Through The Looking Glass

Michael Brown' press secretary Sharon Worthy wrote to him: "Please roll up the sleeves of your shirt, all shirts. Even the president rolled his sleeves to just below the elbow. In this [crisis] and on TV you just need to look more hard-working." (democracy now)

Controlling speech and images, very finely, has become necessary to sustaining the spectacle's monopoly on communication; the more staging there is, the more staging is required, the more egregious the unstaged appears.

Censorship of course dresses itself up as another humanitarian intervention, champion of the oppressed, engine of liberté, egalité and fraternité:

From The Black Commentator:

Uncle Tom. Sellout. Race traitor. Minstrel. Self-hater. Sambo.

African Americans, who have known for centuries that living, breathing, groveling, shuffling characters walk among us who actually match these caricatures, have been put on notice that it is taboo to point out the obvious.

One would think white media and politicians would have enough to do, policing the racist statements of their own group. Yet instead of deploying their censorship squads to suppress explicit and implicit white supremacist speech – which flows like a daily tsunami from George Bush’s Confederate/Republican Party and all its unofficial manifestations – corporate media and Democrats make common cause to suppress the free speech of Black writers and artists who dare to confront other Black people who have committed political offenses against African Americans.

...

The latest Dem/GOP/corporate assault on Black internal political autonomy targeted The News Blog, operated by Black New Yorker Steve Gilliard. Gilliard altered a photo of Maryland’s Black Republican Lt. Governor, Michael S. Steele, a candidate for U.S. senator, to conform more closely to the historical archetype that Steele’s reflexive subordinate behavior most resembles. “Simple Sambo wants to move to the big house," read the caption under what Gilliard had made to look like a flyer for Steele’s one-man minstrel show.

...


Hearing the cries of distress from across the border, Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Tim Kaine pulled his campaign ads from Gilliard’s blog – all $350 worth. "It's a racist image, and we did not want our campaign ad appearing next to a racist image," said a Kaine staffer.

When white folks have the final say on what is and is not racist, we are in deep trouble. And when whites are allowed to referee an intra-Black argument, the cuckoo has flown.

We can’t show you the Lt. Gov. Steele-as-Sambo picture that appeared for a short time on Gilliard’s blog. In a grand gesture of solidarity with the rich and powerful everywhere, the Washington Post, which had copyrights to the photo, forced Gilliard to remove it.

Of course we are not expected to believe in the pageant, in the spectacle. Only to accept it as all there is:

As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling. The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the General Accounting Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage.

And so we accept Election Miracles in an age of Election Science.