November 6, 2006--Overwhelment
Until the other day I thought that the Republicans’ basic political strategy was distraction. Do anything to keep the public focused on marginal wedge issues such as gay marriage, prayer in schools, flag burning, and John Kerry. They knew that more Americans were tuning in on TV to watch Dancing With Stars than even Fox News. So they came up with their equivalent entertainments to distract us from the developing chaos in Iraq, the rising death rate of US soldiers, the unraveling in Afghanistan, the A Bomb in North Korea, the doubling of the national debt to 8.0 trillion, and of course Mark Foley and how his transgressions were being covered up.
This strategy of distraction was always aided and abetted by shameless lying. The bigger and more extensive the lying, it must have been assumed by Republican political operatives, especially if carried out over time, the more we would become befuddled and as a result the lies in the aggregate would begin to feel like the truth. This is one of the axioms of the propaganda since at least the middle of the twentieth century —that the will to believe among populations who feel fear and dislocation is so strong that it is not hard to convince people that lies represent the truth. One only has to look at how pre-emptivists were able to win public support for their adventures in the Middle East--by constructing “truth” out of a fabric of lies.
This worked quite well for a number of years but in recent months, as the media put it, “facts on the ground,” a spate of popular books such as Fiasco and State of Denial began to expose the lies behind the “truth.” And it all began to unravel.
Rather than giving up, though, the Republicans have reached deeper into their bag of tricks in an attempt to retain their all-but-absolute power. They have moved on to the strategy of what I call bewilderment. Here’s how this works, drawn from a handful of stories from just one recent issue of the NY Times.
On the front page there are two side-by-side outrageous and bewildering stories—the first is about how the Bush administration set up a Website to make public documents captured in Iraq that “revealed” the dangers posed by the Saddam Hussein regime prior to our invasion. As a way to strengthen the case for war. But in recent weeks, to demonstrate the threat Saddam’s nuclear program represented, the site, incredibly, posted what experts say is “a basic guide to building an atom bomb.” We can only assume that this guide was widely downloaded in North Korea, Iran, and who-knows where else.
A story in the adjoining column tells about legislation the president recently signed to terminate the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. This operation was set up to keep an eye on how well, or poorly, how cost-effectively, or gouging Halliburton and others were in carrying out their construction and services contracts in Iraq. We know how scandalous some of their behavior has been, how much they have been ripping us and the Iraqis off; but without this office, all restraints on their greed and corruption will be removed.
Not entirely surprising, but also bewildering, was the report, buried on the bottom of page 18 in the Times, about Reverend Ted Haggard, institutional leader of 30 million Evangelicals and White House confident, who resigned his office and pulpit after being caught in a three-year long Meth-infested pay-for-service gay sex scandal.
And then, just a few pages deeper in the paper, equally bewildering, there is a report about an article in Science Magazine that asserts that unless drastic steps are immediately taken to reduce over-fishing, by the year 2050 there will be “a marine calamity.” The oceans will be so depleted of fish, so many species will have been extinguished, that fish, for all intents and purposes, will be eliminated from the seas and our diets. (Article linked below.)
My point about all of this—if the Big Lie is no longer working, move on to overwhelming us with so many things going wrong, so much of the world and human activity spinning out of control, that in our bewilderment we’ll throw our hands up in hopelessness and despair and reach for the red wine.
Which after all is good for us. So, come to think about it, who needs fish?
This strategy of distraction was always aided and abetted by shameless lying. The bigger and more extensive the lying, it must have been assumed by Republican political operatives, especially if carried out over time, the more we would become befuddled and as a result the lies in the aggregate would begin to feel like the truth. This is one of the axioms of the propaganda since at least the middle of the twentieth century —that the will to believe among populations who feel fear and dislocation is so strong that it is not hard to convince people that lies represent the truth. One only has to look at how pre-emptivists were able to win public support for their adventures in the Middle East--by constructing “truth” out of a fabric of lies.
This worked quite well for a number of years but in recent months, as the media put it, “facts on the ground,” a spate of popular books such as Fiasco and State of Denial began to expose the lies behind the “truth.” And it all began to unravel.
Rather than giving up, though, the Republicans have reached deeper into their bag of tricks in an attempt to retain their all-but-absolute power. They have moved on to the strategy of what I call bewilderment. Here’s how this works, drawn from a handful of stories from just one recent issue of the NY Times.
On the front page there are two side-by-side outrageous and bewildering stories—the first is about how the Bush administration set up a Website to make public documents captured in Iraq that “revealed” the dangers posed by the Saddam Hussein regime prior to our invasion. As a way to strengthen the case for war. But in recent weeks, to demonstrate the threat Saddam’s nuclear program represented, the site, incredibly, posted what experts say is “a basic guide to building an atom bomb.” We can only assume that this guide was widely downloaded in North Korea, Iran, and who-knows where else.
A story in the adjoining column tells about legislation the president recently signed to terminate the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. This operation was set up to keep an eye on how well, or poorly, how cost-effectively, or gouging Halliburton and others were in carrying out their construction and services contracts in Iraq. We know how scandalous some of their behavior has been, how much they have been ripping us and the Iraqis off; but without this office, all restraints on their greed and corruption will be removed.
Not entirely surprising, but also bewildering, was the report, buried on the bottom of page 18 in the Times, about Reverend Ted Haggard, institutional leader of 30 million Evangelicals and White House confident, who resigned his office and pulpit after being caught in a three-year long Meth-infested pay-for-service gay sex scandal.
And then, just a few pages deeper in the paper, equally bewildering, there is a report about an article in Science Magazine that asserts that unless drastic steps are immediately taken to reduce over-fishing, by the year 2050 there will be “a marine calamity.” The oceans will be so depleted of fish, so many species will have been extinguished, that fish, for all intents and purposes, will be eliminated from the seas and our diets. (Article linked below.)
My point about all of this—if the Big Lie is no longer working, move on to overwhelming us with so many things going wrong, so much of the world and human activity spinning out of control, that in our bewilderment we’ll throw our hands up in hopelessness and despair and reach for the red wine.
Which after all is good for us. So, come to think about it, who needs fish?
posted by Steven Zwerling at
10:42 AM
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