Dissent in Porterville

Michael Carley of Porterville is director of institutional research at Porterville College. He wrote an editorial complaining about the Iraq War. I was amazed to see it published in the online version of the Porterville Recorder.

If Porterville is a representative example then small town America is fed a steady diet of the most extreme right wing propaganda in its local newspapers. Dissenting voices are not usually allowed. In Porterville the local newspaper is the Porterville Recorder. It is owned by something called the Freedom Newspapers which advocates for anything but freedom of thought and freedom of action.

Patrick Greene was a local resident who wanted the Protestant cross removed from the main city park where it had been erected in the 1960's. He no longer lives in Porterville.


Dear Dr. Carley:

You are a man of great courage. I can only imagine how unpopular you will become now that you have written an editorial something other than the typical right wing propaganda of Kathleen Parker, et. al., so popular in the Recorder. How a “freedom” newspaper would allow your opinion to be published puzzles me. Was the regular editor out of town?

I applaud and agree with everything you wrote. I would add an item about the “Saddam in his underwear” photos published by the London Sun and the New York Post. Both “newspapers” are owned by Rupert Murdoch who also owns FOX “news.”

Do you suppose there will be days of outrage on cable news and radio talk about the riots and deaths caused by the underwear photos? Will Rupert Murdoch be condemned by any of the hypocrites on the right? Will we hear from Parker, Limbaugh, Lars or the screaming quartet of chicken hawk patriots on Fox--O’Reilly, Hannity, Cavuto and the San Joaquin’s own, Jim Gibson? I think not.

Anything the right wing propaganda machine does is fine even when they lie about potential presidents of our country like Al Gore and John Kerry. The Machine destroyed any and all of the people who revealed inner secrets of the Bush administrations, such as the administration’s lack of diligence in protecting our country from the 9/11 disaster and the pre-war WMD lies told with intent to deceive the American public. Imagine if a Democratic president told lies to take us into a war. He would be destroyed. (Oh yeah he was—Lyndon Baines Johnson).

It seems that lies which further the right wing agenda aren’t lies at all. In fact they are even better than truth. They make such good sound bites.

Good luck with the angry phone calls. You are the true patriot. Real Americans speak up and speak out when our country is on the wrong track. True Americans fought slavery. True Americans defended Indians from genocide. True Americans rallied for a woman’s right to vote. True Americans spoke up against the internment Japanese Americans.

The Kathleen Parkers and Rupert Murdochs, and Rush Limbaughs in our early history did their best to work for the wrong and immoral side on each of those issues. Lucky for America their hate, cons and lies were limited to one newspaper at a time. Today we are not so fortunate.

If infiltration of our homes with right wing radio and Fox News had been around since 1776 instead of just the last 15 or twenty years, we would still have slaves, all the Indians would be dead, all women would be barefoot and pregnant including Kathleen Parker, and the Japanese ancestry Americans would still be in camps if not dead or deported.

The Germans thought they had a great civilization before WWII, but it turned out that the good people of Germany could be killed or beaten into submission by “patriotic” German crowd. More than twenty million people died because not enough Dietrich Bonhoeffers spoke up. I pray the same disaster does not happen to us in America.

I wish you the very best of luck. You and Patrick Greene are the real Patriots in Porterville.

Sincerely,
Peter Welch—darwindad@cox.net
Former resident and subscriber to what we then fondly called the Porterville Distorter.

PS—I came to Porterville as a brand new starry-eyed middle school teacher proud of what I was doing. One of the first editorials in the Recorder that I read sticks with me still. It informed me and all public school teachers in the city that we were pigs eating at the public trough and we should be eternally grateful for any scrap of pay or benefit we were tossed. We should remember that all of our salaries came out of the pockets of those who “really” worked for a living.

I remember being shocked, hurt, and depressed that anyone could feel that way about such a noble giving profession that I had worked hard to join, let alone print such nastiness in our local paper. It was even worse that the person who wrote the vitriol was the editor of the paper no less.

Today with your editorial “the world has turned upside down” and momentarily a different viewpoint was on the pages of the Porterville Recorder. May today’s King Georges and their Cornwallish henchman always be defeated by words and actions of brave patriots like you.