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"Baltimore Believe": The Black Art of Propaganda

When I first saw the tail end of the "Baltimore Believe" video while changing channels, I thought I had stumbled across one of those awful Partners for a Drug-Free America ads that flood the late night airwaves. But this video went on for too long, way too long and the part I saw , which had a cheap melodramatic clunker of a story line, ending (conveniently) with a little girl getting shot, left me cold. Who would put out such manipulative crap, complete with a solemn Jack Webb-type voice over intoning the ways people can "take back our city?" It was only as the credits rolled that I saw the "Baltimore Believe" Campaign is a product of an anti-drug coalition, including what is arguably our very own local "Axis of Evil": the Mayor, the Police Department and the business community.

Since then, like the ravings of some lunatic end of the world religious cult, ominous black billboards with the word "Believe" printed in bold, white letters have started to crop up in the city. What more is in store, inquiring minds want to know?

Don't be fooled; "Baltimore Believe" is state-sponsored propaganda of the worst sort, as ham-fisted and oppressive as one of those Nazi newsreels from the 30s you see on the History Channel. Like all propaganda campaigns, "Baltimore Believe" is designed to deflect attention away from the REAL culprits and the REAL source of problems and instead simply put the blame elsewhere for troubles that each of the 3 partners have substantially created on their own in the city. A Democratic Mayor, who like his predecessors, has closed libraries and recreation centers and basically acts as a hit-man for downtown business interests, a sector whose "civic activism", in turn, has consisted in re-directing as many tax deferments and outright subsidies away from distressed neighborhoods and into their accounting ledgers, can hardly take the moral high ground and point the finger elsewhere, especially down at those who have suffered the most from the effects of their policies and decisions. And, as an astute Op-ed piece by Ed Burns, one of the authors of "The Corner" correctly pointed out, not one penny of the considerable money bankrolled for "Baltimore Believe" is aimed at alleviating any of the mounting problems of the poor and working class of the city.

Yes, a lot of people remember the days when you could sleep on your porch on a hot summer night, when you could sit on your stoops and sip a Colt 45 without risking a bullet (or an arrest, for that matter), when you didn't have to live behind bars and grates more suitable for a prison than a home. By focusing on the symptoms rather than the essence, it is exactly these feelings that "Baltimore Believe" wants to exploit and direct elsewhere rather than where the culpability belongs, in the spreading rot in the structure and foundation. The simplistic solutions offered in this slickly calculating campaign will have as much relevance and success in tackling the city's systemic problems as wearing a smiley face button has to curing a major depression. But roping people into "empowering" themselves to "do more" - the proposed remedies ranging from the merely insulting, such as picking up the trash in the alleys (when a well-staffed sanitation department used to do so before all the Mayors' lay-offs) to the truly foul (having one half of the population snitch to the police on the other half) certainly takes the heat off the real sources of the stress of everyday life in the city, doesn't it?

Which, of course, is what the black art of propaganda is all about.

UPDATE

Just a few short months later, the Believe campaign is R.I.P. The tattered billboards, brilliantly captured in a SUN photo essay, came down (while the murder rate went sharply up) and the ad companies pocketed their dough. Unless, "Baltimore Believe", like "Nightmare on Elm Street" or "Friday the 13th", is fated to return for some squalid, second-rate sequel, the campaign, thankfully, appears played out.

So little return for so much money. You still see a "Believe" T-shirt or bumper sticker, undoubtedly given away, here and there but the fever pitch of the early days has evaporated. As the campaign progressed over the early summer, different slogans were trotted out every few weeks. But there is no evidence that people paid any attention to them. And why should they? Slogans like "Coming to the City to Buy Drugs? The Police Will Impound Your Car" were so out of touch with everyday reality, where in most neighborhoods it is easier after dark to buy a vial of crack than a pack of cigarettes. Or take the slogan "If you are doing drugs, you are killing yourself and killing Baltimore too", arrogantly assuming that the reason people do drugs is to kill themselves. It made you wonder at times what was being smoked in the "Baltimore Believe" command center. And as for killing the city, that already took place before the drugs, through red-lining, systematic divestment and capital flight. And the murder of Baltimore was aided and abetted by the predecessors and current cronies of the "Baltimore Believe" campaign itself. To pin the city's decline on some poor slob smoking a crack pipe is nothing but a sick, sick joke.

Despite the campaign's surface bluster and swagger, "Baltimore Believe" was, in reality, a stunning admission of defeat. The campaign was really saying, "we no longer have any answers" and all our previous solutions have failed. So we have to turn to YOU. "Baltimore Believe's" emphasis on empowerment underscored this. But empowerment in the 60s used to mean taking something back from the system; now, it's what you're left with when the system has taken from you. Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps when the shoe strings have been cut, holes punched in the soles and with an outstretched leg waiting to trip you up, if you do manage to take a step.

The problem being that people have been so used to being lied to that they no longer believe or trust in anything coming from the top. For better or worse - and it's a mixed bag - the main form of opposition today is a refusal to participate. And "Baltimore Believe" was no different in the response it got from anything else the system promotes. Stunning silence and sullen indifference.

CP