Writers for this round: Mitchell Stephens, Susie Linfield, Mark Crispin Miller, Ellen Willis, Jay Rosen and Siva Vaidhyanathan.Perfectly Imperfect Story
April 17, 2000Mitchell Stephens
opens this round:
In some ways it is the perfectly imperfect story — typical of so many we've had in recent years. It is sensational and petty: Obviously, the tale of one six-year-old boy, however cute, does not provide a comprehensive or balanced perspective on U.S.-Cuba relations. The story has also been given our new, most-networks-most-of-the-time coverage: too much coverage, anyone you ask will mutter. Yet, I must admit that by mid-April the story — with its looming showdown in Miami — had captured my attention.
Is this just, as a certain cynical news historian might claim, news being its sappy, cute-kid-loving, conflict-obsessed, often unintelligent self? Or is there evidence here of a new corporate-driven decline in seriousness? Or, another possibility, are there, in fact, things we are learning from Elián about issues involving Cuba or families that might not be available to us through thoughtful, balanced — if you'll excuse the expression — beard pulling?
Click here for "Elián: Human
Interest" — A video experiment by Mitchell
Stephens.
(viewing
instructions)
No Truth Outside Themselves
April 19, 2000Susie Linfield
writes: The Elián González story isn't petty. In fact, the problem here may be that the story encompasses too many meanings, most of which the press missed. (This is in sharp contrast to stories such as O.J., JonBenet, even Monica, all of which the press stuffed with spurious meanings the stories themselves simply couldn't support.) Thousands of people, both in Miami and Havana, have moved into the streets to demonstrate their convictions about Elián's fate. Thousands of people in the streets isn't the only definition of an important story, but it sure is one of them (and obviously distinguishes this tale from the three mentioned above). Of course, one could say that these thousands of people were merely pathetic dupes, but that would be untrue.
That doesn't mean, however, that the passions and convictions such people are expressing necessarily correspond to any truth outside of themselves. Indeed, this is precisely where, to me, this story becomes so fascinating (and important). The Cuban-Americans in Miami are a stark, poignant and terrifying example of the ways in which people can be obsessed with, and extremely knowledgeable about, their history, yet entirely oblivious to its moral meaning. They live, as Michael Ignatieff wrote of the Serbs, trapped in "the dream time of vengeance."
The Elián story was a great squandered opportunity for the press to explore this phenomenon. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Steve Wasserman likened the relationship (beginning approximately 100 years ago) between the U.S. and Cuba to a long love affair gone sour. This seems right. The U.S.'s attitudes, and actions, towards Cuba — obsessive, abnormal, highly fetishized, even sadistic — will, at some point, need to be examined with humility and realism. The Elián story was an excellent opportunity to begin doing so, though the press, alas, missed the boat.
The Great Audience Remains Unmoved
April 26, 2000Mark Crispin Miller
writes: In this case (as in so many others), it is tempting to deplore the mawkishness and triviality that have marked the product of the telejournalists — to point out that a little child shall always lead them, even as a hundred problems of far greater moment cry out for exposure and investigation. Whether it's JonBenet or Elián, one might contend, the single celebrated Child in Trouble will at once upstage the whole wide world with all its crises — even those that are affecting thousands, even millions, of anonymous other children the world over.
This objection certainly makes sense (although it fails to take account of the celebrity orientation of TV), and yet the case of Elián has been a lot more edifying than such complaint suggests, because of its historical moment, and the light it has shed upon this moment. The stark fanaticism of the diehards in Miami, the flagrancy of their attempt to use the child for their revanchist purposes, and, most importantly, the vast unpopularity of their behavior elsewhere in the United States together indicate how greatly things have changed, especially since the Cold War flared, but also since the Cold War stopped. Evidently, for most U.S. viewers/citizens, Elián's case has been a jumbo-sized no-brainer: he belongs with his father. Only the fanatics — those down there wielding placards in the street, and overheated suits like Robert Novak — have thought otherwise; and that's significant, as well as cause for guarded optimism.
On this the mainstream press (by which I mean TV primarily) is out of step with everybody else, if those news-bits I've seen exemplify the telecoverage. To my mind, among the network anchors and their correspondents there's been far too much bending over backward to accommodate the statist view, too little emphasis on how the rightist keep-him-here position has contradicted the right's "family values" discourse. And even, here and there, there's been some shameless neo-Dullesian propaganda (such as CBS's gratuitous triumphalist segment on a young Soviet-bloc defector who, years ago, fought to stay here even though his parents wanted him to go back home with them). Here again, it would appear that the great audience, by and large, is more humane and open-minded than the upper mediocracy.
This split has been especially striking since the child was rescued (as most people see it) or abducted (as the mad minority keeps screaming). Leaving aside the reasonable question as to whether that SWAT team actually put Elián at risk, BATF-style (the mission was, let's face it, just a glitch away from bloody accident), let's turn to the current propaganda mini-war between the staunch Miamians and Juan González's Federal hosts. The nightmare shot of Elián Under Fire was certainly disquieting — and so the later snaps of Elián Returned seemed all the more consoling. (In their cheeriness they are, of course, also misleading, given all that that poor kid has been through.) But, predictably, it was the earlier scarier picture that got all the play (a decision surely based, in most cases, not on ideological but on commercial grounds, horror always selling far more briskly than contentment).
And yet, although the darker image was the one in everybody's face, the national consensus did not shift in favor of the patriotic surrogates. Indeed, mass support for the father-and-child reunion seemed to grow a little stronger even after we were inundated by that ugly picture (which looked like a still from "Cops"). This is striking, given all the wrathful shrieking from the Florida contingent and the yanqui tribunes of the right. Such national resistance may be due in part to the pop-eyed fanaticism of the latter — especially the González clan, whose claim that Juan González' snaps were forgeries betrayed the same wild, paranoid misprision that impelled them to produce their stomach-turning video of the child insisting that we let him be a full-fledged citizen of Disney World.
Of course, American viewers are likelier to be turned off by a bunch of frantic foreigners than by a bunch of frantic all-Americans like Jeb Bush, Trent Lott and Connie Mack. The rantings of those patriots may or may not have offended the majority, but I'll speak for myself: It's well worth noting that the same types who have long deplored the presence of news cameras on the battlefield — because such visual revelation hurts the national morale — and who, for much the same reason, impugned the footage of the cops assaulting Rodney King, are now enraged by the pathetic sight of Elián's terror-stricken face. (A lot of little kids were also pretty scared in Panama, the night they kidnapped Noriega, and in Baghdad, and elsewhere.)
The overriding facts of Juan's paternity and (as far as we know) unimpeachable parental record count as nothing in the wild eyes of those partisans, who happily violate "family values" for the sake of their political agenda. In this they are exactly like those legendary commies whom they so detest, and, evidently, quite unlike the rest of us (if I may say so), for whom the world is finally something different from the world of just ten years ago. With any luck, they'll stay in the minority, and maybe even lose their power as they have lost their bearings.
An Egregious Case of Child Abuse
April 26, 2000Ellen Willis
writes:Far from being "petty," the Elián González story — like all grand-scale media obsessions — has resonance far beyond its immediate facts. Elián has become a symbol of, and stand-in for, several converging stories of American politics and culture, none of which would be so potent in the absence of the others.
Last Saturday one of those stories became, for the moment, at least, the main text: the González affair as mini-recap of the Gingrich "revolution" of 1994. Then, liberals were paralyzed in the face of a passionate insurgent right, and the Clinton administration made nice to its enemies while paramilitary anarchists inveighed against the government's "jackbooted thugs." It took the shock of the Oklahoma City bombing to give the country second thoughts about what such rhetoric might lead to; and even so, it arguably led to the impeachment of the president. Now the Cuban émigrés have revived this script with a vengeance. They made clear that they would not give up Elián voluntarily; they did not flinch from using a little boy as, in effect, their hostage. In the face of their defiance, the Clinton administration declined, for months, to enforce the law. Janet Reno found one excuse after another not to move. Al Gore pandered to voters who would sooner spit on him than send him to the White House. Bill Clinton, as always when any matter of principle is at stake, said nothing for a long time and then very little. As appeasers will, they let a dangerous situation build. Predictably, it escalated to a dramatic denouement that has become another Waco in the inflamed Republican imagination. In the absence of dead bodies, a photograph will serve.
Playing counterpoint to the feds-as-storm-troopers trope is Cuban-American relations as epilogue to the Cold War narrative. I agree with those who argue that at a time when the U.S. government is obscenely eager to establish "normal trade relations" with China's repressive regime, the continued isolation, demonization and starvation of Cuba is morally absurd, not to mention inhumane. But I don't believe, as many do, that the persistence of this policy is solely an artifact of the Cuban vote, important though that is. It also has to do with the centrality of the struggle against Communism to America's self-definition in the last half of the 20th century, and the imaginative vacuum its end threatens to leave. Cuba — militarily weak, economically marginal, irrelevant to international politics, and, best of all, a non-nuclear power — is terrain on which this obsolescent scenario may still be played out, without the risk of provoking war or alarming investors.
There are signs that the appeal of the embargo has weakened; globalizers in government and business are tired of it; and few Americans outside Miami and the ranks of the far right have evinced great commitment to maintaining it. Yet the other leg of our Cuban policy — the special treatment of Cuban refugees that allowed Elián to be placed with his Miami relatives and made it possible to raise the issue of whether he may seek asylum against his father's wishes — has so far been firmly defended by the courts hearing his case. And it's hard to imagine that all traces of the Cold War drama could have disappeared from the American psyche in a scant ten years. Elián may be its last icon; his return with his father to Cuba (if it finally does occur) its final elegiac scene.
The third and ultimately the central story embodied in the Elián saga is Americans' conflicting attitudes toward children — a compound of genuine concern, narcissistic identification, fear, and bad conscience, all covered over with poisonous sentimentality. Elián is, to begin with, the alter ego of all those children outside the bounds of our policymakers' solicitude — refugees from other countries who don't happen to be Cold War trophies; Third World victims of war, disease and dire poverty; poor kids at home. His interests have been equated with — take your pick — the sacred parent-child bond and the sacred right to grow up in freedom (and material comfort), with little consideration of how either of these abstractions accords with a six-year-old child's emotional reality.
As the mills of the courts grind slowly on, can adults' memories of childhood experience be so dulled that they are blind to the urgent need of a child who has lost his mother and almost died himself to be restored to familiar surroundings, the people who have loved and cared for him, the ordinary rhythm of his life as soon as possible? (No, I would not return a Jewish child to Nazi Germany — and for that matter would have plenty of reservations about returning a girl to the Taliban — but Elián is not facing death or political persecution in Cuba.) Have they entirely forgotten that children do not live in adult time, that for a child Elián's age a few months might as well be five years?
Americans are supposedly very concerned about child abuse, so much so that they have succumbed to bouts of mass hysteria like the trumped-up "ritual sex abuse" trials that ensnared hundreds of child-care workers in the `80s. Yet while the establishment media and majority sentiment seemed to agree from the beginning that Elián should be with his father, there has been no publicly visible protest against an egregious case of child abuse with many perpetrators: the Miami relatives; Fidel Castro (who should have shut up rather than making the case a political cause célčbre); the supine executive branch of the U.S. government; the courts that have delayed the resolution of the case and now are willing to entertain the possibility that a traumatized six-year-old is capable of making an informed and rational decision on whether to ask for asylum; and perhaps even Juan Miguel González himself, who delayed coming to reclaim Elián for reasons that remain unclear. Meanwhile, in this nation of freedom and material comfort, we continue our national debate about whether young children who commit crimes should be tried as adults.
Mad With Significance
April 26, 2000
Jay Rosen
writes:The story first set in Miami is overloaded with meaning. There is an excess there I believe we all feel, as critics charged with making sense of events. Cut into the action from one side, and you find thick narrative chords running the opposite and every other way. Slice one of those — Religions that Find Elián a Mystical Figure, his Rescue a Divine Event — and fantastic interpretations spill out by the dozens.
The entire thing defies categories, eludes whatever narrative frame is hastily put upon it. The struggle over Elián González is not an ordinary political event or even a media frenzy, but a portal through which politics of nearly every twisted kind can be reached. It's also a medium itself, sending abstractions to the streets and back — values added. History, Ideology, Justice, Faith, Law, Violence, Loyalty, Memory, Captivity, Treason, Family, Economy: even then, the list is not complete.
How the media covered the story is in some way the least of it, since the story has long been in charge of its own replication — a true media virus, in Douglas Rushkoff's phrase. Last weekend, the device forwarded two pictures through its media hosts: "The horrifying image of a federal agent with a gun confronting a crying Elián, and a reassuring reunion photo released by Gregory Craig, attorney for Juan Miguel González, showing the boy smiling and embracing his father." (Joan Walsh in Salon.com, April 25th.)
On television, a containment act began as soon as the first images hit. Reactions came in, and within an hour they were reactions to the pictures. Questions remained, and they concerned the afterlife of the pictures. Experts were consulted, and their expertise was backlash from the pictures. "The pictures are the story," it was said. "That's what the Americans will remember."
With this routine feat of compression and condescension, The Story was reclaimed for manageable categories: dueling family camps, clashing interpretations, attacks on the government's decision to move and ringing defenses of that decision, the Republicans savaging the White House, the candidates heckling from the stump, the pundits summing up the winners and losers, and, in service to all, the two stark photos from opposite, screaming worlds.
Though there is much sound and fury to come, from this point forward Elián's signifying power seems containable within the rituals of partisan politics and media glare: Congressional hearings, the long legal struggle ahead, investigative reporting on Janet Reno's decision to use force, polling data for the continuing fallout, and, for everything else, the human interest frame.
But how close it came to busting these retaining walls. A common graphic the past few weeks showed the southern half of Florida breaking away from the rest of the United States in a jagged line. You can live through a hundred political traumas and media spectaculars without finding one that justifies that particular visual. This one did.
During the time Elián was held in Little Havana, everyone knew that ground zero was Miami. But no one could say where Miami was (and is) on the shifting map of the Americas. Just as no one could say for sure what time we were living in. Susie Linfield is right to draw a parallel between the Cubans and the Serbs, both trapped in "the dream time of vengeance." (The phrase is Michael Ignatieff's.)
It could not be located, it could not be narrated. It was not only serious, it was always mad with significance, this tale of a Cuban boy and his protecting army. There — I have just done violence to it by telling you of it, not that I had any choice.
Anti-Significance
April 26, 2000Mitchell Stephens
writes:Sometimes the world disgorges a story that seems almost pure news. Government upheavals, wars and famines don't qualify: They are diluted by politics, by history. Simple tragedies, no matter how celebrated the victims, don't often make the grade: It is not enough for something wildly unexpected to have happened; wildly unexpected things must, for a time, keep happening. I think of Patty Hearst, of O.J. Simpson. The Elián González story hasn't yet given us anything on the level of "Tania," the kidnapped heiress, helping rob a bank, or of Simpson's white Bronco wandering the Los Angeles freeways, but it has had its moments.
These high-concentration news stories seem to tap into a deep, fairy-tale layer of the brain — filled with dreams of miraculous survival, sudden death and magical change in circumstance. And they are freighted, I believe, with anti-significance.
Commentators certainly try their best to make sense out of them. They must. But their struggles inevitably fail. These stories are news — huge news — precisely because they evade extant systems of understanding, because we are unable to dismiss them with a simple "that makes sense." If there are meanings in them, there are, as Jay Rosen writes, too many meanings. They overflow. (Susie Linfield also speaks of an excess of meanings in Elián's story; however, she is not at all pessimistic about the possibility of containing them.)
What explanatory system can get its arms around the facts of O. J. Simpson's life: the Cinderella-success, Big-Bad-Wolf-violence and Mad-Hatter-trial? What moral, for that matter, could cover all the twists, turns and precipitous falls in the tale of a six-year-old, boat-person, shipwrecked, religious-symbol, political-pawn, captured, reunited, motherless child?
And such almost pure news doesn't merely resist understanding, it overturns understandings. As the Elián González story demonstrates, its anti-significances threaten any order — any "moral meaning," in Linfield's term — that wanders too close. The right — attracted to Elián, as Ellen Willis notes, by a Cold-War nostalgia — suddenly finds itself forced to argue against a father's rights. Mark Crispin Miller, justly, savors this. But pursuit of Elián also has led President Clinton down the rabbit hole. This man, known for moving slowly on Bosnia and not at all on Rwanda, suddenly finds himself accused (along with Attorney General Reno, whose legacy is rather different) of an untoward affection for force. It is as if news were bent on bringing forth ironies.
All that remains is for Elián's father — and this would truly be the "Tania" moment — to defect. Then the left, which has been enjoying the right's predicament and indulging in its own variety of Cold-War nostalgia, would see (not for the first time) some of its understandings upended.
Is there a philosophy, let alone a politics, flexible and broad enough to encompass the subversive energies of news in its purest forms? Or are such stories condemned — like the members of a carnival troop — to a nomadic existence, beyond the walls of human understanding?
Elián and the Incredigencia
April 26, 2000 Siva Vaidhyanathan
writes:I will believe almost any claim, as long as it relies on an assumption of disbelief.
I believe the National Hockey League is rigged. In the final game of the 1999 Stanley Cup finals, the Dallas Stars walked away with a fraudulent championship after the officials on the ice and the league commissioner refused to review an illegal winning goal in overtime of the final game. The apparent scorer had his skate in the goal crease, a violation of league rules. But the league had no interest in a rust-belt team of blue-collar grunts led by a Czech goalie hoisting the Cup. The league would be better off if pretty Sun-Belt boys got to ride with the Stanley Cup in convertibles and toss it into swimming pools.
After growing up through Watergate, Koreagate, Iran-Contragate, the Hitler Diaries, the film "Capricorn One," Milli Vanilli, Ronald Reagan, the X-Files and the construction and subsequent deconstruction of deconstruction, the only thing that seems incredible is the credibility of credibility. If there is a conspiracy possible, I'll consider it. If someone claims to have "evidence," or worse, "proof," I am the first to dismiss it — unless it's "counter evidence" or "disproof."
And I'm not the only one. At 1:15 a.m. Sunday, April 22, I came home from an evening at a Jazz club and switched on the television. Appropriately, the Fox News Channel is right next to Comedy Central on my cable box. Fox news, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, and NY1 have much time to fill yet wish to spend almost nothing on "content." So they fill the days and nights with raw information, unfiltered voices.
Fox News was taking calls from just about anyone stupid enough to be up at that hour watching Fox News. That would include me. That's when I heard it for the first time: the photograph of Elián González smiling and hugging his father was a fake. An angry caller from Miami made the claim. And he was deeply sincere in his cynicism. Yep. Look at the hair. It's shorter ... or longer ... or darker. I forget the specifics. They don't matter. PhotoShop was at work again. Any sucker with a recent computer and some pirated software can cut a face off of one body and paste it on another. It happens all the time. Even National Geographic does it. I giggled. Of course someone would call Fox News at 1:15 in the morning with such a claim. This is a big country with too many telephones.
ut when the sun rose Sunday, it failed to burn off the fog of conspiracy. The charges mounted. More people repeated the fakery charge on CNN, on the radio, on the Web. Then the most amazing thing followed. The "credible" elements started the efforts to "prove" the legitimacy of the hugging photo. The Associated Press voiced a claim that the photo had not been altered. Pollsters proclaimed that most people did not believe the photo was faked. On Sunday, Joan Walsh of Salon.com dismissed the conspiracy theorists. On Tuesday, Walsh even offered a detailed response to the right-wing complainers. She actually took their charges seriously enough to attack them. As I learned from the movie "All the President's Men," deniability is essential to any competent conspiracy. The Castro-Clinton-Reno-AP-Salon-Saddam forces had denied everything. Aha!
Monday night, I flipped between wrestling on one Ted Turner channel and pro basketball on another. Both shows had the same texture, same pace, and same feel. Hmmmmmmm. Then, after getting bored with wrestling, I caught "The Matrix" on HBO. Wow. Now it all makes sense.
The totality of our perception is faked through digital technology. Everything is boiled down to a series of portable ones and zeros — the simplest possible grammar. That explains everything. It's a PhotoShop world. We just pretend to live in it. We are fully digitized, fully mediated. Elián is not a real child. He's an image ripe for manipulation. He's content. Run him through software. Scream and spam and type in ALL CAPS THAT HE IS WHAT I READ HIM TO BE AND YOU ARE EVIL OR AT LEAST DUPED. IF YOU TRY TO PROVE ME WRONG, WELL ... you know.
Actually, I'm lying. I don't believe everything that undermines belief. On Tuesday afternoon, walking to my building, I heard two little girls singing a jump-rope song. The sun was beaming. They were smiling and giggling. They were real. They were analog. As the Monkees sang on an old piece of vinyl, "Then I saw her face; now I'm a believer."
I am a pragmatist. I believe that a belief is something upon which I am willing to act. I am not willing to act upon the National Hockey League for executing its evil agenda. I am not willing to act for or against anyone who might have faked Elián González' hug photograph. I am not willing to act for or against the nation-state of Cuba. I am not willing to act for or against Janet Reno. Therefore, I hold no real "beliefs" about this whole painful saga.
I hold opinions. I entertain hypotheses. I gladly share them. What does that mean? Opinions, hypotheses, and guesses are not "beliefs." What possible difference could it make that I hold the opinion that the early morning caller to Fox News is a nut and that Salon.com did no one a service by debunking the fakery claim? If a pollster were to call me this evening, she might ask me if I "believe the photograph of Elián hugging his father and smiling is real?" Would my declaration be an action? Would my opinion become a belief if I answered?
That pollster could grant me access to a powerful illusion: What I say matters; someone actually cares what I "believe." If I flip around these channels some more, I am bound to find some news channel soliciting my "belief" about the authenticity of the photo via a toll phone call or e-mail. Wow. Maybe I can assume the power to manipulate the Matrix.
No, wait. I don't believe any of that. I am not willing to voice my opinion to pollsters. I am not willing to conflate inconsequential (and thus irresponsible) declarations with actions.
But I am a citizen in a republic. My words, my conversations should have some value. Perhaps, under the right conditions, they are acts. To converse, to convince, to risk consensus if not conversion, is to act. And my opinions, expressed in an appropriate forum, are beliefs. This is one of my beliefs. I am willing to act upon it.
Just before I switched on Fox News, I had been eavesdropping between sets at the jazz club. I had overheard people talking in small groups about Elián González. They shared their impressions about the early morning raid. They talked about the fairness of U.S. immigration policy. They considered whether children should or could enjoy rights and interests distinct from their parents'. Some of their statements were inane. Some were insightful. But they all were valuable. Each speaker engaged the others with sincerity,risked embarrassment, and stood to be corrected. They were responsible and thoughtful. The important stuff always happens when the television is off.
Fox News could have facilitated such conversations. It could have invested in potential consensus or at least piqued curiosity about one of these important public issues. Instead, it exploited conflict and encouraged conspiratorial rants.
In what passes for mediated public discourse, there is little room for the reasonable.There is low tolerance for the credible. But the incredible, the extreme, the wacky almost always find a place. The same company that brought us the X-Files brought us the fake photo theory.The remarkable thing about the five-month Elián González saga is that most news channels exhausted their supply of wacky content weeks ago. They have had to consider such important ancillary issues such as immigration policy or children's rights. I've actually seen these reports. If they cover something long enough, they might end up saying something important. As Bill Cosby used to say before each episode of The Fat Albert Show, "If you're not careful, you might learn something."
But as soon as the incredible participants in the story found something new to say, they drowned out the reasonable and credible. Since Saturday, we have heard too much from the Miami González family, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Sen. Bob Smith, and Peggy Noonan — the Incredigencia.
Well, I have to stop writing now. My television is offering me simultaneous hockey and basketball. There's no wrestling tonight. But it hardly matters.
Elián meets the press.
