A free range Petaluma, California media report with roots extending all the way to Appalachia, the Raucous Rooster is also a radical, unconventional holler at the working-class to recall its history, and has been the North Bay’s abattoir for sacred cows since 2013. It is reporting for an engaged citizenry, compost for feeding the soil and sowing the seeds of a sustainable democracy of, by, and for the people.
It is also, quite simply, an archive of an extraordinary moment in human history.
The late Australian sociologist Alex Carey – to whom Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky dedicated their landmark work on propaganda, media, and democracy, The Manufacture of Consent – suggested that the 20th century was characterized by three developments of great political importance:
- the growth of democracy
- the growth of corporate power
- the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power from democracy
Believing Carey’s assessment to have considerable but largely unrecognized merit, the Raucous Rooster seeks to exercise and stretch that democratic muscle, and pursue a course in continuing civic education and intellectual self defense. Such an effort is an absolute necessity in an age when corporations have been granted the rights of people, whose protected speech is expressed in dollars.
Unfortunately corporate and U.S. government-produced propaganda is an intrinsic element of U.S. democracy and exceptionalism in the 21st century, and must be countered by engaged democrats everywhere. To that end, particularly on the subject of mass media and how the American public obtains its news, this Rooster will crow repeatedly and at ungodly hours. It will do so frequently and loudly in support of small-scale farming using agroecological methods, an essential element of preparations for the end of the Age of Oil and a crucial means of mitigating climate change.
Anti-imperialist in orientation, RR aims to support all efforts to end the Military Industrial Complex which has so successfully militarized the planet and U.S. foreign policy that it is presumed the norm that every dilemma facing humanity has a weaponized solution which Uncle Sam will cheerily provide. Tip o’ the hat to Smedley Butler for the heads-up about war being a racket, and to Ike for warning us about the M.I.C. on his way out the door. If only he’d not cemented its firm grip over our society, and fueled Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist hysteria before doing so.
Historian Bruce Cumings, in his preface to the 1988 edition of I.F. Stone’s Hidden History of the Korean War, pointed to the historical dilemma we enjoy continually exploring at the Raucous Rooster:
People with a built-in indifference to history are ill accustomed to retrospective digging, to lifting up rugs, to searching for subterranean forces and tendencies. Exploring the labyrinth of history is alien to the American soul, perhaps because an optimistic people find knowledge of the past too burdensome in the present.
