Opinion: Uncomfortable Truths and Satire as Activism
Most Senior News readers will recall the Big Three networks on the family B&W TV.
Back then, journalists often reported uncomfortable facts about U.S. military aggression, top U.S. administration corruption, labor strikes, police violence, etc., asking difficult and persistent questions holding public officials and industrialists accountable for their misstatements.
There even used to be weekly televised debates on current issues!
In the 1990s, mainstream media consolidation began in earnest, accelerated by the Clinton-era’s Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Billionaire owners are not served by investigative journalism, which has all but vanished, relegating most mainstream reporting to unquestioned government press releases, sports, celebrities and human-interest stories.
Since then, satirists have become the standard-bearers for reporting uncomfortable truths in mainstream media, still tolerated in revealing government-industry collusion, top officials’ blatant lies, corruption and scandal … until now.
The current administration seeks to ban the comics, too, having already demonstrated how easy it is to undermine and eliminate two generations of hard-won social, economic and environmental legislative reforms in just one year. This reveals the tenuous nature of reform in the absence of a well-informed and outraged public.
Founder of the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898, Mark Twain understood the insurmountable force of change when its demands (and its costs) begin permeating the daily lives of millions. “We have three celebrated freedoms in America, the freedom of speech, the freedom to assemble and the prudence to do neither,” he wrote.
It’s still possible for every individual to find a way to integrate joy and resistance, no matter how small or large.
In one personal example, when investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported stories of U.S. soldiers taking photographs of Iraqi prisoners they tortured at Abu Graib, we used the disturbing photos to make greeting cards with quotes like, “What you do to the least of these my brethren, you do unto me,” or, in the case of a hooded prisoner holding his child, the greeting read, “Wish I could see you on your birthday.”
These cards were an instant hit, sold to diners in our popular family restaurant in Eureka. Once we reached $1,000 in sales, we had a huge check made out to Amnesty International and asked the Redwood Peace and Justice Center to join us in a press release.
“The Humboldt Beacon” was the only paper to cover the story, omitting examples of the cards themselves.
What acts of resistance do you enjoy in your daily life?
George Clark is the former owner of Kyoto Japanese Restaurant in Eureka.
