Good Night and Good Luck:
The Revolution May Never Be Televised

“I am entirely persuaded that the American public is more reasonable, restrained and more mature than most of our industry’s program planners believe.”

Edward R. Murrow, 1958

To say that George Clooney’s new film “Good Night and Good Luck” is one of the most important films of this year is to be guilty of significant understatement. Not since Michael Mann’s 1999 thriller “The Insider” has a Hollywood film director made a media-focused mainstream movie this important or timely.

Clooney tells the story of CBS news broadcaster Edward R. Murrow (masterfully played by David Strathairn) and his battle to expose the anti-Communist excesses of Wisconsin junior Senator Joseph McCarthy (played by himself, thanks to recovered 1950s kinescope footage). Led by CBS producer Fred Friendly (a be-speckled Clooney) and supported by a loyal news team, Murrow’s courageous “See It Now” TV program confronted the domestic fallout of Cold War ideology (and, by extension, the military/industrial/media complex propping it up) while simultaneously staking out a more tolerant and inclusive version of American patriotism that honored privacy, individual rights, and a sense of fair play.

Does this debate sound strangely familiar?

While Murrow’s truth-telling won him praise from New York Times media reporter Jack Gould and other influential cultural gate-keepers, his nightly stories put “See It Now’s” parent company and Columbia Broadcast System CEO William Paley (Frank Langella, in the film) under tremendous pressure. Large corporations cancelled their underwriting contracts with CBS (during the 1950s, before the days of wall-to-wall ads, companies like Alcoa often single-handedly supported an entire program), and US military officials showed up in Friendly’s office for a not-so-friendly heart-to-heart chat.

In telling Murrow’s story, Clooney wisely plays to his medium’s strengths. Shooting in black and white, he has produced a compact film that is tightly edited, atmospheric, and, for TV news studio scenes, downright claustrophobic. We learn nothing about Murrow’s personal life, very little about any of the story’s major characters beyond the news room, and precious few details about Cold War culture.

What we do learn, thanks to Clooney’s decision to book-end his film with a speech Murrow made at a 1958 Radio-Television News Director Association dinner, is that many Americans like Murrow believed very much in the power of television to educate, enlighten, and inspire, rather than to simply sell people stuff. Murrow’s 1958 observations – now legendary in media circles - still stand as some of the most prescient and honest statements about TV and U.S. society ever made by an industry insider.

“We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this.” Murrow observed on that October 1958 evening in Chicago. “But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.”

What would Murrow make of U.S. television today? The massive global consolidation of a hyper-commercial corporate structure? The 28 hours a week we Americans watch, on average? The Fox-ification of TV “news”? The 24-7 ad-driven “consensus trance” created by the medium, our society’s epistemological command center even today? The 1996 $70 billion Congressional giveaway of the publicly-owned digital spectrum – for FREE - to the telecommunications industry? Or, on the positive side, community cable TV broadcasters’ valiant efforts to exploit the medium to capture the real lives of real communities – to use TV for something other than simply selling us stuff?

And, if Murrow were alive today, would he tackle our most provocative but unreported national news stories-to-be? Election Fraud? 911 Truth? Corporate corruption on a grand scale? International drug trafficking by our country’s own intelligence agencies?

“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends,” Murrow concluded in 1958. “Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.”

Prophetic words. And ones that, I fear, will never be completely realized as long as the television medium, in the main, is owned and operated by our society’s richest and most powerful players.

Why Ask?
Storyteller Alan Stracke’s Journey Into Sociology

By Dr. Rob Williams

Alan Stracke (call him “White Beard”) teaches sociology at Champlain College, which is to say he is deeply interested in stories, and how different cultures use story-telling to make meaning in and about the world. Rather than adopt a traditional “textbook” method that might render “living stories” inert, imprisoned amidst the black and white of the glossy but tightly-bound pages of a very heavy and often-dull text, Stracke has produced, with his partner Lynda Reid, a fascinating new sociological resource book called A Storyteller’s Journey Into Sociology. Organic, home-grown, alive and brimming over with wit, wisdom and an abiding sense that sociology matters, this new book is a thought-provoking exploration of sociology’s relevance as an academic discipline, when embedded as practice in the life of any individual or culture.

The cover of A Storyteller’s Journey features an image of Stracke, his back towards the camera, sitting on a Caribbean beach at the center of a sand-scribed circle, facing out towards an azure ocean with an island off in the distance. Sounds tranquil, to be sure, but Stracke and Reid have lofty ambitions—namely, the re-invention, literally and pedagogically, of sociological practice through a new approach that the two have pioneered through first-hand study and application as part of their work and travels throughout the Caribbean. “I am a teacher that writes,” Stracke tells me, “not a writer that teaches.”

Fortunately for interested readers, Stracke and Reid offer up both teaching and writing in generous doses throughout this book, which takes an eleven-section approach to teaching sociology that is at once fun and insightful. Section One introduces sociology by pointing out that the cover photo—Stracke on the beach—serves as metaphor for the course, connecting the teacher with the reader through sociological practice, with the sand circle representing “our connectedness and our transitions in the world.” Sections Two through Four flesh out the notion of Self in the context of what Stracke and Reid call the “Global Mosaic.” There is a difference between simply “learning” and truly “understanding,” Stracke suggests, and one can grasp this by adopting a new pedagogical lens called the “cognitive mirror,” in which individual students become aware, as Stracke writes, that “this is not your parents’ world, this is your world.”

Section Five provides what Stracke calls the “protein” of sociology, the “essential building blocks of social life.” He explores these ideas in more detail in Sections Six and Seven, considering how “cultural change” impacts changing notions of Self in relationship to others, and how each individual has the power to shape positive experiences through an applied understanding of basic sociological concepts.

If that last paragraph makes Stracke’s work sound a bit dry, don’t be fooled. Embedded in the text are dozens and dozens of stories—funny and powerful little texts collected from decades of cross-cultural travel and research—that bring to life, in vivid and enjoyable detail, the concepts Stracke and Reid lay out on their journey. Reid has even taking Champlain College’s Core Competencies—Critical Thinking, Written Communication, Oral Communication, Global Awareness, Ethical Reasoning, Quantitative Literacy and Technological Competency—and matched them up with each activity in each section of the book, providing a comprehensive blueprint for adapting Stracke’s pioneering work to Champlain’s own academic model.

Ultimately, of course, the human experience is all about stories, and A Storytellers’ Journey offers a powerful way of encouraging sojourners to tell their own stories and honor and understand those of others. It is an impressive and exciting achievement for “White Beard” and Reid, one that offers wisdom for us all.

The Wal-Martization of America:
Uncovering the High Cost of Low Price

Remember back to grade school, when your teacher occasionally interrupted your daily classroom routine to take you and your classmates on a “field trip”? Maybe it was to a museum, or a play, or some other artistic or “cultural” event. Invariably, barring any serious injuries or unforeseen catastrophes, everyone would return at the end of the day knowing a bit more about each other and the way the world really worked, having accumulated a set of shared stories from the journey.

As a history teacher for two decades now, the single best field trip I’ve ever taken with students involved a visit to a “local” Wal-Mart in Albuquerque, New Mexico. During the 1990s, when I lived and taught in the urban desert, the Duke City served as a prime example of urban sprawl run amuck, with box store chains routinely popping up on every corner like mushrooms after a late summer rain. As part of our exploration of late 20th century globalization, my sophomores and I decided we’d take an official tour of Wal-Mart. We’d been reading essays fairly critical of the Bentonville-based company, so we decided we’d get the official Wal-Mart party line straight from the horse’s mouth. After calling the store to set up a visit, we walked across the mesa to have a look inside the world’s largest corporation.

Suffice to say, our two-hour visit in Wal-Mart, escorted around by the store’s friendly (and honest) manager, answered many of our questions, raised others, and, most importantly, opened our eyes to the realities of corporate retail in modern America. “Do all Wal-Mart employees really do a Wal-Mart cheer at the beginning of each work day?” asked one of my unbelieving students. “We do,” one employee sheepishly admitted, and then proceeded to perform the rather embarrassing number with her fellow “associates.” “You kids be sure to stay in school and finish your education,” admonished another “associate” taking a brief break in the store lounge. “You don’t want to end up working in retail like me.”

Think of Robert Greenwald’s powerful new film “Wal-Mart: The High Cost Of Low Price” as one giant field trip across the United States at a time when corporate multinational retail box store power dominates the landscape. Anyone with even a passing interest in matters economic knows a bit about Wal-Mart’s rap sheet, as well as the lure of “low prices – always.” But Greenwald’s film both contextualizes and personalizes the wide variety of trade offs Americans have made in allowing Wal-Mart to own and operate the very fabric of our 21st century economy.

The film is full of moments of heartache that resonate – long-time family-owned and operated businesses driven into the ground by the aggressive Wal-Martization of Anywhere, USA. In one poignant scene at film’s beginning, we see, in slow motion, a sepia-toned Stars and Stripes fluttering against Bruce Springsteen’s haunting crooning of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” sung over a depressing picture that is all too familiar: dilapidated and boarded-up down town Main Streets across America, driven out of business by the economic clout of giant corporate power, wielding more efficient economies of scale, as well as aggressive (some would say “ruthless) business tactics.

In assembling his new film, Greenwald makes two shrewd tactical decisions that pay off in spades by film’s end. The first involves his decision to give voice to the voice-less. Those familiar with Greenwald’s previous films - “Uncovered: The Whole Truth About The Iraq War,” for example - know of his interest in capturing powerful voices on film, authoritative voices from inside the corridors of power who know how the System works and aren’t afraid to speak honestly about abuse and injustice. In “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price,” however, the viewer won’t encounter a single Ph.D.-sporting talking head.

Instead, we meet ordinary Americans, struggling to make sense of a billion dollar multinational corporation that consistently says one thing and does another, displaying an arrogance and an eye-opening set of double-standards that could fill volumes. Many of these Americans are dyed-in-the-whole small town conservatives, rock-ribbed Republicans (in the traditional sense of the term) who believe in the mythical power of hard work, sacrifice, entrepreneurialism, and a sense of fair play that, once upon a time, made the United States economy the envy of the world. The film also interviews a number of former Wal-Mart employees, many of them upper level managers, who speak candidly about the corporation’s deeply rooted sense of foul play, amoral behavior, and unethical business practices. Hearing their celluloid confessions is enough to make any CEO squirm.

Greenwald’s second tactical decision in telling his story involves brilliant use of rhetorical jujitsu, as he leverages the multi-billion dollar juggernaut of Wal-Mart’s advertising and public relations (PR) power against itself. We see, for example, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott at a national company rally, claiming that his corporation provides well-paying jobs with retirement benefits and a host of other perks. Then we meet Wal-Mart workers who simply cannot make ends meet, no matter how hard they try, backed up by sobering statistics pointing out that, while CEO Scott pulled in a $27 million salary last year and the five members of the Walton family are worth more than $102 billion (with a “b,” yes), the average full time Wal-Mart employee (FT defined as a mere 28 hours a week by Wal-Mart’s reckoning) earned under $14,000 last year.

In this way, Greenwald’s new film is as much a study in the propagandistic power of corporate public relations and advertising as it is a meditation on Wal-Mart’s deliberate bleeding of the U.S. economy to enrich the pockets of its shareholders. The shiny happy people featured in Wal-Mart advertisements, as well as the company’s continued PR claims of corporate responsibility (“We at Wal-Mart take an active interest in conserving the environment!”), simply doesn’t match the frustrating reality of their corporate behavior. Even the largely toothless Environmental Protection Agency, for example, an agency that sometimes seems to exist simply to provide regulatory permits for giant corporate polluters, has managed to prosecute Wal-Mart for Clean Air Act violations in nine states, due to the company’s stubborn insistence on storing lawn fertilizer and other toxic chemicals in parking lots located near local watershed areas.

Greenwald even takes us to Wal-Mart’s global factories in China, Honduras, and Bangladesh, where Wal-Mart workers put in 14 hour days 7 days a week and brush their teeth with fireplace ashes because their salaries don’t allow them to buy tooth paste. Implicitly in this global tour is the fact that, while wrapping itself in the American flag and a shallow sham version of patriotism, Wal-Mart cares very little for the health and well being of its workers, the environment, or the health of the U.S. economy as a whole, beyond the short-term dollar value it can extract to increase its profits margin.

While all of this is deeply sobering, Greenwald wisely chooses to end the film on a powerful high note, spotlighting and interviewing several citizen/activists – normal people just like you and me – who have chosen to organize their communities to oppose Wal-Mart’s predatory behavior and fight for more just and sustainable local economies.

And this is this filmic field trip’s ultimate message. Don’t believe Wal-Mart’s hype. Educate. Speak out. Organize. As consumers, as workers, as citizens, as elected officials, all of us every day make decisions that perpetuate or undermine Wal-Mart’s (and other large multinational corporations) existence in our communities.

Let us choose wisely. Our economic future is at stake.

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First published in “Vermont Guardian.”

Sonic Mini-Movies: Delmhorst and Mulvey Come To Mad River Valley

I’ve been writing and performing my own songs for two decades now, and I am often asked a simple question about the magical and maddening craft of musical wordsmith-ing:

“Dude, what is that song about, anyway?”

Rather than answer that question, let me suggest that the singer/songwriter’s ultimate musical quest is to capture, via the voice and the instrument, a particular specific moment in time and space, and then blow it up into a universal story to which listeners might relate. In other words, what we songwriters try to do is create what I would call a “sonic mini-movie,” an audio story that captures a common experience or widely-shared emotion through the telling of a specific story. If our goal is attained, listeners will nod, smile, laugh, cry and connect with a song about someone they don’t know, because that “stranger’s” experience resonates.

This is tricky business, of course, and we fail as often as we succeed. But if you are looking for two musicians who’ve been at this a while, look no further than Kris Delmhorst and Peter Mulvey. Here are two singer/songwriters who can paint “sonic mini-movies” better than most, and the good news is that they both are performing at Mad River Valley’s Valley Players Theater on Sunday night, November 20th.

Begin with Peter Mulvey, whose music I’ve been listening to for more than a decade now. His new CD is called “Kitchen Radio,” and from the opening chords of “Road To Mallow,” the first tune, it is apparent that Mulvey is after big sonic game here – trying to re-capture the intimacies of home, hearth, travel, aging, matter spiritual and literary, and those other realities that go unspoken in most of what passes for mainstream pop music broadcast through the ether these days.

Song after song, the gravelly-voiced Mulvey masterfully captures vignettes from his own wanderings, as in this description of a late night Old World sojourn, set to a haunting plastic-picked descending acoustic refrain:

“This road is shining bright after rain, the moon is just past full/Saw an old ghost by the side of the road, drunk out of his skull…

And then, using both words and music to lead the listener, Mulvey lifts us to look at the heavens:

“High above, vapor trails passing over gleaming rails/
Glowing towers, crashing waves, Euros, dollars, ashes, slaves/Screens and streets and streams of rushing liquid light/Far and away…

A late night highway moment we can all relate to, connected to a larger global world of molten motion and confusion. This type of story-telling – keen-eyed, observant, literary - informs so much of the Mulvey-ian musical landscape, in which he sings of airport travel and “the ghost of Rumi who winks as he glides past you” in “Wednesday morning Denver 6: a.m.” (Track 6); or an audio look at a “Chopin waltzes old upright” in the arresting 3/4 time number “You” (Track 11); or “Neruda in a knapsack” in “Toad” (Track 12), or the road-weary but rousing climactic final track “Sad Sad Sad Sad (And Faraway From Home), where he sings:

Houdini’s still stuck in that Doctorow book
The one place he can never escape
And your voice on the phone is like one of those paintings
Where everything loses its shape…

Good stuff. Speaking of which, Kris Delmhorst (who joins Mulvey on his last track) throws down some equally provocative sonic creations in her preciently-titled CD “Songs For A Hurricane.” Delmhorst shares Mulvey’s gift for sonic particulars, able to wring intimate precision out of life’s odd moments and then gently and effortlessly embed them in the collective universal human experience with stark and plaintive beauty.

All thirteen songs on her latest CD are stand-along gems. “Waiting Under The Waves” tells the tale of the same, Delmhorst singing “I’m sorry that we’re sinking but we’re sinking just the same.” Is this a love song? A meditation on Katrina’s wrath? A meditation at the impending collapse of U.S. Empire? What’s this song about, dude? I hear all three in the story – the mark of a gifted songwriter at work.

Or consider my favorite tune, “weather vane,” which takes the aggrieved lover’s tale and ties it to meteorological meddling, of sorts:

“I’m gonna rattle at your windows, rattle at your doors/ Rattle at your shutters, show you what they’re for/No more weather vane, I’m gonna be the wind/No more spin around but always face away…”

This is songwriting at its finest, to take a well-worn genre and metaphorically re-cast it in un-anticipated and surprising ways, and Delmhorst does this again and again, and does it beautifully, on her CD.

To have an opportunity to listen to two of America’s finest emerging singer/songwriters together in one place is a not-to-be-missed treat. You’ll leave laughing, crying, thinking, and understanding that the world’s sonic landscapes are better explored for these two in it.

An Unreasonable Woman:
The Most Inspiring True-Life Adventure of the Year

Our mainstream press is fond of celebrating the world’s great heroes. You know, people (mostly men) who make the time to cross the globe solo in a hot air balloon (Go Steve Forbes), or hit more home runs in a single year than anyone else (Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio?), or make more money in a single year than any other family on the planet (Thanks, Wal-Mart Waltons!).

But what about ordinary folks who do something extra-ordinary? Those who get out of bed in the morning and go to work, while simultaneously managing to raise children, those who discover that the world doesn’t look quite right from the front porch or the wooden comfort of the Adirondack chair?

Let’s say, for example, that you read in the newspaper one day that the Environmental Protection Agency (DC’s EPA – you know, the federal agency that is supposed to help keep our water clean and our air breathable?) has declared the county in which you live to be the single most polluted county in the entire country.

Let’s say, to go one step further, that, when you read this article in the newspaper, you know WHY this is the case. It has to do with plastics. And chemicals. And emissions. And the political power of one very large trans-national corporation with which you share the neighborhood.

If you are like most of us, you probably nod knowingly, sigh, and go about your business. After all, there ain’t nothing you can do to fix things, right?

But let’s say you are “nobody particular” who decides to DO something about the situation. Now we’ve got a heroine’s tale on our hands.

In this true life story called “An Unreasonable Woman” (which represents yet another publishing coup by Vermont independent Chelsea Green Press at www.chelseagreen.com) Diane Wilson - working class shrimp boat captain and mother of five - recounts the often-harrowing account of her five year fight to hold corporate polluter Formosa Plastics to a “zero emissions” policy for their insidious (but all too typical) waste disposal methods in Wilson’s town of Sea Drift, Texas.

And get this.

Wilson won.

How she defeated the machinations of one of the world’ largest and most powerful industrial polluters is the subject of the book, which also offers honest insights into life in a southern seaside working class community from a woman’s point of view, a community that I never knew existed.

And who out there knows women can captain shrimp boats? Or understands that women actually can play characters other than vamps or victims? All my life, I’ve read books populated with women, but until this real life story, I’ve never met a woman like Diane Wilson. In a pop culture world dripping with testosterone, car chases, and gun play, Wilson is no shrinking violet, no damsel in distress.

Exactly the opposite. She intuits her way through what becomes one of the most courageous struggles for justice I’ve read in a long while, challenging corporate control over our economic and political life (and her bayside community) with grit, good humor, and vernacular insights that, while uneven in some places, made me laugh and cry and cheer and buy copies of this book for friends and family.

She also, in the most wry and self-deprecating way imaginable, makes most of the men in her life look like pantywaists by comparison.

Books like an “Unreasonable Woman” come along only rarely. Diane Wilson is a working class heroine with heart, an activist with the guts to do something about the problems confronting her (and all of us, really). The world is a better place for having her and her story in it. If you are not moved after reading this book, it might be time to forgo reading altogether.

Reasonably speaking, “Unreasonable Woman” is the most inspiring and inspired book I’ve read all year.

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First printed at Amazon.com.