The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,15
“they, the people”; such as domestic disarmament; such as the health of our communities.
When the mystification of everyday life is complete, there is nothing new or contemporary in the news. It will be, in spite of its up-to-the-minuteness, as archaic, moribund, and unreal as a quill pen, lagging behind the future in order to enshrine deprivation—making the absence of commodities (poverty) the only despair worth discussing. If poverty and criminality can be off-loaded to blacks, then the illusion of satisfaction and the thrill of the hunt might keep the public still and obedient. But for how long? How long can news function as a palliative for despair and counter space for products? It is so frustrating and sad to open a newspaper and find the news literally at the edges, like the embroidered hem of the real subject—advertisement.
The media spectacle must not continue to direct its attention to the manufacture of consent, rather than debate with more than two sides, to the reinforcement of untruths, and a review of what else there is to buy. Otherwise it will be not out of commerce, but already out of business. When the spectacle becomes “public” in the narrowest sense of the word—meaning available to purchase—the world can buy you, but it can’t afford you.
Now I have been talking to you as though you were a single organism that took shape and grew by some immutable natural law outside human decision-making. When in fact, you are people, human individuals with a stake in being so. You have public-spiritedness and dreams of a secure democracy, as well as prejudices that seep through and shape the tools at your disposal. Boards of directors, owners, and editorial managers are made up of people trying to get profitable, stay profitable, and increase profitability. That must be tough. But if your industry becomes socially irrelevant, it will be impossible.
I suspect that a nonracist, nonsexist, educating press is as profitable as one that is not. I suspect that clarification of difficult issues is just as entertaining as obscuring and reducing them is. But it will take more than an effort of the will to make such a press profitable; it will take imagination, invention, and a strong sense of responsibility and accountability. Without you, by ourselves we can just pull raw data off of our computers; shape it ourselves, talk to one another, question one another, argue, get it wrong, get it right. Reinvent public space, in other words, and the public dialogue that can take place within it. The generations of students that I teach (and my own sons, for that matter) do it all the time.
But, irrespective of the internet’s CompuServes, nodes, bulletin boards, Lexus—whatever makes the information highway work—there is something the press can do in language that a society cannot do. You’ve done it before. Move us closer to participatory democracy; help us distinguish between a pseudo-experience and a living one, between an encounter and an engagement, between theme and life. Help us all try to figure out what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.
Moral Inhabitants
IN The Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 right after “rice” and just before “tar” and “turpentine” are the humans. The rice is measured by pounds; the pitch, tar, and turpentine by the barrel weight. There was no way to measure by pound, tonnage, or barrel weight the humans. Head count served the purpose of measuring. This reference book is full of fascinating information, not the least of which is Series Z 281–303, which documents, in chronological order and by point of destination, the import and export of humans in the United States from 1619 to 1773. Every effort seems to have been made to assure the accuracy of the tables. Below the neat columns of figures, footnotes seem to apologize for the occasional lapses from complete information. “We are sorry,” the Bureau of the Census seems to be saying, “that better records were not kept or available to us. The country was just getting itself together, you understand, and things were less than efficient.”
One senses reasonableness and gentlemanly assertion everywhere in these pages. But it is reasonableness without the least hope of success, for the language itself cracks under the weight of its own implications. Footnote 3, for example, under “Slaves” clarifies the ambiguity of its reference with the following words: “Source also shows 72 Indian slaves imported; 231 slaves died and 103 drawn back for exportation.” “Died”…“drawn back”—strange, violent words