Leonard Pitts, Jr. Puts Fox News In Its Place

Most thinking people know it as Faux News and trust it less than Wikipedia (after all, Wikipedia often has valid information; Fox rarely has anything more than the sorts of things one used to read in The National Enquirer).
Scarily enough, many people are duped by Fox, and that's why I loved this article from The Miami Herald, reprinted in today's Salt Lake Tribune.

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Pitts: Why serious people discount Fox News

BY LEONARD PITTS JR.

THE MIAMI HERALD

PUBLISHED: JANUARY 25, 2015 06:00AM
UPDATED: JANUARY 25, 2015 06:00AM

Tucker Carlson said on Fox that more children die of bathtub drownings than of accidental shootings. They don’t.

Steve Doocy said on Fox that NASA scientists faked data to make the case for global warming. They didn’t.

Rudy Giuliani said on Fox that President Obama has issued propaganda asking everybody to “hate the police.” He hasn’t.

John Stossel said on Fox that there is “no good data” proving secondhand cigarette smoke kills nonsmokers. There is.

So maybe you can see why serious people — a category excluding those who rely upon it for news and information — do not take Fox, well ... seriously, why they dub it Pox News and Fakes News, to name two of the printable variations. Fox is, after all, the network of death panels, terrorist fist jabs, birtherism, anchor babies, victory mosques, wars on Christmas and Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. It’s not just that it is the chief global distributor of unfact and untruth but that it distributes unfact and untruth with a bluster, an arrogance, a gonad-grabbing swagger, that implicitly and intentionally dares you to believe fact and truth matter.

Many of us have gotten used to this. We don’t even bother to protest Fox being Fox. Might as well protest a sewer for stinking.

But the French and the British, being French and British, see it differently. And that’s what produced the scenario that recently floored many of us.

There was Fox, doing what Fox does, in this case hosting one Steve Emerson, a supposed expert on Islamic extremist terrorism, who spoke about so-called “no go” zones in Europe — i.e., areas of Germany, Sweden, France and Great Britain — where non-Muslims are banned, the government has no control and sharia law is in effect. Naturally, Fox did not question this outrageous assertion — in fact, it repeated it throughout the week — and most of us, long ago benumbed by the network’s serial mendacities, did not challenge Fox.

Then, there erupted from Europe the jarring sound of a continent laughing. British Prime Minister David Cameron called Emerson an “idiot.” A French program in the mold of “The Daily Show” sent correspondents — in helmets! — to interview people peaceably sipping coffee in the no-go zones. Twitter went medieval on Fox’s backside. And the mayor of Paris threatened to sue.

Last week, Fox did something Fox almost never does. It apologized. Indeed, it apologized profusely, multiple times, on air.

The most important takeaway here is not the admittedly startling news that Fox, contrary to all indications, is capable of shame. Rather, it is what the European response tells us about ourselves and our waning capacity for moral indignation with this sort of garbage.

It’s amazing, the things you can get used to, that can come to seem normal. In America, it has come to seem normal that a major news organization functions as the propaganda arm of an extremist political ideology, that it spews a constant stream of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, paranoia and manufactured outrage, and that it does so with brazen disregard for what is factual, what is right, what is fair, what is balanced — virtues that are supposed to be the sine qua non of anything calling itself a newsroom.

If you live with aberrance long enough, you can forget it’s aberrance. You can forget that facts matter, that logic is important, that science is critical, that he who speaks claptrap loudly still speaks claptrap — and that claptrap has no place in reasoned and informed debate. Sometimes, it takes someone from outside to hold up a mirror and allow you to see more clearly what you have grown accustomed to.

This is what the French and the British did for America last week.

For that, Fox owed them an apology. But serious people owe them thanks.

On The Instantaneous Creation Of Great American Folk Songs

As I wrote about in a not-too-long-ago post, I spent a fair-sized chunk of my life traveling to different countries for dance festivals.  This, of course, gave me a good deal of exposure to folk music, and I learned a good deal about how other people view America's folk culture.
One thing I learned was that the song most closely associated with the USA is not "The Star-Spangled Banner" or "America, The Beautiful."  Nope.  It's "Oh, Susannah."
In any parade in any country, when our bluegrass band struck up that tune, people would smile, clap along, and start to sing.  Well, at least they'd sing the words, "Oh, Susannah."  Most of them didn't know much else.  (And let's face it; phrases like "a buckwheat cake was in her mouth" are not what folks learn in their English classes.)
I've heard that song sung by Poles and played on a leaf.  I've also heard it sung in Mandarin Chinese.  Odd.  (I wonder how they translated "buckwheat.")
But, truth be told, the song "Oh, Susannah" isn't a folk song in the sense that it's been sung for so many years that no one knows where it came from.  No, "Oh, Susannah" is a folk song in the same way that Peter, Paul, and Mary's "If I Had A Hammer" is a folk song.  "Oh, Susannah" was a popular song written in 1848 by Steven Foster (who gave us other great tunes like "Old Kentucky Home"), but it had a folksy feel to it, and it became an "instant" folk song.
Still, for our dance group, sometimes "Oh, Susannah" wasn't enough.
Most of us could sing as well as dance, and several members of the group had been in various community and church choirs, so it was no hardship for us to sing.  Besides "Oh, Susannah" in parades (and in one pioneer round dance number), we frequently sang "She'll Be Comin' 'Round The Mountain" (to which our director, George, would add extra verses in countries where English was not commonly spoken -- I've had to sing such lyrics as "Oh, we'll lock her in the basement when she comes" or "Oh, we'll make her clean the attic when she comes."), and, in performances, it was sometimes "Amazing Grace."  (We had one bizarre instance when we were informed the night before a long day of performing that we were expected to sing in Mass in a tiny town in central Italy.  As "Oh, Susannah" was hardly acceptable, we decided on "Amazing Grace."  It was beautiful as we sang it, but it was still America's most popular Protestant hymn -- sung in a Catholic church by a bunch of Mormons, former Mormons, and one Russian Orthodox member.  Oh, and it was accompanied by guitar, fiddle, string bass -- and washboard.)
And then there was "The Hokey Pokey."
This was mostly my fault, really.  It was 1996, and the festival in Birmingham, England began something they called The Ball of the Nations.  The idea was that all the festival dancers would have an evening together --without an audience -- wherein they taught each other simple dances.  It was a fantastic idea, but our group stressed over whether or not we could teach our easiest recreational dances in our allotted time.  Also, some of our favorites were either too reliant on singing ("Charlie Is A Miller Boy") or possibly offensive in a community that understood all the words ("Cotton-Eyed Joe").  I was the one who suggested that we teach "The Hokey Pokey."  And I was the one who got stuck teaching it.  In England.  Later in Austria and Hungary.  In Spain.  And, finally, in China.  (Yeah, I just admitted that: I taught "The Hokey Pokey" in China.)
But the instant folk song that really stays in my mind was one we created in Sweden.
It was a beautiful summer evening in June, and our group had been treated to a night out in a lodge used by the Swedish dance group hosting us.  They'd fed us all herring-packed food (ever had scrambled eggs with herring?  salad with herring?  potato casserole with herring?  I have.  It's not all that great.), and it was time to go.
It was getting dark, and as we stood outside, waiting to board our bus to go back to the city and the dorms where we were staying, the Swedish group lined up along the walkway and sang a lovely folk song.
A smile plastered rather too tightly on his face, George, our director (who could speak fluent Swedish), whispered to those of us next to him, "It's a farewell song.  They'll expect us to sing back.  What can we sing?!"
My mind raced.  I didn't know a single farewell folk song other than "Aloha Oe," which hardly seemed appropriate.  Plus, it had to be something that our whole group knew.
Fortunately for us, this was 1991, and I was the youngest member of the troupe because, in those few very awkward seconds of silence that followed our polite applause of the Swedes, came the sound of Bart, one of the best dancers in the group and a member of the Salt Lake Men's Choir.  He was singing a farewell song that ALL of us knew:

Yep.  Lawrence Welk to the rescue.  Presto: instant folk song.
YouTube didn't exist in those far-off days, and the Swedes hadn't had much experience with American TV variety shows of the 1970s.  They had no idea that what we sang was only a TV theme song; it sounded like a folk song, and it fit the occasion.
But it was all we could do not to burst out laughing afterwards when George muttered under his breath, "Thank you, Bobby and Cissy."