Meals From The Marketplace

            In the end, the roller coaster ride that Shirley Sherrod experienced last month may well leave her better off than she was before she was forced onto it.  If so, she will probably be the only person who can say so.

            Just about everyone else who got involved in the case looks worse than they did, and probably is worse off than they were before it became a big enough story to displace (for a few days, anyway) the BP oil disaster as the lead on most cable networks.  At least that’s my assessment, although I should hasten to add that apologists for just about everyone (especially those on the right) defended their positions by taking to the offense.  And what else is new in that regard?

            The story began, for those who may have missed the details, with a post by a conservative blogger named Andrew Breitbart.  Mr. Breitbart, heretofore unknown to all but the most aware political observers and players, has been managing and authoring a number of right-wing blogs for some time. 

            This man is not subtle about his views.  Shortly after Senator Ted Kennedy’s death last year, Mr. Breitbart called the Senator “a villain, a duplicitous bastard, and a special pile of human excrement.”  He is often a speaker at tea party events, has worked closely with Matt Drudge, and has described himself as Matt Drudge’s “bitch.”  (Draw whatever conclusions from that self-description as you may.)

            He may need a new moniker after the dust settles from his role in the Sherrod story.  That role was to create an accusation of reverse racism against Ms. Sherrod (who is black) by posting a short excerpt of a speech Ms. Sherrod gave to a local NAACP chapter earlier this year.

            In the speech, Mr. Sherrod (then a U.S. Department of Agriculture official) spoke inspiringly of an awakening she had experienced some 25 years earlier when she was working for a non-profit organization that sought to help farmers who were struggling. 

            After telling her audience that her father had been lynched by the Klan when she was a child, she explained that her first reaction to the white farmers who sought her assistance was negative.

            But she overcame that initial feeling and helped the farmers, a husband and wife who were facing foreclosure on their farm.  Helping the couple find a competent and committed attorney, Ms. Sherrod befriended the couple, who remain thankful for her efforts to this day.

            Of course, Mr. Breitbart didn’t include that part of her speech in his blog post.  All he included were the few minutes that made Ms. Sherrod sound like, well, like a reverse racist.

            The next actors to enter the scene were the gang from Fox News, which apparently has an inside track to Mr. Breitbart’s posts, as it almost immediately aired a copy of the clip that Breitbart had put on his blog.  Bill O’Reilly ran with the story, if that’s what it could be called, of Ms. Sherrod’s supposedly racist comments in her speech and demanded her immediate resignation.  (He apologized two days later.)  And he got it even before his demand hit the airwaves.  (His show was taped earlier in the day, and by the time it aired, Ms. Sherrod had resigned.) 

            She resigned at the behest of either the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, or someone in the White House (or maybe a combination of both).  Vilsack claimed, in a press conference that was a classic “fall on the sword for the boss” act, that he and he alone was responsible for the hasty – and highly regrettable – decision to ask Ms. Sherrod to resign.  He claimed not to have spoken to President Obama about the incident and denied being pressured by anyone else in the White House on the subject.

            He further claimed that he had acted hastily because he was ultra-sensitive to the many charges of racism that he inherited when he became Secretary of the Agriculture Department a year and a half ago. 

            But he wasn’t the only possible ally of Ms. Sherrod who jumped the gun by firing a salvo at her before all the facts had been ascertained.  In fact, the first such shot, other than O’Reilly’s, was fired by the NAACP, the very organization to whom Ms. Sherrod had delivered her inspirational speech.

            After hearing the excerpt of the speech posted by Breitbart, the organization issued a statement condemning it.  A day later, after taking the time to study the entire speech, NAACP president Benjamin Jealous claimed his organization had been “snookered.” 

            If it was, it must have had the same snookering Secretary Vilsack and his friends at the White House had experienced.  Vilsack was all over himself with contrition when he took the hit for the Obama administration at his press conference.  It appeared to be all he could do to keep from crying his eyes out with grief over the pain he had caused “this good woman,” whom he had personally apologized to and offered a new job as some kind of head of racial healing within the department.

            President Obama also went the contrition route, even though he still claimed not to have had a say in the initial decision.  He followed Vilsack’s call to Ms. Sherrod with one of his own.  Ms. Sherrod says of that conversation that while the president didn’t actually say the words “I’m sorry,” she felt he was apologizing just by making the call and reassuring her.

            At week’s end, Ms. Sherrod was contemplating her future, probably trying to decide why in the world she would want to get back on the roller coaster of public service, now that she had essentially regained her good name and had become something of a hero for having borne the brunt of the worst the right-wing nutcases can concoct about the alleged reverse racism in the Obama administration and having overcome the worst of the cowardly attitudes the president and his minion continually convey on the subject of race.

            In the end, the Sherrod story most probably will not even be a footnote in the annals of the Obama years.  But for now, it makes two points very clear: The conservative movement in America is out of control, and the administration is scared to death of it.

            (I wrote this column ten years ago.  In the succeeding decade, the growing power of faceless corporations and the seeming ineptitude of government agencies have only increased the anger that all too many Americans are feeling.  The field is ripe for charlatans, demagogues and scoundrels, and the country’s future is ever more in doubt.)

            In a little-noted film from 1972 entitled “Rage,” George C. Scott (who also directed) stars as an ordinary guy who becomes homicidally enraged when he and his teenage son are subjected to lethal amounts of a poisonous gas that was being “tested” in a secluded area where the two happened to be camping one night.  The tests, as Scott’s character ultimately discovers, were authorized by a secret government agency pursuant to vaguely worded legislation that provided no real accountability for the obviously-flawed testing procedures.  (The film subtly presaged the concept of “plausible deniability” as developed in the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra scandal, wherein if no one is ever completely aware of everything, everyone can claim to be “out of the loop” or otherwise uninformed and therefore not responsible.)

            The film depicts this rancher’s progression from initial confusion when his son is first stricken (the youngster had slept out in the open, while his dad had slept under a tent) to frustration when he is unable to find anyone who can explain what has happened and finally to the aforementioned homicidal rage when he ultimately discovers that his son (whom he will soon follow) died because of untraceable decisions made by unidentifiable individuals acting under the unconfirmed aegis of unconcerned corporate and governmental entities.  In his last days, the rancher (he survives about a week longer than his son) comes to the realization that no one can be held accountable because no one is in control.  He dies in the midst of a wholly impotent attempt to destroy a chemical lab that probably wasn’t even involved in the testing that killed his son and himself.

            The world has changed dramatically since Scott’s film debuted.  Technological advances have made our lives easier, richer and more exciting.  As the twenty-first century unfolds, we may well experience an average longevity of well over one hundred years while we engage regularly in interplanetary travel and develop forms of virtual reality that will enhance our sense of pleasure beyond anything currently imaginable.

            Unfortunately, we are already seeing changes that suggest a less optimistic view of the future, and some of those changes deal with the same concept developed by Mr. Scott in his movie.  There is what might be called a creeping depersonalization in the society of this new millennium, and people are becoming less significant and less noticed as a result.  As if it were a requisite of a brave new world, human beings are being replaced with machines that parrot or carry out institutional regulations and procedures from which there is virtually no surcease. 

            Examples abound.  Here is just one that is all too typical:  You receive your credit card bill and find a charge that you don’t recall.  You call the toll-free number and are immediately connected to a recorded voice that recites a long menu of options, none of which seem to address your concern. 

            After you choose an option just so you can move things along, another voice reads through another menu.  Finally, you are told that if you wish to speak to a “customer service representative,” you should hold.  You are then “entertained” with recorded music which is interrupted every thirty seconds by another recorded voice that apologizes for the delay, adding, “Your call is important to us, so please continue to hold.” 

            After no more than twenty minutes, if you are lucky, a real person gets on the line.  This person listens to your problem, puts you on hold again, and then finally says, “Our records show that you made the purchase at the store indicated, but I don’t have the details available now.  If you would like to make a request in writing, I can give you the address to send it to.  Or if you think someone else has used your card, I can transfer you to our fraud division.”  You quickly contemplate these options and decide to pay the charge rather than run the risk of spending any more time on this relatively trivial matter.

            Note what has happened in this example.  You have gone from confusion to frustration to something akin to rage.  Okay, maybe rage is a stretch, but what about the tenth time you experience this type of situation, or the one-hundredth, or the one thousandth?  And what if episodes all too similar to this one are repeated on a daily basis?  And what if they do not only relate to minor expenses but instead concern matters of great import to you, such as airline tickets for your family’s vacation or a stock purchase you tried to make on-line or the dispute in which you are engaged with the Internal Revenue Service?

            And what if the cumulative effect of all of these wholly unsatisfying impersonal contacts with highly structured institutional bureaucracies that never provide complete resolution to any problem is that you finally begin to consider that much of your effort is a gigantic waste of your precious time?  What if, after repeatedly finding no “real people” who can address your needs, you are left with the sense that no one is responsible for the frustration you constantly feel, because everyone is “out of the loop?”  What if, in other words, you ultimately confront the reality that you are no longer viewed as a unique individual with respect to many matters that represent a significant part of your life?

            The answer, at that point, may well be a seething rage that is the consequence of feeling permanently wronged by decisions and actions by faceless entities that refuse to acknowledge their fallibility or responsibility.  In an individual, this kind of rage can lead to all manner of unpleasant consequences.  And when it is felt collectively by millions of individuals in an entire society,  . . .