On Selling One's Body

Something happens to a person when he or she has to sell himself in order to survive. They lose their dignity; they look wormy and ugly. They lose their moral compass. Even when it's all talk.

Today, I had the dubious pleasure of watching two videos showing middle-aged white men in suits panting at people with money, acting their seductive best. We saw it only last week in the famous Scott Walker telephone call.

The more recent video showed an NPR fund-raiser hustling a couple of fake Muslims from conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe's stable of actors in an expensive Washington restaurant. This one was all over the place by mid-day Tuesday.

The earlier one was a very short, surreptitious recording of Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown hustling David Koch for campaign contributions at the dedication of Koch's new cancer research center at M.I.T. This one had to be searched out from left-leaning sites and television shows.

In the edited down version of the video linked above, the NPR fund-raiser, Ronald Schiller, says a bunch of things that are basically true, though a bit startling. He says them in a way that would be palatable to people he thinks are a couple of wealthy Muslims. He's trying to sell them on NPR because they had dangled a $5 million contribution to NPR. (As a sidelight, it's weird why he doesn't ask why a rich Nigerian is tied up with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.)

This sort of thing is what happens when public organizations have to hustle for foundation contributions to stay alive. Not just NPR, but every research lab, every college and university, every arts organization, all of them and more. (If you're not familiar with business lunches, take a look at the two-hour version of the video. They're dreadful.)

It's really no different than what you see in the few seconds of the other video -- on Scott Brown begging Koch for money for 2012. Unless a person has Bloomberg-scale millions of his own money, this is what he has do most of the time to keep his job.

The real moral of these two videos is that money talks.

I know that the debate is raging over the attack journalism tactics. Maybe they're not dignified but they're telling us something important.

I also know that more debate is raging over Schiller's words, especially what he said about racism on the right. That's another story, and I believe it is an example of what Eric Holder, the attorney general, meant when he said we don't really talk about race. People can behave racist, but no one speaks the word -- that's forbidden.

What's to be done?

I have two suggestions:

1. If you listen to public radio, or watch public television, send them a check. It's your station if you want it.
2. If you vote, avoid the guy who raised hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a lousy senate seat. It's your country if you want it.