| Clearing The Decks
First, let's get clear on the basic fact of the madness. What did MoveOn say? Did MoveOn criticize the military? (Gasp!) No, in fact, MoveOn did not. Did MoveOn attack the military? No, in fact, MoveOn did the precise opposite: It defended the military by pointedly asking if the troops were being sold out for a political purpose. And the people who mounted this attack on MoveOn were precisely those who have been selling out the military since day one.
This is projection, folks, pure and simple. Pot. Kettle. Black. It's been the dominant form of political discourse since the GOP took over Congress in 1994.
Consider. Here is the military's own summary of its "lessons learned" from the Vietnam War. It came to be known as "The Powell Doctrine," because it was prominently articulated by Colin Powell around the time of the First Gulf War. But in fact it did not come from Powell personally. If was a consensus judgment, and for the military as an institution, it made a lot of sense. Here it is:
The questions posed by the Powell Doctrine, which should be answered affirmatively before military action, are:
1. Is a vital national security interest threatened?
2. Do we have a clear attainable objective?
3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
4. Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
6. Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
7. Is the action supported by the American people?
8. Do we have genuine broad international support?
By now, the fiasco of Iraq is so well-known that simply to pose these questions is to indict the Bush Administration. Every single question can unambiguously be answered in the negative. And this is not simply something that we can say with the wisdom of hindsight. This was obvious as events were unfolding.
So, here's the simple construction:
(1) The military developed the "Powell Doctrine" as its set of lessons learned from Vietnam, to protect itself in the future, and thus to protect its ability to defend America.
(2) Bush carelessly discarded the "Powell Doctrine", thus severely damaging the military and its ability to defend America.
(3) Bush hates the troops. He treats them with utter contempt. General staff that chooses to do his bidding aligns itself with Bush, and against the troops entrusted to their care.
(4) Criticizing officers who betray the troops is defending the troops against their betrayal.
Taking the Measure of Insanity
Without even thinking about it, most of us have our political clocks set to the time-scale of 9/11. This is where we go terribly wrong. If our collective political insanity really had started then, then it would be perfectly normal to expect that madness to be wearing off. The election of a Democratic Congress nearly a year ago should have signaled a sharp turning point.
But this assumption is wrong. And it's not just that the Democrats actually controlled the Senate when they voted to authorize war with Iraq in 2002. It's wrong because we had already experienced more than half a decade of madness before 9/11. Indeed, we have every reason to believe that that period of madness was why 9/11 happened in the first place.
If you think that a President getting a blow-job is the greatest crisis in the history of American government, then it pretty much goes without saying that you're missing the big picture. And that big picture includes people plotting to destroy the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the White House and/or Congress.
To gain some perspective on that madness, I want to quote from a document--a collection of email posts, actually--from the pre-blog era. These are from Phil Agre, whose essay, "What Is Conservatism and What is Wrong With It?" also figured prominently in post-2004 election discussions at MyDD, and was the first subject of the first Book Club discussion there.
Like that essay, the posts collected in this document--Notes On The New Jargon came from Agre's email list, the Red Rock Eater Newsletter, which had around 5,000 subscribers as I recall--a pretty considerable audience for the time. Some were written during the 2000 Florida election contest, some earlier in 2000, and a couple in 1998 and 1999. The document as a whole runs over 30,000 words, and is well worth reading in its entirety. But here are just a few choice excerpts, worth reading both for their invaluable insight, and for the reminder of just how long things have been going on like this:
12/9/00
The Florida Supreme Court's order to finally count the votes in the presidential election should not have been a surprise. Republicans in Florida insist on counting illegal ballots and not counting legal ballots, and accuse the Democrats of stealing the election for insisting otherwise. Florida Republicans stole the 1998 Miami mayor's race using illegal absentee ballots, and now they insist that illegal absentee ballots be counted in the 2000 race, and excoriate the Democrats for circulating a memo that summarizes Florida absentee ballot laws. It's incredible.
Meanwhile the Republicans accuse the Democrats of trying to change the rules after the election simply for going to court to make the election boards follow the Florida election law, even as the Republican Florida legislature attempts to change the rules after their election with their utterly illegal attempt to replace the citizens' votes with their own.
We see here the central principle of the new jargon: whatever you're doing, falsely accuse your opponents of doing it. Now the far-rightwing of the US Supreme Court has engaged in the most extreme case of judicial activism in American history, staying action by the Florida Supreme Court under the very clear authority granted to the Florida courts by the Florida legislature, shutting down the contest procedure that Florida law provides and thus effectively throwing the election to its preferred conservative choice. In response to all of this,the sidewalk of the federal building in Los Angeles is filled with right-wing protesters whose signs use words like "fascism" and "evil"-- to describe what the Florida court did.
This is what actually happened to bring George Bush to power. It was so bad that, for instance, Agre was one of the few public commentators to actually note at the time something that has been totally flushed down the memory hole--there never even was a full Florida recount in the first place. A significant chunk of counties did not recount their ballots as required by law, but simply re-ran the tabulation software. This could readily be seen at the time, since they were the counties that had identical vote totals for the original count and the recount--something that virtually never happens with more than a few thousand votes.
Did this make a difference in the outcome? We'll never know. But it is fully indicative of how utterly lawless the process was, left to itself, and how utterly incompetent the media was in reporting on it. These are the filters through which all the known outrageous need to be viewed.
Agre continues:
America is now Upside-Down-Backwards Land; it is filled with people who are capable of doing anything, because whatever they do, no matter how crazy or extreme, they hallucinate that it is really being done to them. How do they get themselves into that state? Let me give you an example. Looking at the map of which American states voted for which presidential candidate, conservative pundit Mike Barnicle remarked on MSNBC that the southern and middle states, which voted for Bush, represented "family values", and that the northeastern and west-coast states, which voted for Gore, represented "entitlement".
In a normal country this sort of thing would be denounced as ugly and divisive stereotyping. Instead, Gore supporter Paul Begala responded in a polite way by arguing that the situation is more complicated, and that every state has both good and bad aspects. To illustrate this, and clearly in that context, he pointed out that the states that Barnicle praised where also the states where James Byrd was lynched, Matthew Shepard was crucified, a federal office building was blown up, and so on. He continued by repeating that each of those states also has good attributes, and repeated that the picture is complicated. He concluded by calling Barnicle a "gifted commentator".
Then Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall St. Journal, took out of context the bit about the Bush states being places where people got lynched and crucified and so on, and presented it as if Begala were claiming that those events defined the states they happened in. She mentioned nothing of Barnicle's comments, or of the message about things being complicated. Noonan's out-of-context quote was then repeated over and over by the conservative media echo chamber, Michael Kelly in the Washington Post for example.
The quote bounced all over the Internet, and was mailed tome by several different people. In each case, starting with Noonan, the argument was the same: this is the viciousness of Democrats to which we must respond in kind. Can you see the projection? Republican columnist issues vicious stereotype of Democratic states. Nobody expresses outrage. Democrat responds that the picture is complicated and that stereotypes do not apply. Republicans quote Democrat out of context, accusing him of issuing vicious stereotype of Republican states, using said accusation to justify further vicious behavior of their own. That's how it works.
That's the ways it's done: hysterical rightwing propaganda is normalized, and not even liberal, but a purely factual centrist observation is demonized as vicious and hateful.
(Of course, Begala could have said something much more damning and appropriate to the specifics of Barnicle's claims: It is the the northeastern and west-coast states, which voted for Gore, which supposed "represented 'entitlement'", that are by in large net donors to the federal government, and the Bush red states that live off of federal money. Likewise, the southern and middle states, which voted for Bush and supposedly "represented 'family values'", are the ones with the highest divorce rates.
But, of course, Begala would never say such a thing. After all, he's one of the ones they let onto tv.)
Here's one final quote from that first email in the document:
Here's another example. The Republicans have incessantly used the word "selective" to suggest that there is something wrong with the Florida law that allows a party to an election to ask for recounts in particular counties. This law is not remotely unusual, and Republicans have asked for recounts under similar laws in many jurisdictions.
Now, however, they claim to discern a 14th amendment equal-protection problem, an idea that the courts have basically laughed at. Like so many words of the new jargon, the word "selective" is nicely ambiguous: it has one meaning that is true but trivial, and another meaning that is menacing but false.
The true-but-trivial meaning is simply that the recounts are to be held in some jurisdictions and not others; a more suitable word might perhaps be "selected". But "selective" carries a negative connotation that the selection has been made in an arbitrary, unfair, or biased way, and this is the second, menacing, false meaning -- false because, as everyone on a sane planet would clearly recognize, the Republicans had a perfectly equal right to ask for recounts of their own, and simply declined to do so.
This starts to get into the sort of linguistic analysis that Agre excels at, unravelling how two different frameworks interact with one another to obfuscate and confuse.
Another thing Agre does is illuminate how projection works in larger context. This is from the next emai in the document:
(1) The words "partisan" and "bias". In the time that I have been writing about the current elections, I have received perhaps 100 messages telling me nothing except that I am either "partisan" or "biased". These words are outstanding examples of the perversity of the current jargon. The first entered into circulation when some Americans called people like Newt Gingrich "partisan" for doing things like training political candidates to describe their opponents with words like decay, sick, pathetic, stagnation, corrupt, and traitors (LA Times 12/19/94).
The jargon-speakers did something characteristic with this: they accused their opponents of identifying as "partisan" any views other than their own. Notice how this works: it inflates the word, deletes all mention of the justification for using it, and projects both of these moves onto Them.
Next, they started using the word "partisan" in the inflated, dishonest way that they had ascribed to their opponents. Again very characteristically, this gave them the cover they needed to go around irrationally abusing people: it let them think "they're really the ones who are doing this to us".
This is one reason why the speakers of the new jargon so cherish the slights that they sometimes experience: they now have new cover to employ in abusing people. What is more, the word "partisan", like the word "bias", now means nothing except "you have a different opinion than mine", except that having a different opinion is now ipso facto wrong -- not just mistaken but improper.
Faced with the discomfort of differing views, you can now release the tension by flinging these empty words, thereby assaulting people while feeling inwardly that you are standing up for morality. And if they have a problem with that, then of course you can ask surprised and accuse them of abusing you.
These quotes, although somewhat long, only scratch the surface of this collected work on jargon. The point of my presenting it, again, is two-fold: first, to introduce folks to some powerful insights, and second to remind us all of just how long things have been this crazy. Because we live in America, rather than Versailles, it's a lot easier for us to see through all this BS. But if you're living right in the middle of it, and if you have done so for years, then this sort of insanity becomes "normal" and normal thought comes to seem insane.
Speaking of insanity, here's one final excerpt before I sign off:
9/3/00
American culture is going insane. I'm not sure that I mean this in a clinical way, but I do mean it. In "The Divided Self", R. D. Laing described the experience of going insane, and I think that his model applies well. Insanity, he says, starts with "ontological insecurity", which is a doubt about whether one's own self exists. People who suffer from ontological insecurity are unhappy, and they may even be crazy, but they are not insane. Insanity starts when the individual decides that his or her own personality is evil, and that they are obligated to destroy it.
American culture has always been prone to ontological insecurity, ever since Europe exported all of its religious fanatics to us. Not all religious people are crazy; indeed, true religion is the cure for craziness. Rather, Europe was raked for centuries by horrific wars and epidemics, and the cultural upshot of these experiences in a deeply religious and badly educated society was religious fanaticism.
In the American context, religious fanaticism rapidly turned into a politics of conspiracy theories, and that politics has returned periodically to the surface ever since. Conspiracy theories are precisely but a kind of political psychosis driven by ontological insecurity: a doubt that the institutions of the country even exist.
This takes extreme forms with wackos, mostly on the right but on the left as well, who believe that the United States Constitution was officially repealed in the 1930s, or any number of other wild scenarios. But ontological insecurity was also a dominant theme of 1990s mass culture, for example in the X-Files -- to be sure a great show, but very much a product of the encapsulated psychosis of American conspiratism.
But it wasn't just craziness that came to the surface in the 1990s, but insanity as well: the delusional belief that one has an obligation to destroy one's own personality. And this insanity was found equally on the left and right. The self-destruction of the country's cultural personality is easy to find: look for either anger or humor that gets its bite by stigmatizing and then punching through some boundary of morality or conscience.
On the left, the highest product of American cultural insanity is "South Park", whose humor consisted precisely of -- as the patter goes -- "breaking taboos". Why is it funny to see little kids cussing their faces off? Because it's a blow for freedom against the uptight ayatollahs of the religious right who don't like it.
On the right, the highest product of American cultural insanity is Rush Limbaugh. His humor works the same way: those politically correct jerks on the left are oppressing us, so we have to stand up for freedom by, for example, instructing a black caller to get the bone out of his nose. In a normal world this would be racist garbage, but in the insane world of Limbaugh it's a courageous act of standing up to the intimidation of liberal thought control. The very fact that "they" don't like it *obligates* us to do it.
This sense of continually, purposefully punching through the barriers of conscience is exactly the process of making oneself insane. It becomes a habit of mind, and as one's conscience is slowly cut away one becomes less and less capable of rational thought.
I would disagree with Agre that "South Park" is on the left, although they definitely appeal to some folks on the left. But the rest of this seems amazingly spot on to me. Who has ever pegged Rush better than this?--his whole purpose is making his audience insane... and proud of it!
All the above strongly suggests that what we are up against is not just "crazy" in some vernacular sense. It is actually crazy in a clinical sense. Books like "Bush on the Couch" are not just sly digs, they are survival manuals. And not nearly enough of our representatives in Versailles are surviving.
I do not have a 10-point plan for dealing with this. But I think we need to start a very serious dialogue about how we go about deprogramming an entire village, a subculture that rules America and dominates the world.
The problem clearly is not just Bush, not just the Administration, not just the Republicans, or even the Conservative noise machine and its "mainstream" echo chamber. The problem has deeply infected the Democrats as well. And we need to be thinking about basic mental first aid on a mass basis. |
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