My profession has a saying, coined right here in Chicago: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." Good advice, particularly now that building airy castles of fabrication is official U.S. government policy, and social media is awash in engaging untruths, making each of us a little paper boat buffeted by an endless typhoon of lies. Anything unusual enough to catch attention merits immediately asking: Is this true?
A few days ago I noticed a grid of 15 images supposedly created by the U.S. Department of Labor, assembled by Geoff Bowser, a Brooklyn real estate attorney with fewer than a thousand followers on Bluesky. "I made an image of all the art posted by US DOL on X since approximately Labor Day," he wrote.
A dozen of the images were versions of the same broad-shouldered white hunk, with stern admonishments like "BUILD YOUR HOMELAND'S FUTURE" and "AMERICANS FIRST." The other three were a family straight out of "Fun with Dick and Jane," right down to the white-collared shirtwaist dress on the little girl.
The standard 1950s dream images of a white-bread America that never existed — not without squinting away a whole bunch of folks who didn't count, then, and apparently still don't. An America that exists even less today, except in the fever dreams of those, now sadly in power, trying to stuff our country back into the confines of their narrow cookie-cutter molds.
Why is this surprising? It perfectly meshes with everything else going on. Chicagoans are being snatched from the streets by masked thugs for the crime of being Brown in public. Black people are scrubbed from of our nation's history on official websites and driven out of positions of authority in the military.
But could the Department of Labor really be representing America as a white man and only a white man, with no minorities in sight, and women, who make up half the work force, delegated to gazing with adoration at a daughter — in a pink bonnet! — at church?
The United States is 19% Hispanic. Twelve percent Black. Six percent Asian. More than a third of the population. Is the Labor Department really giving them all the cold shoulder?
I jumped on X to check — "if your mother tells you she loves you" etc.— and examined the Labor Department's X feed.
The images are in support of Operation Firewall, the department's move to restrict visas.
"The American Dream belongs to the American People," the department announces over one poster. And we know who those people are.
"Initially, I just went to X out of curiosity to see whether the art that was posted was representative of the full extent of the art they used," Bowser told me. "When I saw that it was all white men as workers ... I felt compelled to share it as a composite to draw attention to the propaganda and racism."
Why bother putting together that grid and disseminating it?
"I'm angry and heartbroken about what Trump is doing to this country," said Bowser, who has two boys, 3 and 6. "On a more basic level, I'm doing it because it's something I can do. I don't want to have to tell my sons that I didn't try to stand against this."
I reached out to the Labor Department for comment, forgetting that the government is shut down until further notice.
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It's probably even worse than what it seems at first glance. These images are all CGI creations. The big boss AI generator in the clouds is being programmed by malevolent bigots. We need to nip this in the bud.
ReplyDelete"If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out with two independent sources" or "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." Both of those originated at the old City News Bureau.
ReplyDeleteThat was where all the young reporters learned how to cover hard news and breaking news stories, which were still called bulletins back in the day. They were often sent back to get more information for their stories, so that they would learn to get it in the first place.
One of the stories I heard about the CNB was the one about a young reporter who called in the story of the killing of an infant. He was sent back to get the answer to the question, "What color were the dead baby's eyes?" A variation was that the baby had choked to death on a Christmas tree ornament. The reporter was told to call back the grieving parents and ask: "What color was the ornament your baby choked on?"
Supposedly, somebody refused to do it, and they were fired. Those kinds of stories were cautionary tales. You had to get your hands dirty, and if you didn't, then somebody else would. And they would be the ones who filled the next available slot at the Sun-Times or the Daily New or the Trib. Only the strong survived. That was the Chicago way.
I was a reporter at Lerner Newspapers. My beat was Niles. A cabdriver was robbed and murdered while on duty. He lived in Niles and my editor insisted that I get a quote from the family. I called and called and got no answer (and I was grateful!). Then he said, "You've got the address, ring the doorbell." To this day I wish I had refused. We had a union.... But I went. No one in the house spoke English except the man's daughter, who was very young, and I said, "I'm here to talk to your family about your father's death" or something to that effect. She said something in their language to a woman standing behind her and the woman started yelling and hitting me in the chest. The little girl was muttering, "My daddy's not dead." It is the worst thing I've ever done in my professional life. More than 30 years later, I am deeply ashamed of that. So, yeah, when your mother says she loves you, check it out, but don't be an asshole.
DeleteThe 1950s were not nearly as clean and wholesome as (ahem) certain people would have you believe. There was a whole lot of heavy drinking and adultery in them thar white picket fenced suburbs (read some of the novels), and lynchings were frequent. Also a lot of men with severe PTSD from WW2 and Korea. (again, read the literature). But, just like today at Mar-A-Lago, it's all about the look, not the reality.
ReplyDeleteI was disappointed to see that the powerful sentence about having one's suitcase snatched away at the train station was missing from the on-line S-T column, and I assume it's missing from the print edition as well, but I know you must pick your battles these days.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that caught my eye about those Dick-and-Jane images, aside from wondering why a U.S. flag would be in the background of a church scene (at least the Norman Rockwell type of church portrayals being attempted here), was that the AMERICANS FIRST image shows a background flag with an extra, eighth row of three stars across the top. At first I thought it was just a silly CGI mistake going unnoticed by the illiterate employee cranking these out, but then I remembered Greenland, Canada, and... I dunno, Venezuela?
I did argue over that, at length. The editors don't like to deploy Holocaust imagery prematurely. (Though by the time we're certain it's fair, we won't have an outlet to say it in). At first I was puzzled at how you read it — I thought maybe you work at the paper and read it in the system, as people sometimes do. Then I realized that, rather than delete the line, I put it in what we call "notes mode" which drops away when I define and move the copy to put it in the blog.
Deletei imagined everyone in those pictures to ust burst in with that chilling song in Cabaret, "tomorrow belongs to me", our ne national anthem "Trumpland uber allest"
DeleteThanks Neil. Sometimes it feels like we are proverbial frogs in a pot on the stove. Your columns shine an important light. Keep it up.
ReplyDeleteMore disconcerting is the image I saw and reposted on FB yesterday, a side-by-side comparison of the DOL ads and Nazi propaganda posters from the 1930s. I'd post them here if I could, but they shouldn't be too hard to find.
ReplyDeleteMy father used to talk about the Germans who said they didn't know. "Those plumbers building the camps sure as hell knew what they were doing." I think about that a lot. It seems to me that we're in the "What would I have done in Germany in the '30's?" stage. We have to be prepared to be arrested, to be beaten up, to go to jail. I feel like a crazy person saying this. But masked, badgeless people are throwing people into unmarked vehicles because they "look" like they might be here illegally. It's madness.
ReplyDeleteMAGA is, at its core, a white supremacist phenomena. My head hurts when I consider that the most horrifying aspects of this white supremacist operation is organized and managed by a Jewish man. The horror..
ReplyDeleteI truly believe that you are some one who make a difference going forward.
ReplyDeleteIf they walk like a duck...
ReplyDelete