Eyes are watching, ears are listening …

Eyes are watching, ears are listening … January 28, 2025

• I did not know that one of Michael Keaton’s first jobs in show biz was at KQED in Pittsburgh, as a member of the production crew for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

As a member of the crew, Keaton did “everything” from serving as a floor manager, working on lighting, or just doing manual labor, as Keaton described in a March 2024 episode of the podcast “Q with Tom Power.” Keaton also briefly appeared on the show as a member of the “The Flying Zookeeni Brothers Daredevil Circus,” who perform for character King Friday’s birthday. The daredevil circus originally began as a joke among the crew.

Asked about working with Mister Rogers, Keaton said, “He was just a very nice man. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, thinking, ‘Well this can’t be real’ — turns out it is real.”

Keaton also said that Mister Rogers had a great sense of humor. The crew, Keaton said, was “way ahead of our time” with women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and lots of people with long hair and beards. “We were pretty wild,” he remembered, but Mister Rogers “just appreciated us all” and thought they were funny.

Mister Rogers, Keaton said, “was just the real deal.”

• Not Listening to other people is bad. Proclaiming that Not Listening is a virtue is worse. Michael Ignatieff is very proud of his Not Listening, and thus is very proud of the strawman he constructs here and 0f his rebuttal of the argument he invents and places in the mouths of those he refuses to listen to, lifting up his rebuttal of this imaginary argument as further evidence for why Not Listening is virtuous and principled:

Once each group — Black, female, gay and transgender — achieved emancipation, many of them began to identify with their own group to the exclusion of wider civic-sized political aggregations of interest. The old political parties — Liberal in Canada, Democratic in the United States, Social Democratic in Europe — that had presided over the liberal revolution now saw their White working-class base heading for the exits and their multicultural support splintering into autonomous groups that each began to make a strange new epistemological claim: You can understand me only if you are like me. Only Black people can understand the Black experience of racism and police violence. Only women can understand the tyranny of patriarchy and the fear of male sexual violence. Only gay people can understand what same-sex love truly means.

Ugh. This is deliberate, willful, self-reinforcing ignorance defended to oneself with lofty, high-falutin’ talk of Grand Principles not actually applied here.

First there’s the unsupported and unsupportable claim that “emancipation” (meaning what? full legal, civic, and social equality?) has already been fully “achieved” for every “Black, female, gay, and transgender” person in America, Canada, and the EU. I’m sorry I missed the day that happened. There must’ve been a heck of a celebration.

But the industrial-grade smarm here comes with the nasty, self-flattering assertion that these Others are making “a strange new epistemological claim: You can only understand me if you are like me.”

No. This is not what is being said or what is being claimed. These folks are not making an epistemological claim, they are simply making the same plea that all people ever, anywhere and everywhere, have always made: “Listen to my story.”

The smarmy pseudo-“liberal” critique of “identity politics” (an always derogatory category always attributed to others and claimed by no one, anywhere, for themselves) rejects this plea and condemns it. It doesn’t need to listen to your story because it already has Grand Principles and, therefore, it already knows your story better than you do. This is the strangest possible epistemological claim, but Ignatieff is the one making it here — explicitly arguing that other people’s direct experience has nothing to contribute to his understanding of their direct experience.

The arrogance, ignorance, and hostility of that isn’t going to sit well with any human. The human response to that will always be “I know my own story better than you do.” The smarmy critique of the bogeyman of “identity politics” twists this universal human response into what Ignatieff asserts above “Only Black people can understand the Black experience.”

His accusation recoils and the imaginary thing he condemns turns into an actual thing he inflicts on himself. By refusing to listen to others’ stories — by making Not Listening to their stories a matter of Grand Principle — he prohibits himself from understanding their experience.

You know your story better than I do. If I want to understand you better, I should listen to your story. I know my story better than you do. If you want to understand me better, you should listen to my story. This is not a strange new epistemological claim. It’s Basic Humanity 101.

Listen and learn. Refuse to listen and never learn. These are our options. Anybody using the phrase “identity politics” unironically has chosen the second one.

Rebecca Shaw:

I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.

… I’ve always skipped content based on cringe humour like Meet the Parents, Borat or Nathan for You. It makes my skin crawl and it makes the contents of my stomach try to crawl out of my mouth. But I cannot skip world events.

I like what mistermix is getting at here:

When we talk of a Democratic alternative to Fox, or at least when I talk about it, I definitely don’t think we ought to create our own set of liars spewing bullshit.  The kinds of stories I’m talking about are stories of people being denied insurance coverage, women dying in parking lots for lack of a D&C, farmers who wouldn’t be able to harvest crops or keep cattle without immigrant labor, and youth pastors raping kids.  Obviously, 24/7 coverage of stories like that would be like listening to Kindertotenlieder on repeat.  But there are a ton of bright side stores that are also missed by Fox:  urban gardens, community organizations working together to help others, the retired nurses who came out of retirement just to help with vaccinations.  Hire a bunch of young, excited reporters and put your content out as stories as well as social-media-sized morsels (video, gif, whatever).  Make it left-wing infotainment, and not always overtly political or even about politics.

I’d just add this: cover Good News as Good News and Bad News as Bad News. Not in terms of political wins and political losses for Our Team, but in terms of the actual impact on actual people.

Some blue-state governor signs a school lunch bill? Don’t report that as a Win for Democrats. It’s a win for schoolchildren, a win for teachers, and a win for parents. You want to seek out or create some “balancing” quote for that piece by shoving a mic in front of some resentment-driven asshole? Fine. But make it clear that’s what you’re doing. “Everybody wins, and everybody’s happy — except, of course, for the people who will never be happy unless others are miserable, like this guy …”

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