Naomi R Ockler. Communication Review. Volume 6, Issue 2, 2003.
Despite the prevalence of the mass media in U.S. life, evidence suggests that many Americans do not feel that the mass media warrant critical interrogation— especially media texts that are “entertaining” as opposed to “informative.” As Jhally and Lewis (1992) observed, Americans are apt to dismiss television criticism because “most television, goes the gigantic disclaimer, is (after all) nothing more than ‘entertainment’” (p. 17). When editors of a collection of Disney essays (Bell, Haas, & Sells, 1995) assigned the essays to their students, the students rejected the legitimacy of Disney criticism with complaints such as, “it’s only for children, it’s only fantasy, it’s only a cartoon, and it’s just good business” (p. 4). In their international study of Dallas viewers, Liebes and Katz (1990) found that American viewers, when asked to criticize the “messages” in Dallas, felt that Dallas did not have any messages because “it is just entertainment, only escape” (p. 120). In a study of college women viewers of Beverly Hills, 90210, Rockler (1999) found that the students’ insistence that the program was unrealistic constrained them from evaluating the program in a more ideological manner.
In her analysis of Internet soap opera newsgroup users, Scodari (1998) found that viewers strongly distinguished their personal, escape-driven viewing experiences from political issues, such as gender and race representations in soap operas, that a few aberrant viewers introduced into the discussions. The viewers who introduced these issues were told these were inappropriate newsgroups topics. Here, newsgroup subscribers expressed their displeasure with this kind of critical discourse:
“This newsgroup is about Another World,” a poster responded vehemently. “It is not about weight, it is not about gender, it is not about race…” On AOL, the assumption that politics and soap operas are mutually exclusive was echoed when some posters began discussing feminism in connection to an Another World couple. “If you want to post something political go to a political folder,” they were warned. “Soaps have offered an escape from everyday life and when these issues are raised I want to scream.” (Scodari, 1998, p. 177)
The phenomenon of American resistance to popular culture criticism warrants further research because of its disturbing implications for U.S. culture. If Americans reject critical analysis of popular culture and other media texts, they reject analysis of a significant portion of their life activity. In 1996, according to Nielsen Media Research data, the average U.S. household consumed almost 51 hours of television per week, and the average individual consumed almost 28 hours—an average of almost 4 hours per day, and over a day’s worth of television per week (Head, Sterling, Schofield, Spann, & McGregor, 1998, pp. 296-297). Furthermore, the sources of the messages that occupy this portion of Americans’ life activity are increasingly oligopolistic media corporations. According to Bagdikian (2000), the vast majority of the mainstream media in the United States is controlled by only six corporations, down from 50 corporations in 1984, 23 in 1990, and 10 in 1996. Furthermore, as McChesney (1997) argued, the public’s failure to hold media corporations to critical scrutiny has resulted in antidemocratic media practices that never would have been tolerated if the media were controlled by the government (see p. 25)
In addition, Americans’ resistance to critical analysis of entertaining media texts has serious implications for the media literacy movement in the United States. This international pedagogical movement, in which students from kindergarten through college are taught to become critical interrogators of the media, has been popular in much of the Western world since the 1970s, but is in its infancy in the United States. Kubey (1998) argued that the movement has not caught on in the United States because of structural issues within the U.S. educational system; Phillips (1998) argued that media literacy faces cultural obstacles in the United States, such as U.S. ambivalence about consumerism and violence. If Americans are likely to reject critical interrogations of entertainment media, this also may hinder the movement with a serious obstacle. If citizens perceive entertainment media to be innocuous, it is less likely that educators will be eager to make media interrogation skills part of school curricula, and it is less likely that students will be receptive to media education classes.
In this article, I examine the discourse of Americans who reject the legitimacy of critical interrogation of popular culture. I focus on the discourse from newspaper editorial pages and from the Internet surrounding two recent popular culture controversies: (1) the 1998 controversy about the representation of a Spanish-speaking Chihuahua in advertisements for the fast food chain Taco Bell and (2) the 1998 controversy that erupted in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area after morning radio entertainers joked about a 13-year-old Hmong rape victim who committed infanticide. I argue that the discourse Americans use to reject the legitimacy of criticism of these popular culture texts reflects the American value of individualism, and falls under the genre of therapeutic rhetoric.
The Terministic Screen of Individualism and Therapeutic Rhetoric
From the early days of the United States, when French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville both admired and criticized the young nation’s individualistic spirit, individualism always has been a defining value of U.S. discourse and society. It manifests itself in U.S. mythos such as the self-sufficient, adventurous pioneers and cowboys, and in the popular nineteenth century “Horatio Alger” tales of young men who “pull themselves up from their bootstraps” out of poverty to become successful. Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swinder, and Tipton (1985) defined individualism in two ways; first as “a belief in the inherent dignity and, indeed, sacredness, of the human person” and second as “a belief that the individual has a primary reality whereas society is a second-order, derived or artificial construct” (p. 334). The authors argued that the latter definition, which they called ontological individualism, has emerged as the dominant definition of individualism in the contemporary United States, as opposed to alternative forms of individualism which do not privilege the needs of the individual so heavily over the needs of society. Gans (1988) defined “popular” or “middle American” individualism as the desire to be in control of one’s personal life and the desire for privacy. Popular individualism manifests itself in home ownership, dependence on cars as opposed to mass transit, and a break with obligatory memberships in religious institutions and political parties.
In Burke’s (1966) terms, individualism is a terministic screen through which Americans understand and discuss social issues (pp. 44-62). Like all terministic screens, the vocabulary of individualism allows Americans to “select” certain portions of “reality” while “deflecting” others (p. 45); in other words, the vocabularies of terministic screens allow people to understand certain perceptions easily while rendering other kinds of perceptions more difficult to understand. Americans who operate within the terministic screen of individualism may share a vocabulary that allows them much insight into individual behavior, but they may lack insight into the complexities of social problems.
The discourse that surrounds the U.S. propensity to understand and discuss social problems through the terministic screen of individualism has been called “therapeutic rhetoric.” This term originates from the practice of psychotherapy, which traditionally has focused on encouraging patients to modify their behavior to better adapt to society. Therapeutic rhetoric is a discourse that encourages citizens to solve personal problems by changing one’s behavior on a personal or family level, as opposed to understanding individual problems as the result of systemic issues such as patriarchy, racism, or class structure.
Therapeutic rhetoric is hegemonic because it is a discourse within which it is difficult to discuss or encourage social transformation. As Cloud (1998a) argued, therapeutic rhetoric fosters status quo power relationships by focusing citizens’ attention away from the systemic causes of social inequality:
I regard the therapeutic as a political strategy of contemporary capitalism, by which potential dissent is contained within a discourse of individual or family responsibility … In contrast to scholars of liberalism who applaud therapy’s near-exclusive emphasis on individual initiative and personal responsibility, my argument insists on acknowledging the collective and structural features of an unequal social reality in which individuals are imbedded and out of which our personal experience, in large part, derives. Racism, sexism, and capitalism pose significant obstacles to individual mobility and well-being; their roles in structuring social reality, however, are obscured in therapeutic discourses that locate the ill not with society but with the individual or private family. (p. xiii)
Similarly, Jhally and Lewis (1992) argued that the “American Dream,” the allegory that all individuals have the opportunity and the ability to pull themselves up by their “bootstraps” and succeed, is a therapeutic myth that maintains consent to capitalism by maintaining the illusion that the system is fair (p. 74)
Cloud (1998a) further argued that therapeutic rhetoric is especially compelling and effective because it does not deny that social injustice exists, especially in regard to issues of race, class, and gender. Rather, it reframes widespread discontent with social injustice as personal “dis-ease” that individuals are responsible for “curing” by learning to cope better within the system. Cloud argued, “At moments of political anger or dissatisfaction, rebellion is possible, but therapeutic discourse effectively translates resistance into ‘dis-ease’ and locates blame and responsibility for solutions in the private sphere” (p. 4). Often therapeutic rhetoric is marked by medical or psychiatric metaphors, reframing issues from the sociopolitical to the “dis-ease(d)” bodies of individuals or families.
Discourse about women’s issues and feminism often poses solutions to systemic problems in terms of the therapeutic, and therefore rechannels women’s unrest that might result in social change into individual efforts to cure one’s own “dis-ease.” Media texts that potentially could encourage women to channel their systemic frustrations into social activism instead evoke the liberal feminist precept that women need to take responsibility for their discontent by finding success within the system. For example, Cloud (1998a) criticized Gloria Steinem’s 1992 bestseller Revolution From Within because it therapeutically rechannels women’s discontent by offering increased self-esteem as the solution to women’s problems (pp. 113-116). Illouz (1991) argued that women’s magazines promote a therapeutic ethos by advising women on how to maintain their relationships, in lieu of more politicized messages attributing relationship conflicts in part to patriarchy. Dow (1996) argued that television programs often depoliticize feminist issues; for example, the sitcom One Day at a Time was transformed from a relatively politicized portrayal of a divorced woman into a depoliticized “feminist Horatio Alger story” that focused on an individual woman’s struggle to make it on her own (p. 81).
Racial issues also often are framed as individual problems as opposed to structural ones that require social change to alleviate. Iyengar (1991) argued that news coverage of social issues typically are framed episodically through examples of individual anecdotes or people, as opposed to thematically by placing these issues within in-depth contexts. Iyengar demonstrated that when citizens watch episodic news stories on issues such as poverty and crime, they are more likely to attribute responsibility for those issues to individuals rather than to the system as a whole. For example, C. P. Campbell (1995) argued that news coverage of Martin Luther King Day celebrations reduced the event to episodic anecdotes about successful African American families, while failing to thematize the issue with in-depth analysis of the current conditions of African Americans in the United States (see pp. 85-112).
In contrast to news coverage of African Americans, U.S. popular culture portrays African Americans almost exclusively as middle and upper-middle class. Gray (1989) argued that these middle-class portrayals function as evidence that the American Dream is available to anyone who is willing to take personal responsibility for achieving success, and as further evidence that the lower-class African Americans on the news are responsible for their own poverty. In focus group interviews with White viewers of the popular 1980s sitcom The Cosby Show, Jhally and Lewis (1992) argued that the portrayal of the upper-middle class Huxtable family had precisely this effect; the majority of the White participants articulated that The Cosby Show represented the arrival of a racially-just society and was evidence that programs such as Affirmative Action are no longer needed.
Thus, therapeutic rhetoric reframes systemic racial problems as the individual failings of African Americans and other minorities, who are unable to take personal responsibility for their own success. Cloud (1998a, pp. 55-84; 1998b) argued that this scapegoating of minorities for systemic problems pervades in the rhetoric of family values. In the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, for example, politicians such as Dan Quayle blamed systemic racial issues surrounding the Rodney King uprising on the personal failings of negligent families through the rhetoric of family values, which “offered a utopian return to a mythic familial ideal even as it scapegoated private families—especially those headed by single parents, racial minorities, and the poor—for structural social problems” (Cloud, 1998b, p. 388). At the same time, family values rhetoric scapegoats women for these systemic problems; according to the therapeutic rhetoric of family values, if women remained in more traditional roles, their families would not break down, and social unrest would not occur.
Peck (1994, 1995) argued that therapeutic rhetoric about both race and gender-related issues are prevalent on talk shows. The format of talk shows lends itself easily to therapeutic discourse; individuals present problems, and the host, audience members, and guest “experts” try to help these individuals cope. Similarly, Cloud (1996) argued that Oprah Winfrey has self-consciously created the persona of a therapeutic “token” of African American success, a message that is echoed through her program’s lack of rhetoric that deviates from the therapeutic.
Feminist discourse that posits that “the personal is political” is oppositional to therapeutic discourse. This phrase, allegedly coined by Carol Hanisch (1970), was a central principle of the women’s liberation movement; it posits that women’s personal struggles with patriarchal men and oppressive gender roles are indivisible from broader political issues that affect many women. In accordance with the philosophy that the personal is political, feminists in the 1970s formed “consciousness-raising groups,” in which women were encouraged to develop a feminist consciousness by using their problems as starting point for understanding how patriarchy affects women as a class. As Hanisch argued, consciousness-raising groups did not reflect traditional therapy’s goal of helping women adapt to society, but rather encouraged women to transform society:
Therapy assumes that someone is sick and that there is a cure, e.g., a personal solution. I am greatly offended that I or any other woman is thought to need therapy in the first place. Women are messed over, not messed up! We need to change the objective conditions, not adjust to them. Therapy is adjusting to your bad personal alternative. (p. 76)
“The personal is political” is oppositional to therapeutic discourse because it challenges the therapeutic assumption that widespread discontent with systemic issues should be reframed as personal “dis-ease.” Rather, “the personal is political” challenges discontented individuals to channel their discontent into social activism. Unlike therapeutic rhetoric, which scapegoats the “failings” of women and minorities for systemic problems, “the personal is political” places blame on the system, and implores individuals to change the system.
Below, I introduce two popular culture controversies, and analyze a sample of 345 U.S. newspaper articles, newspaper columns, letters to the editor, and Internet posts relating to these controversies. I then demonstrate how the terministic screen of individualism constrained Americans from discussing the political implications of several prominent popular culture texts. When critics charged that these texts had political implications, many Americans insisted that these texts should be understood exclusively as sites of personal pleasure. These Americans rejected oppositional discourse that posited “the personal” habit of entertainment consumption “is political,” and instead therapeutically argued that “dis-eased” individuals who are unhappy with the media need to change their consumption habits or attitudes.
Two Popular Culture Controversies
Taco Bell
In July 1997, the Taco Bell Corporation introduced an ad campaign starring Dinky, a Chihuahua with a penchant for the corporation’s Mexican fast food. At the end of most of the ads, Dinky says, “Yo quiero Taco Bell” (“I want some Taco Bell”). Some of the ads alluded to images of Latin American revolutions; for example, in an ad for a flatbread taco called a gordita, Dinky appears in a beret on a verandah overlooking a cheering crowd and cries, “Viva gorditas!”
The Dinky ad campaign was a huge success for Taco Bell. In March 1998, USA Today reported that the campaign was one of the three most popular it had ever measured in its Ad Track poll (Enrico, 1998, p. 4B). The punchline “Yo quiero Taco Bell” became “part of American pop culture-speak, right up there with ‘Where’s the beef?’” (Bidwell, 1998, p. C5).
The campaign caused controversy among some Mexican American and Latin American groups, who protested the ads. In April 1998, Gabriel Cazares, the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) chapter in Clearwater, Florida, called the dog a demeaning stereotype of Mexican Americans and a hate crime, and called for a national boycott of the chain (Payton, 1998, p. 2A). In New York, members of the National Hispanic Republican Assembly protested the use of a dog to represent Mexican culture, the image of the Latino blindly following a mythical figure, and the ridicule of Latino accents (Salcedo, 1998, p. A04). In August 1998, several leaders of the California chapter of LULAC staged a poorly attended protest at a local Taco Bell (Gurza, 1998, p. E01). Other protesters, especially Cuban Americans, complained about the gordita “revolution” ads that portray the dog ostensibly as Che Guevara (Salcedo, 1998, p. A04).
In response to articles about the protests, columnists and letter-to-the-editor writers across the United States derided the protesters. These responses are analyzed later. The analysis also includes a thread from the milw.general newsgroup (the newsgroup’s official purpose is to focus on local Milwaukee issues), which contains a heated discussion of the ads. The discussion was started by a user named Stacy Alexander (who stated she was a minority but who apparently was not Latina), who argued vehemently that the campaign was as racist as “ads would be which depicted African Americans in some stereotypical manufactured image such as eating watermelon or picking cotton” (Alexander, 1998). In the informal setting of the newsgroup discussion, she received many “flames” for her position.
KQRS
KQRS, a classic rock radio station in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, is best known for its popular “shock-jock” morning radio show, led by Tom Barnard and his “barnyard” morning crew. The announcers frequently ridicule people and tell ethnic jokes, including jokes about the Hmong, a group of mostly Laotian refugees who have settled in the Twin Cities area since the Vietnam War. The controversy began on the June 9, 1998 broadcast, when the morning crew made light of a news story about a 13-year-old Hmong rape victim who gave birth alone in a YMCA restroom in nearby Eau Claire, Wisconsin, panicked, and then left her baby to die. The morning crew graphically described how the tiny girl’s vagina had been ripped while giving birth to the eight-pound baby, and made jokes about torn vaginas. Commenting that the girl could be fined $10,000, Barnard said, “$10,000? That’s a lot of egg rolls.” They admonished the girl’s mother for saying their life in America was just as hard as it had been in a refugee camp. In response to this, Barnard said, “Assimilate or hit the goddamn road” (Holston, 1998a, p. 1E).
In response to this incident and the morning crew’s other mockeries of the Hmong community, a group of Hmong and other citizens formed an organization called Community Action Against Racism (CAAR). CAAR demanded that KQRS issue an apology, stop mocking the Hmong, and end a recurring skit about a stereotypical Asian character. CAAR hosted several well-publicized rallies in downtown St. Paul. KQRS initially was dismissive of the protestors, but finally apologized after major companies pulled their ads from the station.
CAAR received more public support than the Taco Bell protesters. Many citizens wrote letters to the editor in support, as did columnists such as the Minnesota Star Tribune’s Noel Holston, who denounced the morning show; he wrote, “Would anybody with a shred of [decency] treat this sort of story as a comic possibility? Who are the real barbarians here?” (Holston, 1998a, p. 1E). Many other citizens, however, supported KQRS and denounced CAAR’s actions in therapeutic ways. Holston reported that more than 100 readers wrote to him in response to his column, and over 60% of the writers disagreed with him, some quite angrily (Holston, 1998b, p. 8E). The analysis below contains some of these responses, as well as letters to the editor. In addition, the analysis includes a discussion about the KQRS issue from the Minnesota Star Tribune’s on line “Talk” site. Notably, this conversation contains no participants who identified themselves as Hmong.
Therapeutic Responses to Popular Culture Controversies
The responses to critics who politicized the Taco Bell Chihuahua ads and the KQRS broadcast reflect the terministic screen of individualism and therapeutic discourse within which many Americans operate. These therapeutic responses can be categorized into four interpretive frameworks: (1) everyday people versus the critic, (2) consumerism versus citizenship, (3) therapeutic parodic reversal, and (4) scapegoating the victim.
Everyday People Versus the Critic
In the Taco Bell controversy, negative commentary by critics was countered with evidence that the “people” enjoyed the advertisements or were not offended by them. The “people” were portrayed as mainstream, everyday Americans who were rational in that they understood that one should not read too deeply into popular culture. Critics, who sometimes were referred to sarcastically as experts, were portrayed as elitists who were outside the mainstream and were irrational because they attributed political implications to popular culture.
One columnist argued, “Having watched the advertisement more than 40 times, often with friends, I have only heard compliments for the little rascal. So many people, in fact, like the dog that Taco Bell is selling T-shirts starting in April” (Close, 1998, p. 6). Other writers argued that most Latinos liked the ads, and therefore they were not offensive. These arguments came both from Latinos, some of whom used their own opinion of the ads as evidence that they were not offensive, and non-Latinos. Defenders of the ads argued that Taco Bell had presented the ads to Latino focus groups, who found the ads funny and nonoffensive (Reddick, 1998, Business & Finance, p. 1). One newsgroup writer contrasted the newsgroup’s critic Stacy Alexander’s politicization of the ads with the experience of the Latino community in Tampa Bay:
Our friend Stacy Alexander is wringing her head about the racism SHE sees in the Taco Bell ads. I live in the Tampa Bay area which has a LARGE Hispanic population, Cuban and Mexican (not to mention Puerto Rican). A recent SURVEY of the Tampa Bay area Hispanic community showed that LESS than 1% of the Hispanic people felt the ads were offensive in any way. 99% found them to be funny. (PangK, 1998)
Detractors in the Taco Bell controversy insulted critics with ad hominem attacks, especially in the newsgroup where one user asserted angrily, “I can see that you have a serious problem, Stacy … It’s folks like you, the feel-good police, that start race problems” (R & S, Inc., 1998). In the newspaper arguments, writers accused Taco Bell critics of being silly and petty, and for trying to turn a nonpolitical issue into a political one. Several writers argued that Hispanics have more serious political matters to concern themselves with than a fast food commercial about a talking dog. For example, one Seattle Times columnist argued:
Only in America can a four-legged mascot for junk food be held responsible for the collective civil-rights violations of an entire ethnic group … In a rare exhibition of common sense, the national office of LULAC distanced the organization from Cezares’ Dump-Dinky campaign. LULAC president Belen Robles says simply, “We have many more important, substantive things to worry about” (Malkin, 1998, p. B4).
The everyday people versus the critic interpretive frame also was present in the KQRS controversy, although less frequently. Detractors argued that elitist critics ought not to complain because the morning show was popular. One irate respondent to Holston’s critique of KQRS in the Star Tribune wrote:
Dear Pukenose: Who do you think you are? What makes you so qualified to critique Tom Barnard and the gang? … The real reason that pompous media critics like yourself can’t stand the “KQRS Morning Show” is because Tom Barnard’s comments about issues make a lot of sense in a society that makes no sense whatsoever. Average people like myself are sick of being lied to by politicians, sports team owners/presidents and … other powerful officials (Holston, 1998b, p. 8E).
Thus, everyday people, according to this construction, should not politicize popular culture, or they risk taking on the persona of petty, elitist critics. This reflects therapeutic rhetoric in that people are admonished not to consider the systemic implications of popular culture, but rather to experience popular culture exclusively on the level of individual pleasure. Hegemonically, everyday people are disciplined to not examine the systemic implications of popular culture, as this activity will result in ridicule, ad hominem attacks, and comparisons to the “irrational” critics. Thus, the systemic implications of these popular culture texts largely remain unchallenged.
Consumerism versus Citizenship
Lewis and Jhally (1998) argued that media literacy programs in the United States “should be about helping people to become sophisticated citizens rather than sophisticated consumers” (p. 109). They criticized U.S. media literacy efforts that only teach students to analyze media messages, and instead called for contextual media education that problematizes the U.S. capitalist media system as a whole. Current efforts at media education, they argued, teach students to become more critical consumers of products, but do not encourage Americans to become more active in their roles as media citizens. Consumption, after all, is a personal action. Citizenship is political. Unfortunately, they argued, media activism is not appreciated in the United States because “Americans have become used to a system of top-down control, where a citizen’s input is restricted to being a blip in the Nielsen ratings and where commercial conditions are inexorably paramount” (p. 114).
Americans who actively protest popular culture texts are media citizens who believe their relationship to the media should be more than just their consumer role as “a blip in the Nielsen ratings.” Because media activism is seen as irrelevant to the quality of public life, as Lewis and Jhally argued, these activities often are viewed as outside the mainstream and unnecessary.
This was apparent in the KQRS controversy. Detractors frequently argued that if protestors did not like the morning show, they should take individual action as consumers: Turn the radio off, or change the station! Altering one’s consumer behavior, detractors argued, was the only legitimate way to protest media content. One letter-to-the editor writer wrote, “If people do not like what Tom Barnard is saying, turn off his show. This is the most powerful tool that you have. Simply bitching about the show’s formats, characters, and content will do you nothing” (Roefels, 1998, p. 7). One user argued that although he too disliked the program, he had enacted the proper behavior by no longer listening; he wrote, “I more or less just lost interest in the whole deal, and simply didn’t find the program as funny as I think it once was. But I can let it go, and certainly don’t feel any need to keep listening in, or to try and influence some kind of change in what they’re doing” (Baumgartner, 1998).
One user went so far as to express hostility that, as media activists, CAAR wanted to change people’s minds about what station to listen to:
THEY WANT TO USE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO CHANGE MINDS. This is when a flag goes up and the red lights start flashing for me. It is when others are trying to change my mind. KQ has their audience defined. They are NOT trying to change minds. They want you to listen, be entertained, experience enjoyment and hopefully remember the names of some of their advertisers … If you want to provide an alternative, raise funds, pool your resources, buy a station and go into competition with his morning show. This is how is it done in America (Simon, 1998).
In the United States, according to this user, you can adapt to the existing media system by trying to create your own media messages (if you have the resources to do so). However, in America it is inappropriate to create discourse about existing media messages that try to change people’s minds about them— in other words, to be a media activist.
Furthermore, many users at the Star Tribune online site argued that CAAR’s media activism was an infringement of free speech. One user wrote, “What Tom says is right to free speech. If you don’t like what he says, you have every right to change radio stations like he has the right to say what he wants” (Blaschko, 1998). Notably, these users did not classify CAAR’s media activism as a manifestation of their own right to free speech.
The Star Tribune online discussion took a notable tangent when users discussed the poor quality of KQRS as a radio station and suggested listening alternatives. Here, the conversation about the political implications of KQRS took a more acceptable turn as users discussed the quality of KQRS as a consumer commodity. This discussion, which received no animosity from other users, was within the frame of acceptable consumer behavior
This interpretive framework reflects therapeutic rhetoric in that concerns with the political implications of KQRS are reduced to individual “disease,” which can be resolved easily through altering one’s consumer behavior. Detractors called on protestors to rechannel their media activism, literally, by changing the channel.
Therapeutic Parodic Reversal
K. Campbell (1998) argued that one of the primary rhetorical strategies of the feminist movement and other social movement has been parodic reversal, a type of parody that satirizes a common social practice by reversing gender, race, class, or other roles in order to illuminate the social constructedness of those roles. Campbell used the example of Gloria Steinem’s essay, “If Men Could Menstruate,” in which menstruation became a symbol of manliness and braggery, as opposed to the embarrassing “curse” it is for women. Parodic reversal is a powerful rhetorical strategy because, as Campbell argued, it raises “consciousness by calling received wisdom into question” (p. 114). Menstruation is a personal, private experience for women, and most do not consider that the shame and embarrassment women associate with their periods is a gendered response that women share as a class. Parodic reversal is a powerful strategy because it politicizes everyday practices that typically are seen as personal.
As this analysis of popular culture controversies indicates, however, parodic reversal also can be used to do the opposite: It can be used to call into question the politicization of an everyday practice and argue that this practice should be seen as personal and not political. I call this strategy “therapeutic parodic reversal.” These reversals typically reason that the representation of a minority is not political by replacing the role of the minority with a nonminority. Therapeutic parodic reversal operates within the individualistic myth of the American Dream that there is no significant power structure in the United States and that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed—and therefore, representations of women and minorities are as apolitical and innocuous as representations of White men.
In the Taco Bell controversy, detractors frequently argued that complaints about representations of Mexicans in commercials were as ridiculous as criticism of other ethnic representations in commercials. One columnist argued sarcastically, “I happen to be of Scottish decent, and I’m deeply offended that every time some local hardware store has a sale, they drag out those tired old ‘50s drawings of kilt-wearing bagpipe blowing Scotsmen and stick a plaid border on the ad … And the Irish are particularly in need of advocacy, what with the Lucky Charms leprechaun” (Beatts, 1998, p. E10). Referring to a Budweiser campaign that featured lizards with Italian accents, one letter-to-the-editor writer argued, “Heaven knows, I have yet to hear any of my Italian relatives complaining about Budweiser’s irresponsible representation of Italian-Americans as mob-linked lizards” (Bryson, 1998, p. 14). Notably, all the ethnic commercials discussed in this manner involved representations of White ethnicities, such as Irish, Italian, or Scandinavian; no African American, for example, argued that criticism of Taco Bell ads were as “silly” as criticism of Sambo or Aunt Jemima ads.
Several writers sarcastically argued that offense should be taken, not at the portrayal of Mexicans, but at the portrayal of Chihuahuas. One newsgroup writer responded to the local critic with, “Next you will be posting about how the Chihuahua is being exploited. ATTENTION: Chihuahuas everywhere … Protest at Taco Bell headquarters at noon Sunday … Fire hydrants provided. Free milk bones to all participants” (Glaxo99, 1998). One writer penned a letter-to-the-editor from her “Italian canine-American” Greyhound, Fabio, and argued that the real problem was a lack of respect for small dogs (Nottonson, 1998, p. O24). In another variation of therapeutic depoliticization, a user on milw.general sarcastically argued that Taco Bell’s truly offensive behavior was naming a product gordita, which in Spanish means “little fat woman” (Zabel, 1998b).
Detractors of the KQRS protestors also argued that they themselves were not offended by slurs directed at their own ethnicities. As with the Taco Bell controversy, all of the ethnicities referred to in this way were White ethnicities. Several writers compared the morning crew’s Hmong jokes to “Ole & Lena” jokes about Scandinavians, one of the most prominent ethnic groups in Minnesota. One writer argued,
The ethnic jokes have been around for years. Ole & Lena, Polack jokes, Jewish Princesses, Father Guido Sarducci of SNL, Iowa people, etc. While they may not be PC, they’ve been around forever. I for one do not take Ole & Lena or dumb blonde jokes as a personal insult or a slam against my heritage. (Hendrickson, 1998)
Other writers in the KQRS controversy argued that the Hmong jokes should not be politicized because the morning crew makes fun of people of all ethnicities. Similarly, KQRS morning crew member Mike Gelfand argued, “The truth is, we make fun of everybody’s culture—most of all, of course, the culture of wealthy White men, but sooner or later we get around to everyone else” (Gelfand, 1998, p. 25A).
As Cloud (1998b) argues, therapeutic rhetoric operates within the assumption that equal opportunity exists for individuals of all races in the United States, and therefore those minorities who are not successful are scapegoated for their individual failure. Similarly, therapeutic parodic reversal operates under the assumption that there is no genuine social inequality in the United States, and therefore negative representations of marginalized people are as inconsequential as negative representations of nonmarginalized people. Those who politicize these representations are scapegoated for racializing a representation that is seen through therapeutic discourse as innocuous. The blame is placed on individuals who are offended by these “innocuous” representations, while the socially inequitable system that renders some representations more innocuous than others escapes blame. This leads to the fourth therapeutic interpretive framework through which popular culture critics were admonished, the “scapegoat the victim” interpretive framework.
Scapegoating the Victim
A final therapeutic response to the popular culture controversies was the scapegoating of victims. In these responses, the individuals who were offended by the texts were blamed for causing the controversy by being humorless and oversensitive, and were accused of “playing the victim.” KQRS morning crew member Mike Gelfand wrote, “We figure if we can’t make fun of you, you are a helpless victim. Which is a bad thing” (Gelfand, 1998, 25A).
One common strategy within this interpretive framework was to claim that messages only become offensive if thin-skinned, oversensitive individuals claimed they were offended by them. Messages are not political; they are innocuous, and it is the responsibility of the individual not to take them too seriously. For example, a newsgroup user wrote about the Taco Bell controversy, “You can only be offended if you choose to allow yourself to be offended. Grown-ups have overcome these hang-ups” (Zabel, 1998a). A Star Tribune online user wrote, “[An epithet] seems to gain hate status by the reaction of the recipient more than the intention of the sender. If you allow someone to bring out a reaction, then that is a personal issue that you need to deal with … The point is that no matter what is said, it is the reaction to that statement that will give it credence” (Shook, 1998).
Additionally, in the Star Tribune online discussion of the controversy, the Hmong themselves were scapegoated for the comments made by Barnard and his crew because, according to some users, they had not properly assimilated into U.S. culture. These were by far the most overtly racist arguments in this sample. One user exclaimed, “The Hmong should consider themselves very, very lucky to be here!! I’m with Tom B. Assimilate to OUR ways (which includes freedom of speech) or get back on the boats” (Olson, 1998). Partly in response to the chants at the CAAR rally of “two, four, six, eight, we will not assimilate,” these users argued that the Hmong had not tried hard enough to assimilate to U.S. culture, and therefore deserved the wrath of the KQRS morning crew and others. The Hmong were accused of not trying to learn English or adapt to U.S. culture, while still demanding welfare benefits. Some users expressed this more explicitly than others; one user wrote:
The Irish, Scandinavian, German, etc. melted into the pot because there was a concerted effort to assimilate socially. English was stressed, clothing style was adopted and everyone wanted to fit into some perceived American ideal. That no longer is the case. Now, concerted effort is made, not by individuals, but by whole groups, to dress, speak, and act differently. (Houn, 1998a)
As an analogy for why the Hmong are to blame for anti-Hmong attitudes, this user went on to scapegoat Jewish Zionists in part for Nazi anti-Semitism because the Zionists called attention to their differences (Houn, 1998b).
In fact, most of the second half of the online discussion focused on the issue of Hmong assimilation. Many users defended the Hmong; they argued that assimilation is difficult and that others should have compassion, especially because their own ancestors were immigrants. Others, however, argued explicitly that Hmong culture is fundamentally flawed, as did this user:
This thread all along has been about the segment of certain communities that band together along cultural lines, expect welfare handouts, expect to repress the citizens of their community and receive government aid in doing so (as in the treatment of girls)—and demand that they have the right to carry on exactly as they would in their home countries right down [to] sacrificing chickens and placing hoodoo-voodoo curses on people during civil and criminal trials … It is about classes filled with kids that can’t speak English and a school system which needs to accommodate them at the expense of English speaking students. (Malone, 1998)
The Hmong themselves, these users argued, deserve their derision. The personal failings of the Hmong people have earned them political scorn. The “scapegoat the victim” interpretive framework, thus, therapeutically blames those who protest popular culture representations for causing the controversy, therefore deflecting blame from the producers of the popular culture text itself and the system that fosters this kind of racist representations. This interpretive framework calls upon protestors to rechannel their “dis-ease” into behavioral modifications— either by developing a thicker skin or by assimilating into U.S. culture. As is characteristic of therapeutic rhetoric, racial disharmony is not blamed on the system, but rather on “dis-ease(d)” individuals.
Conclusions
This article demonstrates two instances of popular culture controversies where discourse about the political implications of popular culture was constrained considerably. As this analysis demonstrates, the ability of Americans to discuss the political implications of popular culture texts is limited by the terministic screen of individualism and therapeutic rhetoric. Therapeutic rhetoric attempts to rechannel citizens’ discontent with popular culture texts as personal “dis-ease” that can be cured through a change in consumer behavior or attitude.
Because therapeutic rhetoric and the terministic screen of individualism constrain Americans in their ability to consider the critical implications of popular culture, Americans likewise are constrained hegemonically from challenging the status quo power structure of the United States on several levels. On one level, in an environment of media consolidation and market censorship, resistance to critical interrogation of popular culture allows the products of powerful media corporations to escape critical scrutiny. On another level, resistance to critical interrogations of popular culture constrains citizens from questioning the therapeutic assumption that there is equal opportunity in the United States for all regardless of race, gender, or other factor. In both of these examples of popular culture controversies, critics argued that the texts in question were disturbing because they reinforced racial inequality in the United States. The dismissal of the notion that popular culture reflects systemic inequalities functions as a barrier to discuss the very existence of these inequalities. Thus, therapeutic rhetoric hegemonically fosters order as it subdues systemic cultural criticism.
The terministic screen of individualism and therapeutic rhetoric may well serve as an arduous obstacle for the media literacy movement in the United States. Media educators need to be cognizant of the terministic screen of individualism, the ways in which this terministic screen constrains Americans from engaging in critical discourse about popular culture, and the therapeutic reactions one might expect from U.S. students, administrators, and other citizens. As this study indicates, media literacy may be a daunting task in the United States—but it is also a crucial task. In a culture where prevalent and powerful messages are regarded as innocuous, and discourse about these messages is regarded as illegitimate and petty, media educators have a responsibility to promote democracy by persuading Americans that we must engage in critical discourse about our popular culture.