Bleeding Versus Lockdown and Awakening: the Truth of 2020 America

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“If it bleeds, it leads.”—Old rule of media sensationalism, derived from the era of William Randolph Hearst, driven to a dark art form by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox empire, and sunk to its present depths by anonymous trolls in the age of Facebook and Twitter.

“How many times must a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?”—Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Ur-demagogue Donald Trump is trying to get us Americans to see our nation in flames, beset by unruly and violent protesting mobs. As Paul Krugman reasoned in a must-read column, that’s just about all he’s got. It’s a last-ditch lie by a president drowning in his own excrement—a narcissist who grabbed power with lies, ruled by lie, and would lie us all into Hell if we let him.

The solution is simple, but it goes against the grain of most modern media. Tell the truth and tell it big. Tell it even if it doesn’t bleed. Shout the tranquility of a nation huddled and sequestered against the pandemic. Shout it from the rooftops!

Krugman did just that. In his very first paragraph, he described a peaceful, tranquil, even subdued New York City. New Yorkers were enjoying a bright, calm day in late summer, as in ages past. The only somber notes were the strange quiet, the closed shops and the partly empty streets—all due to the virus.

That, not violence, is our nation’s central truth as summer turns to fall in 2020. We are not a nation of cities in flames. We are a nation of cities mostly shut down by a new virus and our government’s spastic and inept response to it. What subsumes our cities is anything but turmoil. Our offices, streets, theaters, bars, restaurants, hotels, gyms, stadia and aircraft routes—and many of our schools—are strangely quiet.

We are a nation hunkered down. We await the advent of Reason, in the form of Science, to save us. We await a vaccine. Or we await—at long last—a bit of coherent planning for testing, contact tracing and quarantining, which so may other nations and a few of our own leading States have used to get the virus under control.

So what should our media do? They should “tell it like it is.” That might seem dull. But they should broadcast scenes of quiet, leafy suburbs, half-empty streets, socially-distanced parks and beaches, ballparks with empty stands transmitting “virtual” play, and other subdued signs of our times. They should show us as we are: a nation quietly waiting for a reprieve from a sentence of disease and death meted out by the misrule of an inept braggart and con-man.

What we need to see most is not rare episodes of short-lived and well-contained violent disorder. We need more perspective on what’s really happening, day after day, in the vast reaches of our diverse nation.

That goes double for our greatest national tragedy and national shame—our “original sin.” From shortly after white European refugees came to this continent, the central truth of their relationship with others has been violence and domination. They have applied these “means” both to those they found already living here and to those they brought here, by force, from Africa and the Caribbean to toil as slaves.

After four centuries of unremitting atrocities and denial, a great awakening is coming to our white population. Trump, his GOP lackeys and his fawning media are trying mightily to suppress it. But it’s happening nevertheless.

The awakening has many causes and manifestations. Cell phones and body cameras bear undeniable witness to the pointless murder and maiming of so many Black citizens, like George Floyd and Jacob Blake. Our media now seem willing to investigate and report these atrocities, rather than suppressing them, as earlier, to maintain the “Thin Blue Line.” Meticulous exposés by leading Black historians and intellectuals like Vann R. Newkirk II, Ta-Nehisi Coats, and Nikole Hannah-Jones detail the dismal history of White Terror and white economic domination by exclusion, deception, fraud, swindling and threats of violence.

We now know well the multiple layers of historical depredation: the post-Reconstruction night riders, the Ku Klux Klan, the lynchings, the apartheid, the poll taxes and literacy tests, the modern vote suppression, the redlining, the theft of land through fraud and violence, the exclusion from banking and finance, the dismal excuses for schools, the food deserts in the ghettos, and the relentless blaming of the victims. Our educators more often write textbooks that tell it like it was and is; they condemn the whitewashed Lost-Cause lies of “Gone with the Wind” and “Birth of a Nation.” We feel a rising urge to pull down monuments to false and traitorous men and replace them with statues of true heroes and patriots.

Now in our seventies or older, we Boomers grew up with great artists giving us the same painful truths more succinctly, in the spare words of song. We came of age hearing songs of protest by artists like Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Baez.

As we Boomers age and our short-term memories fade, ghosts of these songs drift through our minds in snippets of half-forgotten poetry. The quotation from Bob Dylan, above, is just one example of many.

Our Boomers’ generation may have been one of the most self-focused in human history. But there’s at least one thing we can be proud of: our sense of justice and righteousness. We helped push through the civil-rights gains of the sixties. We were young then, and we are old now; but we can rejoice that, after a half-century hiatus, the great awakening that we felt just beginning to stir so long ago is finally gaining momentum.

Millions of white people joining Black Lives Matter marches are a central truth of our times. At long last, a majority of the now-waning majority is coming to its senses. Coming just a generation before our white majority fades into demographic oblivion, their epiphany is ironic. But it’s real and important nevertheless.

So the central truth of this age and this election is not just one more dismal attempt by the plutocrats’ party to scare working and aging whites into voting against their own economic interests. It’s not just one more Hail Mary pass to steal an election by raising yet another Willie Horton bogeyman. It’s a vast awakening among white people—all people—to the horror of four centuries of oppression and discrimination and the very real chance for much-delayed redemption. It’s the realization that we all must stand and vote together to save our democracy and our economy.

It’s the dawning awareness of the secret behind Nelson Mandela’s “miracle.” White fear reflects no reality of organized Black-on-white violence. There’s not nearly enough of that to shake a nation. There never has been. White fear comes from knowing that you or those who look like you have wronged your neighbors so hard and for so long, and that all must live among those who’ve been wronged. Replace that dismal knowing with an honest quest for compassion and justice, and the fear vanishes like a bad dream. It yields to determination, to solidarity, and to hope.

That’s what’s happening in America today: whites awakening by the millions.

So something unambiguously positive and hopeful is rising from the ashes of the most vile political regime since the Confederacy. That’s what our media should be focusing on relentlessly, and what our Boomers and others should be watching, not the few and transient eruptions of what bleeds.

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