Voices/Dr. Jean Daniels

The re-packaging of symbols in place of
substance
    The strategy is to re-package Camelot.  
    To date, some 2 million people, mostly Black and Latino/a, are incarcerated in the U.S. while 3.6. million are on parole or on probation. In the world,
some 1 million people are homeless, and in the U.S. 600, 000 families are without homes and 1.35 million children are among those families. The United
Nations reports that 850 million are without food worldwide. In New Orleans, the homeless rate has increased: 1 out of 25 are without homes after Katrina.  
Unemployment in the U.S. continues to increase for Blacks and Latino/as. Tornadoes are striking the Midwest with more frequency, the U.S. infrastructure is
collapsing, and food prices are rising, challenging an already stressed population of poor and low-wage earners.  
But the strategy is to re-package Camelot.  
    Hours upon hours of air time is given to discussing Republicrat politics: Sen. Hillary Clinton’s hair, her pantsuits, her husband Bill, her Americans-are-hard-
workers-and-hard-workers-are-White, and recently her Robert Kennedy comment was or wasn’t intentional, did or didn’t suggest that someone should kill her
opponent. Her opponent, Sen. Obama, whose responses to corporate media’s favorite kind of “investigative” work — digging up scandal — has helped
produce more hours of “news” time. His booting of pastor, church, and staffers who don’t remain on the straight and narrow road to the White House and then
his apologies are “newsworthy.” Everyone tunes in! Sen. McCain knows what he will do one day but changes his mind the next. The media plays video of the
McCain-Bush hug while Sen. McCain claims he is maverick McCain and not a Bushite.  
    Meanwhile, the occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan continues. U.S. soldiers and Iraqis continue to die daily in a conflict that should never have begun
but for a president’s elaborate lie and a capitulating U.S. Congress.  
    Most people who suffer the most from the entertainment news are viewers of Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN or their local news stations. If the presidential
candidates note their stand on key issues such as unemployment or the homeless victims of Katrina, this information is located on their websites and online
analysis of these issues and the candidates are also not available to a population without access to the computer and the internet. These are people subject
to absorbing the re-packaging of Camelot 24/7 even while they struggle directly with the issues no candidate or news broadcast finds marketable. The media
focuses on scandal at best, personality when all else fails and crime (and certainly not the crime of war or corporate greed).
    They are asked to remember the days of Camelot and hope for the best! Hope for change! This message features the passivist agenda: Let’s just hope it
works itself out!   
    I’ve heard “progressive” talk show host acknowledge that Senators Obama and Clinton are corporatists. They have corporate interests. They are not
progressives or even liberals. But …
    But what? We’ll have to vote for Sen. McCain!
    The only other option, then, is to remain a spectator in the sports of politics — where the players are selected by corporate media!
This is freedom in the U.S.! This is democratic! This is something to share with other sovereign nations by force! These other nations are just thrilled to have
this NEW way of selecting a presidential candidate. It’s like having the U.S. come in and, through regime change … oh, that is what’s happening! Regime
change that advances only as it advances the cause of corporate interests.
    Among the issues Former Congresswoman now Green Party Presidential Candidate Cynthia McKinney has either supported or calls for corrective action,
are the need to end the occupation in Iraq, assure that the U.S. becomes a partner for peace in the global community, restore Affirmative Action for college
admission, end the death penalty and No Child Left Behind, declare the U.S. carbon and nuclear free, begin the process for reparations, establish single-
payer universal health care, end the rollback on our civil liberties, and address a corporate media that limits discourse and discourages voters from
participation as informed citizens.  
    Presidential runner McKinney’s seems a voice in the wilderness of U.S. politics thanks to the corporate media who along with corporate controlled
politicians, don’t want to see a thinking citizenry here in the U.S. The idea of “thought crime” has become a reality.  
    The act of collective amnesia, as Hamid Dabashi points out, “accompanies a strategy of selective memory.”  The systematic loss of collective memory
presumes that no one is watching, no one is counting, and no one is keeping record of anything — that history is dead, as is memory, recollection,
experience … [it] amounts to the end of collective memory and the effective erasure of shared experiences — even (or perhaps particularly) of the most
recent history.  (“Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire”)
    McKinney is committed to issues that are being challenged by the re-packaging of Camelot. Never mind if most citizens don’t have a collective memory
of the history behind the symbol of Camelot. All that matters is symbol!