouth.

And it’s unfortunate from a pro-gun as much as it is an anti-gun agenda. I agree that guns can be useful in the event of a home invasion. I think fresh-caught wild game meat is some of the best eating there is. But I also think the mild recommendations being proposed are more likely to save than endanger lives, or are at least motivated by the desire to do so. I don’t think the 2^nd Amendment has any meaning today and that even if it did, gun enthusiasts are grossly misinterpreting it ("well-regulated" is a key phrase). And I don’t see any good coming of ordinary citizens carrying assault rifles in public places, just in case the situation gets hairy. Unfortunately, this paragraph, encapsulating as I feel it is of all or most of the relevant gun arguments, is not the crux of the debate in this country. Instead, we have a black-and-white, us-vs.-them scenario fostered by a profit-oriented media and very happy billion-dollar lobbying organizations. It couldn’t be further from democratic. And it’s too bad, because it’s a nuanced debate that any civilized society ought to be able to settle and because, indeed, lives are on the line.

Bill Maher once made a joke about the link between teen suicides and music. He said "Penny Lane" was worth ten kids’ lives. “Dark Side of the Moon” was worth a hundred. I don’t know if I agree with his math, but we have to think about what we really want with guns. It may sound crass or utilitarian, but we’ve got to get along somehow. Instruments of death are going to be man’s burden for a considerable length of time to come. If a handful of innocent lives are sacrificed each year so we don’t live in a society full of heavily-armed people pointing guns at each other all the time, it’s only the price we’ve forced ourselves to pay.