J'Accuse - WHRW

J’Accuse

The Public Affairs department of WHRW


1. VIOLATION OF UNSPOKEN GOOD FAITH AGREEMENT

In regard to airing an alleged profanity.

A. It is absurd to hold me responsible for violating the FCC non-profanity rule, when the instance cited is virtually inaudible, decipherable without multiple hearings (I checked with a friend who hadn’t heard it before – didn’t get it at all. As a matter of fact, “Hormoaning” was released in Japan, and the US released box set of Nirvana has no translated lyric text lines. There are no official Nirvana English lyrics; someone added the on-line text. Maybe if you spoke Japanese, hearing what sounded like whatever their colloquialism is for dung sung in English might violate a FCC rule against broadcasting profanity? Huh huh huh I wonder why I was told the printed lyrics must be trusted for what cannot be heard?

B. “That (the printed text of the lyrics) is what we have to go on,” I was informed.

2 replies. A. No it isn’t. The test of what a reasonable person could expect a normal listener to hear would surely cover borderline, inadvertent infractions enough to avoid fines -- esoteric associations made by cliques to the contrary notwithstanding. B. So where is that text? If the word can’t be heard, and no text for what is slurred … the glove don’t fit. It’s a bunch of …..

C. “When you hand a CD over to your engineer (sic) you are certifying it contains no violation of the FCC rules,” I was told. Reply: first, I didn’t “hand a CD over” to the engineer; he picked it up off the table, I think. Unimportant detail though it is, it shows how little minds frame up little rituals to hold others responsible for violating. Second: why this is the first time this particular ritual, retro-actively applied, heard from? The advance information session offered every opportunity to say “It is your responsibility to make sure the music played on your program is clean.” One might then have asked “what does ‘clean’ mean? Does it include how it might sound translated into foreign languages”?

The fact that this instance was reported as misconduct, drawing a warning citation, is not a good faith response to what can only have been presumed an innocent, totally innoculous occurrence. “Hey! Did you know a banned word was on that Nirvana tape you played….?”, would have got “What….? You’re kidding…what word? Where?” I chose the selection because of its great guitar work, beat, hard-driving mood.

Then this pre-judgmental behavior on the part of WHRW station personnel, unjustified in itself, was secondarily excused by “that’s what we have to go on” -- not true either, as pointed out above; merely declared – demonstrates a settled disposition to dissemble to avoid the consequences of ham-handed over-reaching. Same thing happened in the famous late 19th century Dreyfus case. The military, church, pro-government factions falsely charging the French Jew of spying for Germany wouldn’t, couldn’t take back its condemnation, even after it was discovered and proved that the evidence was forged. They just continued confabulating punishment fantasies, extended to the whistle blower. Same thing happened at Harpur college in 1988, when it became understood I was right about the anti-Semitic incident of swastikas spray-painted on the Jewish Student Union being faked for effect. Who cared? People got to see their hate tokens displayed there, right side-by-side, courtesy of JSU president James Oppenheim, one can only presume on the evidence. Thus what I said then – they had it coming -- was thus proven doubly apt, afterward. Hyping evidence to accuse someone of misconduct ought to be a punishable offense.

I stipulate that I have never acted toward WHRW as a station, its personnel, Public Affairs department in any other way than in good faith, always, of course, predicated along with some abominable personality defect deep inside somewhere that seems to tick people off in advance, origin largely unknown, but as acceptable as what I can perceive with my own eyes and ears as hardly worse than at least half of the beings I have known and related to for 70+ years, and counting, on this planet inhabited by the species ‘human’. Notwithstanding, all I have consistently got in return has been a constant barrage of thou-shalt-nots, usually shouting the seven prohibited FCC words as if one or all of them might pop out of my mouth at any time, night or day, plus repeated warnings of the sort “WE’LL CUT YOU OFF”, “WILL NOT HESTITATE TO PULL THE PLUG”, “WE’VE GOT OUR FINGER ON THE BUTTON IF YOU CROSS THE LINE, BUSTER BROWN.” – almost as if everyone at the station assumed that THAT was what I was about, and they had it coming. As for helpful hints about how to get over with good programs? Exactly one, the first meeting I attended. A goyish guy; never saw him later, don’t know why. “The more you go over it in advance, the better you will do,” he said.

I therefore advise applicants for a PA slot to expect nothing more, unless a regime change and/or ethnic cleansing occur. It is really a kind of entrapment. What one goes into with ideas, ideals, good faith, and energy galore, may leave them scared, scarred, disillusioned and soul raped.


2. FALSE CHARGES OF INDECENT LANGUAGE USE

APART FROM THE SEVEN TERMS SPECIFIED AS PROFANITY, EVERYTHING IS CONTEXT.

Citing: Michael Powell, ex-FCC chairman; Kevin Martin, current FCC chairman.

So I guess local WHRW Public Affairs people either know more than the FCC chairmen, or deliberately choose on their own to rate the context of my use of MALE anal rape “indecent.”

“Use of ‘anal rape’ is certainly indecent,” Stefanie Wolff allows.

But that can’t be true, can it, or she would have committed an indedency in writing it. And frankly, coming from a woman, I took a bit of umbrage, since nothing in my contextual use aimed it at the opposite sex. Or “gender”, as we say in these PC days – the word “sex” itself has actually become radioactive, so any reference to what goes on to make babies, much less live a robust, healthy, unrepressed libidinous instinctual life, has been poisoned. In sex-economic terms, which I used to teach about in the Freud, Jung and Reich philo course, that is the underlying psychodynamic condition of the American group-psyche today. ( (Other models apply -- later Freud’s tripartite super-ego/ego/id personality analysis; early Freud’s neuro-physiological/anatomical systems “conscious/unconscious”-cathexis model; Wm. Reich’s arousal-tension/ / discharge-relaxation model of the spasmodic orgastic discharge release; among others.)

CNN ran stories of a rape at Duke University yesterday whose details I do not want to go into here. The FCC, of course, took no notice. It was news. It would be absurd to censor the word “rape”. It’s use is necessary to that context.

Similarly for my use of “MALE anal rape” in the context of Talk America. Granted, what it stands for is an indecent mode of ultra-traumatic humiliation if there ever was one. Certainly, it is not a topic that would arise in cultural Paris or London salons, if there were any, though it might turn up in bordellos and Catholic girls like the oneVIVA attended (60’s thing – a female porno mag published back then by an escapee, Viva). But one could argue that even they have as much right to hear what is happening to America addressed on-air, in terms they understand, as do elitists or religious prudes. And, some terms MUST be used if the condition is to be addressed, whether anyone thinks they are indecent or not. For God’s sake, people. When Kraeplin (sp.) displayed the corpuses of brutalized, murdered girls in the Paris morgue in his forensic lectures from which Freud developed his earliest trauma-repression theory, it is not recorded that he had to fight off indecency police. Trying to shut down communication of truth on the pretext of finding plain references to it indecent is a kind of indecency, itself.

In fact, wonder of wonders, the kind of indecency it is, is the kind that fits the text/token crime. This must be insisted on my defense of the right to use “anal rape” in the context of discussion of what is happening at the unconscious group-fantasy level in the context of discussing American manhood. The words are required to connect the facts with those fantasies; to suppress its literal application is to block this connection between what we see, for instance at Abu Ghraib, and the particular quality of the revulsion felt. Without that connection, the analysis cannot reach its communication goal. The words are less graphic than the pictures, are they not? – even without adding the chair of “John Israel” with its back turned toward the action, away from the camera. That is how America was first alerted to its torture regime and first impressions are lasting in these matters. The FCC would not dare suppress an attempt to get to the bottom of why this occurred, particularly on a university Public Affairs radio Talk Show. You can write and ask them, then cut me off if you have to or want to, but until then you have no choice but let me use it, in whatever vocal modulations are dictated by how I feel at the time in the context of what is happening. As I was getting to in the last show, the Bush Repubes are actually making this anti-human maleness into the ideal standard for manhood, what maleness is. To allow this to go by without calling attention to it, is to become one of the coalition of the willing. It is to allow one’s masculine soul to be raped.

And as old Willie Nelson sings, so beautifully, “inside each woman’s head, there’s a cowboy that wants to come out.” Too bad the women representing Harpur College haven’t got that far.

“Inside every cowboy, there’s a woman who wants to slip out.” he sings. As far as I’m concerned, they can slip back in, what do you say?

There are further deep psychodynamic connections (speaking colloquially) the Bushies (perverted male activists), feminazis (singing in the Decency Police choir), and the “Libby Lobby”, I call it (from “THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY”, John J. Mearsheimer, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, March 2006, London Review of Books, Vol. 28, No.6. available at www.lrb.co.uk, and other places, now.) .
Whoever might be “certain” that the words “anal rape” are “indecent”, taken out of context, could surely also be certain that the FCC would not only support, but applaud this effort by an American university to actually act like one.

That means stop harassing me, in particular. If you don’t, I will be forced to report ypur behavior to Colin Powell (Michael's father) himself; to Mr. Gonzales, about infringement of my civil rights; and to judges Scalia and Alitoto -- to uphold, with vigor, speech sounding truth to power.

- Sid Thomas