From: David L. Moore
Subject: Pacifica/Douglas Article
Letter to the Editor, The Nation
The Twilight of White Liberalism
Susan J. Douglas's piece, "Is There a Future for Pacifica?" (The Nation April 15, 2002) helps to map the issues in the re-organization of the Pacifica radio network, though some of her critiques of battling caricatures tend to reinscribe those cartoon terms. For instance, she outlines a contest between the "pragmatists" and the "purists," suggesting that both would rather destroy the network than hand over power to the other. Again, she maps the issue, in part, as one between "progressive journalism" and "progressive activism," suggesting that journalistic standards leave no air-time for voices of marginal political positions. Against these uncompromising dichotomies, I'd like to propose that the foundations of Pacifica as a forum for pacifist dialogue among dissenting and divergent views still offer a viable framework for progressive broadcasting. The Pacifica stalwarts currently revising by-laws and organizing Local Advisory Board elections do need to take the time, as in any moment of revitalization, to revisit those founding Pacifica principles.
The problems at Pacifica have always been the problems of America's own ideals, and Pacifica is important precisely because it has tried consciously to foster the ideal of a unum, a forum where pluribus diversity can live rather than be subsumed in a media mix called the melting pot. A radically democratic pluralism requires what is sometimes operative in Native American gatherings, a radical patience with process, with the communications process that builds toward compromise, even consensus. Similarly, the Dalai Lama maps some sense of this process: "With care and compassion, a warm heart and determination, difficult things can change and healthy, happy people can talk through their differences, reaching a compromise that all can live with." Such language is not merely idealistic. It makes direct, pragmatic demands on participants in a conflict.
But no one excluded from and deprived of power wants to talk of compromise and consensus if that means re-absorption and erasure, if the consensus process is co-opted and becomes a cancellation of difference. It is this co-optation by the white Left which progressive peoples of color regard with profound suspicion. Control of the airwaves is really the only power-based means to avoid that co-optation.
In a larger context, the real problem for the Left and for "the twilight of common dreams" is not the Balkanization of the progressive cause into an anarchy of identity differences. It is rather the urbane backlash of white liberals, and then the frustration of peoples of color, who mistake robust difference for dissipation and who cannot conceive of dialogue in a community of differences, debate, and dissent.
The problem is not that people of color are splitting and Balkanizing the Left into identity politics. The problem is a lack of imagination. Hegemony cannot conceive of diversity, and all of us, white and colored, implicated in that hegemonic system, continue to have difficulty imagining a different structure that allows difference. The only alternative available to hegemonic thinking seems to be destruction of and separation from the hegemony rather than construction of an alternative community. The white power center of the Left, however much it may wish to believe itself enlightened otherwise, still has difficulty conceiving of sharing power with the margins which it continues to marginalize by its own white privilege. So those "margins" become angry and at times separatist, de-centering power rather than hoping to share it with entrenched resistance to change. Separation rather than re-distribution of power becomes the only option for the marginalized who then are accused oxymoronically of self-segregation.
As everyone glimpsed in the different racial responses to the O.J. Simpson verdict, as everyone acknowledges in the continuing problems of racial misrepresentation or non-representation in the entertainment and news media, and as many other social flags of warning continue to flap in the political breezes, white supremacy remains deeply imbedded in America. Patently, people of color know it far more painfully than whites.
The American dream of e pluribus unum which is simply what Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked in his "I Have a Dream" speech has never been realized because no one can conceive of a community of differences. Community tends toward conformity, and power in a community wants conformity. Thus, one reason such a conception of a community of differences is so difficult is power's primal fear of change. A community fostering difference would live in a pragmatic, on-going process of change. Power wants stability, mutual security, the products of productivity. Sharing power wants flexibility, mutual vulnerability, the process rather than products.
Pacifica's founding principles of pacifist dialogue remain a forum for just such an American dream. The twin poles of dialogue and dissent (mapped usefully in Matthew Lasar's history of Pacifica) which energize community, as in "community radio," remain the twin goals of this moment in Pacifica's reconstruction.
When Susan J. Douglas and others try to map the Pacifica crisis, they rarely return to the Pacifica principles of dialogue among dissenters. Certainly the dynamics of dialogue are not conceived for those who already agree among themselves. To return to a revised American dream, unum can be the forum for pluribus, not a homogenized conformity of opinion. Unum must not be a vacuum of unmarked unanimity that sucks pluribus into unrecognizability. Centuries of racialized and gendered economics in an ongoing colonial project have usurped the unum and asserted that the dominant center is the "normal" which has a right, by some divine economy of power or manifest destiny, to absorb all the margins of power as its ever-expanding markets. Thus the pluribus does indeed disappear. The racial markings of power have held those centers and margins in place for over 500 years. Pacifica's project, indeed like King's dream, is precisely the opposite: to foster difference and dissent in a forum of dialogue.
Both because of the subtlety of reconceiving dialogue with dissent and because of the weight of economic and racial history, building that forum is the real test of Pacifica today, as it was in 1949 and in each decade of crises since then. Perhaps the process is getting clearer, but it will always remain a process, and verbal as well as physical non-violence will keep Pacifica's process alive.
Short Bio
As the son of Lewis Hill and Eleanor McKinney, David L. Moore was raised in the atmosphere of Pacifica broadcasting. His natural parents, along with his stepfather, Richard Moore, were the founding "triumvirate" who ran KPFA and Pacifica in the late Forties and early Fifties. He moved from Berkeley to New York in 1960 as a child when his mother, Eleanor McKinney, transferred from KPFA to help establish WBAI. Now a professor of cross-cultural humanities with a keen professional interest in non-adversarial communications, he is both intimately familiar with the founding principles of Pacifica and with the political and social changes in American society which have made Pacifica's role so crucial and contested. Moore is currently on the literature faculty in the English Department at the University of Montana. He teaches and publishes on Native American and American literatures, and has taught previously at the University of South Dakota, Salish Kootenai College on the Flathead Reservation, and Cornell University. He lives with his family in Missoula, Montana, where he listens to Pacifica broadcasts by streaming audio on the Internet.
David L. Moore
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Montana
Missoula, MT 59812
"Tyranny is essentially against human nature. It can't work. It is against nature's law, so therefore no force can stop human nature from winning." Dalai Lama
"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fail -- Think of it, always." Mahatma Gandhi
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