Bush's (Mis)State(ment) of the Union: Postmodern PR Theater

Watching George "Divine Right" Bush's State of the Union address tonight I was reminded of Shadia B. Drury's excellent dissection of the American right-wing in her book, LEO STRAUSS AND THE AMERICAN RIGHT, which I reviewed on Amazon in January, 2003. I was thinking specifically of her observation that Straussian right-wingers believe there is no ultimate truth, but that instead there are only discourses of power and that whoever controls the discourse wins. And further, because the right and much of the left operates from the same bankrupt premise American politics are now at their narrowest and most tedious. Here's my review:

POSTMODERN CONSERVATISM, January 3, 2003

The chief insight offered by Shadia Drury in LEO STRAUSS AND THE AMERICAN RIGHT is that Leo Strauss's political philosophy is a radical variant of conservatism whose assumptions and strategies are at odds with traditional conservatism. While both Straussian and Burkean philosophy appear similar in that they both make the assumption that the only choice is between a beneficent plutocracy and anarchy, the Straussians are unsentimental about the past, rejecting the older conservative view that naturalizes pre-modern hierarchy and the inequalities preserved therein as intrinsic to and representative of mankind. Straussians are instead post-modern activists, who use the past as repository from which to cull whatever elements are necessary to build whatever institutional machine is necessary to regulate lesser mortals. They imagine themselves as an intellectual pastorate who must defend society against the depredations of liberalism -- that socially disruptive idea which insists on equality of opportunity and justice.

According to Drury, Strauss's philosophy accepts the death of God, (unlike traditional conservatism) and then moves positivistically (unlike traditional conservatism) to fill the vacuum with elite group of self-elected philosopher kings. This elite, alive to the nihilism of the liberal ethos and its potentially anarchic consequences, believes it must act forcefully to paper over the hole left by His demise. Their esoteric/exoteric readings of philosophy tell them they must forge from the ashes a seamless, monocultural machine to encourage obedience and staunch chaos. This nationalistic machine must be equipped with a religion (any religion) and a mythic culture based on flag-reverence and knee-jerk patriotism. This is necessary because pluralistic, liberal societies cannot meet the challenge posed by well-organized, culturally cohesive states. Because the mass of men are primitive, credulous, prone to error and evil, the state with the best machine necessarily will win. Straussians, unlike traditional conservatives who see the state as malevolent, justify their activism by insisting that as philosophers they are immune to temptations of power.

According to Drury, a particularly striking strategy of Straussian conservatives is their struggle to identify and mythologize American traditions. She points out that while Burke had the last remnants of feudalism to extol as a naturally just system, American conservatives have been forced to create a "traditional" America out of whole cloth. To do so, according the Drury, Strauss's followers have invaded history departments across the US where they have been working hard to uncover "tradition" in the beginnings of America -- a difficult task given that America was the first truly modernist state. Nevertheless, these historians, depending upon which ax they are grinding, rewrite American history either to prove that colonial America was feudal, or to prove the Founding Fathers were not Deists and creatures of the (Liberal) Enlightenment, but rather Platonists. Drury notes that like postmodernists on the left, Straussians believe there is no ultimate truth, but that instead there are only discourses of power and that whoever controls the discourse wins. She notes that this is what makes American politics so narrow and so tedious -- the right and the left both operate from the same morally bankrupt premise.

This goes a long way toward explaining the bizarre combination of libertarianism and fundamentalism in neo-conservative thought. Like other dogmas which have been used to support those in power -- Social Darwinism and eugenics come to mind -- neoconservatism is just the latest apologia for the up-to-date reactionary. Notably, its adherents are generally unaware of the contradiction. This does not deter them from defending this instrumental hodgepodge of Ayn Rand "objectivism" and millenarian "revivalism" however. Such a philosophy is, of course, its own best self-satirization.

Well-written, its conclusions careful and amply defended, LEO STRAUSS AND THE AMERICAN RIGHT, is not the ravings of conspiracy theorist. It does not imagine that Straussians have come to run the United States, nor that they form a secret cult which pulls the strings behind the scene. It exposes rather the infiltration of post-modern intellectual cynicism into the once decent, and even honorable, Republican Party.

By the way, when I was writing this review, I was reading a collection of essays by Randolph Bourne, an inspiring American writer and social critic whose insights into American power are as fresh, compelling and as controversial now as when he wrote them just prior to World War I. Yes, World War I. WWI featured America's first massive government propoganda effort and was guided by American intellectuals and progressive thinkers, including John Dewey, who helped promote the U.S. entry into the war. Bourne opposed the war and suffered professionally for it. Bourne's political insights are preternaturally prescient, his prose style lucid and bristling with moral disgust.


Finally, here's a link to a very succinct and useful interview with Shadia Drury.

Krugman: " 'Balance' Not Always 'Truth' "

Here's a few paragraphs from Paul Krugman's column today, A False Balance, which speaks to how the right wing spinmeisters, under the guise of insisting on fair and objective "on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand" journalistic practice, have succeeded in gulling the Washington Post and The Today Show, among others, into reporting the Abramoff scandal as a standard (and demonstrably untrue) "pox on both their houses" narrative wherein both parties accepted money from Abramoff.

...(snip)
...over the past few weeks a number of journalists, ranging from The Washington Post's ombudsman to the "Today" show's Katie Couric, have declared that Mr. Abramoff gave money to both parties. In each case the journalists or their news organization, when challenged, grudgingly conceded that Mr. Abramoff himself hasn't given a penny to Democrats.
...(snip)

There have been both bipartisan and purely Democratic scandals in the past. Based on everything we know so far, however, the Abramoff affair is a purely Republican scandal.

Why does the insistence of some journalists on calling this one-party scandal bipartisan matter? For one thing, the public is led to believe that the Abramoff affair is just Washington business as usual, which it isn't. The scale of the scandals now coming to light, of which the Abramoff affair is just a part, dwarfs anything in living memory.
...(snip)

So the reluctance of some journalists to report facts that, in this case, happen to have an anti-Republican agenda is a serious matter. It's not a stretch to say that these journalists are acting as enablers for the rampant corruption that has emerged in Washington over the last decade.

Waking from its recent slumbers, The Times also in an editorial yesterday put the lie to George "Divine Right" Bush's "Would You Rather Die Or What" justification for warrantless domestic spying, laying out clearly and in abundant detail the cynical methods employed by this most cynical of regimes to put another lie over on the American people.

Right Wing: "Threats 'R' Ideas"

Recently on Bill O'Reilly's hateathon, Ann Coulter said that liberal have ideas that are so intellectual that they "just can't fit on a bumpersticker." Further, she claimed that all liberals can't formulate counterarguments to conservative "ideas," all they can do "is throw food." Here's the quote:

If you go speak at a college campus, I promise you, if you don't have a security detail, they will physically attack you, because they are the party of ideas, and they're so intellectual their ideas just can't fit on a bumper sticker. You know, everything else they're always saying about themselves. But when it actually comes time to formulate a counterargument, all they can do is throw food.

Coulter was referring to an incident at the University of Arizona in October 2004 where two men threw a pie at her and missed. The pie throwing incident was an inexcusable breach of civility, but it can hardly be said to constitute a fair and balanced characterization of liberal counterarguments to Ann Coulter's "ideas" or the ideas of the right-wing reactionaries whom she defends so splenetically.

Here's one counterargument, short enough to fit on a bumpersticker, that to my knowledge that neither Ms. Coulter nor her masters and minions have ever addressed: THREATS ARE NOT IDEAS.

Further, threats which pose as ideas, are not ideas, they are threats in disguise. When George "Divine Right" Bush justifies spying on Americans because it would have saved and will save American lives, not only is he lying, he is also invoking a threat of death while at the same time pointing toward those who would stop him from rewriting the Constitution as those who are responsible and will be responsible for American deaths: terrorists, and by extension, their liberal dupes.

One of the favorite strategies of the right is to project onto liberals their own hate-mongering tactics. For instance, Coulter in her statement above suggests that it is Liberals who are unwilling to engage in the free exchange of ideas, who would instead simply throw food.

Ms. Coulter, to my knowledge, has never advanced any ideas. She has worked energetically to attack any person or group who might attempt to suggest that real political debate is something other than the constant reiteration of the cynical collection of focus-group-tested wedge issues so beloved of the right: Guns, God, and Gays. And the corollary to the God "issue": God = Free Market.

And, of course, she has made threats against her political enemies, most recently, and interestingly, a food-related threat against Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. She suggested that someone should put rat poison on his creme brulee. After making this threat she explained: "That's just a joke, for you in the media."

I'm not sure how this can be seen as a joke. At best it's a jokey threat, but in the same way that threats are not ideas, suggesting that one's political enemies should be poisoned simply can't be accepted as a joke.

If such a suggestion can actually be claimed and taken as a joke, then the political sphere has become so toxic, so coarsened by the hate- and war-mongering of the right-wing, then this "joke" must be taken as a sign that reasonable people must work even harder to resurrect and renovate the shattered public forum of decent democratic debate in this once great country of ours.

George "Divine Right" Bush: "Let 'Em Eat War"

In today's New York Times the editors finally (although timidly, and way too belatedly) call George "Divine Right" Bush for his assumption of the American imperial throne:

He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy, civil liberties and judicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers. The founders of our country created the system of checks and balances to avert just this sort of imperial arrogance.

Gore Vidal, who was excoriated when he began calling the U.S. an imperial power back in the 70s, has written a great piece, President Jonah, on the Bush court's crazed gropings for absolute power as a bellwether for the end of American Empire.

In reaching for absolute power, George "Divine Right" Bush betrays the totalitarian predilictions of his court and the military industrial defense energy infotainment complex whom they serve, even, of course, as they serve themselves in doing so.

George "Divine Right" Bush: "Let 'Em Eat Smoke"

According to The New York Times, "The top climate scientist at NASA [James E. Hansen, picture at right] says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming."

Revelations of the Market God

Here's a review I wrote a while ago of Thomas Frank's ONE MARKET UNDER GOD. In his more recent work WHAT HAPPENED TO KANSAS, which I also highly recommend, Frank relates the story of his political awakening from unexamined Republican (by family affiliation) to left-wing writer.

His conversion occurs at a large Midwestern college where he discovers a social hierarchy which reinforces the dominance of the rich, Republican kids at the expense of anyone less rich, including less rich Republicans. Awakened by the starkly visible lineaments of this regime, the scales drop from his eyes, he begins to read classic sociology texts. He is especially drawn to fellow midwesterner Thorstein Veblen's crititque of "conspicuous consumption" in THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS and eventually embarks on his career as left-wing social critic, publishing a magazine called The Baffler.

In ONE MARKET UNDER GOD, Frank deconstructs and then deflates the claims of the neo-liberal economists, revealing their theories for what they are: the latest apologia for the ruling class, a ruling class which, under the class-compassionate Bush regime, is experiencing an obscene recrudescence rivaling the era of Veblen's leisure class robber barons.

Revelations, October 12, 2005
In ONE MARKET UNDER GOD, Thomas Frank brilliantly unpacks the self-serving ideology of the corporatocracy. As he did in CONQUEST OF COOL and WHAT HAPPENED TO KANSAS, he examines the many self-serving narratives of the corporate state, showing how each story supports a pseudo-populist philosophy designed to whip up anti-elitist sentiments in order to better serve the interests of that elite.

Legitimacy, since the Great Crash, had, until fairly recently been a fairly daunting problem for business. Now, as Frank points out, with the children of the Depression passing away, the corporatocracy and its junior partners in government have been emboldened to portray themselves as the heirs to Populism, Progressivism, and the New Deal, to advertise themselves as the vanguard of a revolutionary movement, a movement which through the millennial workings of the market is clearing the way for a new birth of freedom in the U.S.A., and throughout the world.

Frank notes, for instance, that throughout the 90s Americans were told that average working stiff could easily become the "millionaire next door," and further, that the average guy was much better off owning stock than relying on his pension or Social Security to see him through his golden years. So pervasive did this free market farrago become in the media, that even now, well after the New Economy bubble burst, many still hear it as gospel, believe that inevitably everything must be privatized. So cunning has the pro-business rhetoric of the corporate state become that the average American blames himself for not being "entrepreneurial" enough, when instead Frank says he should be working to reverse the corporatocracy's 30-year rollback of worker's and citizen's rights.

A profoundly funny writer with a razor-sharp satiric edge, Frank will have you laughing out loud at the transparent self-serving cant of the corporatocracy and their handmaidens in the media, academia, and government. Frank knows his history, and clearly sees through the latest lies of that great unregenerate beast, redder now in tooth and claw than ever before.

Dowd on Dems: "Judy" to Rove's "Punch"

Here's a key sentence from Maureen Dowd's column, Delusion and Illusion Worthy of Dickens, from today's NY Times that reiterates what I've been saying about Rove's "All Terror, All the Time" strategy.

As Dowd says, for the right wing it's all about testosterone and putting the American body politic and American bodies in jeopardy and then promising to protect those bodies against terrorists and liberals.

Delusion and Illusion Worthy of Dickens by Maureen Dowd

The Democrats will never win the White House as long as they're stuck in Bleak House. They're slipping and sliding in the same crust-upon-crust of mud and caboose-creeping fog and soft black drizzle and flakes of soot that blacken the chamber of law in the opening of the terrific Dickens novel (now an irresistible PBS series).
....(snip)

The party simply seems incapable of getting the muscular message and riveting messenger needed to dispel the mud, fog, drizzle and soot emanating from Karl Rove's rag-and-bone shop on Pennsylvania Avenue.

As the White House drives its truckload of lies around the country, it becomes ever clearer that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore are just not the right people to respond to the administration's national security scare-a-thon.
...(snip)

But Karl Rove is still dishing out the same line, and it's still working: those who want to re-evaluate the strategy in Iraq are soft. Those who want to rein in the Patriot Act are soft. Those who question the Alito doctrine of presidential absolutism are soft. Those who don't want to break the law and snoop on Americans are soft - not just soft, but practically collaborating with the terrorists.
.... (snip)

In their usual twisted way, the Bushies are reducing their abuse of the law to a test of testosterone - knowing that the Democrats will play Judy to their Punch.

Mastering War: The Rove Prescription

Here's a review I wrote of WAR: The Lethal Custom by Gynne Dyer. The book seems particularly relevant now that Karl "Divine Right" Rove has anounced that he will be sticking to the "All Terror, All the Time" brand messaging for the 2006 elelctions.

To quote myself from the last paragraph of the review below: "Dyer questions the notion of a 'War on Terror' as espoused by the current American regime as emblematic of its naivete. The idea of war implies an end, a truce, an armistice. Dyer suggests that the U.S., by declaring a 'war' on terror fell into the trap laid by Osama Bid Laden. For it is not a war that can be won through warfare. 'Police Action Against Terrorists,' while not as compelling from a rhetorical standpoint, has been shown to be the more effective strategy over time."

Mastering War, October 29, 2005
When a tourist lodge opened about twenty years ago in Kenya, the alpha males of a nearby baboon troop helped themselves to the easy pickings at the garbage dump. In the time honored tradition of baboon despotism where status obsessed males strictly enforce the prevailing hierarchy, the top ranking males claimed the spoils for themselves, and drove away their lower ranking brother baboons. The alpha males then perished en masse when they become infected with bovine tuberculosis from the rotten meat they ate at the dump. Once the alpha males died and their terroristic bullying tactics with them, the survivors were suddenly able to relax and began treating each other more decently. A new more peaceful baboon society was born.

Gwynne Dyer recounts this incident in the last chapter of "WAR: The Lethal Custom" to summarize and exemplify one of his main arguments in this thought-provoking work -- that our species' penchant for violence, although it does have roots in our evolutionary past, does not mean it is inevitable. He argues that as sentient beings we do have and have shown the capacity for making peace, too. In what is a hopeful but realistic retelling of the founding of the League of Nations after WWI and the United Nations after WWII, Dyer suggests that through it these organizations human beings are attempting to deal with the very real possiblity of species annihilation. He argues that the reversal of despoliation of the world must begin in earnest now so as to prevent the international anarchy that will undoubtedly follow if nations choose not to cooperate and instead chase after and fight over diminishing resources.

Tracing the rise of war from our early ancestors to the present day, Dyer relates a convincing story of increasing technological efficiency in the art and machinery of death, where the technology of war comes to outstrip the capacity of most human societies to contain and direct it. Early on when our species lived in egalitarian societies of roughly thirty individuals to a band, killing one's neighbors was a rare occurrence. In a sparsely peopled world with few competitors for game or territory, it was rare that roving bands would skirmish or fight each other. War appeared as a more constant and sustained human enterprise with the rise of agriculturalism with its settled communities ripe for plunder by marauding bands whose economic lives and assumptions about tactics were based on their experience as shepherds of livestock. Highly mobile, schooled in techniques of herding, these bands employed the same principles when facing armies of settlers, e.g., using speed, terror, bluff and deception to terrorize settled communities into giving up their treasures.

War figures heavily in explaining the rise and fall of civilizations and peoples throughout history. The Roman phalanx, for instance, an early "machine" of war which used men as its moving parts, remained effective for hundreds of years, until guns eventually rendered it passe. Walled cities and medieval castles too, were marvels of defensive engineering, until they met a similar fate. Then with the end of professional and mercenary armies with the levee en masse in the wake of the French Revolution, came the era of total war when civilian populations, the manufacturers of the materiel of war, became defined as combatants, too, ushering in totalitarian states, weapons of mass destruction and the possiblity of annihilation.

Dyer also does a particularly fine job on guerilla warfare, which acquired that name during the resistance to Napoleon's invasion and annexation of Spain. He questions the notion of a "War on Terror" as espoused by the current American regime as emblematic of its naivete. The idea of war implies an end, a truce, an armistice. Dyer suggests that the U.S., by declaring a "war" on terror fell into the trap laid by Osama Bid Laden. For it is not a war that can be won through warfare. "Police Action Against Terrorists," while not as compelling from a rhetorical standpoint, has been shown to be the more effective strategy over time.

A history of the humankind told through the changing techniques of warfare and the key confrontations marking these shifts, written with verve, psychological and anthropological acuity, WAR is a valuable exploration of this most uncivil custom. Dyer sees evidence of and movement toward the restoration on an international level of the cooperation of early egalitarian societies. He suggests the spread of cross-cultural communication, which is opening a field for international debate (as evidenced in the massive worldwide anti-war protests against the invasion of Iraq), is restoring the possiblity of dialogue and a democracy of the multitude.

Frank Rich VS. "White House Propoganda Factory"

Below is an excerpt from Frank Rich's column today "Truthiness 101: From Frey to Alito." The entire text can be found at Nevada Thunder.

Rich shows that his earlier career as a theater critic prepared him well for his reviews of the Bush PR Theater Company. (Below he calls it "Rove's White House propoganda factory").

He's also hip to the right wing propoganda strategy of putting the body politic in somatic jeopardy and then promising to protect it against terrorists and Democrats. Rich is going on book leave to write "nonfiction about our post-9/11 fictions" and will be back in the spring.

Let's hope he comes back swinging even harder against the lyin' spyin' Bush cabal.

....
As everyone knows now - except for the 22 percent, according to a recent Harris poll, who still believe that Saddam helped plan 9/11 - it’s the truthiness [emphasis added] of all those imminent mushroom clouds that sold the invasion of Iraq. What’s remarkable is how much fictionalization plays a role in almost every national debate. Even after a big humbug is exposed as blatantly as Professor Marvel in “The Wizard of Oz” - FEMA’s heck of a job in New Orleans, for instance - we remain ready and eager to be duped by the next tall tale. It’s as if the country is living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief.

Democrats who go berserk at their every political defeat still don’t understand this. They fault the public for not listening to their facts and arguments, as though facts and arguments would make a difference, even if the Democrats were coherent. It’s the power of the story that always counts first, and the selling of it that comes second. Accuracy is optional. The Frey-like genius of the right is its ability to dissemble with a straight face while simultaneously mustering the slick media machinery and expertise to push the goods. It not only has the White House propaganda operation at its disposal, but also an intricate network of P.R. outfits and fake-news outlets that are far more effective than their often hapless liberal counterparts.

....
If Karl Rove’s White House propaganda factory is the NBC Universal or Time Warner of G.O.P. fictionalization, then the Miramax and Focus Features of the right are such nominally “independent” satellites as Cybercast News, the Lincoln Group (which places fake news stories in Iraqi newspapers), the Rendon Group (which helped manufacture the heroic image of Ahmad Chalabi) and the now-dormant Talon News (the fake Republican-staffed news site whose fake White House correspondent, Jeff Gannon, was unmasked last year).

Rove, 2006: Riding the "Terror Train" To Victory?

The director of the Bush PR Theater Company, Karl "Divine Right" Rove, yesterday announced an upcoming refurbishment of the company's long-running, marginally sucessful melodrama, "All Terror, All the Time."

Insiders say the production, which met with limited success in its earlier runs in 2002 and 2004, will soon be getting a massive infusion of investment capital from a number of economic angels in hopes of revitalizing the production.

"They've got some work to do if they want to keep it viable," said a highly placed source in the theatrical community. "I'd heard they're trying out different angles on their promotional messaging. But based on what Rove said in the Post, (a theatrical trade publication) I'd say he's going to stick pretty close to his usual approach: Republicans are Men, Democrats Are Gay. It could still work, but it's a little risky."

In the meeting the insider referrred to, the winter meeting of the Republican National Committee yesterday, Rove was quoted as saying the following: "At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views on national security. Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic -- not at all. But it does make them wrong -- deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong." (actual quote).

Both Rove and assistant director Ken Mehlman are considering adding a scene where the Democratic anti-heroes, Pelosi and Dean, will, in their fussiness over Miss Liberty's right to privacy will "liberally" choose to let her die with her "rights" intact. As reported in the Washington Post: Rove and Mehlman "defended Bush's use of warrantless eavesdropping to gather intelligence about possible terrorist plots. 'Do Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean really think that when the NSA is listening in on terrorists planning attacks on America, they need to hang up when those terrorists dial their sleeper cells in the United States?' Mehlman asked. (actual quote).

Outside the White House Theater, Republican voter and veteran theatergoer Randy Jones, 33, of Bethesda Maryland, who has seen the production hundreds of times since its opening, when informed that "All Terror, All the Time" might undergo some modifications said: "That whole bit at the end where they have that guy with the beard and the turban tie that Miss Liberty woman to the train tracks? And they have that giant smoking, snorting "Terror Train" is coming down on her? They better keep that in, for sure, because people go nuts over that schtick!"

Abramoff and the Golden Eggs

Hendrik Hertzberg's short piece on the Abramoff scandal in the Talk of the Town section in The New Yorker on Monday features a paragraph which nicely summarizes the corruption now endemic in Washington, D.C. He shows that not only are the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government all run by Republicans for the benefit of their friends and donors, so is the lobbying branch:

Abramoff was the apotheosis of the “K Street Project,” a highly successful, years-long effort to turn the capital’s “lobbying community” into a Republican auxiliary, by pressuring lobbying firms and trade associations to support a broad conservative agenda, hire only Republicans, and give money overwhelmingly to Republican politicians. In some ways, the K Street Project is a national, and grander, version of the big-city political machines of old. But those machines, corrupt though they were, had their Robin Hood aspects. The pols got the graft and the diamond-stickpin boys got the contracts, but the poor got turkeys, jobs, and, sometimes, genuinely useful public programs. The K Street Project is strictly Sheriff of Nottingham. K Street, by its nature, promotes the interests of the rich, especially the well-organized corporate rich: they’re the only ones who can afford its services. The lobbyists’ alliance with the dominant wing of the Republican Party is a near-perfect match. The reigning conservative ideologues in the White House and on Capitol Hill believe, with apparent sincerity, that the path to economic and social progress for all is to reward—“incentivize”—the rich and to liberate private business from the wealth-destroying fetters of regulation. When these become the highest purposes of public policy, and when the ameliorative functions of government are held in contempt, then a single thread ties together upper-income tax cuts, the dismantling of environmental and safety protections, the shredding of the social safety net, the peopling of regulatory agencies with cronies hostile to their purposes, and, finally, outright corruption. If government is seen as a whore, why not treat her like one? All that remains is to fleece the johns and divide the take.

Very well said, Hendrik. I think it can be summed up this way, too: There is no Bush "administration." What we have is an "attack/patronage machine" ("attackronage?") which shouts splenetic attacks from its upper mouth and lays golden goverment eggs for its friends from the lower.

Bodies In Motion: Part II

Bodies in Motion: Part II (See Part I)
We are constantly told by the right-wing ownership class that we should embrace economic contingency, freely flow to new jobs, to be ready instantly retrain ourselves in some new esoteric specialization in order to better serve the latest economic and technological exigency.

At the same time, we are under the strict orders of the Right that we must have traditional, intergenerational families with traditional values, including strong, long-standing religious and community ties. (Sennett, in FLESH AND STONE, has a marvelous chapter where he discusses the strains and dislocations caused by beginning of capitalism in Paris in the Middle Ages, occurring as it did about the same time as the religious revival movement known to as the Imitation of Christ. The first portended the rise of homo economicus, that profit-seeking individualistic actor who eventually overruns the world, and the second, a blossoming forth of human sympathy for one's fellow beings under the image of Christ's suffering. Kinda incompatible, no?)

Liberals are accused by right-wing propagandists of attempting to limit the free flow of goods, calling any socially responsible redistributive programs socialism or communism. They accuse liberals of screwing up the proper free ciculation of goods with their "bleeding heart" policies that prevent the full and complete appearance of Smith's miraculous Indivisible Hand, the ne plus ultra of circulation.

Speaking of hands, on the other hand, there is the conservative's Visible Hand of Discipline. Conservatives claim liberals promote the free circulation of bodies under unclean social circumstances, e.g., the endorsement of homosexual relationships, the mixing of the races. The right-wing also frequently resurrects a self-serving shorthand of the 60s during which they claim a tidal wave of orgiastic behavior, fueled by drugs and radical left politics, nearly poisoned the American body politic. Moral police, they only trust the circulation of people under the goad of economic circustances. Under other circumstances, like the free association of one body with another, the free sociality of desire, the heavy-handed scold appears and slap the bodies back into line.

The rightist economic fantasy, that we as a nation practice the free-market values we espouse, that we promote the free circulation of goods, is pure nonsense, of course. What we actually have socialism for the wealthy, or, crony capitalism. Through our post WWII grasp on the short hairs of the world economy, the U.S. government tampers with the free flow of goods and labor all the time according to the needs of US business (which are now closer to identical than any time since era of the Robber Barons).

Anyone even marginally acquainted with the doings of business knows that as much as possible companies try to find ways to create monopoly positions in their markets. Or, to continue using the analogy to circulation, to staunch the flow of life-giving money to its competitors. Either that or they engage in a form of tacit price-fixing with the competition to insure profits. Or coerce the government to grant them some favorable circumstance under which to conduct their business to the detriment of their competitors. Or all three at once. In any case, these strategies attempt to freeze circumstances advantageous to them, to close off competition, interrupt the free circulation of goods and ideas, or to stimulate the growth of government hand-outs so they may suckle at the government teat.

Poor people are a good example of market flows which do not promote economic health. Marooned in urban environments where healthy foods are either not readily available or too expensive, poor people purchase and prepare foods which inexpensively short-circuit hunger and which incidentally promote conditions like diabetes: starchy, sugary, super-processed snacks and meals. (Incidentally, if you haven't read the recent NY Times series on diabetes, you really should; it's a chilling indictment of the price we as a society pay in medical and social costs for the free circulation of diabetes-inducing foods. Poor New Yorkers are twice as likely as middle class New Yorkers to have diabetes).

But instead of facing the disastrous effects of its anti-poor, anti-middle class policies on actual bodies, this administration instead points to terrorists, homosexuals and liberals as those who would put American's bodies in jeopardy. It promises to defend the bodies of true believers, and in the ultimate revenge fantasy of the fundamentalists – the "Left Behind" series – they get the pleasure of watching unbelievers get slaughtered by Jesus. This gang stimulates hatred of the Other, of the dissenter, as a means to keep the resentment of its shock troops stoked and ready for action.

So how can the Left get out from under this mythological version of how the U.S. economy works? How can it stop being cast as a promoter of the circulation of dangerous, debased and defiled bodies? And how can it defend itself from Jesus' terrible swift sword, which, according to the fundamentalist right, will soon spill the blood of the infidels all over the Promised Land?

I'll get back to you on that.

Bodies in Motion: Part I of II

I've been reading FLESH AND STONE: The Body and City in Western Civilization by Richard Sennett (Norton, 1994), which I suspect is responsible for my focus over the last week on the idea that right-wing propaganda operates by placing the body politic in jeopardy under the sign of liberals and terrorists, and at the same time promises to defend and protect the body under the sign of strong, unflinching moral leadership.

Sennett, a colleague of Michel Foucault's, with whom he began the book back in the 70s, examines in FLESH AND STONE how ideas about of the human body are reflected in the built environments of cities and the behaviors and perceptions of its citizens from ancient Athens to modern New York with stops along the way in Rome, Venice, Paris, and London. It's an extraordinarily rich work, deep in scope, scholarly erudition and insight.

I'm in the third section where Sennett is making the case that "A new master image of the body took form" through the discoveries William Harvey made about the circulation of the blood, that "Harvey launched a scientific revolution in the understanding of the body: its structure, its healthy state, and its relation to the soul" (page 255).

Harvey's discovery in the 1630s that blood flowing through the circulatory system is driven by mechanical means (the heart), and not because of the blood's heat (the ancient Greek notion which remained current until Harvey), were also responsible for "new understandings of the body that coincided with the birth of modern capitalism and [brought] about the great social transformation we call individualism. The modern individual is, above all else, a mobile human being" (page 255-56).

Adam Smith took Harvey's insight into the connection between freely circulating blood and health and used it to claim, according to Sennett, that the "free market of labor and goods operat[es] much like freely circulating blood within the body [and brought] similar life giving consequences" (page 256) Sennett goes on to say that a consequence of human mobility in the service of economic circulation promoting human beings increasingly desensitized to their environment, resulting in cities "which have succumbed to the dominant value of circulation" (page 256). (On this last point, I'm reminded of Robert Moses' destruction of the social fabric of neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens in order to move traffic around the New York metropolis.)

The idea of freely circulating blood as promoter of good health was reflected then and now in urban designs where new "arteries" and "veins" were constructed for the free circulation of people and goods and waste, e.g., new boulevards, underground sewer systems, etc. Similarly, around the same time human skin was discovered to be instrumental in the circulation of air in the body. This resulted in more frequent bathing to open pores clotted with dirt, the loosening of clothing, and in terms of cities, the introduction of "lungs" in the form of parks and the paving and cleaning of city streets.

What particularly strikes me in Sennett's discussion is that the foundational text of neo-liberal free-marketeers, Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" is based on an analogy with the free circulation of blood and its healthful effects. Every neo-liberal economist assents to this powerful mostly unexamined analogy that equates circulation with health. However, the circulation of goods and labor since Smith's time have, in fact, yielded mixed results insofar as the health of people, their cities, and ultimately the earth and its atmosphere. Recently, the supreme value of circulation has yielded the near instant global distribution of deadly local germs on international jet passenger flights.

Also destructive has been the forced circulation of the neo-liberal market orthodoxy by the United States through its organs the IMF and World Bank which have forced Southern and Eastern peoples to swallow the bitter pill of neo-liberal economic reform or be denied life-giving flows of foreign exchange.

Sennett notes that Harvey's discovery also began a medical revolution, a "medical revolution [which] seemed to have substituted health for morality as a standard of human happiness among those social engineers by motion and circulation" (ibid).

Here is the intersection where I locate the primary (and contradictory) program of the reactionary right: the (claimed) promotion of the free circulation of goods and labor on the one hand, and a tightly regulated circulation of bodies and desires on the other. In short, the free circulation of people in pursuit of work is deemed critical to a healthy society, while the social circulation of different people with different desires is deemed unhealthy, immoral, unclean.

Malkin: Would You Rather Die or What?

This is almost getting to be funny. Check out this post on Crooks and Liars referencing a column by Michelle Malkin where to justify Bush's warrantless spying on American citizens, she passes along a fake news story about Arabs buying 60 cells phones to be used as detonators, a "plot" stopped by an alert clerk. Her conclusion? We Are All Homeland Security Agents Now.

This has all the earmarks of the kind of disinformation campaign the right is known for (e.g., Reagan's welfare queen who was not an actual person, but a "straw man," used to justify his reactionary welfare policies).

Malkin, cunningly, is trying to put every American clerk's body into motion as a defender of the body politic, thereby casting a large segment of the polis into the role of posse. I can only hope that we non-clerks can something to prevent non-terrorists from engaging in non-terroristic activities, too.

MSNBC's Matthews: Would You Rather Die or What?

Chris Matthews, MSNBC's Hardball host, has thrown in with the Bush gang's justification for warrantless spying on Americans: Would you rather die or what? Here's a summary of what Matthews said (from Media Matters):

On the January 12 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, host Chris Matthews asserted that wiretapping Americans in an effort to track down terrorists -- which his guest asserted would be "breaking the law" -- was "maybe ... part of the job" of the president of the United States."

In the "all terror, all the time" post 9/11 construction of the Bush public relations theater company, all the bodies of the body politic are in jeopardy and the first reponsiblity of government is the preservation of those bodies, a responsiblity which overules the rights of citizenship and justifies the total power of the sovereign. The sovereign is law.

In his endorsement of this view, Matthews is endorsing the teachings of Carl Schmitt, German political theorist and enthusiastic supporter of Hitler who believed, that "Debate, deliberation, and persuasion obscure what is essential for politics -- firm sovereign decisions for dealing with political enemies" (From Richard Bernstein's The Abuse of Evil , page 91).

Grounded on the familiar conservative judgment that enmity is the basic existential condition of mankind from which it follow that a strong sovereign must be in place to staunch chaos and enforce order, Schmitt, according to Bernstein, contends that "Sovereigns may pretend that they are making decisions in the name of some 'higher principle' or that they are following proper legal and political procedures, but this should not disguise the fact that such decisions are ungrounded; they are solely the sovereign's decision." (page 91). The "higher principle" here is actually the low materialist principle of bodily preservation.

The directors of the Bush theater know that bodies running before the scream of sirens and exhausted in the aftermath of adrenal panic, would gladly bargain away the preservation of rights for the preservation of the body. Matthews, in saying breaking the law is part of the president's job, gives away the rights of citizens under the "argument" of the siren.

He is not alone in this, of course. The media, under Wall Street's demand for higher corporate profits, has been cranking up the society of the siren for the last two decades. Knowing that fear, terror, sex and loathing captures more "eyeballs" for resale to advertisers than do reasoned appraisals of the issues confronting the commonweal, the media races to find new stimulations for eyeballs and the bodies attached to them, aiming now squarely for the reptile brain -- the limbic system -- the lowest common biological denominator. Increased stimulation means more eyeballs, higher ratings, higher advertising rates, higher profits, higher returns on investment for the wealthiest Americans especially the top 1% of the American ruling class who hold 44% of all privately held stock.

The Bush PR theater has been embraced by Big Media because they have mastered the stimulation of the American body. Unlike television shows and advertisements which inculcate fear and envy on the mundane basis of one's appearance or possessions (the possiblity of social death because one's deodorant does not fully repress body odor), the Bush gang are able to place the American body in total somatic jeopardy: "Buy Bush As Sovereign or Die."

Side-effects like the loss of rights are masked or downplayed -- e.g., the loss of rights is limited to a small population who have spied on Americans -- just like in the pharma industries' direct-to-consumer advertising where the announcer glosses quickly over the side-effects and keeps pointing to the benefits of the enhanced and continued life of the body.

At the same time the sovereign put the body in jeopardy and protects it, he claims for himself and his gang, higher, purer, more honorable motives than his enemies. The military, for example, are constantly held up an exemplars of moral virtue because they willing to place their bodies in jeopardy for the good of the American body politic. Those who would question Bush's unilateral military invasion of Iraq, or the invasion of the privacy of Americans, are then coded as dishonorable, weak, corrupt. And, of course, once again, as liberal.

How then to counteract the BushMedia construction of reality? I'll get back to you on that one. I promise.

Bush's Body Politics: Why Impeachment Is Unlikely

Summary:The lower prong of the right wing's two-tier marketing strategy, simply stated, focuses on placing the American body in jeopardy and then promising to defend or release it. Since Bush's presidential body is not in jeopardy, like Clinton's was, there can be no impeachment.

The Argument: In the right wing's brand differentiation strategy, liberals are portrayed as architects and advocates of unnatural bodies and unnaturally used bodies. Liberals are careless of the bodies of the people. They would put people of different colors together, fostering "race mixing." Liberals would give license to homosexuals who express their unnatural bodily desires and gender preferences. Liberals would reach into mother's wombs, and shut off life-support machines. Liberals, soft on communism/ terrorism/ Marxism/ socialism, put the bodies of average Americans within the grasp of death-dealing Others. Liberals take away guns, which is the average American's last line of defense of the body, against criminals, criminals coddled by liberal courts, as well as the usual non-whites and radical Others. And, liberals would let bodies live that have murdered the lives of innocent bodies. The list goes on.

It seems to me that these body politics play particularly well in the South, and that the Bush brand strategy emphasizes Bush's Southern white male body to reinforce his power and his policies with his base. I reference here a empirical study on the "Southern Culture of Honor" which talks about how the Southern white male thinks of and uses his body differently than the Northern white male. I saw a short documentary about it on PBS a couple of years ago, and it seems relevant here.

This "experimental ethnography" involved an experimental design that had having one male researcher walk down a long, narrow hallway, accidentally bump against an unsuspecting test subject coming from the other direction and mutter "asshole" at contact. A camera was mounted in the ceiling to observe what happened and metrics devised to measure reactions, and included measuring and comparing testosterone and cortisol levels. The main finding? Men from the South were much more likely to take affront at the contact, for instance, to demand an apology, threaten the other man with physical harm, and to fight. They also exhibited higher levels of testosterone and cortisol in the blood. Men from the North who were bumped typically paid less attention to the contact, and experienced lower levels of hormonal change.

The researchers cite at some length what I guess one might call an culture-anthropological explanation for the difference referencing "shepherding behavior" which I find somewhat interesting. In this explanation, the ancestors of Southern men, coming from some "herding economies on the fringes of Britain" are more prone to violence because the herding life is all about terroritoriality. The paper also mentions the institution of slavery as a potential contributing factor, but seems to me to give it short shrift. It would seem to me that the Southern Culture of Honor was at least reinforced the South for about 250 years was a gigantic slave labor camp. This was massive prison which required that all white males, who as a population were outnumbered by slaves, be on constant guard against the possibility of slave rebellion. In addition, each southern male was enjoined to participate in the capture of runaway slaves as a duty of citizenship.

This vigilante behavior did not go away after the Civil War. The disciplinary regime merely changed from discipline and punish to discipline and lynch. Also, the South has, perhaps because for much of its history it was a prison camp, the South has always been much more militaristically inclined than the North. The military, of course, has very strict codes regarding personal honor, and a strict hierarchical structure which dovetails with the disciplinary regime of the Slavocracy.

So what's that got to do with the lower prong of the two-tier marketing strategy? The marketing messages that claim liberals put the body in jeopardy has worked particularly well in the South because they fit with the culture of honor. The flip side of maintaining honor is fighting back against those who would humiliate you and would thus call into question your honor. As the losing side in the War Between the States, the South has been resentful of Northern power ever since, and has fought back so ably and with such dedication that U.S. politics have been effectively Southernized over the past 30 years.

Okay. Let's turn to the Southern male body of George W. Bush, noted often for its swagger, its cockiness. As Bush's brand manager, communicating news about the presidential body, Karl Rove knows that the image is much more powerful than the word. He places Bush in dramatic situations where Red Staters can see the language of Bush's Southern male body, and in so doing identify themselves in that language. The foremost example, of course, is Bush walking across the aircraft carrier in his flight suit to declare "mission accomplished." And more recently we were treated to his long walk the park in New Orleans to his podium, shirt sleeves rolled up, his walk a simulacrum of force, resolve and purpose. Bush has mastered this language, and its all his supporters, both South and North, need to see to understand that he's the one running the show, and that Liberals haven't got a chance.

Now consider Bill Clinton's southern male body. Consider how the American public was made to imagine "unnatural acts" being performed on that body. His body was coded as corrupt, unclean, unnatural, illegal and immoral. In other words, impeachable.

The reason, I'm claiming, why we don't have any serious, sustained calls for impeachment for Bush lying and spying is because in the Southernization of the American psyche we have become so captive to the language and imagery of the body that the violation of rights has become too abstract. It's not visceral enough. We do not squirm in our seats. The body does not recoil in fear or repugnance when we think of other people getting spied upon. The American people just don't get excited enough about principles anymore unless they are described in such a way as to put the body in jeopardy.

Further, that this is the problem that afflicts the left on many of its classic issues. The left tends to see the political in more abstract terms, terms of fairness and equality and rights: the right to privacy, to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, free from discrimination, from exploitation, from want, etc. For each of these, the right points to a body in jeopardy. For instance, in the case of Privacy the right asks: Would you rather die or what? In the case of discrimination the right asks: You want "race-mixing" and homosexual teachers? It's the Anxious Either/Or (Control vs. Chaos) tied time and time again to the body.

What can the Democrats do to counter-punch the right-wing strategy of the body? I'll have to get back to you on that one.

Frank Rich and The Bush PR Theater Company

Indented below are a few key sentences from Frank Rich's editorial today in the NY Times which I borrowed from AMERICAblog.

First, a word of praise for Frank Rich. Rich's incisive dissections of the taxpayer-supported Bush Public Relations Theater Company, a key node of the military-industrial-defense-energy-infotainment complex, are always welcome. Mr. Rich, longtime theater critic, is clearly well-suited to reviewing the latest improvisations of the Bush troupe since we no longer have a functioning democracy but instead have this very well-funded theatrical enterprise, which, for the benefit of its many investors in the corporate complex, puts on spectacular shows of dissembling, disinformation, and deception. Without further introduction, here's Rich's quote:

The highest priority for the Karl Rove-driven presidency is...to preserve its own power at all costs. With this gang, political victory and the propaganda needed to secure it always trump principles, even conservative principles, let alone the truth. Whenever the White House most vociferously attacks the press, you can be sure its No. 1 motive is to deflect attention from embarrassing revelations about its incompetence and failures.

As much as I am grateful for Rich's columns -- one of the last voices, along with Krugman's, of the Times' once-proud bourgeoisie brownstone liberal tradition -- I find myself shaking my head at his last sentence. He seems to imply that the Bush administration might be "embarrassed" by "incompetence and failures."

Rich, perhaps because he seems to be a person with strong moral and professional values, seems to believe that Bush and his supporting cast might share his belief in professional, if not moral values. I commend him for his charitableness in this; but Bush and his henchmen, immoral, are incapable of embarassment over "incompetence. "

They are instead very capable of sniffing the political winds and sensing what their audiences need. They know when others think they should be embarrrassed, and depending upon whom they wish to discipline or stimulate, will put on a performance to draw attention to themselves and, if necessary, shine a harsh interrogatory spotlight on anyone in the crowd who dares to respond to their latest show with a sigh, a snore, a catcall or Bronx cheer.

You can only be embarrassed at incompetence and failure if you believe you have been shown to be incomptent or to have failed. And since, as part of the Bush troupe's image they cannot admit to failure, they must lash out or humiliate anyone who might suggest a mistake was made.

Recall if you will Bush's inability to admit to making a mistake in his Presidency a couple of years ago. Many liberal commmentators saw that as an example of his inability to look inward or to examine a new set of facts, draw new conclusions and make new plans. But, in fact, he was playing to an audience elsewhere. He used this moment, and very skillfully I might add, to humiliate and mock a representative of "liberal media" for the pleasure of his base. As the president of Good and Evil, Bush doesn't make mistakes. His word is The Word.

Bush's recent "softer focus" pre-Christmas speech suggesting that there might have been "wrong" intelligence about Iraq but that attacking Iraq was still the best course of action was not an admission of failure or incompetence; it was a small off-Broadway one-man designed to mollify a press that was suddenly waking up to Bush's low poll ratings and felt emboldened enough to begin to wonder about the usual performance. Only these critics really noticed Bush's attempt to try a "stretch" role.

Can an administration that is always talking in high moral terms about Good and Evil really be so cynical as to see the world as merely a stage for the launching of lies and cover stories? Much as Mr. Rich might expect or wish otherwise, yes. Yes, indeed.

The Bush Gang's One-Two Punch of Two-Tier Marketing

Congress released a report today that says the Bush's administration's spying on Americans was probably against the law. A Bush administration official was quoted as a counter to the report saying administration's interpretation of the law is correct and proper and will hold up in court.

The Washington Post story describing the report and the administration response provides just the kind of message that Republican propogandists would want. It targets the upper tier of their basic two-tier propaganda/marketing segmentation in which the masses are marketed demagogic messages that place the body in jeopardy, while elites receive Scholasticist messages marketed at the mind. This particular story obviously will target the latter segment, and the smaller segement within the top-tier interested enough to read the paper on Saturday.

The message for the masses on warrantless spying was delivered last week by President Bush: Would You Rather Die or What? In his message he insisted this illegal spying is required when dealing with terrorists. Strong, heartful, heavily-backboned cowboy hero that he is, he has sworn himself to protect the American people from near certain death at the hands of terrorists and their weak misguided liberal friends who would insist on rights even for killers. As usual, the populist message is couched in black and white terms of good vs. evil (strong male republican leadership founded on Good principles which will defend and protect the body from evil versus the weak female democratic non-leadership founded on Evil unwilling to defend the body of the people against Evil).

The more elite are meanwhile treated with articles like the one in the Post. For them there is a constant stream of obfuscating statements that remind them of the vexed bureaucratic white collar regime they must navigate at work, an environment where right and wrong is a matter of power and who wins depends on which side has the better lawyers. Many simply tune out because to focus on the details and hair-splitting interpretations is to take too much time from the increasingly demanding rigors of the speed-up at work. Some enjoy the reportage on bureaucratic infighting and will follow every bulletin and update.

Of course, some right-wingers like both the stimulation of the body and the mind. Murdoch's Molechs, i.e., O'Reilly, etc., engage in "intellectual" defenses of the politics of the right-wing body all the time. The "intellectual" David Brooks likes getting hot under the collar as much as he enjoys feeling smart when he repeats the Scholasticist arguments provided by him by the right-wing tanks, those simple-minded, slash and burn arguments that echo the populist marketing prong in slightly trickier language.

The right has been practicing this two-tier marketing approach profitably since the Nixon era when it first developed its "southern strategy," a strategy it still employs and which must therefore be one of the longest-lived marketing campaigns ever. Since then, many high-end brand names have appropriated and refined the strategy. Gucci, for instance, found it could sell its logo emblazoned T-shirts to the masses in the malls, and continue to sell its haute couture lines to the elite without a negative impact on the brand profile. The cross-pollination and evolution of branding strategies between business and politics (which are actually one in the same these days) has given us right-wing T-shirt slogans for the mall crowd, and smartly tailored, quasi-academic screeds for those who prefer to think of themselves as "right wing thinkers."

The Right has identified some issues it finds particularly successful which are strongly keyed to the stimulation of the body, commonly referred to as "wedge issues." These issues, which it generally wheels out during elections are Guns, God and Gays. The issues stress visceral emotions, primarily fear and disgust, connected with the maintenance of control and power of one's body, and the bodies of one's family. On the flip side, the issues call forth the possibility of performing valorous acts against one's enemies in order to preserve the bodies of one's family and fellows.

For example, families with a gun in the house are protected against criminals who would kill them and liberals who would take their guns (which would permit criminals to kill them), families with a Bible in hand are protected from the gray moral relativism of secular humanists who maliciously mock their values and advocate what they deem to be unnatural and sinful acts that threaten the very basis of the patriarchal regime, acts such as abortion and the homosexual "lifestyle." Under the logic of the body any counter arguments to such closely-held beliefs are instantly ruled out of order, anti-God, anti-family, or anti-patriotic because to tolerate such arguments would place the body in jeopardy. All kinds of jeopardy. And overlaying it all is resentment at those (liberals) who would put their bodies in jeopardy, and a wish to humiliate those liberals for doing so.

These wedge issues do have an elite component: there are "intellectual" arguments attached to gun ownership, abortion, homosexuality, and moral values, and these arguments are vigorously advanced as well. These arguments mostly rest upon a conviction that with God in His Heaven and His Commandments Followed all will be Right with the World. For those right-wingers that do not wish to invoke Him as justification, the rationalizations are made under the Cartesian Either/Or (Autocracy vs. Anarchy), Tradition for the sake of Tradition, or under the inviolate rules of that other God popular with the crew at the country club, the Market God. This unsentimentally but always correctly God assigns value through the workings of an Invisible Hand, and, miraculously tends to support those in power, especially those in dominant positions of power, which is a very nice theory indeed for those in power.

So how can the Left hope to win against what seems to be massively-funded, comprehensive and dominating marketing strategy?

I'm going to have to get back to you on that one.

Chomsky: Putting the Lie to the Liars

Here's my recent review of Noam Chomsky's Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World . A friend of mine, a member of that vanishing breed, the moderate Republican, once asked me: "Why does Chomsky hate America so much?" Never having read Chomsky, I decided to find out if indeed he does hate America. After reading about four of his books, I felt informed enough to tell my friend that Chomsky doesn't hate America. What he hates are the money and power grubbing that is done in the name of America. He's also pretty upset about injustice, lying, and war. All good things to hate.

Facts Are Stubborn Things, October 23, 2005

There is an exquisitely satisfying moment in the DVD documentary "Manufacturing Consent" where Noam Chomsky flatly contradicts William F. Buckley's version of events in Greece in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Clearly flabbergasted by Chomsky's command of the facts but perhaps even more so by his refusal to accept the standard cold-war inspired interpretation of these events, Buckley eventually loses his temper and is reduced to insisting that he is right and that Chomsky is wrong.

At this remove, the interview, conducted sometime in the late 70s or early 80s, is a disturbing artifact of a time when facts were important in the making of political argument, for it is apparent that Buckley is chagrined by his inability to rebut Chomsky on the facts and reduced to repeating his position with greater and greater insistence. Now, of course, as the right itself acknowledges, conservatives do not deign to traffic in "fact-based reality." They instead weave and then don bright, shining garments of red, white and blue, and viciously attack anyone who might suggest they are clothed in raiment of gray lies and dun dissemblance.

And that is precisely why Chomsky is so valuable. He offers a compelling, fact-based counternarrative to the triumphalist ideology of Buckley and the scores of conservative apparatchiks that Buckley and his billionaire inheritance-baby buddies have spawned over the past 30 years -- that same triumphalist nonsense that, for instance, predicted US troops would be greeted in Baghdad as they were Paris in WWII -- with flowers, champagne and kisses.

A self-described "anarcho-syndicalist" in the one-party state that is the US these days, Chomsky's views are apparently too dangerous to allow him more than an occasional interview on radio or television in this great democracy of ours. (Why is it that in the US media that is supposed to be so "liberal," Chomsky is rarely if ever seen, but that we have an endless supply of right wing provocateurs preaching their furious farrago of free market fantasy and unchristian Christianity?).

If you've never read Chomsky, this latest work is a very good introduction to his bracing, fact-based version of American history as imperial adventure and botched conquest. If you're content with the fumigated Sunday school version of reality offered by the mainstream media or the knee-jerk nationalism peddled by the revanchist reactionaries on Fox, Chomsky is probably not for you. But if as a thinking American you have come to doubt the infallibility of our president's heart as naturally right in all things -- e.g., his latest nomination to the Supreme Court, etc. -- you will in reading Chomsky come to use your own head and your own heart, and see American foreign policy for what it truly is.

Coulter: Liberals Are Killers

You only have to read the first sentence of Ann Coulter's defense of the Bush administration's lyin' and spyin' in her column today to see the gigantic straw man she's frantically stuffing so she can, oh so satisfyingly, knock it down. And beat it. And set it on fire in her usual 5 alarm fashion.

It seems the Bush administration -- being a group of sane, informed adults -- has been secretly tapping Arab terrorists without warrants. (Column here if you can stand it.)

Guess those liberals just aren't sane. Or informed. Guess those liberals are weak. Really weak. So weak in fact that liberals allowed, even enabled and, yes, almost even planned 9/11!

Coulter's is the vitriolic version of Bush's more "presidential version" of why he felt it was necessary to spy on Americans: Would You Rather Die or What?

Bush, Etc: Lying, Spying Liars

I think that the review I wrote back in 2003 of Al Franken's Lies and Lying Liars Who Tell Them is particularly relevant during these days of extra special lyin' by the Bush administration and their oh-so-many PR flacks on Fox.

Work on the Haymaker, Al, October 12, 2003
Thank you Mr. Franken for refuting the scurrilous, anti-democratic cant of the oh-so-many assorted tools of the rich and powerful, the murderous mouthpieces Coulter, O'Reilly and Hannity, et. al. Murdoch's Molechs have gotten away their vicious innuendo, distortions, and lies for far too long. With "Liars," Mr. Franken, you, with the help of your Harvard-trained research staff, have put the lie to the hoohah of this hydra-headed beast.

But really, Al, I wonder, do you really think reason and point-by-point refutation, no matter how accurately executed, will have the slightest effect on the beast and its minions? It's a shame that it's gotten this bad, but the bought-and-paid-for rhetoric of the hydra has so polarized America, so marginalized, circumscribed, and even criminalized any other point of view that one wonders if there really is any hope for book like yours actually changing anyone's mind. Yes, it's a shame the so-called liberal media has been missing in action like in the old McCarthy days, and your valiant attempt to throw a monkey wrench into the well-oiled attack machine is laudable, but, really, maybe you should consider doing what so many Americans have already done: relax into the warm bath of slander and take the draught of diminished hope.

Think about it, Al. Maybe it's time to get your heart into the right place, if you know what I mean. Harden it. Stop the bleeding. As we have been told so many times by the Coulter O'Reilly Hannity hydra, there are only two kinds of people in the world: the deserving people who own and run everything because they deserve to, and the undeserving people who are lazy and will never have anything and therefore don't deserve to. You're successul. You deserve your fame and money. You worked hard for it. Luck had nothing to do with it. Not your family either. It was all you, you Rugged Individualist.

So why not gratefully abandon yourself to delicious knee-jerk patriotism and flag reverence of the Fox Network? Remember that war is the health of the state. Punch your fist in the air as the Fox tools toadie to the cynical oligarchy which has swallowed up the once-honorable Republican party. Shout huzzahs to the perfection of the cabalistic policies of George Jr., Cheney, Perle, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bremer and the corporatist state. It'll feel great. Really, Al. And you deserve it, Al. You're proof that the American system works, aren't you?

Whew! Boy that feels good, that "us" and "them" stuff. The deserving and the undeserving thing. You can almost see how the Coulter's and Hannity's get carried away with that stuff. Kind of gets you all puffed up, don't it? But anyway, seriously, Al, by engaging in this dogfight, this parsing of truth and untruth, you're in mortal danger of becoming a pawn in their game of one-upmanship. This is a hard game to win.

I'm not saying you shouldn't have done it, or shouldn't continue to, but consider this, too: the best parts of your book are not the sections where you talk how the conservatives have shredded the social safety net and made off with the family silver, or the parts where you show how Americans have been sold down the trickle-down river, but rather those humane and decent parts of the book where you, for instance, talk about your long and abiding friendship with Paul Wellstone, or talk about the inspiration you find in the American government programs of the New Deal when social justice and equality were embodied in the social safety net, the one that was there for your wife's family when her father was killed in the war.

It is the language of compassion, of community and love that best refutes the devil-take-the-hindmost ethos of Supply Side Jesus. (By the way I suspect that's one of the reasons you like Clinton so much -- he knew how to strike the chord of compassion in most decent Americans, whether Democrat or Republican. This was the gift that drove his enemies wild with hatred: the common touch conservatives claim to have, but don't).

So what if Hannity doesn't have the number one show on television as he claims? Or that O'Reilly never won those two Peabody he claims he did? Until someone with similar bandwidth can get up and slap down that hydra, head by head with the human language of real compassion -- and short-circuit the sound-bite, tough-love, focus-group language of compassionate conservatism -- we're going to be forever treated to Murdoch's Manichean world of good and evil: it simply plays so much better on television.

You're right, someone has to put the lie to the liars, and this is a good start, and we appreciate it. But the other, and, perhaps the more powerful weapon you have at your disposal is your decency and humanity, especially your gift for admitting your own zealousness might sometimes have led you astray. This weapon is powerful because, as you point out, Americans prefer moral persons to scoundrels and liars. And Americans very much want to act morally toward their neighbors, their communities, their country and the world. They are beginning to awaken to the deceptions of these venal and vituperative hacks and their political puppet masters. The weapons of humility, decency and humanity are powerful too because those who have arrayed themselves against the best interests of America are people who are sorely lacking in these estimable traits. You and TeamFranken have the good left jab; use it to keep the bums off-balance while you work on the haymaker.

Bush on Spying: Would You Rather Die or What?

Today our president, against his usual backdrop of US soldiers (although, notably, this time he used wounded US soldiers as props) -- offered his latest, revised reasons for spying on Americans.

Guess what? He says that he had to spy to save Americans from terrorists and liberals. What a surprise! And oh, he also said that because it was only a little spying that makes it okay.

What's fascinating here is Bush's temporization of the rights of Americans. I thought liberals were the ones who engaged in "moral relativism" and that conservatives had hard and fast beliefs about good and evil. I would have thought that government spying is evil -- a black deed, not a gray deed as Mr. Bush seems to be saying, as if grayness makes it kind of okay. I thought liberals were the ones who always saw things in shades of gray.

But now without further adieu, here's Bush's latest:

"This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America, and I repeat limited," Bush said before flying back to Washington after six days cloistered on his ranch in Crawford, Tex. "I think most Americans understand the need to find out what the enemy's thinking. Takeway: Because the spying is limited (whatever that means) therefore it's okay.

"If somebody from al Qaeda is calling you, we'd like to know why." Takeaway: Anybody/any liberal who would stop us from spying on people without a warrant is an al Queda terrorist or sympathizer

The president's first public comments of the new year after no public appearances last week offered a glimpse into how his administration intends to deflect congressional inquiries into his authorization of wiretaps on terrorism suspects -- with a vigorous defense of the program as a matter of national security. Bush acknowledged in a live radio address last month that he authorized the four-year-old surveillance program and defended it as "critical to saving American lives," a tool to prevent another attack on U.S. soil. Two days later, he defended the legality of domestic spying in a lengthy year-end news conference at the White House. Takeaway: Weak liberals want to kill Americans, just like terrorists do.

"It seems logical to me that if we know there's a phone number associated with al Qaeda or an al Qaeda affiliate and they're making phone calls, it makes sense to find out why," Bush said at the Brooke Army Medical Center, where he met with about 50 wounded soldiers, Marines and airmen and their families. He also awarded nine Purple Hearts to troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. "They attacked us before, they'll attack us again."Takeaway: It just does not make sense to have to get a warrant when you're finding out why al Queda is calling a liberal or even a moderate Republican.

I can hardly wait to see Krugman's next editorial!

Mlitary, Too, Now Looking For The Exit In Iraq

Thanks to Democratic Undergound for the links to a poll taken among active duty military personnel and published yesterday at MilitaryCity.com which finds:

Approval of the president’s Iraq policy fell 9 percentage points from 2004; a bare majority, 54 percent, now say they view his performance on Iraq as favorable. Support for his overall performance fell 11 points, to 60 percent, among active-duty readers of the Military Times newspapers.
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The poll also found diminished optimism that U.S. goals in Iraq can be accomplished, and a somewhat smaller drop in support for the decision to go to war in 2003.
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• Nearly two-thirds said the military is stretched too thin to be effective, though that figure is down substantially from two years ago.
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• For the first time in the three-year history of the poll, more than half of respondents said they had deployed in support of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The declining support is not surprising as the military is composed, like the American public, of mostly resonable people who can be fooled for some of the time, but not all the time. More and more it's looking like time is up for this lyin' & spyin' White House gang.

Not reported in the write-up on the site is whether those deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan are more or less or similarly positive/negative in their appraisal of Bush's Iraq policy than those who have not served there. Now that would really tell the story of what's happening over there.

Republicans Are From Action; Democrats From Consulting

The headline of a post on AMERICAblog reads Congressional leaders were informed, not consulted about domestic spying. Then a couple paragraphs from a TIME article (which I've shortened and posted below) are cited in the post:

Tom Daschle, then the Senate Democratic majority leader, says the Administration knows it did not have that implicit authority [to spy on Americans without a warrant] because White House officials had sought unsuccessfully to get congressional leaders to include explicit language approving no-warrant wiretaps in the resolution. Attorney General Gonzales says the Administration decided to go forward with the program anyway because it was convinced that the President possessed the inherent power to act.

What I'm particularly interested in pointing out here is the AMERICAblog headline really shows in summary form how the Bush administrations manages to dominate the Democrats and, most of the time, manipulate the media and thereby the American people.

According to the Republican's master narrative, "consulting" is something liberals would do. The Bush gang acts (always for their own benefit, of course), and then excoriates straw-men liberals for being too weak to act. Republicans then claim liberal inaction puts American lives at risk, which disqualifies them for leadership. Very neat. Very effective.

Cynically, Republicans take advantage of the American culture's admiration for "men of action." Couple this with the way media companies are organized -- to pursue and report news -- and the mostly positive depiction of the actions of "men of action" -- newsmakers -- become clear. Bush and his gang have been a total action system since 9/11, acting, acting, acting. Democrats have been wathching, watching, watching, and occasionally complaining, complaining, complaining. This could perhaps be summarized in the following journalistic metaphor: Republicans Do Headllines. Democrats Do Sub-Heads.

One can only hope that soon the Bush gang's execrable "actions" -- all of them tyrannical, self-serving, and, of course, simply bad -- and the regrettable results of those actions -- anti-democratic and anti-human results most of them, will finally become so apparent that the scales will fall from the eyes of enough Americans that the Bush gang will begin to "consult" with more moderate voices in its own party. Then maybe some of the worst excesses of this total action system will be stymied, at least for a while.