Fear on the Dole
Hysteria is ever-present on The Oprah Winfrey Show. They scream about child abuse and rock stars and women who had babies without realising they were pregnant. They scream, they clap, they weep, they bawl, they sigh. Oprah Winfrey is America's therapist; her show is a condensed session of yelled collective introspection. If anyone wants to know what America is like they would do well to watch The Oprah Winfrey Show.
On 6 May (Channel Four, 5 pm) the topic was unemployment. The format was the usual mix of victims and experts—the victims weepy and public about their intimate miseries: the experts victims of their own political ignorance. The victims gave eloquent testimony to the anger and sadness of being a human statistic, cast upon the alter of profit as sacrifices of the recession. One spoke of how she would sit at home crying uncontrollably. Another spoke of his anger at feeling impotent in the face of the "The Economy". An audience member, displaying the statutory Winfreyesque flood of tears, spoke of his rage at being told that he was not wanted as a skilled worker and how unemployment had strained his marriage and forced him to seek the aid of a psychiatrist.
Oprah's experts were worse than useless. They were witch doctors, offering remedies for a disease which they did not begin to understand. A loud financial columnist spoke how the unemployed must accept in their own minds that the worst that will happen to them is a cut in their standard of living. Her message was to "be realistic" and plan for poverty. What insulting crap! Poverty of the worst kind can mean your kids dying because you can’t afford medical attention for them; it means having to eat bad junk food; it means having your home taken away; it means depression and humiliation and, sometimes, suicide. The other expert, an editor of a magazine called Psychology Today, rambled on about the need not to feel like a failure if you lose your job. But as a wage or salary slave you are a failure if you cannot sell your labour power for a wage or salary. He is right to tell the system's victims not to blame themselves. but self-respect doesn't pay the rent.
Oprah herself—who is a millionairess owner of a TV company—urged the unemployed to see the problem of losing their livelihoods as an opportunity. Her pompously stated "spiritual" philosophy is that every new problem creates a chance to move on to new life chances. The American wet dream is alive and well, as is the nightmare of despair which keeps awake millions of American workers who do not know where the money will come from to pay the bills which are the weights around our necks under capitalism. The show treated unemployment as if it was a natural catastrophe, like an earthquake or a plague. Nobody said that it was an inevitable effect of a removable cause: The Profit System. Nobody said that the way out of the rut is for workers to organise consciously and democratically to create a world where all may work and none may work for an employer. Neither the cause of the malady nor its cure were even touched upon. And they wept and they trembled and they raged and they bore witness. All to no effect.
Christ's College, USA
Staying in The Land of the Unfree (USA Ltd). Everyman ( BBC1, 3 May. 10.25 pm) had a worthwhile documentary about religious fundamentalism in America. Featured was the bizarre Bob Jones University where male and female students are forbidden to touch each other, students from different "races" are segregated, women are given classes in how to submit to their husbands and every lecturer has a Bible in his hand.
The so-called university is a theological nut-house created for people who want to acquire faith in place of knowledge. The extremities of the Bob Jones style of indoctrination is but a magnified version of what has gone on in Sunday schools and compulsory Religious Education lessons in schools for generations. The fundamentalists are simply taking to its illogical conclusion what is inherent in all religious dogma.
There was a frightening degree of organisation amongst these dangerous cranks: they run holiday camps at which kids are driven mad by preachers and they force handicapped people, many of whom are unable to walk away from them, to endure their relentless nonsense. A girl who received awful burns in an accident was told that this was god's will and that if he had meant her to have hands (which were burnt away in the accident) he would have let her keep them. The girl's father, an evangelist ranter, screamed at his congregants that they were all sinners: it is as natural for humans to sin as for dogs to bark— our only course is to repent. The audience screamed out to god, repenting for crimes that they probably lacked the imagination to commit.
With Bob Jones running a university and Oprah Winfrey as their therapist it is little wonder that the frustration which ignites murderous street riots is the order of the day in capitalism's showpiece nation.
Steve Coleman
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