It’s a truism that what we see in the media is not so much “the news” or “the events of the day” as it is somebody’s idea of information that might entertain us or give us a reason to go tsk tsk. Especially now, when we can pre-select our news sources and confirm, for example, that people are no damn good and the world is going to hell, if that’s what we expect the news to be. And we see in the news not so much what’s there, anymore, objectivity not being what it once was, as what we assume some “producer” of the news has determined will make them a profit. After all, since we are committed to the notion of a free press, we can’t very well have a committee of wise men and women deciding what information we should be fed. Barring rule by wise and wonderful philosopher kings, we’re pretty much at the mercy of producers of news stories making calculated guesses on what will sell.
This means it’s a fair question, when you open your newspaper or turn on a TV news program, to ask, "Who benefits from the choice of this particular news item over another? And what, if anything, in this story is worth my time?" Often, as when the media tell us so much about how Americans say they are going to vote, for example, and so little about the truth value of candidates' assertions, I am tempted to think there is no reason to follow the news at all. In fact, I’ve stopped completely watching the local evening news with all their warehouse fires and 'if it bleeds, it leads' stories. But sometimes a look at what’s wrong with the world may actually serve a purpose. The question is always what purpose.
Take the story that came out of Arkansas this week about a school board member who posted a rant against gay people on Facebook. And not just a rant. An illiterate rant, and that meant that to the large audience of people who would fault him for his homophobia was added a second large audience of people who wondered how such a dunce ever got elected vice president of a school board.
Clint McCance is his name, and his school district is in rural Arkansas. He’s from Pleasant Plains, a town of 138 male and 133 female residents. There is little doubt the notoriety he has received since his homophobic rant was “outed” last Wednesday in the pages of the Advocate, the gay publication of record, has shaken him up pretty bad. It wasn’t long before the story went viral, and before Anderson Cooper was making hay of it, and religious and civil organizations all over Arkansas, including the school board itself, were gathering to distance themselves from this yokel’s point of view.
A simpleton has been revealed to be a simpleton. It’s hard to see why that should be a news story. But Clint McCance happened to shoot his mouth off at just the wrong moment in American social history. Because the story of gay student suicides has become the topic du jour of late, it’s national news when a school board member says he would wear a purple shirt in solidarity with the victims of gay suicide and their families only “if they all commit suicide.”
I have to admit I was glued to the computer screen the two days Anderson Cooper gave to this story. On the first, he lambasted this crude fellow. On the second day McCance actually agreed to come on his program and use that occasion to resign from the school board. It was at this point when I began thinking this could well seen as a story about Anderson Cooper, particularly if you read the gay press and the constant commentary from gays that this guy ought to come out as gay once and for all. Normally, I ignore such talk as irrelevant. This time, I began to wonder.
But let me stick with this as a story about a homophobe from Arkansas, for the moment. And start with a brief excursion. Too much is being made, I think, about the fact this guy is on his local school board. First off, it's a school board in a small town. Of the 271 citizens of Pleasant Plains, how many are eligible voters? And how many actually vote for school board candidates? I'm pretty sure Clint McCance, or practically any local boy like him, could pretty much elect himself, if he got his family and friends into the act. One news story I followed made mention of the fact that the religious right has a national plan to take over the country one school board at a time, and this could well be part of that plot. But conspiracy speculations aside, it could also be explained away as just one of those things that happen in small towns. Idiots get elected to public office, just as they do in any size town when nobody else wants the job and the electorate turns a blind eye.
Unless you live in a bubble of enlightened men and women, sheltered from the kinds of people now coming out of the woodwork to vote for Tea Party candidates, you already know lots of Clint McCances. Men in their 20s and 30s with the bravado of a post-pubescent bully sounding off about how them gays ought to kill thereselves. It’s only if you’ve never watched an anti-gay rally that the line “they should get AIDS and die” comes as a surprise.
Watch the first and particularly the second Anderson Cooper day interview with McCance, and watch the guy squirm. He understands on some level that he did something wrong and owes people an apology. But in his apology is a wealth of information about where his head is. He used the wrong words, he says. His words were "over the top."
Really? The wrong words? Then why, when asked if he would really throw his own kids out of his house if they turned out to be gay did he actually say he could not predict what he would do in the future? And why, when asked if he would use words like queer and faggot again did he have trouble with the word no?
As the interview goes on, your sense of pity and revulsion increase, because it becomes increasingly clear he is apologizing for getting caught, not for being wrong-headed. This alleged apology is like watching a house burn down.
If you listen carefully, you will hear him defend himself, thus negating even his attempt at an apology, by saying he still holds to his religious beliefs – which beliefs are clearly that “people like that” ought to pay for their sins.
That’s the real story, as far as I’m concerned. Not that a not-ready-for-prime-time not-very-well-educated yokel has made an ass of himself and been forced to apologize. Not even that the apology isn’t an apology. But that here, in the middle of America, a deeply held American social value is being revealed, a belief founded on an understanding of Christian scripture that gays are flawed and that revulsion against gays is a completely natural response.
That's not new. What is new is that Anderson Cooper and others are demonstrating the revulsion I feel in listening to this guy, and that even on CNN somebody with that slant on the story is capturing a good half hour of prime time air time. Also new are suggestions coming from the likes of Max Brantley, editor of the Arkansas Times that Bible belt Christianity is not an innocent bystander in this drama.
What we're watching here is not the shedding of homophobia. That's a ways off yet. At best, if McCance's humiliation serves as a deterrent to others, what we're getting is the message, "it's OK to be homophobic, but be sure you don't hurt anybody with it." Here in this neck of the woods, the message of tolerance is arriving, brought by the culture in which the national media live. In other words, Anderson Cooper isn't just giving us the news. He's turning the lights on intolerance, and in so doing, he is acting as agent of a subset of American society in which tolerance has already been replaced by acceptance. The McCances of America can come along, if they wish. Or they can find the middle ground between acceptance and intolerance, which is tolerance.
Also working simultaneously with media culture's acceptance is Christian tolerance, a spectrum of attitudes from "love the sinner, hate the sin" - only barely across the line from where McCance sits at the moment, to begrudging acceptance, barely across the line from full acceptance. McCance can go a little way into tolerance - into the "bring the gays to Jesus" camp, for example. Or he can travel a great deal further.
He can also slide back, once the lights are off, and join those, like the first six people to respond to McCance’s facebook trash, who find his revulsion perfectly natural. The story is not really about him. It's really more about the media itself and how it serves as an agent of change.
Or so it seems to me.
We all see in these news stories what we are prepared to see. Some will see a bad boy becoming good through an apology. Some will see what a backward place Arkansas can be. Professional linguists will argue that thereselves is merely a dialectal variant of themselves and some in the hoi polloi will insist that it’s perfectly normal to write can’t as cant on a facebook page, since editing is not expected any more. But I see in this story how far we still have to go before gays and lesbians are freed from the fearful ignorant authoritarian literalist Christianity that no longer disparages Jews, or women, or blacks, as it once did, but is still the main source of American homophobia. That form of Christianity (thank God there are others) is still an integral part of American culture, and the reason why we are engaged in a cultural civil war.
So after beginning this reflection with a bit of media bashing, I feel obliged to speak for the other side. Nice job, national media. Even when your story appears at first sight to be just another tsk-tsk-aren’t-people-awful story. Even when the story is a topic of the hour story and not a treatment of historical moment. When the media hold a mirror up to society, as Anderson Cooper did in this instance, sometimes there is more going on than simple profit making. Sometimes it’s like airing out a stuffy room.
If you see it that way.
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