The Power of
Culture:
on the Absurd in
Political Discourse
There is no
doubt that we live in a nation on the decline. One look at the national debt, the national waistline, or
the national casualty count of our foreign wars make it clear that America is
living above its means. But do we
understand our predicament? I
venture that we do not. Recently,
this was best exemplified at the 2006 White House Correspondent’s dinner, the
nearly century old gala thrown at the Hilton Hotel by the White House Correspondent’s
association, allowing the establishment to jovially poke fun at itself. So far, every President since Calvin
Coolidge has attended at least one of the dinners.. 2006 was an odd year.
After a surreal performance by President Bush and a body double playing
the role of Bush’s wandering mind, the podium was turned over to actor Stephen
Colbert, who had just launched his own talk show, the Colbert Report on Comedy
Central, as a spin off to Jon Stewart’s wildly successful Daily Show. With the President and the first family
sitting only yards away, Colbert had a once in a lifetime opportunity to launch
his new political television vehicle in front of the entire American. He proceeded to shamelessly mock every government
mishap and crime authorized since 2001.
“I feel like I’m
dreaming,” he began, “somebody pinch me.
No wait, I’m a pretty sound sleeper, somebody better shoot me in the
face.” In everyone’s mind was the
incident that had taken place only months earlier, when the nation’s Vice President
Richard B. Cheney had shot a lawyer, Harry Whittington, in the face with
birdshot while they were quail hunting together on the 50,000 acre Texas ranch of
Republican lobbyist Katherine Armstrong.
Colbert was out for blood, and no one in the crowd was safe.
He empathized
with the President for not being a “brainiac on the nerd patrol” or a member of
the “factanista.” He spoke of
Bush’s talent for not only standing for things but on things. “Things like aircraft carriers and
rubble and recently flooded city squares.
And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America,
she will always respond—with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the
world.” He boasted that Democracy
was America’s greatest export, “at least until China can find a way to stamp it
out of plastic for three cents a unit,” thanking the Chinese Ambassador for
“making our happy meals possible.”
He joked that Peter Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was
still supporting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld only because Pace had yet to
retire, adding that the military should employ the controversial “stop loss”
program on all the retired generals opposing the current military policy. “If
you’re strong enough to go on one of those pundit shows,” Colbert reasoned,
“you’re strong enough to stand in front of a bank of computer monitors and
order men into battle.” He
complimented John McCain for “seeing the light” and joining the Republican
right, inviting him to stay at his summer home in South Carolina when McCain
speaks at the evangelical Bob Jones University. He even attacked the mainstream journalists around him for
being so good to the administration, “over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the
effect of global warming.” Colbert
thanked the press, because, “We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the
courtesy not to try to find out.”
He finished his speech by airing a video produced with Helen Thomas, the
oldest member of the White House Press Corp, showing Thomas chasing through a
parking garage the government Press Secretary, played by Colbert, hunting down
the motive behind the invasion of Iraq.
Colbert’s roast
may have been the most important intelligence brief George W. Bush ever
received in his political career.
Sitting at the establishment’s heart, he was able to hear in person the
world’s opinion of his government’s policies. For instance, Bush, always known to be a savant of the
literary world, would now exhibit no shock if he went onto YouTube and watched
Harold Pinter’s 2005 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, where
from a wheelchair, the British playwright spoke into a camera for nearly an
hour, calling the invasion of Iraq, the self-described centerpiece of Bush’s
rule:
A bandit
act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the
concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action
inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and
therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and
economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other
justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A
formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation
of thousands and thousands of innocent people. We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium,
innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi
people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.[i]
Bush would also
be prepared if he picked up the habit of reading the morning papers, some thing
he famously avoided while in office.
If so, he may have opened up the New York Times to Maureen Dowd’s back page column, written just as
he had made his graceless exit amidst the greatest financial collapse of his
presidency. Dowd, reviewing the
Broadway show You’re Welcome America: A Final Night with George W.
Bush, wrote of a crowd that “howled with delight” at the mockery of “one of
the worst Presidents ever.”[ii] She quoted the playwrights, Saturday
Night Live alumni Will Ferrell and Adam McKay describing the now former
President to be “a petulant teenager who just flunked the trig quiz and knows
he screwed up,” and as a figure who “just used his whole life to front questionable
business endeavors,” adding the apt comparison that “in a way that’s what his
presidency was,” one massively questionable business endeavor. The title of Dowd’s column, “Cheney and
the Goat Devil,” referred to a scene in the play where Bush, played by Ferrell,
recounts the experience of walking in on the Vice President, arms locked with a
giant goal devil in a White House basement full of pentagrams.
“He looked at me
with solid silver glowing orb-like eyes, and his breath had a strong ammonia
scent to it,” Ferrell’s W. said. “And he told me in a language that I knew in
my heart hadn’t been spoken in a thousand years ‘Pariff Go Lanerff!’ And I just
ran.”
Bush would even
be ready if he secretly followed the proceedings of his imperial successor,
Barack Obama, who joked within his first months in office that Vice President
Cheney’s memoirs, ostensibly the most insider of insider perspective on the
greatest change to the U.S. government since World War Two, should be titled
“How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People.”
These are both
funny and unfunny developments. It
was delightfully absurd to have George W. Bush preside over the post 9/11
destruction of the American government.
For those opposing him, it gave a hope that the problem wasn’t systemic,
only the product of an idiot Texan from Connecticut, a version of the
television sitcom Dynasty come to life, who had to blatantly steal an election
in order to get into power.
For his supporters, he was proof positive of a people’s champion, a
god-fearing, baseball-loving governor who would deal with problems the American
way. Once he declared his crusade
against America’s enemies, he was anointed by God to his supporters, and prayed
for in Superchurches across the country.
If he had been a player on the Texas Rangers, instead of its owner, his
career would mirror that of an out of shape, hotheaded phenom, one who attempts
to set his comrades emotionally alight by starting a brawl, only to later come
up famously lame when the levees began to break on his team’s chances. No matter the objective harm such a
career has, everyone can get behind this distinct national storyline, one that
the late President Dwight Eisenhower might have categorized as “the disastrous
rise of misplaced power.” It makes
sense, and one gets used to such blunders as history progresses.
However,
on the other side of the coin, the Bush years, in their radically unhinged
nature, were harmful to the American psyche in an insidious manner not yet
fully understood. The CIA originally
used the term “blowback” in 1953, as a prediction of would be borne out after
American intelligence officers, carrying the aristocratic names of Roosevelt
and Schwarzkopf, organized the overthrow of the Prime Minister of Iran. In 2000, long time Asia scholar
Chalmers Johnson published a book with the same title, the first of a
groundbreaking trilogy detailing the effect of U.S. militarism on the
world. Johnson defines
blowback as “retaliation for covert, illegal violence that our government has
been carried out abroad that it kept totally secret from the American public
(even though such acts are seldom secret among the people on the receiving
end).”[iii] Relating to George W. Bush and Iraq, it
is still not clear what was kept secret as a matter of Presidential policy, and
what was kept secret from the President himself. With exatly 50 years having passed between the Iran coup and
the invasion of Iraq, it as not as clear where will the blowback come from, now
that overthrowing Middle Eastern governments is not as simple a task as it was
a half century ago. To paraphrase
Donald Rumsfeld, we still don’t know what we don’t know about the last eight
years of lethal politics.
Juicy details keep
coming out in the books being released by the few remaining investigative
journalists left in Washington D.C..
Some of the more disturbing stories include a conversation that took
place between George W. Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush in August of
2006, during a vacation at the family estate in Kennebunkport, Maine. Feeling the effects of a Presidency
gone awry, the younger Bush had thrown away a policy paper delivered to him by
his father, written by his father’s former national security advisor and
coauthor Brent Scowcroft. Bush was
a child throwing a tantrum. “I’m
sick and tired of getting papers from Brent Scowcroft telling me what to do,
and I never want to see another one again.”[iv] Later, after calming down, baby Bush
took a walk with his father through the estate grounds. Resigned with problems, he asked his
father a question that must have been troubling his mind for some time.
“What’s a neocon?” The father, a former President, Vice
President, and CIA chief, replied by asking his son if he wanted names or a
description of the political sect that had dominated his governments response
to 9/11.
“Description.”
“Well, I’ll give it to you in one
word. Israel.”
There is also
the little known story of George W. Bush’s actual athletic career. While a student at Harvard Business
School in the mid 1970s, Bush had been a jock and a clown, “short on academic
skill, but long on bravado.”[v] He was the captain of the class
basketball team, which competed intramuraly against other Business school
classes. In one particular game,
against the winning team from the class below, the future president
intentionally slugged the opposing captain, Gary Engle, in the mouth with his
elbow while Engle was taking a shot, silently smiling at his reaction of shock
and anger. Then, as play moved to
the other end of the court and Engle went up for a rebound, Bush chopped his
legs out from under him, starting a fistfight between the two captains. In recounting this tale, journalist Ron
Suskind understands the episode as fitting Bush’s unique talent as
President. “Cheney came up with
the doctrine, but George W. Bush intuitively knew how to carry it forward. A sudden blow for no reason is better
than one for a good reason. Make
your opponents second-guess themselves.
That’s when they make mistakes.”[vi]
These
are the stories that highlight the disturbing stupidity and evil of the Bush
years. A portrait of a vindictive
child of the establishment serving as the mascot for whatever cadre of elites
had the ear and wallet of those actually making government policy. A former President and a sitting President,
father and son, hashing out the future of America on their palatial coastal
estate, blaming their problems on foreign countries. Games of psychological chicken, competitions of machismo
between shallow businessmen. This
version of the story is hard to laugh at, when it is though about in
conjunction with the human atrocities of war and poverty. And it is not only the Bush
Administration that carries this sordid history, but nearly every American
government in recent memory.
This
leaves a question out there to be answered. What will be the dominant intellectual strain in
international politics over the following years? Will it be the jester holding court at twilight galas,
gently turning all crimes into laughable asides, or the enraged populous,
calling for all out war and death for the figures pulling the strings at the
top. As it stands, the emperor has
no cloths, and there are two responses; that of the New York Times editorial board or that of armed militias equipped with
pirate radio stations and Facebook pages.
Both are very real factions within the 300 million people that live in
America, and both have the power to physically harm the public at large.
First,
there is the U.S corporate media—the New York Times, Newsweek,
and the television show Fox and Friends being just a few examples of the breed. It is safe to say that in the eyes of many, the performance
of these entities is ranked very low, perhaps even as low as that of the
Federal Congress. Greg Palast, the
award winning American journalist—although one that is virtually blacklisted
from the U.S. press—opened the introduction to the American edition of his 2003
book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by writing “You read the papers and you watch television, so you know
the kind of spider-brained, commercially poisoned piece of crap reporting you
get in America. You could call
this book What You Didn’t Read in the New York Times and What You
Can’t See on CBS.”[vii] But Palast had a grudge; his
groundbreaking expose for the BBC on how Florida Governor Jeb Bush deliberately
purged black Democratic voters from the state’s register, helping his brother
to steal the 2000 Presidential vote, had not been picked up by any major
American press outlets.
Another
man with a grudge against the New York Times is Ervand Abrahamian, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the
City University in New York. In a
heavily annotated article written in the summer of 2003, just as the American
occupation of Iraq was turning sour, Abrahamian reflected on the effect that
the “Clash of Civilizations” thesis had had on American media, much of it
headquartered in his academic home city, after September 11th:
The Media framed the
whole crisis within the context of Islam, of cultural conflicts, and of Western
Civilizations threatened by the Other.
Even the liberal New York Times
adopted this framework, and then tried every so often to distinguish between
good and bad Muslims, between the correct and incorrect interpretation of
Islam, and between peaceful and violent understandings of the Koran. No doubt it editors would reassure us
that some of their friends—nay, some of their op-ed writers—are Muslim. Such nuances, however, are lost within
the larger picture portraying the main threat as coming from the Muslim
world. The article headings
invariably featured the term Islam.
Illustrations often shoed bearded uloma and angry mobs waving Korans. And a host of ills found in the region
from Morocco to Indonesia were traced to religion.[viii]
Today, the game continues. Just last summer, Thomas Friedman, the
wealthy and influential travel writer who serves as the guiding voice of
foreign affairs coverage for the Times,
wrote of his recent experience taking a “fun” helicopter ride with Admiral Mike
Mullen through the mountains of Afghanistan, foothills to the Himalayan roof of
the world. Mullen was two years
into his Chairmanship of the armed services, and Friedman was eight years into
an Afghan war he had helped cheerlead, and both men were off to see
humanitarian celebrity Greg Mortenson open a school for Afghan girls. Witnessing the Chairman hand a notebook
to one girl, no doubt safely within a perimeter force of elite bodyguards, made
Friedman reminisce on what the idea of the “war on terror” was really all about
in the first place. What are all
these soldiers doing all the way across the world, anyways? Conveniently, Friedman remembered that
they were there to fight “the war of ideas within Islam,” what he describes as
“a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keeps Islam
untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women
disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas
and empower Muslim women as much of men.”[ix]
This
type of widely read viewpoint becomes very important when one looks at another
aspect of the “war on terror,” that of American soldiers indiscriminately
killing Muslim civilians, regardless of gender, in airstrikes and nightly
Commando raids on houses. This has
occurred as a matter of policy throughout much of the current wars in both Iraq
and Afghanistan, and causes huge backlash among the population of the countries
we are attempting to occupy. For a
sense of how ingrained this tactic is, one only has to look to General Stanley
McChrystal, the Obama appointed chief warlord of Afghanistan. McChrystal had spent the last several
years leading the American Special Forces in Iraq, where he acquired the
nickname “manhunter” for his primal physical regiment and success at killing
Iraqi’s targeted as being bad Iraqi;s by god knows who.
In essence,
however, little has changed from the time of Vietnam, when the same devastating
triangle of military generals, Washington politicians, and corporate press
created what scholar and activist Daniel Ellsberg calls “atrocity-generating
situations.” Journalist Michael
Herr, in his masterful Dispatches, put
it slightly differently, writing “Somewhere on the periphery of that total
Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning papers too heavy to bear,
lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as
simple as it had always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of
victims.
“But there was
also a command that didn’t feel this,” he wrote. “And an Administration that
believed the Command, a cross-fertilization of ignorance, and a press whose
tradition of objectivity and fairness (not to mention self-interest) saw that
it all got space.”[x]
What
is different today from the time of Vietnam is that the New York Times and its myopic ilk have less of a credible edge to
stand on. Their editorial slant
has been outpaced by technology.
Now, when American newspapers barely cover an embarrassing incident,
such as the accidental bombing of a wedding ceremony, or the murder of pregnant
women by U.S. Special Forces, it is easy to see the lack of coverage in
context. The Internet, in its
ability to aggregate international news in real time, places the omission of
coverage next to some report from overseas, and the American establishment
comes out all the worse. Not only
is it apparent that the wars are being fought in devious manners, it is also
apparent that all the official reports are laced with cover-ups and
propaganda. Just because the New
York Times pundit is still taking
helicopter rides with the top military brass does not mean that every brave
journalist is, and the Internet has made both equally as accessible to an
inquisitive mind.
On
cable news channels, this phenomenon is even more outlandish. Americans may be used to the
twenty-four hour news station, Ten Turner’s CNN having been founded in 1980,
but for the rest of the world it is a sociological innovation taking place right
now. English language news stations, internationally broadcast,
have sprung up in Qatar (al Jazeera English), Iran (Press TV), Russia (Russia Today,
or RT), and France (France 24). In
South America, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez led a consortium of Argentina, Bolivia,
Cuba and Uruguay in launching a Spanish language network “teleSur,” now available
in 17 Latin American countries and working in cooperation with al-Jazeera.[xi] In addition to being broadcasted
globally over satellite, the shows are all available for free on the Internet,
through both their own websites and YouTube. At least one institution, the Pentagon, understands the
power of these international TV channels.
U.S. forces have so far bombed two of al Jazeera’s news bureaus, in both
Kabul and Baghdad.
The
ostensible purpose of these channels is to give a different perspective on
international news than that of CNN and the BBC, but in reality they are
becoming bastions for the most radical of voices to achieve fame by bashing the
actions of the Western elite. As
an example, former Wall Street trader, financial analyst and documentary
filmmaker Max Keiser is quickly becoming a star of the new medium, with
currently hosting half hour shows on both PressTV and RT. At the beginning of last year, he had a
short run hosting a program on the BBC, The Oracle, where he would attempt to predict the news. In a memorable first episode, Keiser
ran a skit where his face was superimposed over Colin Powell’s, while Powell
was delivering his infamous Iraq speech to the UN Security Council. But instead, overdubbed was a speech by
Keiser on the dangers of financial weapons of mass destruction, with
international bankers substituting in the position of Saddam Hussein.[xii] Suffice to say, the BBC did not keep
him for that long.
But
on the other channels, Keiser is unstoppable. He routinely calls Goldman Sachs thieving scum, at times
even advocating for their death.
In November 2008, as the financial crisis was exploding, he spoke on
al-Jazeera, calling for a fatwa to be called against U.S. Treasury Secretary
Hank Paulson, because “his head should be bouncing down the capital steps.”[xiii] Last month, as Greece was in the midst
of its own crisis, Keiser again exploded on al-Jazeera, advocating that the
Greeks should choose “insurrection” and overthrow their corrupt government.[xiv] One of his favorite lines is that he
would rather have Osama bin-Laden running the central banks of America and
England than the “financial terrorists” running them now.
Keiser
sees himself as somewhat of a postmodern Robin Hood figure, having founded the
Karmabanque hedge fund, which advocates for boycotts of Corporate products like
Coca Cola, and then bets against the stock price, donating the resulting
profits to the people exploited by the corporations the world over. He was also the founder of the Hollywood
Stock Exchange, a popular virtual stock
exchange allowing people to bet on Hollywood profits. For his efforts at Karmabanque, the Guardian characterized Keiser as someone who believes he
exists “beyond the normal forces and controls of society.”[xv]
And
if one thinks this type of coverage is the exception, it is not, nor is it
limited to the burgeoning new culture of international media. American pundits have themselves taken
up much of the same banner of resistance, although you would be hard pressed to
know only watching television.
However, on the Internet, the likes of both the intellectual left and
right have united against government militarism and moneyed speculation.
A
full listing of this convergence is presently impossible, but just a few
examples will suffice. On the left
there is TomDispatch.com, founded as an email list shortly after 9/11 by editor
Tom Englehardt, and quickly expanded into the American Empire book series. This series has included such authors
as the previously mentioned Chalmers Johnson, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and
Michael Klare. Tomdispatch.com,
the ideological heart of the literary movement, is now a part of the Nation
Institute, a think tank centered around the liberal magazine. Every few days it publishes a new
essay, promoting the concept of America as a failed state choking on its own
sword of unfettered neoliberal capitalism and imperial militarism. Just like Max Keiser insists, such
claims are not to be taken as hyperbole, and they are often featured in the
subtitles of the scholarly books in the series. Across the political spectrum on the right, the libertarian
driven Antiwar.com, founded in 1996, performs much the same function, with a
particular bent towards the politics of Ron Paul and Patrick Buchanan. The American Conservative, the
magazine Every day one
of their internet antiwarriors assembles every link they can find that details
the horrors of any war taking place anywhere in the world. The archives of both Tomdispatch.com
and Antiwar.com serve as excellent catalogues of the folly of government
policy, especially during the Bush years.
However, they both have a definite oppositional viewpoint. From the cute little donation button on
Tomdispatch adorned with the message “resist empire” to the libertarians
intense dislike of the state, a virulent anti-Americanism is the cause.
Another example
worth mentioning is the muckraking stalwart Rolling Stone magazine.
Rolling Stone has recently taken to featuring the ranting and
railing articles of Matt Taibbi. Taibbi is an American political dissident, and
the founder of a bi-weekly gonzo paper in Russia, The Exile, that dissected and mocked the corruption of Russian
politics in the late 1990’s. So scared of controversy Taibbi is not. Last summer, he accused Goldman Sachs
of being both “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,
relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,”
and “a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth
of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on
Earth—pure profit for rich individuals.”[xvi] Later in the year, he turned on the
Obama administration, declaring that the White House, “rather than doing what
FDR had done during the Great Depression and institute stringent new rules to
curb financial abuses,” was doing exactly what Bush had done,
“institutionalizing the policy” of “keeping a few megafirms rich at the expense
of everyone else.”[xvii]
When
Rolling Stone published these articles,
Taibbi had to stave off a load of criticism from more mainstream pundits. He was accused of not being objective,
and of sacrificing detail to create space for curse words. However, his real crime was that he
treated establishment finance as one giant metaphor for evil. But as of last week, Taibbi was
vindicated by Senator Carl Levin, a powerful Democrat from Michigan, and the
chairman of the Congressional Subcommittee on Investigations. Armed with a foot-tall binder of
subpoenaed internal documents from Goldman Sachs, Levin berated the helpless
banker sitting at the table below him with an email that emphasized how one
Goldman financial product, named “Timberwolf,” was “a shitty deal” for whoever
was buying it. There was a moment
during the testimony, as the executive was trying to squirm away from the
questioning, when Levin’s eyes got wide, and he said “It doesn’t matter, its an
internal document,” and you could tell the Senator had just moved a little bit
closer to the crazies like Taibbi.
After this moment, Levin kept repeating questions about Goldman’s
“shitty deal,” over and over, like he was surprised that the forces of usury
were not beneficial to all. It was
one of the most profane moments in recent Congressional history, at least since
Vice President Cheney said “Go fuck yourself” to Senator Patrick Leahy over
probing questioning from the Vermonter about Haliburton, the oil industry giant
of which Cheney had previously been a CEO.
The
thread that ties this altogether—connecting Max Keiser’s death threats on
Iranian television to Noam Chomsky’s latest book to Carl Levin cursing up a
storm—is the confused intellectual response to the absurdity of American
politics. It is Stephen Colbert’s
Correspondent Dinner roast and the murder of al-Jazeera journalists by
American’s flying Bell Helicopters all rolled into one. People do not know whether to laugh or
cry, to be scared at the Orwellian information controls being placed around
them or grin at the folly of these controls being physically, not just
theoretically, implemented. It was
once leaked that in their post 9/11 heyday—full of anthrax attacks,
civilizational clashes, and a PATRIOT act—a group of paranoid security
bureaucrats at DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, wanted to implement a
blanket of “total information awareness” over the citizenry. The scheme was exposed to scandal and
nominally cancelled, to the furor of Secretary Rumsfeld. "Oh my goodness gracious isn't that
terrible,” he mocked to a journalist when asked about the recently cancelled
program. “Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.”
“I went down that next day and said fine, if
you want to savage this thing fine I'll give you the corpse. There's the name.
You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs
to be done and I have.”[xviii] But it seems that Rumsfeld’s scheme
worked in reverse, and instead the world’s public has total awareness of the
Pentagon’s failure. The political
economy of information has become so twisted that it is hard for any researcher
to evaluate the sources they are receiving.
As
a personal example, I came to this revelation myself while browsing the shelves
of a Barnes and Noble in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Being pushed by a branch of America’s largest corporate
bookseller, sitting in a strip mall in a rich New England village, was none
other than Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine,
a polemic critique of the last thirty years of American capitalism. Klein, a Canadian socialist, writes of
the East Coast establishment without respect, spilling as much ink on Harvard
University and Jeffery Sachs as she does on American policy in Iraq. When I saw her book comfortably nestled
in what should have been an institution safe from such radical thought, I
realized the full extant of the political machinations surrounding intellectual
discourse. Klein herself was
confused by this phenomenon, and the bad reviews her bestseller received from
the International business press.
Writing on the Huffington Post, she admitted that the City of London’s salmon-pink moneyed bible, the
Financial Times, which had called
her work a threat to “impressionable readers,” was one of her best sources. “What
hurts most about the attacks from the world's business editors: even as they
find new ways to dismiss me, I remain a devoted reader of their pages. Sure,
financial editors have to do PR for capitalism. Their reporters, however, have
a crucial market role. Investors require reliable information, and it's their
job to supply it.”[xix] What have we come to when a leading
voice of the left is advocating that information, the collective of ideas,
should be understood as varying degrees of “PR for capitalism,” different
“market roles.” We are all extras in a play
designed to control the mind and confuse the heart, caught up in what Lewis
Lapham, the longtime editor of Harper’s
magazine calls the “theater of war:”
Money in sufficient
quantity washes out the stains of cruelty and greed, transports its proprietors
to always higher altitudes of snow white innocence. If the Air Force can drop bombs from 30,000 feet, preferably
through a veil of fluffy white clouds, we can imagine ourselves making a war
movie of playing a harmless video game. The work of ritual purification is best
done when one knows as little as possible about who is doing what to whom. The procedure is better suited to the
selling of Internet stock and soft pornography than to the governing of
empires.[xx]
[i] Harold Pinter,
“Art, Truth and Politics,” The Nobel Foundation, 2005.
[ii] Maureen
Dowd, “Cheney and the Goat Devil,” New York Times, February 18th, 2009.
[iii] Chalmers
Johnson, Nemesis: The Last
Days of the American Republic, (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2007), pg. 2.
[iv] Andrew
Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise,
Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, (New York:
Scriber, 2007), pg. 219.
[v] Ron Suskind,
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep
Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006) pg. 215.
[vi] Ibid., 216.
[vii] Greg
Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Truth About Corporate Cons,
Globalization, and High-Finance Fraudsters,
(London: Plume Books, 2003), pg. 1.
[viii] Ervand
Abrahamian, “The US Media, Huntington, and September 11,” Third World
Quarterly, Vol.. 24, No. 3 (June., 2003)
pg. 531.
[ix] Thomas
Friedman, “Teacher Can we Leave Now? No.,” New York Times, July 18th 2009.
[x] Michael
Herr, Dispatches, (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1977), pg. 214.
[xi] Dilip Hiro,
After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World, (New York: Nation Books, 2010), pg. 246.
[xii] http://maxkeiser.com/watch/rebel-rouser/max-keiser-speaking-before-the-un-security-council-about-disarming-bankers/
[xiii] http://maxkeiser.com/watch/al-jazeera-english-news-appearances/16-november-2008/
[xiv] http://maxkeiser.com/watch/al-jazeera-english-news-appearances/14-march-2010-greek-crisis/
[xv]
“Destination Uncertain—Mad Max,” The Guardian Online, November 26th 2004.
[xvi] Matt
Taibbi, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” Rolling Stone, July 9th, 2009.
[xvii] Matt
Taibbi, “Obama’s Big Sellout,” Rolling Stone, December 13th, 2009.
[xviii]
“Secretary Rumsfeld Media Availability En Route to Chile,” Department of
Defense Transcript, November 18, 2002. (http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2002/11/dod111802.html)
[xix] Naomi
Klein, “My Unrequited Love for the Business Press,” Huffington Post, October 25th, 2007.
[xx] Lewis
Lapham, Theater of War, (New York: The
New Press, 2002) pg. 133.
No comments:
Post a Comment