“Duck Call Is The New Dog Whistle”: What Conservatives Support Is Not “Freedom”, But “Conformity” To A Conservative Culture
Put those dog whistles away. Judging by the hordes of red neck fans who rose up in angry protest after the star of the popular reality show Duck Dynasty was pulled from the airwaves for saying offensive things about blacks and gays, maybe we ought to start referring to these periodic eruptions of right wing agitation as “duck call politics.”
The reactions to duck call politics are as predictable as they are dispiriting. One Facebook friend of mine professed disbelief that her “liberal friends” had not instantaneously rallied around Phil Robertson once the embattled patriarch of Duck Dynasty was temporarily suspended for his tirade against gays which appeared in GQ earlier this month.
“When did America become a Gestapo State?” my friend wanted to know. “Come on people, this has to stop. Regardless of whether you agree with Phil, the America we love has to support his right to his personal convictions and his FREEDOM to say them.”
Sarah Palin has never let the facts stand in the way of an opportunity to stir up the perpetually resentful populist mob. And so, undeterred by the fact she’d never actually read or saw what Robertson had to say about gays and blacks, Palin nevertheless felt competent to weigh in that: “Those offended by what Phil Robertson said are offended by the Gospel.”
Shortly after the Duck Dynasty controversy began on December 18, Palin wrote on her Facebook page that: “Free speech is an endangered species. Those ‘intolerants’ hatin and taking on the Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing his personal opinion are taking on all of us.”
Palin’s comment drew over 428,000 “likes.”
Now, let’s be clear. When former Pope Benedict said that “tradition” based on Sacred Scripture “has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,” he was expressing a religious opinion. It may have been hurtful, or wrongheaded, or even un-Christian in my view. But when Benedict said that homosexual acts are “contrary to the natural law” because they “close the sexual act to the gift of life” and do not proceed “from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity” and so “under no circumstances can they be approved” he was still expressing his interpretation of what Catholic doctrine requires.
What Phil Robertson did was altogether different. Robertson was just being crude and hateful when he told a reporter for GQ: “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men. Don’t be deceived (he said paraphrasing Corinthians) neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers — they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”
Robertson then went further: “It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”
Not content to confine his tastelessness to gays, Robertson also resurrected the embarrassing minstrel show fixture of the “Happy Negro,” a stock character whose origins go all the way back to Southern slave apologists like George Fitzhugh, who said “the negro slaves of the South are the happiest and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”
Fitzhugh was one of those Southern “fire-eaters” who believed the condition of the Southern slave compared favorably to that of the wage earner in the North since, as he said, slaves were “capital” whose “owners” paid dearly for them. And so “when slaves are worth $1,000 a head they will be cared for and well provided for” – unlike, he inferred, the expendable, exploitable and readily disposable wage slaves of the North.
Brought up-to-date by the likes of Phil Robertson, Fitzhugh’s repulsive idea sounds something like this: “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’-not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
For the relatively minor consequences he faced for these boorish remarks, Phil Robertson has become a celebrated martyr on the right and their latest cause célèbre. Conservatives have hoisted Robertson up on their shoulders as a cultural icon whose “brave” words are what other right wingers wish they could voice but for one reason or another can’t bring themselves to say out loud.
Nevertheless, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it probably is a duck. And what Phil Robertson said to GQ was anti-gay bigotry, plain and simple, whose open hostility towards these minorities is precisely why conservatives are now retroactively trying to dignify Robertson’s ugly hatefulness by wrapping it in the holy vestments of religious expression and free speech.
But the argument is hollow because Robertson’s fans are no more concerned with free speech than was the Tea Party with debts and deficits as they stood immobile and mute for eight long years while Republicans under George W. Bush doubled both until the Tea Party rose up in spontaneous and righteous anger the moment the American people had the effrontery to elect a black man as their President.
Right wing conservatives are not rallying around Robertson because they are the principled advocates of free speech or dedicated students of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and John Milton’s Areopagitica.
There were no angry outcries from conservatives a decade ago when the Dixie Chicks were being banned from one country music station after another, or having their records burned, once the superstar group said some contrarian things about President Bush and his baseless invasion of Iraq way back in 2003 when such anti-war opposition was unpopular but really mattered.
Country stations pulled the Dixie Chicks after lead singer Natalie Maines told a London audience she was “ashamed” that Bush hailed from Texas, where the Chicks are also from.
Soon, station managers were flooded with calls from angry listeners who thought the Chick’s criticism of Bush was “unpatriotic.” One station in Kansas City even held a Dixie “chicken toss” party where listeners were encouraged to dump the group’s tapes, CDs and concert tickets into trash cans.
“We’ve got them off the air for right now,” said Jeff Garrison, program director at KILT in Texas. “People are shocked. They cannot believe Texas’ own have attacked the state and the president.”
When the Dixie Chicks were preparing for their nationwide Top of the World Tour, death threats caused promoters to install metal detectors at the shows. In Dallas, fears for the safety of the group led police to provide an escort from the show to the airport.
A Colorado radio station suspended two of its disc jockeys for playing music by the Dixie Chicks. When the group was nominated for Entertainer of the Year at the Academy of Country Music awards in Las Vegas, host Vince Gill had to remind the booing audience that everyone is entitled to freedom of speech.
Even President Bush weighed in, telling Tom Brokow: “the Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind. They can say what they want to say. They shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records when they speak out. Freedom is a two-way street.”
Yes, freedom is a two-way street. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion just not their own TV show. People are free to speak their mind and other people are free to retaliate by writing letters, organizing boycotts or taking offensive people off the air.
But what the Dixie Chicks did, it’s important to keep in mind, was criticize President Bush for the political acts he took while in office. Phil Robertson, on the other hand, was merely insulting gays and blacks for being who they are. Then he and his supporters used religion to hide their sin.
The idea that conservatives are civil libertarians who support free speech and diversity is a comic farce in any case, for what conservatives support is not “freedom” but “conformity” to a conservative culture where people have sex in the missionary position with members of the opposite sex or not at all, and where country music groups don’t criticize God-fearing Republican presidents, especially if they are from Texas, for waging wars against the non-Christian infidel.
And if accomplishing this agenda means banning celebrities from the airwaves one minute and then attacking TV networks for doing the same thing to other celebrities the next, then so be it.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, December 26, 2013
“Duck Dynasty Bigots Will Fade Into Obscurity”: The Robertsons Are Country-Clubbers Posing As Rednecks
Now that I’ve actually seen a few episodes, Duck Dynasty is relatively harmless entertainment. Whatever “reality TV” means, it’s definitely not that. It’s a semi-scripted sitcom, basically cornball self-parody. Think Hee Haw without the music. I find it utterly inane, but then I don’t watch TV with children.
The “tell” is the show’s women; cute Southern sorority girls turned mommies. In real life, no way would those women tolerate their “menfolk” running around looking like a truckload of ZZ Top impersonators. They’re also not going on TV with hay in their hair like some Hollywood director’s idea of a country girl. Every comedy needs a straight man; on Duck Dynasty it’s the women.
But realism? Please. The beards, hair and overalls are costumes every bit as theatrical as the outfits the Rolling Stones wear onstage. In the rural Arkansas county where I live, you could hang around the feed store for a month without seeing anybody like Duck Dynasty “patriarch” (and head bigot) Phil Robertson. And if you did, his wife wouldn’t have any teeth.
The Robertsons are country-clubbers posing as rednecks. Duck hunting itself — requiring, as it does, quite a bit of expensive gear and pricey leases — is mainly a rich man’s pastime in the South. Deer hunting makes economic sense; duck hunting’s a luxury. It’s what doctors, lawyers and bankers do when the weather’s too lousy for golf. Bill Clinton used to go duck hunting once a year to prove he loved guns.
(My own most recent—and final—duck hunting trip began with me tasked with lugging an outboard motor across a muddy soybean field at 5:30 AM. Never again.)
But I digress. Although many Southerners wince at yokel stereotypes, the basic Duck Dynasty joke is that every redneck is a Peter Pan at heart. The Robertson men spend their time bickering like children and making mischief with pickup trucks, ATVs, shotguns, handguns, deer rifles, chainsaws, outboard motors, dynamite, etc. Basically anything that makes loud noises and/or throws mud around.
How long, I wonder, before the Duck Dynasty boys endorse the “Bad Boy” brand of riding mowers? Currently represented by a half-clothed model urging guys to “Get a Bad Boy, Baby!” these machines have the magical capacity to convert a tax accountant mowing a suburban half-acre under his wife’s supervision to a daredevil NASCAR racer. Yee Haw!
But the laughter ended abruptly when “Duck Commander” Phil Robertson inserted himself into the nation’s vituperative culture wars. The whole thing looked like a publicity stunt gone wrong—possibly successful in the short run, but almost certain to prove destructive in the end.
Concerning which, a few thoughts:
First, Sarah Palin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal notwithstanding, nobody has a First Amendment right to appear on TV. Make controversial public pronouncements deeply offensive to your employers, and you’d better have a backup plan.
The creator and producer of Duck Dynasty is one Scott Gurney, who once appeared in a gay-themed film called The Fluffer. (Don’t ask.)
The guy helps make you rich and famous, and you denounce gays as evil? That’s appalling.
Second, it has nothing to do with Christianity. Robertson didn’t just say he’s against gay marriage, nor even that God is. He spoke in the coarsest possible terms about homosexuality, equating it with bestiality.
He’s elsewhere characterized gay men and women as “full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God haters, they are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless, they invent ways of doing evil.”
Here’s my favorite moral philosopher, Fox News’ own Bill O’Reilly:
“It’s not about the Bible, or believing or not believing in the Bible. It’s singling out a group, could be any group, and saying to that group ‘Hey, you’re not worthy. You’re not worthy in the eyes of the Lord, or in the eyes of God, you’re not worthy because of who you are.’ So once you get that personal, once you get down into that kind of a realm, problems arise.”
Third, 10 years ago, many of the same people portraying Robertson as a martyr burned Dixie Chicks CDs and cheered their banishment from country radio stations for the terrible crime of saying they were embarrassed by George W. Bush before everybody was.
And those girls have genuine talent.
Fourth, as for the happy, singing darkies of Robertson’s Louisiana childhood, where are they on Duck Dynasty? Know what the African-American population of Monroe/West Monroe is? It’s roughly 60 percent. I’ve seen no black faces on the program.
Another prominent American from West Monroe is Boston Celtics great Bill Russell—a black man who’s been known to have strong opinions about race. Maybe Robertson ought to talk with him, although it wouldn’t be easy.
Duck Dynasty may be this month’s right wing cause célèbre. Longer term, however, unapologetic bigots always fade into obscurity, basically because they embarrass people.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, December 26, 2013
“Bombs Over Baghdad”: Ten Years On, Iraq War Skeptics Have A Right To Say “I Told You So”
Possibly you remember “Shock and Awe.” No, that’s not the title of a Rolling Stones concert tour, but of the United States’ bombs-over-Baghdad campaign that began exactly 10 years ago. American soldiers went pounding into Iraq accompanied by scores of “embedded” journalists seemingly eager to prove their patriotism and courage.
A skeptic couldn’t help but be reminded of spectators who rode from Washington in horse-drawn carriages to witness the battle of Bull Run in July of 1861. They too expected a short, decisive conflict. Even on NPR, invading Iraq was treated like the world’s largest Boy Scout Jamboree, instead of what it turned into: arguably the worst military and foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.
Skepticism, however, was in short supply. Spooked by 9/11 and intimidated by the intellectual bullies of the Bush administration, American journalists largely abandoned that professional virtue in favor of propaganda and groupthink.
Among scores of examples, the one that’s stuck in my craw was allegedly liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. Reacting to Gen. Colin Powell’s anti-Saddam speech to the United Nations General Assembly—since repudiated by its author—Cohen wrote that “Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool—or possibly a Frenchman—could conclude otherwise.”
“War fever, catch it,” this fool wrote.
I added that to anybody capable of remembering past intelligence hoaxes, it wasn’t clear that Powell’s presentation answered any of the objections put forward by doubters like George H.W. Bush’s national security advisor, Gen. Brent Scowcroft.
“To any skeptic with a computer modem, moreover, it became quite clear why Powell’s speech failed to convert many at the UN,” my Feb. 5, 2003 column continued.
“Key parts of [his] presentation were dubious on their face. That alleged al Qaeda base in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq? If it’s what Powell says, why hasn’t it been bombed to smithereens? British and U.S. jets have been conducting sorties in the no-fly zone for months. Because it’s a dusty outpost not worth bombing, reporters for The Observer who visited the place quickly saw.
“The mobile bio-war death labs? Please. Even if [UN inspector] Hans Blix hadn’t told The Guardian that U.S. tips had guided inspectors to mobile food inspection facilities, anybody who’s dodged herds of camels, goats and sheep and maniacal drivers on bumpy Middle Eastern highways had to laugh. Bio-war experts told Newsweek the idea was preposterous. ‘U.S. intelligence,’ it reported ‘after years of looking for them, has never found even one.’
“Then there was the embarrassing fact that key elements of a British intelligence document cited by Powell turned out to have been plagiarized from magazine articles and a California grad student’s M.A. thesis based upon 12-year-old evidence.”
I could go on. In fact, I did.
“This isn’t conservatism,” I concluded. “It’s utopian folly and a prescription for endless war.” Although the short-term outcome wasn’t in doubt and Americans could be counted upon to rally around the troops, it struck me as almost mad to imagine that the U.S. could convert Iraq into a Middle Eastern Switzerland by force of arms.
That was basically the Frenchman’s conclusion too. Conservative Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said that although “we all share the same priority—that of fighting terrorism mercilessly,” invading Iraq without just cause would likely “exacerbate the divisions between societies, cultures and peoples, divisions that nurture terrorism.”
If it were up to me, the Post columnist’s byline would read like a prizefighter’s robe: Richard “Only a Fool or a Frenchman” Cohen. However, there are no penalties in Washington journalism for being proven dramatically wrong.
The safest place during a stampede is always the middle of the herd.
My own reward was getting Dixie Chicked out of a part-time teaching job halfway through a series of columns about Iraq. Supposedly, Hendrix College ran out of money to pay me. My most popular offering had been a course about George Orwell. Oh well.
But the purpose here isn’t to blow my own horn. (OK, maybe a little.) It’s to point out that not everybody got buffaloed. Many thousands of American and European citizens took to the streets to protest what they saw as imperialist folly.
I was also very far from being the only journalist to notice that the Bush administration’s case for Saddam Hussein’s imaginary “weapons of mass destruction” didn’t add up. Anybody reading the astringent dispatches of Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) reporters Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, John Walcott and Joe Galloway couldn’t help but know the score.
But the prediction I’m proudest of was a cynical observation I made after morons began smashing Dixie Chicks CDs and renaming fried potatoes “Freedom Fries.”
A former Hendrix student emailed me proof: a photo of a vending machine in a rural Arkansas truckstop.
Sold only for the prevention of disease: “Freedom Ticklers.”
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, March 20, 2013
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