Culture Notes...

I was taking the bus home yesterday when I discovered that the driver was listening to the "Howie Carr Show". He didn't have the sound up too loud so all I caught was Howie's unmistakable snarky dulcet tones droning on about fags, lesbians, hacks etc etc etc blah blah blah!
This gave me to wonder, why in the world would a well compensated public employee, a member of one of the strongest remaining labor unions on the Eastern seaboard would wanna listen to the famously anti-labor anti-public service Howie Carr?

Well, allegedly Howie is funny.
I think he is the dreariest little putz imaginable but lets face facts, it is a Pauly Shore world out there. Of course, Howie's main targets are the usual sexual others, gays, lesbians and the like. In fact, far as I can tell, Howie is fairly obsessed with homosexual practices great and small.
And clearly his audience digs that the most, why else would he keep harping on it?

One of the things we liberals haven't seemed to assessed yet, is the sheer power or certain conservative cultural signifiers, in this case fag-bashing.
So far as I can see, it can quite easily lead a man far astray from his economic or political interests.
Homo Economicus versus Homo-Phobus...and it looks like the latter is winning by a country mile.
The answer isn't hard to see, the white working class in America has been propagandized on fear for nigh on fifty years now, fear of communists, fear of blacks, fear of women and now fear of faggots and liberals.
Reaction formation posits we often laugh at we are afraid of, hence the endless stream of gay gags from out talk radio.
Fear is also a great source of confusion when it comes to sorting out long term versus short term interests.
So really, behind those signifiers is a great roiling fear...so the challenge therefore is to somehow come up with our own fear-dispersing signifiers.
How to do that is beyond Humble Elias.

Such is the Kingdom of God
On the Congressionally Licensed
Public Airwaves and Elsewhere.
7-14-05
5:45pm EST
God Save the Republic
God Save the Commonwealth.