alias Bruce.

Bill Moyers, Corner Man, Gets in Beaten-Up Obama's Face.

I'm now reading a book of short stories, Rope Burns, by the late, great writer F.X. Toole. In real life, Toole was what is known in boxing as a "cut man:" the guy in a fighter's corner who furiously works salves and other potions between rounds to stem the bleeding on the fighter's face, especially above the eyes, which can stop a fight quickly if unabated. Toole wrote the short story "Million Dollar Baby," which became an Oscar-winning movie starring Hilary Swank as a star-crossed female boxing phenom. Toole specialized in telling stories from deep within the underside of boxing – if you can imagine the underside of a life like boxing. If that's something you can deal with, I recommend you find Toole and read him, right now. If it isn't, I suggest you avoid him.

The point I'm making here is that last week Bill Moyers played corner man to a beaten-up President Barack Obama, sitting down a gasping and bewildered Obama between rounds and giving him a ruthless talking-to about the need to go back out there and fight. Moyers did this in his September 4 commentary on his television program Bill Moyers' Journal, in which he gave the seemingly weak-kneed Obama a long-overdue what-for about heart, guts, and health reform. An excerpt:

Poor Obama. He came to town preaching the religion of nice. But every time he bows politely, the harder the Republicans kick him.

No one's ever conquered Washington politics by constantly saying "pretty please" to the guys trying to cut your throat.

...Come on, Mr. President. Show us America is more than a circus or a market. Remind us of our greatness as a democracy. When you speak to Congress next week, just come out and say it. We thought we heard you say during the campaign last year that you want a government run insurance plan alongside private insurance — mostly premium-based, with subsidies for low-and-moderate income people. Open to all individuals and employees who want to join and with everyone free to choose the doctors we want. We thought you said Uncle Sam would sign on as our tough, cost-minded negotiator standing up to the cartel of drug and insurance companies and Wall Street investors whose only interest is a company's share price and profits.

And that's just a snippet of Moyers' corner talk to a president who gained the White House with the public momentum of health care reform firmly behind him but who has managed to bow and mince his way into being sidelined by the wild punches of a political minority that is by parts racist, blindly hysterical, and corporate-abetted.

I have friends and colleagues who have already given up on Obama. These are thoughtful and intelligent people who have soberly concluded that Obama's makeup and political instincts are not up to the task at hand. Personally, I still hold out hope that Obama's gift for inspiring people, his (seemingly buried) principles, and his political intellect can somehow make all of this a dramatically teachable moment for him, and that we may at some point see him come charging out of his corner as the leader he could be. But even if he does, by that time it may be too late, both for health care reform and for the overall promise of his presidency. If Obama stays on the track he's on, he'll look more and more like a one-term president.

But that potential tragedy, and the shifts that could make it possible, are things to write about on another day.

For now, read Moyers' words to Obama. And while you're at it, follow the link Moyers provides to an intense essay by media scholar Henry Giroux about the rise of right-wing talk media and what Giroux calls the "culture of cruelty" that has nurtured the lynch mobs of know-nothing far-right zealots at Town Hall Meetings and elsewhere. Giroux surgically dissects the elements of today's American cultural violence, looking by turns at television and radio, cinema, video games, and a fascistic gospel of political meanness and hatred that exploded in the second Bush Administration. Giroux also takes a hard look at what all of this means today. Don't miss his piece.

Thanks to The Agonist for pointing to Moyers' piece.

Health News Coverage: Too Bad to Be Graded.

I promise: my post immediately following this one will contain good news. It will at least make you smile, and it might, if you're a certain kind of person, prod you into irresistible curiosity.

But first, we have to talk about the bad news. And I mean literally Bad News.

This from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)'s radio program As It Happens:

When it comes to the debate over health-care reform in the United States, many of the debaters seem to be having trouble using their inside voices. So, for clarity on this and other health issues, Americans turn to their televisions, seeking the truth amid the noise. And that may not be good news.

Health News Review-dot-org is a health-journalism watchdog group that rates [American] news coverage for accuracy and balance. The group has just announced that it will continue to watch TV news segments, but it will no longer be grading the quality of those segments. And part of the reason for the decision is that most TV health coverage is bad -- and showing no signs of getting better.

In the show's interview -- which I heard last night -- with Health News Review publisher Gary Schwitzer, a professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota, Schwitzer gets straight to the point: Most American TV news coverage of health issues (including health care reform) is now so bad that it is no longer worth reviewing or rating. It's gotten to the point, says Schwitzer, where most news coverage of health topics literally does more harm than good. The problem, he says, is twofold: a proliferation of light, fluffy, lifestyle "news" about new drugs, treatments and gizmos; and a failure by reporters and TV hosts to ask the basic questions that journalistic ethics require: what is the evidence for medical gain versus risk, what is the cost versus the benefit, how sound are the claims of success or the pronouncements of failure, and so on. Schwitzer is quick to add that there are still many journalists who want to provide real news coverage on health issues -- but he says his interviews with such reporters found them stymied and frustrated by the junk-news protocols they are forced to follow.

So -- as a 2003 media study showed about Fox News and the Iraq War, and as Al Franken once said -- The more you watch, the less you know.

This is not good: A nation dependent upon poor journalism for its news about health care, while a president and his party back nervously away from the crucial issues of the debate.

Global Dumbing.

The AP has a very good, if very depressing, news story today about the devastation wreaked by global warming upon huge sections of Alaska, northern Canada, Siberia, far northern Europe, and other regions: millions upon millions of acres of northern forest lost to warming-abetted surges in tree-killing insect populations and resulting deadwood wildfires sparked by increased lightning from rising temperatures; a projected 50 percent increase in the area burned by wildfires in the Western United States by the 2050s under even the best-case scenario; a rise in average temperature over the past century of nearly 4 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of the world.

But what is really depressing is the online reader comments that follow the story. At the point at which I checked in to read the story, the comments led off with this stream of knuckle-dragging grunts and belches:

From: Rockola1458
TrekkinBob................It is liberal bullshit as yourself, So get off the pipe and wise up clown.

From: Luckfibs
Global warming is an Astroturf dieology.

From: LandonEx
Four words: "RAID. Kills bugs dead."

From: MDTerrapin04
Hmm, Glacier retreat is a bad thing? No, I'd rather have to migrate because of approaching glaciers myself! Unbelievable. Yep, Liberals run amuck. Get out the DDT and start spraying. DDT saved millions of lives by stopping the spread of malaria and other diseases and it isn't toxic like Liberals made everyone believe.

From: hemipwr54
I am a conservative poilitically but ANYONE that thinks human activity is not speeding up natural processes is just deluding themselves.Fact is by our actions we are increasing the severity of global warming.======== I would believe that statement if Gullible Warning was true .Computer Models are flawed , the data is incomplete and the programs are riddled with errors , so in 50 to 100 years when they get them sorted out and we are just going into the next Ice Age , maybe you will see the truth !Keep your Stick on the Ice !

From: BJTitsengolfJr
Has one of those smart scientist calculated the size of an umbrella needed to shade the Earth from the Sun's light/heat to overcome this man made heat problem? I didn't think so; they are not smart enough to do the KISS principle.

From: GING SIMS
IT'S SOOOOO much better to follow the LIBERAL plan's and let the forest's get Overgrown & Congested which makes thm much more pronr to Disease, Infestation and Massive Wild Fire's! Yes, rather than Harvesting and Tending to the forest's bounty it's much better to let them just burn to the ground in Massive, Huge Conflagration's! I 'FEEL' so much better when I see Nature's Course set loose and everything is destroyed rather than taken care of!

Okay. I know that many such sneer-hungry automouths are bombarded with tempting incentives to leave their brains curbside at the drive-thru. I understand how a certain maggot-eaten state of mind is furthered by some of our national media compost machinery. And I try to tell myself that it is neither nice nor productive to label any of our suffering right-wing potential allies as dim-witted dupes who can neither think nor spell nor punctuate.

But there is just no excuse for this kind of spittle-spewing stupidity. Neither we nor the planet have time for it. If your jaw drops at the moronic response to a compelling, well-sourced AP news story by so many of its intended readers, imagine the bottomless feeling in the stomach of the journalist himself when he scans the comments (if he even bothers to any more). It's no wonder the ranks of dedicated journalists in corporate media are shrinking faster than the speed of thought.

When readers and viewers grunt like imbeciles and slurp from toilets like imbeciles and lap up lies like imbeciles, it is time to treat them as imbeciles. That is, it is time to stop waiting for a reversal of their flatline EEGs, and it is time we took the initiative to, among other things, save our planet. Whether they like it or not.

Just How Blind?

So on a recent afternoon I'm sitting in my car mechanic's waiting room, and on the table amid the jumble of magazines is a copy of the May issue of The Limbaugh Letter, Rush's vanity polemic. The entire cover of this particular issue is a foreboding black, illuminated only in its center by the spotlit white personage of The Fat Man himself (he is portrayed as suspiciously blemish-free and young-looking). Rush strikes a heroic pose in the image, fiercely locking his eyes on you, the reader, as his arm extends boldly to one side to block the ominously reaching, shadowed arm of a business-suited black man (only the black man's arm and hand are visible). The headline reads: "Endangered: The Individual." Guess who the scary, shadowed black arm and its grasping hand are supposed to represent. Unnecessary hint: his last name starts with "O."

Then, some time later, I see a front-page Washington Post story about how South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint's anti-health-reform crusade (his new book is called Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America's Slide into Socialism) is finding a receptive audience among some in his home state. The Post reporter, in a visit to a hospital, quotes the father of a newborn daughter as saying in opposition to Obama's proposed public option for health care, "I've just never been a government-takeover kind of guy." It also quotes a congestive heart patient (who is munching a slice of pepperoni pizza) as declaring that "What we have [in a health coverage system] is about as good as we can do." These ringing tributes to the triumph of "free" enterprise take place in a state where the unemployment rate is 12 percent and where iron-fisted corporate rule has all but locked out unions and collective bargaining.

And as I look at these testimonials from Rush and from South Carolina I'm thinking: Is there any limit to the brain damage that fear and racism inflict on a sizable portion of the white American body politic?

I mentioned this in the coda to my July 22 post about the Henry Louis Gates arrest. And I will keep writing about it until more of our scared-witless white brethren clap their hands to their skulls in search of their hijacked frontal lobes. I mean, come on, folks. Working and non-working American whites have been suckers for the fear-mongering schemes of their white bosses for going on 500 years now: Those red savages are gonna gitcha; you're white and better than Them. Those imported African savages are gonna gitcha; you're white and better than Them. Those uppity militant blacks are gonna gitcha; you're white and entitled to be socialized and educated separately from Them. Those urban black predators are gonna gitcha; you're white and respectable and entitled to be protected and distant from Them. Those raghead sand-nigger terrorists are gonna gitcha; you're white and civilized and you deserve protection from Them at any cost. Those brown illegal immigrants are gonna gitcha and take your jobs and rob your tax dollars; you're white and legal and you deserve to have Them beaten back to where they belong. That black president and his freeloading constituency are gonna gitcha and take down your country with Them; you're white and you're the foundation of this republic and you deserve to have that grasping black claw and its socialist backers whacked the hell out of your liberty-loving life. Those liberal big-government despots are gonna gitcha; you're free and white and you deserve all the bounteous gifts of safety and confidence that the free market has given you.

This is a deadly condition for millions of American white people, whereby their perfectly sound cerebral equipment is rendered instantly nonfunctional by a surgically induced Fear of The Other and a chest-thumping privileged sense of My Endangered Good Life. It makes it possible, tragically, for afflicted whites to believe that their jailers (the white rich) are their liberators; that their allies (non-rich people of color) are their enemies; that the policies that in fact wreak havoc with their lives (free rein for business and the wealthy; an avalanche of guns; permission for the state to trample the constitutional rights to privacy and due process for the sake of so-called "security") will somehow afford them protection and economic relief as "individuals" in their exercise of American "freedom."

The implanted message, in other words, is, You're one of us: You're white, civilized, and one mere lucky break away from being rich and being able to do whatever the hell you want. Do what we tell you and you'll be both free and prosperous.

This suspension of cybernetic activity made it possible for many Rush listeners to approvingly pump their fists as a corporate goon of a white president shredded constitutional rights and civil liberties and spent the country into a fiscal catastrophe, while many of those same folks now shriek about "spending" and "individual rights" when they see a cultured and intellectually-gifted black president trying in an excruciatingly polite way to repair the damage.

This mental condition has also made it possible for some South Carolinians to tremble in fear of "government takeover" and coercion in health care -- while they blithely accept the corporate shackles of a dictatorial regime of private health insurance.

Further, such induced white impairment (and let's face it, we are talking largely about a white subgroup; what proportion of voters of color have you seen buy this "your individual power is endangered by government" scam?) has also caused these voters to allow certain senators and congresspersons to rail, with a straight face, against federal debt that helps unemployed and uninsured workers -- while the same politicians applauded, for eight years, federal debt that cut taxes for plutocrats, filled the coffers of crooked military contractors, and plunged the nation's military off a cliff from which more than 4,000 American souls will never return.

And this malady is, as well, what has enabled a certain gibbering Alaskan ex-governor, without a serious thought or sincere principle to be found anywhere in her cranial cavity, to be paid even a half-moment's notice by a hysterically brain-addled segment of the white electorate.

You can see this mass cerebral malfunction in the know-nothing herd instinct of those who bum-rush blogs with streams of nearly-identical fossilized-right comments, often awash with misspellings and crudities, on issues that inflame them. It has become a common and sad testimony to the state of the American far right, visible, to take just a few examples, in some of the comments responding to my posts on Sarah Palin and Henry Louis Gates; reacting to a recent Sierra Club post about diversity; and sickeningly vilifying the Obama family on the Free Republic blog. It gives the appearance of a gang of high-school hecklers who, talking only to themselves and lacking the knowledge and attention span for sustained reasoning, swarm a site for a few hours with their thrashing and yelling and then move on en masse, never to return.

To quote poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron, "Just how blind can America be?" Just how gullible can a sizable chunk of our white brethren continue to be, with the help of racism, paranoid egotism, and a trembling fear of the latest scripted version of "Them?"

Sadly, this remains an open question.

(Thanks to Mushim for the Sierra Club tip.)

"Racism is Dead."

Rebuttal # 11,471:
The Valley Swim Club in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, canceled its contract with the Creative Steps day care center without explanation after the first day on which the center's black and Hispanic children showed up to swim. The children reported overhearing white club members asking what these black kids were doing there, and expressing fear that the center kids "might do something" to their white children. Valley Club President John Duesler told reporters that the day care center's children had changed "the complexion" and "atmosphere" of the club. He later expressed regret at what he called his poor choice of words, and he declared that overcrowding, not race, was the sole issue, using as support the club's cancellation of contracts with other centers. Question: if you were in Vegas, what odds would you lay that 1.) the black and Hispanic children lied about what they overheard; 2.) "complexion" and "atmosphere" were purely coincidental word choices on Duesler's part that reflected no racial element whatsoever at the club; and 3.) a club founded in 1954, at precisely the time when such private white swimming establishments sprang up nationwide in response to pressure to desegregate public pools, does not have a thread of racial bigotry in its membership culture.

Rebuttal # 11,472:
A sampling of the comments posted on the Free Republic blog, a national hub for right-wing chatter, after 11-year-old Malia Obama appeared in a photograph wearing a peace-symbol T-shirt, according to the Vancouver Sun:

"A typical street whore."
"A bunch of ghetto thugs."
"Ghetto street trash."
"Wonder when she will get her first abortion."
"Could you imagine what world leaders must be thinking seeing this kind of street trash and that we paid for this kind of street ghetto trash to go over there?"
"They make me sick .... The whole family... mammy, pappy, the free loadin' mammy-in-law, the misguided chillin', and especially 'lil cuz... This is not the America I want representin' my peeps."
"DIRTBAGS! All of them. Our [White House] is now a joke to the rest of the world. We have no respect and this is not going to turn out well, mark my words. We will be hit, and much worse than last time. We are now seen as weak and vulnerable. Ghetto and Chicago thugs have taken over."
"This disgusting display makes me more and more eager for the revolution."
"I never actually wnated [sic] to be a pistol before but..."

On the site, a photo of Michelle Obama talking to Malia was accompanied by the caption, "To entertain her daughter, Michelle Obama loves to make monkey sounds."

According to the Sun, the blog left the comments intact for nearly 24 hours, removing them only after a writer doing research on conservative politics made a complaint.

These online graffiti-scribblers are folks who almost certainly supported that paragon of classy personal behavior and cultivated knowledge, George W. Bush, and his elegant and well-behaved daughters.

Behold the power of racism: one of the most effective agents for debilitating the gray matter of millions of white Americans.

Thanks to David for the tip.

Quitters, Crybabies, and Ninnies.

So the governor of Alaska (I won't say her name because the fewer Google hits she gets, the better) has suddenly quit midway through the first term of the only substantial political position she has ever held -- in order to show us that she is not a quitter.

Partisan manufacturers of excuses are hard at work with quickly-concocted explanations: she is freeing herself for a barnstorming tour to impress and inspire Americans (yeah, bailing on your elected duty and ditching your already-sparse on-the-job training in governance is a great way to wow Americans with your leadership skills); she is a "maverick" who does the unexpected (well, the guy on the street who shrieks at manhole covers does the unexpected, too, but I'm not voting for him in 2012); and, my favorite: the meanies in the liberal media, with their hostile coverage and unkind political cartoons, have tormented the poor governor into jumping ship and striking out on her own (this accusation comes from a right wing that has made a booming industry of nonstop lies, personal abuse, and character assassination of its countless targets in the mainstream and on the left).

At this point, it is pretty much a law of American political zoology that the saber-toothed right wing can dish it out but can't take it.

This trait is not unique. It is a distinguishing feature of insecure bullies of all kinds, including those who abuse their spouses or kick their kids around.

And so now we have a mob of paleo-right hit men and women crying crocodile tears for the poor soon-to-be ex-governor of Alaska, who -- the outrage! -- isn't even allowed to make a hypocritical mockery of herself and her "family values" family without being skeptically scrutinized by the national media. Why, it's a wonder the tortured governor hasn't yet felt driven to fill her waders with water and end it all with an agonized plunge off of her fishing boat.

The governor is, of course, a joke as a political figure, albeit one that is not funny, and her base is the most weak-minded and ignorant segment of the American electorate. The extent to which her current cut-and-run fake-populist act gains any traction is a measure of just how brain-impaired a cadre of voters can become when security as they know it begins to dissolve.

So, all of you professional mockers in the conservative media circus, start getting used to public and journalistic ridicule of your latest big-top attraction. Stop being such sensitive ninnies and suck it up already. You've earned the mockery, and so has she.

Aha!

For months I have been scratching my head over what possessed the Obama camp to appoint the clumsy, inarticulate, perpetually-awakened-from-a-nap Robert Gibbs as press secretary. I know he was Obama's longtime spokesperson. But at the White House, at a podium in front of the Washington press corps and the nation, the guy is painful to watch.

But today I had a flash:

Gibbs makes Obama look more powerful.

Not that Obama needs the help. But I can envision the White House wanting to keep the communicative halo, and the spotlight, focused on this eloquent President and his supremely persuasive way of making his case to us, his audience. Having a commanding and clever press spokesperson could detract from that, and could undercut the sense of singular seriousness and decisive authority with which Obama clearly wants his role as President to be invested. Obama's style is to let his best and brightest duke it out on policy behind closed doors, and to then silence the room and announce his decision. He is The Man. That might not leave a lot of room for a star White House spokesperson.

Of course, maybe I'm totally wrong. Maybe Gibbs is just another bad or incomprehensible decision by an incoming Obama team that appears to have a median age of about 17. A crew that vetted Tom Daschle as A-1 for the cabinet is capable of anything.

But this Gibbs theory does have a certain intriguing logic.

David Simon on Drugs.

Here's an irony: For the kind of ruthlessly frank discourse on drug crime and drug policy that most of our journalists won't touch, watch the in-depth interview with screenwriter -- that's right, screenwriter -- David Simon on the April 17 edition of Bill Moyers' Journal.

Simon, a former police reporter for the Baltimore Sun, was creator of the HBO series The Wire and The Corner (both set here in Baltimore), among others. As I recently wrote while devouring episodes of The Wire on DVD, Simon is the consummate example of how incisive social-drama fiction can be more truthful than the offerings of journalists whose outlooks (and job prospects) are wedded to officially-accepted assumptions about how the world works. Sure, artists have always served as truth-tellers via the decidedly mixed blessing of their disenfranchisement. But Simon is a rare animal: a social reformer who found a commercially successful dramatic vehicle for his political message. Again, the irony is that Simon left journalism because of how insistently the profession closed its eyes and ears to the stories he found needed telling.

In the interview with Moyers, Simon talks with brutal clarity and conviction about what drove him to leave the corporate newsroom; how and why the War on Drugs is a long-dead-and-buried policy failure that today's police embrace solely for the cynical sake of arrest statistics and coveted federal funding; how the narrative of real-life drug addiction and drug crime blatantly contradicts the Page One and Evening News stories; and what it will take to actually get a firm and effective handle on America's criminal and medical drug addiction problem.

If you wonder how a purveyor of TV drama can wade in such deep water and keep his footing, watch the interview. You will not be disappointed.

There is also, by the way, an interesting March 30 profile of Simon -- and his indictment of corporate journalists for their not holding bad policy and corrupt leadership accountable to the public -- on the British news and commentary site The First Post.

Chickengate.

This from my hometown of Rochester, NY: It seems that the local Popeye's chicken franchises advertised an incredible deal offering an 8-piece chicken meal for $4.99. Talk about a recession special. People took Popeye's by storm. But two of the area restaurants failed to order enough to meet demand. Soon there were lines of angry chicken-hungry customers at two Popeye's locations that had closed early and sent employees home because they had sold every drumstick, wing and thigh in the joint.

But things went from worse to crazy when a TV station sent a photographer not to both Popeye's locations (a heavily-white suburb and a heavily-black neighborhood near downtown) but only to the mostly-black one. Result: an aired news report that showed black person after black person after black person proclaiming, sometimes in guttural terms, that they wanted their fried chicken and they wanted it now. There wasn't a white face to be seen in all of the on-camera fried-chicken-fussing.

Viewer reaction was swift and divided. On its website the station posted its own frank, and necessary, self-scrutiny. As always with such debacles, this isn't just about chicken. (The idea of a mass convergence on a Popeye's fried chicken sale is, in fact, kind of funny until you factor in the desperation with which a lot of people are trying to feed their families.) It's also about race: it's about Little Black Sambo and his pancakes; and the way that TV shows about white protagonists are for "everybody" while those about black protagonists are mostly reserved for "black" audiences; and the ease with which many whites continue to view blacks as a bloc while reflexively treating whites as individuals. This is why a TV newscast's fried-chicken-and-black-people snafu carries weight far beyond an 8-piece dinner. People are still talking, and arguing, about it online in Rochester, where I posted the following comment about the TV news account:

1.) I think this is a news story that was probably overplayed. If a chain runs a killer promotion and a lot of people show up, upset, at a closed-down shop, it's a lightweight story that deserves lightweight treatment. It probably got more play than it deserved because of the tendency of corporate TV news affiliates to lean on cheap, easy-to-cover "event" stories (accidents, shootings, fried chicken shortages) rather than more publicly significant news that's more time-consuming and expensive to cover.

2.) The story, as aired (I saw it), is careless in how it reinforces stereotypes. Both Lake Ave. and Penfield had a run on chicken and ran out, angering streams of customers. People in mostly-white Penfield like fried chicken, too. From what I understand from people at WHAM, the photographer who went out didn't know about Penfield and simply went to Lake Avenue, where, by simple probability, s/he encountered mostly or all black customers. So we saw a procession of irate black people complaining about not getting their fried chicken. This misrepresents the actual story, and it was easy to avoid with journalistic good sense. An editor needed to look at the footage, declare, "We need more than this," and send the photographer to Penfield to get a truthful mix. I think the problem wasn't malevolence at WHAM, but carelessness and thoughtlessness, which are damaging enough. In a society where a customer places a large monkey book in the middle of a Barnes & Noble Obama window display and it stays there for days, and where a WHAM radio host tells black and brown girls to "keep your legs together, sweet cheeks" and keeps his job, showing an understanding of stereotype matters. Those who show contempt for this concern as being "PC" are themselves proof of the belligerent ignorance that sustains the problem.

3.) Sadly, WHAM has provided fodder for a YouTube video post at which dull-eyed viewers can snicker about "blacks and their fried chicken."

The radio host of whom I speak, by the way, is the race-baiting Bob Lonsberry, a ranting yokel about whom I wrote when he made those remarks.

Anyway, that's the story. Absurd, silly, and persistent. Today it's chicken. Tomorrow, who knows?

Piracy, Pollution, Plunder, and the Press.

Before you accept without further scrutiny the prevailing American narrative about Somalian piracy -- that it is the savage product of anarchy, poverty, greed, and opportunistic anti-Westernism -- consider the case for a much messier scenario: one in which illegal overfishing and dumping of toxic wastes, including radioactive materials (according to the U.N. envoy to Somalia) by industrialized nations have decimated Somalian fishing waters and sickened coastal residents to the point where a nation already without a government now gives its pirates a 70 percent approval rating as protectors of the national interest.

The story itself is radioactive. Wherever it and the evidence supporting it have surfaced here and in Europe, mostly online, something close to open warfare has broken out among readers and commentators. And it should, in fact, be treated as radioactive. Unfounded and reflexive charges of such magnitude would be reckless. Unfortunately for the industrialized world, though, unfounded and reflexive denial of such charges, if they are true, is just as reckless and exponentially more harmful.

So, after you have digested the standard American accounts of ruthless Somalians on the high seas, don't even think about making up your mind until you have at least read and pondered the following:

• Johann Hari's incendiary piece in The Independent in which he writes, in part:

As soon as the [Somalian] government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence".

• The Daily Planet reprint of a 2007 African News Journal story detailing European toxic waste dumping along African coastlines, including the coast of Somalia.

• The EarthFirst account linking overfishing, waste dumping, and Somalian piracy.

• An essay by Somali-Canadian activist K'naan tracing the recent Somali history of governmental breakdown, illegal foreign fishing and toxic dumping, and the resulting rise of piracy and popular sympathy for pirates, published at the Huffington Post.

• Pieces in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times that cite the ire of Somali fishermen and pirates at alleged rampant Western illegal fishing and poisoning of the waters off Somalia, and that quote Somalis to this effect as they express their approval of pirate attacks on large vessels.

Interestingly, L.A. Times reporters Abukar Albadri and Edmund Sanders and New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman seem to show no interest in either verifying or debunking the allegations of illegal fishing, wanton pollution, and resulting coastal sickness. And that's the problem with most of the American coverage we see of the piracy crisis: as it has with terrorism, it fixates on the "sudden" spectacle of violence against Our Way of Life while showing little curiosity about how the industrialized world's role in the longer-term suffering of others may have helped lead to this impasse.

Labeling these questions as anti-American won't cut it here. Are we interested in the whole truth, or aren't we?