My headline-free head

Two weeks with no television has been a peaceful respite from the daily bombardment of the aural senses that is cable news.
I suppose when I do have access to ye olde idiot box, I could tune out, stay away from those infernal grouping of channels lumped together in nearly every basic cable package: CNN, MSNBC, Fox. I could always arrange a perpetual loop of “Green Acres” re-runs on DVDs to smother and dull those lobes of the brain that thirst for an endless feed of gossipy, political trash talking.
But I don’t.
Like many, I get a kick out of becoming outraged, which is about the only emotion most “news” programs seek to elicit these days. They pose big, outrageous ideas that are easy to understand for some, and just as easy to hate for others. Regardless of where their allegiances are on either side of the aisle, the pundits create their own heroes and villains. The important issues of our day — the economy, health care, military involvement in the Middle East — become fodder for what amounts to comic-book entertainment for viewers.
These issues, though, involve real people, not action-movie casualties. Government and the media that reports on it should serve the people, not rile their emotions the way entertainment does.
But for the past two weeks, I’ve been luxuriously out of the loop. In the transition of moving my living operations to Northern Michigan from downstate, I’ve suddenly found myself without TV. Subsequently, I’m carting around a head empty of the screaming headlines and talking points of the day.
Where I’m staying, a lovely old house in downtown Frankfort, is equipped with two unusable televisions thanks to the recent switch to digital. It’s regularly a vacation home, which means its where couches, coffee makers and comforters spend their golden years. The televisions are from the 1980s. They have faux wood exteriors, no remote controls and obsolete rabbit ears poking up from their backs. One of them even has the dial you crank by hand, a fond memory from my childhood. They sit unplugged, dark and quiet, on old tables and stands.
For much of the time throughout my transition, I also haven’t had access to the Internet, nor do I have a newspaper waiting on my doorstep each morning (though, coming from the Detroit area, there hasn’t been a daily paper waiting on the porch since winter.)
The vacation was nice, but once a news junkie, always a news junkie.
After getting started as a reporter here in Manistee, I was once again plugged into the headlines, some of which I learned of by that old news-disseminating system — word of mouth. So, for my first column here at the News Advocate, I’ll consider the few that pop immediately into my head.
Apparently Kanye West again garnered publicity for doing something mean and ridiculously ludicrous at the MTV Video Music Awards (boring), Patrick Swayze is dirty dancing on clouds (sad), an elected member of Congress publicly called our Commander in Chief a liar (stupid) and a young conservative ‘activist’ released videos of himself dressed up as a pimp and walked into ACORN offices with a girl dressed as a prostitute (hmm).
For those who haven’t heard the story, the two young activists walked in to ACORN offices with a hidden video camera and asked for advice on how to legitimize their “business” and disguise their identities with the government.
The ACORN workers gave them the advice and were fired for it.
It was a big outrageous idea posing as having something to do with how we run things. It got people talking and created action: various federal agencies are continuing to sever all ties with ACORN, which stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform now.
Not many had heard of the organization — whose mission is to advocate for families in low to medium-income neighborhoods, from housing to voter registration — until the 2008 election, when the McCain campaign complained of voter fraud for signing up non-existent people.
It’s the type of organization that’s a hero for liberals and a villain for conservatives.
The conservatives would do away with all such government-funded organizations so they can sit in their ninth-hole bunkers, clutching their golf clubs and rifles, waiting for a Christian Armageddon while swilling gin tonics.
The liberals would sell their Birkenstocks and Suburus just to give more money to any sketchy, bloated and corrupt organization that claims it’s helping feed the children or save a rare gnat from extinction.
But that’s not the point.
What I would like to talk about are the tactics employed by these kids.
It was tacky, tasteless and racist.
James E. O'Keefe III, 25, a Fordham MBA student from New Jersey, is the guy dressed as a ‘Snoop Dogg-like’ pimp’ in the video. He walks into an ACORN office in Washington D.C. (the only video I could bear to watch on YouTube) where two black women sit behind the counter. His get-up portrays a caricature both beloved and reviled in the black community — the pimp. Mr. James O’Keefe the Third may as well have walked into the offices with black face on.
But all he and Hannah Giles, the minister’s daughter who played the prostitute, were only pimping their beliefs.
They came into an organization that vowed to help people asking for it. While the women were wrong for giving tax-evading advice — and properly let go — O’Keefe the Third and the Minister’s Daughter made a mockery of their own nascent political beliefs.
They think that by using radical tactics akin to what The Left did during the Sixties will give The Left a taste of their own medicine, that a Jerry Falwell meets “Jackass” premise will get more young people rallied behind their cause.
But all they did was humiliate themselves, the ACORN employees and the federal government.
There are better means of political change than humiliation. Malfeasance and skullduggery should always be exposed — and I’m glad they cracked ACORN’s nut — but I implore this new, cool Conservative Right movement to take a look at the rigidity of the ideas they’re out there theatrically defending. Take a different tact. These are our lives, not a movie or TV show.
Maybe “Green Acres” is the place to be after all.