the power of pop culture, again

Which is more effective—hate-speech laws or the race-tinged animosities broadcast across the Sceptr’ed Isle in Celebrity Big Brother? The Sun tabloid isn’t waiting around for anyone to pass a law or do a study. It addresses race and class issues head-on, if shockingly.

Graham Dudman, the Sun’s managing editor, writes:

We all need to take a stand against racism, which is why we at the Sun have put the issue on the front page.

The idea of this front page was that it was intended to shock. We knew some people would find it offensive that we had used these words. But we had the permission of the children concerned, and their parents, and went ahead after full consultation with Trevor Phillips and the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR).

The point is that, whether we like it or not, this language is in our playgrounds and on the street every day. And it is absolutely wrong. What starts with this kind of racist name-calling is that people are getting marginalised. And that breeds extremism, which leads ultimately, as we saw with 7/7, to young people being willing to cause mayhem and kill innocents by blowing themselves up.

Not everyone is buying, of course:

What then, to make of today’s Sun front-page? On one level, it deserves to be welcomed and applauded. Any message which points out the values and life that we share, that prejudice based both on background and on the colour of our skin is completely unacceptable, and that children especially are often the ones that suffer the most from the unkindness and closed-minds of their peers ought to be celebrated, especially coming from a paper with such a poor history both of promoting forgiveness and tolerance. It’s just that I don’t believe the Sun means it, and there are also far more sinister undertones beneath its apparent road to Damascus-type conversion.

Such as?

[T]he very reason for the Sun running this on their front page has to be related in no small measure to the decision of Shilpa Shetty to sell her story to [the Sun's rival] the Mirror.

Ah, the pressures the free market.

Except: there is something to be said for it, of course. And for pop culture as well, as the brilliant Charles Paul Freund noted in 2003:

A different sort of conflict broke out this summer in the Middle East — one involving reality TV [an Arab American Idol clone called Superstar]. While it offers more evidence that the region is in the grip of a liberationist pop culture frenzy (see “Look Who’s Rocking the Casbah,” June), it also demonstrates that even the region’s pop fandom can fall prey to conspiracy theories and divisiveness. …

Supposedly, the entire Jordanian army had been ordered to vote for Jordan’s contestant. Supposedly, Lebanese leaders had failed the nation by not mobilizing support for Zein. Supposedly, Syria, which controls Lebanon [not anymore, of course --ed.], had exerted itself to control Superstar as well.

And that was a good thing, said Freund, because:

as fan-based cultural identity grows in the region, it expresses itself in terms of the area’s traditional nationalist or sectarian divisions, engendering group enmity and suspicion. The effect of commercial culture, however, is to dissipate conflict by lowering the stakes. Modernist identities (drawing on such influences as fandom) are fluid and changeable; the resulting communities of interest are numerous and temporary. Zein’s fans have now contented themselves with creating a Web site in his honor.

Superstar’s winner, by the way, was Diana Karazone, the singer from Jordan.

Commercial culture dissipates conflict by lowering the stakes—that is a brilliant insight on Freund’s part and a useful one when you throw it into the mix with what Aayan Hirsi Ali and David Kilcullen have to say.
And then you start to think about things in a different way: the aura of rock stardom that, for example, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah has created for himself and his movement: he seems to be seeking (and gaining) fans more than converts.

And then you start to think about the description “[r]ising al-Qaeda star Abu Yehya al-Libi” that Abu Aardvark used (with good reason) the other day when describing a propaganda video.

And then you remember back when France was threatening to ban head scarves in the public schools, Jeremy Harding suggested that maybe somehow the French were less culturally evolved than the British when it came to manipulating cultural “signs”:

In Britain, we know how to nurture an ironic infatuation with signs of difference, status and style. Maybe the flummery and camp of our political institutions and our enthusiastic approval of layering and posturing have helped us to achieve our multiculturalism. That we got usefully from Black Rod’s tights to Ali G’s tracksuit (probably via Dad’s Army) is not going to help us understand the French position, whose Jacobin demand for the transparent citizen is something we recoil from.

And then your head explodes.