PBS FRONTLINE: "American Voices 2024" (Five O'Clock Films, Mike Shum Productions, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, aired October 29, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

After the documentary on High Noon, KPBS showed a Frontline presentation called “American Voices 2024,” which had an interesting derivation. The original “American Voices: A Nation in Turmoil” was made by filmmakers and journalists Mike Shum, Qinling Li and Arthur Nazaryan and shown just before the 2020 election. The 2020 version focused on the COVID-19 pandemic; the surge of “Black Lives Matter” protests following the murder of unarmed African-American George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin; and the Presidential election between then-incumbent Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden. According to Mike Shum (who’s credited as director, while Li and Nazaryan are two of the four credited producers), the 2024 incarnation came about as a result of a conversation with two other members of the team in which they said, “[W]hat if we revisited each of the people we had been following in 2020 for this coming election? And, for me at least, it was a natural ‘yes.’ There was a natural curiosity about where everyone was at. To be able to engage with them in this capacity was something that I was very much interested in doing. It just flows with the mission and the mandate that we started with of creating this wider tapestry of individuals across the country facing a collective unknown.”

The team had recruited a fascinatingly diverse group of people in various locations for the 2020 original, including Cary K. Gordon, senior pastor of the Cornerstone World Outreach mega-church in Sioux City, Iowa; Bryant Moore, African-American barber from Portland, Oregon; Rod and Rosie Borba, co-owners of a flower shop in Cool, California; Carran Lewis, a Black woman community activist from North Chesterfield, Virginia; Amy Garner from Utah, whose brother committed suicide in the early days of COVID-19; Dr. Christine Eady Mann, a family practitioner in Cedar Park, Texas; Mayra Ramirez from Chicago, an early victim of COVID-19 who went through two lung transplants in an effort to keep her alive; Tayo Daniel, Black activist from South Minneapolis, Minnesota, who helped organize protests against the police over the George Floyd killing; Royce White, an African-American pro-Trump U.S. Senate candidate in Minnesota; Mark Curtis, construction company owner and father of four in Richmond, Virginia; and Jason Tolentino and his Asian-born wife Jaime, co-owners of a beauty parlor in Oakland, California. If there’s a message in this show, it’s that the divisions within America’s electorate don’t always shake out the way you’d think they would. Rosie Borba said in 2020 that her feeling about the Black Lives Matter movement was, “All lives matter. Not just Black, not pink, white or purple. It's not just one race.” “All lives matter” had become a talking point among American Rightists who wanted to diminish the significance of centuries of slavery, segregation and violence against African-Americans. But Rosie immediately insisted that that wasn’t her intent at all; she added, “I think it's wrong, basically, what the officer did. I think he should pay a price for what he did. But I look back in history. I had a great-great-grandfather that helped with the slaves. He helped run the Underground Railroad. He was ambushed by white people who felt the slaves should stay slaves. So when they sit there and say every white person is racist or bad, I'm not racist. I'm not bad. I'm a human being. I respect them, I expect to be respected back.”

Rosie Barba was also expressing doubts about Joe Biden’s age in 2020, before he took office and well before his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump on June 27, 2024 that led to a groundswell of opposition within the Democratic Party that ultimately drove him from the Presidential race four weeks later. (It still strikes me as odd that people dwell on Biden’s age but not on Trump’s; Trump is just three years younger and his increasingly incoherent public statements are raising doubts in the reality-based community about his level of cognition and sanity.) Mark Curtis, who in many ways was the most interesting of their interviewees, is shown becoming gradually more disillusioned with America’s political system and the choices it offers. In 2024 he decided to vote for the Libertarian Party candidate rather than either Trump or Biden and said, “I'm tired of people voting for the lesser of two evils—voting Democrat because it's not Trump or voting Republican because it's not Biden. Wouldn't really matter who got into office, I feel like they're one and the same. I think our culture’s going to stay divided. The division that has been created here recently is something that we've regressed to that’s going to take generations to recover. I think our culture is going to be horribly scarred by this. And I don’t know what it’s going to be blamed on in the end or how it's going to be spun, but I think that our culture on the whole has gone down a deep, dark hole.” Pastor Cary Gordon, who in 2020 was sounding off against “Marxists” and their growing influence in American politics, also decided that he could not in good conscience vote for either Biden or Trump. “I will sleep good tonight because someday, as a Christian, I believe Christ will return and all wrongs will be righted and justice will prevail,” Gordon told his parishioners. “And my job is to keep speaking the truth as a minister.” The Tolentinos were ambiguous as to whom they voted for in 2020; Jason said, “I would rather not say who I voted for. I just want everything to come back to normal, that's all I'm praying for, really. People will be surprised, but I don't want to say who I voted for.” Jaime said, “I just vote for myself. Or I vote for the lady. No, I vote for the lady! I don't know who she is, but it seems like she's the only lady, so I vote for the lady. I vote for the woman!” – which led me to guess that in 2020 Jason voted for Trump and Jaime for Biden because he’d put Kamala Harris on his ticket.

Dr. Christine Mann, who seemed to have been radicalized by the Right-wing opposition to common-sense public-health measures to deal with COVID-19, said her first choice for President in 2020 had been Kamala Harris, “who thankfully is the vice presidential candidate, soon to be the vice president.” In 2024 she’s shown walking her precinct for the Harris-Walz ticket and encountering scads of Trump yard signs as she goes through her neighborhood. Mark Curtis is shown in a video with his son Hudson, who’d just joined Junior ROTC, but his pride in his son is tempered by his growing disillusionment with politics in general. “There's a bit of inner turmoil with Hudson being in the JROTC program as well as my distrust in the government,” Curtis said. “I love the values that he's going to learn going through this program, as well as the values that he could be taught in the military. I think he wants to follow in the footsteps of people who've done great things for our country, for our freedoms. I very much worry that he has great potential of being in the military and being pulled into an endless war that costs American lives, costs billions of American dollars, and to what gain?” The filmmakers organized a watch party with some of the interviewees for the September 10, 2024 debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and when Trump made his now-infamous statement about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio – “They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the pets. They're eating – They're eating the pets of the people that live there” – Black activist Tayo Daniel said, “Now, that’s bullshit.” Jason Tolentino said, “I just can’t believe he said that thing about the dogs. [Laughs] They’re eating dogs. I don't know what to believe, honestly, on that one.”

At the same time, Mark Curtis expressed outrage at Harris’s proposals for tax credits for new mothers and small-business startups, “So we're giving away more money,” he said. “When do I get that $50,000 for having a small business?” When Trump made his bizarre claim that “under Roe v. Wade you could do abortions in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month and probably after birth,” Dr. Mann said, “Why is he such a liar?” And when Harris said that “people start leaving [Trump’s] rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” Amy Garner’s husband Matthew said, “That’s rich for her to say that,” which made me wonder if he’s one of the Right-wing space cases who believes the photos of Harris’s rallies were created with artificial intelligence. As I’ve been pointing out regularly in my journal, the statement Lawrence O’Donnell keeps quoting from his former boss, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York), that “everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own set of facts,” is no longer true. Today the media landscape is so fragmented that everyone is entitled to their own set of facts. Those of us on the Left side of the political spectrum flock to media outlets like MS-NBC (while lamenting that as a part of the corporate media, it isn’t and can’t be even remotely as progressive as we’d like), while people on the Right watch Fox News or even more radical-Right Web sites like Newsmax and One America News. And the basically decent people who were interviewed for American Voices both in 2020 and 2024 – the only people who didn’t make the cut were Mayra Ramirez, who died of long-term complications from COVID-19 in 2022, and Rod and Rosie Borba; since Rod died in 2023, Rosie sold their flower shop and moved to parts unknown – are caught in the middle and lament that their own goals for themselves and their society don’t always fit neatly into the prescribed “Left” and “Right” categories or the choices America’s increasingly dysfunctional political system gives them for who should lead the nation.