Van Jones: Making sense of the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, and Barack Obama’s shift from candidate to President

A review of Rebuild the Dream, by Van Jones

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

I always knew Van Jones was smart, but I didn’t know just how smart until I read Rebuild the Dream. In recent years, Jones has emerged as one of the most charismatic and outspoken younger leaders of our time. This book proves he has also become one of the most insightful, too.

We live at a time when far too few of us can make sense of what’s happening around us. With the incessant noise of the news media, our full immersion online from dawn to dusk, and the endless distractions of entertainment reflecting a thousand subcultures, it’s all too easy to just lie back and let it all happen, convincing ourselves that no one could possibly perceive meaningful patterns in this donnybrook we call contemporary American life. Jones does, though.

In Rebuild the Dream, he asks — and answers — three questions:

• “What can Americans who want to fix the system learn from the movement for hope and change that united around Barack Obama in 2008 — and from its collapse after he entered the White House?
• “What can we learn from the Tea Party’s equally impressive capture of the national debate in 2009 — and its successful pivot to electoral politics in 2010?”
• And what can we learn from the startling success of Occupy Wall Street in elevating economic inequality to the top of the political agenda in 2011 — and of its failure to translate that success into the electoral arena?

Rebuild the Dream has been greeted as a call to arms to progressives, an exhortation to reenergize ourselves for the November 2012 elections. That’s true, so far as it goes. But this book is far more valuable for its clear-eyed analysis of today’s political scene. Van Jones has devised a simple analytical framework through which we can see — clearly — the similarities and differences among the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements and the 2008 Obama campaign and its aftermath. If Rebuild the Dream is useful as a guidebook for activists determined to swing the pendulum back to the left, in the long run it will be an even better resource for historians and social scientists attempting to understand this tumultuous era in American history.

However, simply as a call to arms, Rebuild the Dream is compelling: “The time has come to turn things right side up again and declare that America’s honest, hard-working middle class is too big to fail. The aspirations of our low-income, struggling, and marginalized communities are too big and important to fail . . .  The American Dream itself is too big to fail.”

I’ve known Van Jones for more than a decade, first through the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which he founded in Oakland in the mid-1990s, and later through Social Venture Network, of which we we were both members. Van also co-founded the online activist organization Color of Change and later, reflecting his turn to environmental activism and his passionate belief that the environment and the economy both benefit hugely by creating “Green Jobs,” he founded Green for All. Along the way, he also managed to write a New York Times-bestselling book, The Green Collar Economy. Having accomplished all this, however, Jones is nonetheless best-known for his six-month stay in the White House as Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation to President Obama.

It is clearly no coincidence that Color of Change is credited with triggering the successful boycott of Glenn Beck’s hysterical outbursts on Fox News that was responsible for his leaving the network, and that Beck in turn was a central figure in the Right-Wing smear campaign that drove Jones out of his job in the White House.

Jones is a Yale-educated attorney who was born and raised in Tennessee. He is African-American. He is also a very good person to have as a friend. You’ll find an extensive biography of Van Jones here.

Mass media, genocide, and the fate of the world

A review of Kill the Messenger: The Media’s Role in the Fate of the World, by Maria Armoudian

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

The emergence of mass society was one of the defining characteristics of the 20th Century. Enabled by population growth, industrialization, urbanization, rising rates of literacy, and advances in transportation and communications, mass society became a reality for growing numbers of people in more and more far-flung regions of the planet as the century unfolded. In turn, mass society facilitated the growth of Communism, Fascism, and other varieties of authoritarianism. Among the less extreme effects of this new phenomenon in human affairs were the advent of “public opinion,” the globalization of fashion, and the rapid development of important new industries such as advertising, public relations, and broadcast journalism. The “mass communications” we have taken for granted for so many years now were, properly speaking, an artifact of the 20th Century.

In Kill the Messenger, political scientist and radio broadcaster Maria Armoudian ably examines the central role of mass media in human affairs over the course of the century. Through brief case studies of events in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and the former states of Yugoslavia, she explores the influential — and perhaps essential — function of the media as an enabler of genocide. Armoudian shows how authoritarian regimes in South Africa, Chile, Taiwan, and Burundi made similar efforts to harness the media to help promote the murder, torture, and imprisonment of their own citizens but with much more mixed results. In South Africa, for example, she reveals how new attitudes in the news media helped bring about a largely peaceful conclusion to the era of apartheid. However, Kill the Messenger is about mass media’s place in society, not just its relationship with governments. Armoudian’s examination of public opinion about climate change demonstrates the huge impact of relatively minor investments in media by Exxon Mobil, the Koch Brothers, and other naysayers.

Armoudian puts to work the linguistic concept of “framing” throughout the book, showing, for example, how climate change deniers managed to persuade the mass media to present the issue as open to debate. This frame (“debate”) has dominated coverage not just on Fox News but on most other television and radio networks as well.  Similarly, frames (“blaming” and “heroes-versus-villains”) dominated news coverage in countries where genocide became generally accepted.

Kill the Messenger is an important book because it squeezes between two covers a collection of observations and insights about many of the seminal events of the 20th Century, rendering the history of mass society understandable through the lens of mass media. However, it remains to be seen how much longer Armoudian’s analysis will help illuminate events in the future. The emergence of new communications technologies revolving about the Internet may have thrown a monkey wrench into the phenomenon of mass media. It’s far too early to tell.

This fascinating book would have benefitted from a better publisher than Prometheus Books. The text is rife with glaring typos that even a cursory proofreading would have caught. The cover art is uninviting, an unfortunate sign that Prometheus Books either doesn’t know or doesn’t care how to market a book of this significance.