Certainly the practice of attempting to denigrate peoples’ character and show them in the worst conceivable light is clearly the lowest moral road in politics. Americans who understand our democracy are for the most part done with this. Surely we continue to see such practices of character assassination continuing. On the national scene, for instance, most recently Hillary Clinton in concert with shadowy figures on the lunatic red-neck fringe are doing their venal best to destroy Obama’s reputation. The Niagara Times blogger, “Hobbes,” is doing his best to disparage the person of LCTV Legislative Journal talk-show host Tom Christy. At the state level there were recent revelations regarding Karl Roves paying off a Republican lawyer to “find dirt” on a democract (imprisoned, former governor, Don Siegelman) running again for Governor in Georgia, in particular sexually compromising pictures which she never found. Nevertheless the Republican assassination machine eventually got the democratic candidate on trumped up bribery charges. And of course the sad and demoralizing list could go on of other heinous acts of corruption of the democratic and political process.
But America is waking up to the fact that destroying people struggling to practice democracy is really not politics at all. It is violent, elitist and arrogant actions of authoritarian types who prefer to achieve power through whatever force is necessary. But democracy is about creative ideas, rational persuasion and a competitive yet cooperative social self-determination of a people. To keep open this fragile space of freedom between people in the public sphere for the practice of such self-determination is to be political and to create a political space. One herein and hereby engages in debate, critical self-examination, reflective self-inquiry, sharing new ideas and suspending judgement long enough to allow oneself to listen to the voice of the other with whom we must engage and actually hear. That is, actually be affected. As the Old Testament says, “He who does not hear must suffer.”
But attempting to prevent the flourishing of an informed public by refusing to engage in democratic dialogue with respect to what one feels should not be discussed nor heard by others; by suppressing issues, information, questions and problems that people actually have, is to attempt to destroy the political content of discourse and discussion. By trying to control what is discussed by controlling who gets to talk and how it is talked about is to destroy democracy and the political sphere. Such attempts and efforts are usually on the part of people to whom, in order to stop open, public engagement and dialogue or debate, it must seem necessary if not actually more right, to assassinate character, control the media, dumb down education and dis-inform the public. The alternative would be to engage one’s adversary openly and honestly in the spirit of truth, listening to one’s fellow citizen with the respectful anticipation that someone else may really have something to teach us.
The local issue that Niagara County faces in the attempt of the LCTV board of directors using bureaucratic rules to silence Tom Christy is an example of the de-politicization of politics. Their reason for gagging Christy is to enable objective talk about Government to take place and prevent biased political talk from taking place. However what goes unseen in this repressive tactic of speech control is that the politics will still be there if they continue to have their heavy-handed way. Where is the political bias? It lay in the assumptions that the Board makes that allow them to distort to their seeming advantage bureaucratic rules that then construe suppressing speech as editorial privilege. So these days at LCTV the politics has already taken place before the show starts. It seems the Board is either consciously “playing politics” to achieve political advantage or possibly they are afraid as individuals or as a group to lose the favor of local politicians. And, by the way, these Government officials who are after the purging are going “only to talk about government” are politicians first and foremost. Those, like “Hobbes,” who believe that Government exists independently of “the political” or that the self-justification and vision of such officials are not political acts are suffering from double vision. To believe that the democratic struggle for political self-determination stops when a politician is elected as a Government official is naïve or simply lying.
So, such supposedly Governmental purists would rather take the politically self-destructive road of villifying individuals rather than the high road of building democratic communities of creative self-determination.
Political intelligence in its present state in Niagara County is inadequate. The communities are for the most part failing. Thousands of people have left the area over the past decade or so. To stop any speech is to curtail creative thinking even though it is in short supply and there is nothing we need more.
It is sad that “Hobbes” chooses virtual cyber-terrorist tactics hiding behind a blog non-identity and carrying out the dirty work of someone’s political agenda in the name of preserving the purity of Government discourse on the public air waves. We don’t know who you are. And you aren’t using bombs but to attempt to destroy the free political space of intellectual inquiry and discovery is a form of terroristic violence and tactically proto-fascist.
However when the freedom of the political space between people is suppressed and its pressing subject matter repressed, then the political emerges everywhere. If the space of Government is not permitted to express the tensions, oppositions, differences and possibilities of political existence, then the very forms of Government are subject to dissolution in the medium of “politics through other means,” namely war, violence, corruption and the forceful, manipulative misuse and destruction of speech, language, discourse and dialogue, not to mention mutual distrust, suspicion and cynicism.
On LCTV Legislative Journal is educational. It is not news or mere journalism. It is political discourse as it is mediated and constituted by the forms of institutions which are forms of political expression. To censor politics out of government discourse is to bureaucratize its very being or to strive to wrest from its democratic aspirations a fascist future. I’m not sure which is worse, maybe government conceived on a business and crisis management mode.
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