tv on the internet
One of my few memories of Cuba is watching a clown on TV.
Like everything else in Cuba, television was finite and scarce. It would run out and there was no more to be had. So it was a memorable experience.
When my parents and I arrived to the US, we came as refugees. Just like the families our government is forcing to camp out on a concrete bridge, for days and nights. Just like the refugees our president, the GOP, and the Fox Entertainment Group, have used for a new kind of blood libel against Jews.
We missed our own #caravan by just a few months: the Mariel boatlift. Thousands of vessels. Welcomed by the U.S. Imagine that.
Surely, we would have been on one of those boats. Many of our relatives were. Americans appear to have forgotten all about the boatlift; despite Brian de Palma's best efforts to hijack that human drama for his memorable reboot of Scarface. In which an Italian American plays a Cuban American, to tell the story of an earlier Italian American. Or, simply to tell the story of America.
This country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power.
As a newly arrived refugee in Tampa, Florida, I learned to speak English by watching TV. At first, it was mostly 1960s Star Trek and General Hospital. This was 1981, the year Luke and Laura defeated a goddamn weather machine! The following years I would absorb The Bionic Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Dukes of Hazzard, CHiPS; later still, the crypto-feminist canon of I Love Lucy, I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched.
In the eighth grade, now living in Flushing, Queens, NYC, we got HBO, a VCR, and the world was my oyster.* I taped and watched, again and again, some of the best movies of that decade: The Thing, After Hours, Escape from New York, First Blood, as well as what I now realize were sleeper hits like Local Hero.
This was the real world. Stock brokers who follow their dick to utter humiliation in dowtown NYC, and the west coast of Scotland. A veteran kidnapped by a venal president and dumped into a carceral state. Another veteran dumped into a sewer tunnel and made to fend for himself.
It was the marrow of my education.
It's not surprising, then, that I ended up working at a TV station and then a TV network. That I wrote and directed, by sheer accident, three TV movies. That I'm trying to feed my children by selling ideas for TV series.
It's also why I've been so confounded by Fox News.
Last December, I posted the following on Facebook, still the #1 social network among genocidal regimes†:
in America, a for-profit company can advocate for an authoritarian takeover of the state.
and it may be just so the company can make more money.
earlier this year, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that America's intense partisanship is the result of TELEVISION not social media.
econ profs from Stanford and Brown found that polarization increased 86% more for adults 60+ in the last 16 years versus adults 24-40.
For the last year, I've been adding updates to this post in the comments. Most of them are about our president's love affair with television: the way his power flows from television, the way his very psychology is shaped by television.
They are a compendium of the unique role that television is playing in our national nightmare. I have been very careful with them. They are are worth your time.
For a few years, my parents watched a lot of Fox News. At the time, it felt like a natural progression. They'd put up photos of Ronald Reagan and then George H. Bush. After all, it was President Reagan who got credit for defeating communism. And communism was the reason why we fled Cuba. One of the reasons why my father beat me and why I'm proud to have his prison number tattooed on my arm.
Because it's still fashionable to confuse Cuba's anti-imperialism with it's authoritarian regime, let me be clear: the USSR helped Fidel Castro destroy Cuba. Full stop. They did so much in the same way that the US helped destroy El Salvador; as the US once destroyed most Latin American democracies. Hence, the refugees in the latest caravan.
Fox News didn't start out as an apology for American imperialism or the excesses of the Cold War. The CIA sold arms to Iran, and bought cocaine into the US, long before its first broadcast. Nor was Fox News necessary to sell Americans the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq; a decision, yet to be confronted, that led to the slaughter of tens of thousands of children and hundreds of thousands of human beings, just like you and me. That propaganda was done, spectacularly, by NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, etc. All of whom were eager to sell commercial time for a massacre.
No, Fox News was for a domestic campaign. A civil war. Fox News gave my parents permission to hate. It urged them to hate anyone who stood in the way of the Republican Revolution. Fox News told my parents that the Clintons were thieves and murderers – making hay out of Bill Clinton's history of raping women while itself being run by a rapist, aided by men who covered up rapes.
What drew my elderly parents to Fox News is what draws most elderly Americans: it's a channel for people with death on their minds. It feeds on their mortal anxiety and fear. Faces of Death, the network.
And then, suddenly, my parents switched it off.
Why? I imagine my mom will answer. And I'll share her comments with any of you who are interested. But I have a hunch. Unlike most Americans, my parents have survived not just one, but two authoritarian regimes. They know what propaganda looks like.
By 2008, they were not only voting for President Obama but sharing his speeches on social media. Sadly, they did not vote in 2016. (Just as Fox News, Putin and the GOP intended.) But they voted early in 2018: "all blue," as my mother wrote recently on Mark Zuckerberg's contribution to the second dot com bubble.
I hope my parents will survive their third authoritarian regime. I hope we all do. I'd say the odds are 85% yes we will survive. As some of you may recall, those were Hillary Rodham Clinton's chances of winning in 2016.
But I don't mean the Trump presidency. Unlike Duterte or Putin or Kim Jong-un or, now, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump is not the autocrat we need to fear. Trump is just the talent.
The authoritarian regime are the people producing the Trump show. The ones who watch the ratings and place their bets accordingly. You may already know they control all three branches of the US government. They're making bank right now.
And if there's one thing that America is very good at, it's show business.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, I've been reading Cuban history of late. In retrospect, there are moments of great potential; lots of things happening all at once. And then, the clampdown.
Months after the Revolution, Fidel Castro made a bold power grab by drafting a wide-ranging "land reform" decree. He did it in secret, excluding his entire cabinet save for his own family – and the head of the Cuban film institute.
The fall line-up is upon us.
May your week be filled with love and rage.
Footnotes
* "Why, then the world's mine oyster / Which I with sword will open." – The Merry Wives of Windsor by Shakespeare.
† A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military
"Bolsonaro's win in Brazil tonight marks the end of the first Facebook elections. Here’s How A Handful Of American Tech Companies Radicalized The World"
or, "I can’t stop thinking about the far-right Italian populist who said 'thank god for Facebook' in his victory speech." - Kevin Roose