Open Left - mythos

The Family: More Mythos, More Madness, More Maddow

Paul Rosenberg — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Over the past three weeks, Rachel Maddow has repeatedly had Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family as a guest on her show to discuss the unfolding revelations surrounding the secretive elite fundamentalist organization and it's Washington safe house on C Street. In doing so, Maddow has repeatedly hammered away at the point that what's involved here is far more than just standard-issue rightwing hypocrisy about sex. It's about the very essence of conservative belief in an unelected elite that is destined to rule without any accountability to those it would rule over.

This is the very antithesis of what America is supposed to be all about. And yet these people are part of a wider movement that is tirelessly trying to rewrite American history to make us believe that America was founded by people like them, to be a nation ruled by people like them, when nothing could be further from the truth. This false teaching of theirs is very much an example of mythos over logos, a system of meaning that is impervious to fact or logic.

On Thursday, July 9, Maddow and Sharlet discussed just how radically outside the mainstream The Family is-not just the mainstream of American political thought, but outside the mainstream of Christianity as well-fundamentally opposed to it, in fact:

SHARLET: What makes it a little bit different than other Christian conservative organizations-two things. You said that it's secretive. Indeed, the leader of the group describes it, he says, "The more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have."
And the other thing is the nature of the influence they want to have. I got to sit in on a spiritual counseling session between the leader of the family and Congressman Todd Tiahrt on the C Street house. I actually, met Senator Ensign there.
As the leader of the family was counseling Congressman Tiahrt, who had this very standard issue, bill of issues related to the Christian right, and he said, you've got to have a bigger vision of what we're talking about here. He described-he called it "Jesus plus nothing." And he said it's sort of a totalitarian idea of Christianity and he gave his examples of men who he believed, understood the way power should wielded. He actually gave his examples, Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden and Lenin.

Sure! What God-fearing Christian doesn't look up to Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden and Lenin?

MADDOW: Wow. When I-when I read your book, "The Family," when it first came out in hardback, Jeff, I-my notes on, I write notes in the fly leaf about I'm thinking about it. And my notes about it, I went back and looked for that. It was essentially to promote-its role (ph) is promoting American power worldwide, unfettered capitalism, no unions, no programs to help poor people-all with this idea that godly, powerful rich men should get at many resources as possible personally and they should just privately help everyone else. That was the impression that I was left with.
Was I close?
SHARLET: That's dead on the money. The Family-again, it's the oldest Christian conservative organization in Washington. And it goes back 70 years when the founder believed that God gave him a new revelation, saying that Christianity had gotten it wrong for 2000 years, and that what most people think of as Christianity is being about, you know, helping the weak and the poor and the meek and the down and out.
He believed God came to him one night in April of 1935 and said, what Christianity should really be about is building more power for the already powerful and that these powerful men who are chosen by God can then-if they want to dispense blessings to the rest of us, through a kind of trickle down fundamentalism.

So, Jesus loved the money-changers. It was that rag-tag bunch of disciples he had that he really loathed! Riiiiiiight!

Talk about taking Jesus' name in vain! This is the most blasphemous outfit you are ever likely to meet. They make devil-worshippers seem downright orthodox. At least they know who they are praying to!

MADDOW: Well, do you see a connection between that larger sort of power theology and the fact that neither John Ensign nor Mark Sanford for that matter is also affiliated with the group, aren't quitting despite these scandals?
Is there something about this type of theology that tells these guys, "Hey, don't worry about the affair, you know? Big picture, you're good. Stay where you are. It's important for you to stay in power"?
SHARLET: Yes. No. I think actually Governor Sanford made it very clear when he cited King David as an example of the reason why he wasn't going to be resigning office. And that just struck a bell with me, because I-the King David story is the core teaching of the Family. When I first heard it, I was living with the Family.
One of the leaders in the Family was explaining why King David was important. And he says, it's not because he was good man, it's because he's a bad man. You know, seduced another man's wife. He actually had the husband murdered.
And he wants to explain why this was a model-and he says to one of the men in the group, he says, "Suppose I heard you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?" And this guy, being a human being, says, "You would think I was a monster." Well, the leader of the Family says, "No, not at all, because you're chosen. You're chosen by God for leadership, and so the normal rules don't apply."

Again, presumptuously identifying oneself with King David-when there are far, far more Biblical examples of wealthy and powerful men brought down by their arrogance-is nothing but an example of idolatry. An organization that makes this a core part of its practice, a core part of its mythos, can only be considered an idolatrous cult.

Unlike logos, mythos is extremely maleable, even though it may present itself as totally fixed and unshakable. There is no underlying structure of necessity, as with logic, to keep it in line. If you change the details of a mythic tale, then you change its implications. Or you can simply change the interpretation. This has happened countless times with countless different religions over the years.

And so here you have this group that explicitly teaches that they both exempt from God's law and they are its ultimate enforcers!

Clearly, logos plays no role whatsoever in their livers.

On the Friday, July 10 show, Sharlet described in more detail their practice of working in secret, and how private, hidden money transactions--like the bribes in the Ensign case--are a routine part of how they do business in the shadows:

SHARLET: As David Coe-one of the leaders of the group, the son of the man we just saw, and also John Ensign's spiritual counselor we now know-as David Coe explained it to me a few years ago, if money moves around behind the scenes through what they call the man-to-man financial method, then we are able to sort of maintain this veneer of privacy, and that this is very important, because when you're dealing with members of the Family, these guys have been chosen by God for leadership and what the Family is going to do is in some ways almost play the role of consigliores, as fixers for these guys.
So, when I heard about the Ensign money, that makes sense as a kind of thing that they might be comfortable with. But you've got to pull it out into sort of a broader picture. Doug Coe, the leader of the group has said, he said, "I loan or give money to all sorts of people or I have my friends do so."
Now, Coe takes no salary many years. All of the money is sort of moving through this man method and when you apply that overseas-as they do-you start to see what the idea of this is. They believe in something called "biblical capitalism," and biblical capitalism is the way they're going to bring the gospel to the already powerful. Where the money goes they believe God goes.
MADDOW: So, biblical capitalism, this idea of the man-to-man financial method, which is one of the more awkward terms of a summer full of awkward terms. That-it's not just part of the way that they exert power. That is part of their theology, that's part of the way they understand how they are, their version of Christianity at least.
SHARLET: Absolutely yes. It's a theological position.
And when they call themselves a Christian mafia and talk about sort of avoiding institutionalization, talk about avoiding, you know, the books and records and all of that kind of stuff-all of this stuff allows them to avoid accountability. What they see it as is avoiding the building up of an edifice.
There is a level in which they're almost antichurch. They don't like an organized church because it's too democratic. They like this sort of behind-the-scenes elite approach....
It's not that he's a neo Nazi of some sort. It's that they fetishize strength. They look for the leader who they believe is chosen by God. Evidence is his power, his wealth, and his willingness to align himself with their version of American power.
The dictator Suharto in Indonesia was one such. They organized meetings for him with American defense contractors, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with the secretary of defense, and most notably, since Indonesia is a major oil producing company with American oil executives, who described their meetings in memos of Congress as great moments of spiritual honesty between themselves and the dictator.

Let me repeat that: "great moments of spiritual honesty between themselves and the dictator."

Classic!

It bears noting that the way The Famile actually operates is virtually indistinguishable from the way that the non-existent Bavarian Illuminati is alleged to operate. Yes, projection, once again.

Immediately after the above, there's this, clarifying exactly what these people should be obligated to do:

MADDOW: Jeff, briefly, we're just about out of time-but religion is obviously a private matter in this country. Do you think that the members of Congress who belong to this religious group should feel compelled to tell the country more about the group? Do you feel that would be appropriate?
SHARLET: I think when you have-when you have members of Congress who are looking to a particular religious group for a sense of authority, which is explicitly antidemocratic, that explicitly fetishizes strength and dictatorial power, if they want to do that, that it's their choice. But I think they owe it to their constituents to say, "Here is why I have chosen to leave the mainstreams of American religion and affiliate myself with this sect that is so unorthodox and so really brutal in its theology."

To me, that seems like the least they could do. But they're balling their eyes out right now about the very thought of anyone asking them anything. I think I've never seen so many anti-choice Republicans kick up such a long-lasting storm over the right to privacy before. Have you?

This is what we need to do--drag them out into the sunlight, sort of like vampires, and see how long they last. Let them explain to their constituents about how God has chosen them, just like he chose bin Laden.

Yeah. That's the ticket. I'm sure it will go over very well in Nevada. Or South Carolina. Or just about anywhere, really. Because, you know, we're such a Christian nation. And these guys, well, they've been chosen by God. So what's not to like?

Tell us more. Please.

The Birther Mythos

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 16:30:00 GMT

By now, you've probably seen at least part of the video of Delaware Congressman Mike Castle's town-hall encounter with the Birther base:

What struck me immediately on seeing it was how perfectly it epitomized something I wrote about roughly a year ago-the power of mythos as opposed to logos, a topic that has only grown more important over the past year, as all pretense of rightwing logos has crumbled into dust. As I explained, following directly in Karen Armstrong's footsteps from The Battle For God, logos is all about how things work, mythos is about what they mean. As I quoted from Armstrong in "Tales of the City IS Fiction-And Mythos":

Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal. It was also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind. The various mythological stories, which were not intended to be taken literally, were an ancient form of psychology. When people told stories about heroes who descended into the underworld, struggled through labyrinths, or fought with monsters, they were bringing to light the obscure regions of the subconscious realm, which is not accessible to purely rational investigation, but which has a profound effect upon our experience and behavior. Because of the dearth of myth in our modern society, we have had to evolve the science of psychoanalysis to help us to deal with our inner world.

In the good old days, people were smart enough to keep the two separate most of the time, but this has become virtually impossible as logos has become so incredibly successful over the past thousand years or so. This is the deep irony underlying fundamentalism-rather than being a reassertion of traditional religion, as it takes itself to be, it is a total abdication of the power of mythos on which religion ultimately rests.
No true traditionalist would ever consider defending the Bible in terms of logos-for example, as something literally true. To do so would be a sacrilegious trivialization, Taking literal truth as the yardstick for measuring all things is itself an abandonment of mythos that totally misunderstands the nature and purpose of traditional religion, which is to provide a shared framework of meaning and purpose by which we may live.

Of course, fundamentalists haven't lost touch with mythos, even if they have misplaced their central faith in it. Fundamentalists specifically and conservatives generally are much more appreciative of the power of mythos than liberals generally tend to be. Which brings us to the matter of hand-Castle's encounter with the Birthers.

The pattern with the Birthers is much like the pattern with Creationists, global warming deniers or various different brands of Clinton conspiracy theorists who almost overturned our government in the 1990s. They make outrageous claims, have little or no real evidence of their own, demand irrefutable evidence from those who disagree with them, and then when evidence is presented, they dismiss it contemptuously, often without even pretending to take it seriously. This sort of behavior makes no sense whatever in terms of Enlightenment reason, but makes all the sense in the world as a performance demonstrating unshakable belief. And performance is at the very heart of mythos, as Armstrong explains in a passage I quoted in my follow-up diary, "Cults And Culture":

Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshipers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence. Myth and cult were so inseparable that it is a matter of scholarly debate which came first: the mythical narrative or the rituals attached to it.

This is exactly what was happening at Castle's townhall meeting in the Youtube segment above. he words are a bit hard to make out in places, but here's my best attempt at transcription-certainly better than the Rachel Maddow Show transcript, which fails to recognize that Castle responded directly to the woman in red, or that she was the one who called for pledging allegiance to the flag:

REP. MIKE CASTLE ®, DELAWARE: This lady in red has had her hand up for sometime.
LADY IN RED: Thank you. Congressman Cartle. I want to know-I have a birth certificate here from the United States of America saying I am an American citizen with a seal on it, signed by doctors, with the hospital administrator's name, my parents, my date of birth, and the time, the date. I want to go back to January 20th, and I want to know, why are you people ignoring his birth certificate?
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
He is not an American citizen. He is a citizen of Kenya. I am American. My father worked - fought in World War II with the greatest generation in the Pacific Theater for this country, and I don't want this flag to change. I want my country back.
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
CONGRESSMAN CASTLE: I have only one comment... (GARBLED) . If you're referring to the president there, he is a citizen of the United States. ... (GARBLED, but is clearly trying to call on someone else)
LADY IN RED: For all the men and women who died for this country in 1776 until the present time. I think we should all stand up and give pledge of allegiance to that wonderful flag, those people that sacrificed their lives for our freedom. Everybody stand up and say...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Pledge allegiance!
CROWD: (Begins to say pledge of allegiance out of phase with one another and with considerable cross-talk at first, mostly inaudible, but one man's voice is clearly audible--"You probably don't even know it"--though it's entirely unclear who he's addressing. Some people are already all the way to "America" when a loud male voice--it sounds like Castle's--starts at the beginning, and everyone falls in with him.) I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands - one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
CASTLE (Then says something faintly audible about the need to get back to discussing health care, and the need to call on some folks who haven't been heard from.) (END VIDEO CLIP)

The first thing to note about this episode is that it makes no sense whatsoever as a piece of Enlightenment discourse. The woman stands up with what she purports to be her birth certificate. What rational difference does it make whether or not she has her birth certificate? Clearly, none at all. But as a piece of mythos performance it is very important, "evoking... a sense of sacred significance." She is not merely proclaiming her citizenship verbally, she is demonstrating it by holding up her birth certificate and talking about it. This is ritually establishing her claim to be an American-and by implication denying that President Obama is an American. As a matter of pure fact, she almost certainly goes on to lie, saying that the certificate says she's an American citizen. Since any child born in America is an American citizen, explicitly stating that is entirely superfluous, and though I'm not an expert on birth certificates, I have seen several, and none of them make any mention of citizenship. However, it is ritually important that this lady present the implicit fact as an explicit one, and so she makes the claim, regardless of whether it's true or not.

She then goes from a probable lie to literaral incoherence, which draws applause from the crowd:

I want to go back to January 20th, and I want to know, why are you people ignoring his birth certificate?

Of course, it's the Birthers like her who are ignoring Obama's birth certificate:

[Clikc To Enlarge In New Window]

As well as the contemporaneous newspaper announcement of his birth:

Now, one might well say, "Well, she meant 'Why are you ignoring the issue of his birth certificate?'" But what issue is that, exactly? Because it's not just Obama's birth certificate that the Birthers have a problem with, since Obama's birth certificate is just one piece of evidence about where and when he was born, all of which point to the same conclusion-that he was a natural-born American citizen.

On Maddow's show the day after she aired the above Youtube video, she had David Weigle of the Washington Independent on to talk about it:

WEIGEL: I don't know what they want anymore, because every time Hawaii verifies something or a reporter verifies something or a witness verifies something, that witness, that state, that reporter is lying and their evidence must be thrown aside.
We've seen Lou Dobbs do this before four years ago with these claims about leprosy running rampant in America because of illegal immigration. It's still really disappointing to see him go down this path. This is - calling Hawaii and getting this thing verified should be enough for any sane person to put this to bed.
MADDOW: But what are the origins of this story. One of the things you've been able to do is really trace it very specifically to where this theory came from.
WEIGEL: Well, it started with the Obama campaign. There were rumors a year ago, a year in change, that Obama's real birth certificate contains a different middle name. Actually, the rumor was his middle name is Muhammad(ph) and he changed it to Hussein, because Hussein plays better in Iowa, I guess.
And the campaign said, "OK. We'll do what no one has ever done. We'll do what McCain didn't do, Bush didn't, Hillary didn't do. We will put his birth certificate from the state online. Anyone can look at it."
That immediately, instead of settling this, created a cottage industry of people trying to prove this is forged. And then, after Hawaii has said, "No it's not forged. This came from us. We have a different copy on record that says the same stuff," then Hawaii was lying.
Basically, the White House doesn't talk about this. The Democratic National Committee doesn't talk about this because when they do, it just sends this train down the track a little further. This is more evidence that there is a great conspiracy. It's how conspiracies work.

So, clearly, when this birther stands up and says "Why are you people ignoring his birth certificate?" she is symbolically fusing the birth certificate with the wider conspiracy myth that she has come to believe in.

(ASIDE: This kind of behavior has, of course, become institutionalized on the right-and legitimized by the Versailles center, whose assistance to the right has been invaluable. This is what happened with the Clintons and Whitewater-a "scandal" with no "there" there, which nonetheless managed to serve as the scaffolding for the only successful impeachment of a US President since the 1860s. Any and all evidence that there was nothing to investigate was ignored. At the same time, it seemed that even the most outlandish claims that there was something to investigate were treated with the utmost seriousness. Most remarkably, the Resolution Trust Corporation's 1995 Pillsbury Report, which should have completely closed the book on Whitewater was simply ignored by both the Washington Post and the New York Times. Both papers had invested their reputations in the proposition that there was actually something to investigate. The Pillsbury Report demolished that claim. From page 199 of The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton by Joe Conason Gene Lyons:

The firm's findings could hardly have been more favorable to the White House. Based on the Clintons' sworn interrogatories, interviews with forty-five other witnesses, and some two hundred thousand documents, the report concluded that the president and first lady had told the truth about their Whitewater investment: The Clintons were passive investors who were misled about the actual status of the project by Jim McDougal from the start. The report failed to challenge their account on a single substantive point.

And how was the report treated in the press? From page 200:

On December 18, the Wall Street Journal ran a straight, clear summary of [the report's] findings, written by Viveca Novak and Ellen Joan Pollock. But other newspapers with a substantial investment in Whitewater virtually buried news of its contents. The Washington Post stuck a brief mention of the report's existence into a story devoted to the battle over William Kennedy's notes. The New York Times waited until Christmas Eve, then hid Stephen Labaton's perfunctory summary on page 12.

That was the sort of preposterous Alice-in-Wonderland political world in which today's crop of Birthers were schooled, and the Washington Post and the New York Times played no small role in creating that world.)

But then look at what comes next, after a round of cheering and applause:

He is not an American citizen. He is a citizen of Kenya. I am American. My father worked - fought in World War II with the greatest generation in the Pacific Theater for this country, and I don't want this flag to change. I want my country back.

Again, as an example of Enlightenment rationalism, the passage is incoherent. Even if there were legitimate questions about Obama's birth certificate-which there clearly are not-and if there were legitimate questions about the newspaper announcement of his birth-which there are not, and which this Birther did not even bring up-and if there were legitimate questions about other corroboration-which there are not-it's still a huge jump from saying that there are doubts about his citizenship to flatly proclaiming that (a) he's not an American citizen and (b) that he's a Kenyan citizen-a claim for which no evidence was offered. Think about that for a second. The woman brings a copy of her own birth certificate, which cannot possibly prove anything about Obama, but doesn't bring anything relating to her most heated claim that Obama is actually a Kenyan citizen. Why make such a claim without evidence? And if she did have evidence, why not bring it, instead of (or at least in addition to) her own birth certificate?

Why? Because all those questions come out of looking at her diatribe as if it were an example of logos, which it most clearly is not. It is mythos through and through, and mythos has no need of evidence, as logos understands it. The Birther's own birth certificate is not evidence in the sense of logos, it is a talisman, a symbol of her authentic identity as an American, and once she has established that identity, all it takes is her word as an American to cast The Other out. (And, of course, there is no doubt that Obama is The Other after all, he's ~~black~~ a Kenyan citizen! And probably a Muslim terrorist, to boot!) This is why she doesn't offer any evidence that Obama is a Kenyan citizen, but instead simply asserts that she's an American. Well, that proves it! Not according to logos, of course, but according to the Birther mythos it damn sure does!

And to bolster her claim as an American, she immediately invokes military parentage-connection to World War II and the "greatest generation". Of course, Obama, too, can claim an identical lineage-albeit to his grandfather, not his father. In the framework of logos, this would be yet another problem for the Birther lady. But in the framework of the Birther mythos, it's nothing of the sort. If anything, it's just one more thing about Obama that needs to be "debunked". And until it is debunked, it can simply be ignored. After all, it doesn't change the "fact" that he's a Kenyan citizen!

Next, continuing the same sentence where she claims her parental connection with the WWII military, the Birther lady says, "and I don't want this flag to change."

What? Where'd that come from? Who said anything about changing the flag? Although, come to think of it, the flag did change after WWII-both Alaska and Hawaii became states, adding two more stars to the flag. But I don't think that's what she was talking about. Rather, she was enacting a mythos-style fusion of meaning-the flag is the nation, and she doesn't want the nation to change, but saying "flag" for "nation" then leads directly into her call for saying the pledge of allegiance-a complete disruption of the logos for the meeting (which was supposed to be a town hall on health care, it appears, from what Castle says after the pledge is finished).

But, of course, disrupting the logos of the meeting is precisely the point-she is enacting a defeat of logos by her own mythos. And who could argue against her? To argue against her is to refuse to pledge allegiance to the flag! This is the crowning accomplishment of ritual performance-she has gotten everyone to follow her lead in pledging allegiance to the flag. Anyone who would not do it would have identified themselves by their own actions as not being a real American! Who needs a birth certificate to prove that?

This is why this brief videotaped interaction is so strange. It is a complete subversion of one reality by another, and the reality that is subverted is the reality of facts, logic, and good civil order, while the subverting reality is that of unhinged white supremacy utterly cut off from, and contemptuous of all manner of logic and evidence.

When the Birther lady concludes with her cri de coeur, "I want my country back!" can there be any doubt that she's speaking as a white woman? A white woman from a military family? A white conservative woman from a military family whose mythic existence seamlessly melds into Pat Buchanan's fantasy of a nation built by white people (look ma, no slaves!) with a virtually all-white military? Of course that's what she means-her entire performance was nothing but an act of meaning-making. An invocation of mythos, all the more necessary since every last shred of white conservative logos lies shattered in a thousand pieces after eight long years of Bush/Cheney/Rove.

It was the Pledge of Allegiance that utterly impelled me to write this diary. When the crowd rose to say it, chills ran down my spine. "Holy shit!" I thought. "This is straight out of Armstrong's description of mythos in The Battle For God, thinking of the passage already quoted above:

Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshipers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence. Myth and cult were so inseparable that it is a matter of scholarly debate which came first: the mythical narrative or the rituals attached to it.

Indeed. The growth of the Birther mythos today shows just how inseparable myth and cult really are. Come to think of it, with 52% of those polled saying they find Sarah Palin "honest", Is the myth of Sarah Palin any different? Are any of the rightwing myths that surround us any different? And what of Versailles' centrist myths? Particularly the central one that left and right are mirror images of one another? (Remember "Bush derangement syndrome"?) And the myth that only bipartisanship can lead to effective, lasting "reform"? Are Versailles centrist myths any different, either? Ritual repetition is their very lifeblood. And who can say which comes first, the mythical narrative, or the ritual recitations thereof?

Progress Report: Mythos And Logos On The Way To A Potential Landslide

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Note: Polls have tightened some since I wrote the first draft of this on Friday, but there's nothing below that I would change at this point, having tweaked it already a wee bit this morning.

As we've now entered the last three weeks of the campaign, an instructive comparison can be made to where we were just entering the last three months of the campaign, when I wrote a diary, "Swing State Clusters Tell Story of Potential 'Map-Changing' Obama Landslide". (Some maps from that diary reappear on the flip.) Obama's lead in the national polls is up from where it was, as is his projected margin in electoral votes. But the number of Red States potentially in play has plummeted dramatically. There is fairly straightforward explanation for this--the normal consolidation of the bases, combined with the drop in undecideds as low-info voters finally tune into the race. But on the flip I argue for a slightly more nuanced exaplanation. To kick things off, here are the basics in visual form:

National Polls

Chris's Presidential Forecast 07/29

Electoral College: Obama 264, McCain 172, Toss-up 102
National popular vote: Obama 47.2%-41.6% McCain

Chris's Presidential Forecast 10/18

Electoral College: Obama 349, McCain 166 Toss-up 23
National popular vote: Obama 49.8%--43.2% McCain

An Alternate Theory

As mentioned above, there's There a fairly straightforward explanation for the shift from early August to now: the normal consolidation of the bases, combined with the drop in undecideds as low-info voters finally tune into the race. With the differing distributions of the parties' bases, this can readily accomodate an increased Obama lead in national polls, even as the red states potentially available to him have dropped in number.

My interpretation doesn't dispute this interpretation so much as it refines and/or refocuses it. My interpretation draws on the mythos/logos distinction I've been talking about again this weekend. I want to drive home the point that it's not all just airy-fairy talk. It has real, hard-nosed consequences. Remember: what's most important about this distinction for our purposes is that mythos involves the meaning we make of things--even the most mundane (Joe the Plumber? You betcha!)--while logos involves the mechanics of how things work--even things of beauty and imagination. Empirical truth is irrelevant for mythos. Endlessly repeated lies that fit together well and satisfy deep longings-those are the "truths" of mythos.

Put simply, McCain has gone all in to solidify his base with a deep mythos campaign. Logos has been utterly abandoned. Just as everything factual we were first told about Sarah Palin has turned out to be questionable at best, so, too, the same turned out to be the case about Joe the Plumber, only the debunking happened at Warp 9 this time. And therein lies the core to what's happened: the mythos/logos balance of the political system has somehow changed. Conservatives still have a distinct advantage in pushing their mythos, but it's got less of a grip on independent voters, and less of a shelf life with the media. The political system has yet to adjust to this. Obama is still running his own mythos campaign, albeit with a shrewd use of bits of logos here and there.

"ACORN stealing the election" is the latest conservative foray into deep wingnut mythos territory, and since it's not aimed directly at Obama, it has-at least initially-been more successful, and could even somewhat blunt Obama's victory. Let's hope Obama is smart enough to realize this, and how much of a difference it could make for his ability to govern successfully. There are some hopeful signs so far, and even CNN seems to have regianed a bit of sanity. But regardless of all else, the economic crisis simply has folks much too focused on the nuts-and-bolts logos-type questions of how to get out of this mess to be swayed by the usual conservative mythos of cloven-hooved, baby-eating liberals.

Chris may well be correct, and the "bump" Obama received from the economic crises seems to have passed. (We really won't know how accurate these polls have been until election day-if then.) One thing's for certain, however: The wingnut mythos has been dislodged, and the bipartisan mythos has taken center stage. The bipartisan mythos can't actually solve the financial crisis, but it can make Obama seem calm, thoughtful, assured and assuring, steady in as storm, etc., etc., etc. The wingnut mythos won't go away, but it's lost its traction in the swing states, even as it has consolidated itself in red state America--the "real parts" of America we've been hearing about lately.

That's my mythos/logos alternative theory to explain the pattern below.

Chris's Analysis: Swing States Then and Now

Because I used Pollster.com in my August 2 diary--what with its more varied colors, and easy-to-copy tables of polls--I'm going to do the same below. But I want to begin by comparing Chris's charts first.

The number of toss-ups has shrunk from 9 to 3. Six are now "lean Obama", one is now "lean McCain," and one is not "solid McCain," while one "lean McCain" (North Carolina) and one "solid McCain ("West Virginia") have now become tossups.
Thus, just looking at the tossup races, it's clear that Obama is in a much stronger position than he was in early August.

However, if we're thinking transformation here--and crushing the GOP's spirit, as Kos has been writting about more and more lately--then we also have to note that four "lean McCain" states are now "solid McCain": Arizona, Texas, Georgia and South Carolina.

Pollster.com: A Tougher Look

The picture from looking at Pollster.com's maps then and now, though far from dour is less encouring in terms of gains: Pollster showed Obama stronger then, compared to Chris, and weaker now, with the number of swing states dropping from 10 to 7. The new "lean Obama" states are Colorado, Virginia, and Florida. The new "lean McCain" is Montana, and the new "solid McCain" is Arizona. Ohio moves from "lean Obma" to tossup, and West Virginia moves from "solide McCain" to tossup.

Overall, these changes clearly favor Obama, but five states have also moved from "lean McCain" to "solid McCain": South Dakota, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Combine this expanded McCain base with the larger number of toss-ups, and the map looks less promising in terms of a "crush their spirit" transformation:

Pollster.com: Early August

Pollster.com: Oct 17

We can get a more detailed view by recalling my earlier breakdown into four regions. I'll hold off on the close-up maps and detailed poll analysis, and instead just do a quick verbal run-through of each of the regions.

Mountain Swing/Battlegrounds

In this region, two "tossups" have moved: Arizona is now "solid McCain" while Colorado is "lean Obama". While not surprising or disappointing in a conventional "this race" framework, the chance of defeating McCain in his home state was clearly a "dagger in the heart" type of possibility with more than "just" symbolic satisfaction attached. McCain is not long for the Senate, and carrying the state in the presidential election would make Democratic chances to win his seat next cycle considerably brighter.

Northern Plains Swing/Battlegrounds

This was the most promising group, though smallest in terms of EVs. Montana and North Dakota were tossups, South Dakota was "lean McCain". After the GOP Palin-fest in nearby Minnesota, this whole region appeared to be lost. But now North Dakota is back to "tossup," and Montana is "lean McCain," leaving only South Dakota as "solid McCain." While hopes have faded here, the more recent boune-back--particularly in North Dakota, could be really huge in terms of psychic impact. If Obama somehow won both Montana and North Dakota, it would be an earthquake of epic proportions that could fundamentally alter the GOP in Great Plains and upper Mountian West. The futures of Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and Idaho would suddenly be way up in the air, and the prospect of the GOP as a regional party of the Deep South would be an order of magnitude more real than it is today.

Midwest Swing/Battlegrounds

The map here has actually become slightly more favorable to McCain--but that's more of an artefact than an underlying reality. Two states have changed: Iowa from "lean Obama" to "solid Obamna"--a meaningless change, as everyone except John McCain has known for a long, long time that Obama was going to win this state--and Ohio from "lean Obama" to tossup, which would be troubling, except that this completely inverst that actual underlying dynamic of the race:

Likewise, Missouri looks more encouraging than first meets the eye:

Indiana remains a big challenge, with Pollster's trend pretty steady around 3 points favoring McCain, but a good ground game, a demoralized GOP base and skillful use of Lugar's praise for Obama on foreign policy could pull this out.

Southeast Swing/Battlegrounds

This is the best news for Obama from the regional breakdowns: Virginia and Florida both moved from tossup to "lean Obama," and North Carolina stayed "tossup" (while Kagen surged in the Senate race). What's more, beneath the surface, that North Carolina "tossup" looks a lot better now than it did before:

Virginia and Florida would be plenty big enough by themselves to begining pealing away the outer layer of the South for the Democrats. But winning North Carolina would put both Georgia and South Carolina on notice that they will almost certainly be battleground states in 2012.

West Virginia

West Virginia is Pollster's only current swing state that wasn't part of my August 2 breakdown into four battleground regions. Obama still trails there, but only by 2.8% according to Pollster's trend, and Chris has it at just 0.7 for McCain. This would be another one of those states that would send shock waves well beyond its Electoral College weight.

A Big-Picture Look Forward

In my August 2nd diary, I included some maps that summarized the best that candidate could hope for, given the maps at the time. Obama's best looked like this:

As of right now, the only state on this map marked for Obama that looks firmly out of reach is Arizona. He probably won't get Montana, and Indiana looks tough, too, but on the other hand he's got a shot at West Virginia. So this map holds up surprisingly well.

McCain's best looked like this:

It would, quite simply, take a miracle for McCain to come anywhere close to realizing this map. Sarah Palin is more likely to get an advanced degree in particle physics than for this to look anything like the map for the 2008 election.

Factoring in the SUSA polls with Edwards as Obama's VP, a maximal Obama map looked like this:

While there's no real chance that the Electoral College is going to look like this in 2008, there's probably a pretty fair chance that it could look like this--or even better in 2012, depending on how well Obama and the Democrats handle the incredible mess that BushCo is leaving them. Indeed, if Obama handles the economy well, he should be able to pick up West Virginia and Kentucky as well in 2012. The seeds are definitely here for a realigning election, followed by consolidation of new, Democrtatically-dominated Seventh Party System.

My Alternate Theory, Again

"But how does all this relate to Paul's alternate theory?" you might ask. Or even, "Alternative theory? What was that?"

Good questions. Second one first: My alternate theory is that we can best understand the pattern of Obama's partially realized EC gains vs. broader national poll gains in terms of a failed play that McCain made based on the traditional GOP strategy of pushing a social conservative mythos, an over-arching framework of meaning (Secessionist Sarah Palin, good! Terrorist Bill Ayers, bad!) This play has failed for a variety of reasons, not least because of the economic crisis, as the power of logos has emerged as more salient--at least for now. However, Obama did not capitalize on that emergence of logos so much as he used it to tip the balance toward the bipartisan mythos and casting himself in the leadership archetype of that mythos--a pose of balance, steadiness, thoughfulness, reassurance, etc. (Hence, a reprise of praising Reagan, as opposed to a logos-driven appeal to the political legacy of FDR, and a call to update it for the 21st Century.)

As for the first question, I've already partially answered it, but I don't pretend to answer it fully. It is, after all, a matter of interpretaiton. I put my framework out there for you to test for yourselves, to see how much sense it makes for you. But three points are worth considering:

(1) The states that do remain in the balance seem to be precisely those where appeals to social conservatism vs. economic populism seem to be most salient. And those competing appeals can profitably understood in terms of the a conservative mythos on the one hand, and a progressive logos on the other.

(2) Obama's lead on August 2 was blindingly obvious in the polls, but was almost universally obscured by the M$M coverage, an example of Versailles's "balanced"/"bipartisan"/"serious" mythos. Challenging this was part of the purpose of my diary then, as I cited a post at Pollster.com, by UMass Amherst Poly Sci Prof Brian Schaffner which explained:that "Obama had been tied or ahead in 50 consecutive national polls through Sunday," and that meant there was only a .0000000000000009 chance that the race was actually tied at that point. In my mythos/logos framework, this was an example of the power of the "bipartisan" Versailles mythos, which had started out very much favoring John McCain, due to his long-term deep symbiosis with the media.

(3) However, a funny thing happened in the weeks after that, as McCain caught up--but only by drastically shifting gears with his pick of Palin. It was McCain's abrupt shift from one mythos to another that first momentarily saved his campaign, but then started to destroy it. And it was everyday myth-makers like the ladies on The View who took the lead at this point. (Though, ironically, they also seemed to have a better grasp of logos than most "hard" journalists seemed to.)

McCain did everything imaginable to try to stiffle the Troopergate Report--an exmple of logos potentially come back to bite him--and he was largely successful, but for all the wrong reasons: Palin had already been first discredited, and then rendered irrelevant as the financial crisis swelled to the fore. The last-ditch attempt to blame minorities for the financial meltdown--and to tie this to ACORN, "voter fraud" and Bill Ayers--is simply too late in the game, with a fragmented rightwing noise machine in shambles. The pieces of the mythos he wants to use are still there, but mythos doesn't work very well when it's in pieces. That's the whole point: it provides a comprehensive framework for meaning.

Or else it fails.

Joe The Plumber And The Double Mythos Of Versailles

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:51:12 GMT

You may think you've heard enough about [not-] Joe the [not-] Plumber already, and maybe you have. But this isn't really a diary about Joe. It's a diary about Versailles, my term for our contemporary version of the world apart in which the French ruling class lived, until the abandandoned people of France rose up and took away all their power, and a good number of their heads. Versailles is bigger than the Beltway, it includes the vast majority of the corporate media. In some ways, its an alien state of mind. It's bigger than what Digby and others dub "the Village," as it includes many unseen support personel, as did the original Versailles. It's full of experts who are wrong about everything, and never suffer any consequences as a result. It's dominated by Republicans, but it's a very bipartisan place. In fact, that's the key to its power, and the real point of this diary. I want to use Joe the Plumber to illustrate how the double mythos of Versailles keeps logos--and reality--at bay, and how we suffer as a result.

One mythos is that of St. Ronald and the wingnut right. The other is the bipartisan mythos. When the first mythos fails--in Iraq, for example, the second mythos backs it up, keepling logos, reality and the DFHs at bay.
As described in several diaries, mythos refers to a mode of knowledge that's concerned with constructing meaning, purpose and significance. What's more, as Karen Armstrong explains in The Battle for God:

Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshippers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence.

Ceremonial repetition is key. It doesn't matter a damn if what is repeated is factually true. Facts come from the contrasting mode of knowledge known as logos. Mythos tells you that "evildoers" are responsible for 9/11, and virtually everything else that's wrong in the world. Logos tells you, "not so much." Even evildoers can be understood, they can be "profiled" because they have a psychology, a warped psychology, to be sure, but one in which they are the good guys. Their "evildoing" is a product of their own mythos. A sobering thought to contemplate. But logos is not is not welcome in Versailles. Nor is contemplation.

Earlier this year, Glenn Greenwald put together a little list showing how "bipartisanship" works to empower Bush [slightly reformatted]:

In almost every case, the proposals that are enacted are ones favored by the White House and supported by all GOP lawmakers, and then Democrats split and enough of them join with Republicans to ensure that the GOP gets what it wants. That's "bipartisanship" in Washington:

To support the new Bush-supported FISA law:
GOP - 48-0 / Dems - 12-36
To compel redeployment of troops from Iraq:
GOP - 0-49 / Dems - 24-21
To confirm Michael Mukasey as Attorney General:
GOP - 46-0 / Dems - 7-40
To confirm Leslie Southwick as Circuit Court Judge:
GOP - 49-0 / Dems - 8-38
Kyl-Lieberman Resolution on Iran:
GOP - 46-2 / Dems - 30-20
To condemn MoveOn.org:
GOP - 49-0 / Dems - 23-25
The Protect America Act:
GOP - 44-0 / Dems - 20-28
Declaring English to be the Government's official language:
GOP - 48-1 / Dems - 16-33
The Military Commissions Act:
GOP - 53-0 / Dems - 12-34
To renew the Patriot Act:
GOP - 54-0 / Dems - 34-10
Cloture Vote on Sam Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court:
GOP - 54-0 / Dems - 18-25
Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq:
GOP - 48-1 / Dems - 29-22
On virtually every major controversial issue -- particularly, though not only, ones involving national security and terrorism -- the Republicans (including their vaunted mythical moderates and mavericks) vote in almost complete lockstep in favor of the President, the Democratic caucus splits, and the Republicans then get their way on every issue thanks to "bipartisan" support. That's what "bipartisanship" in Washington means.

Joe the Plumber perfectly illustrates how the power of this mythos works, how it interlocks so perfectly with the rightwing mythos which is its only permissible alternative in Versailles.

The mythos of rightwing populism says that Joe the Plumber is Everyman, and in America, Everyman is King. And the bipartisan mythos of Versailles agrees. It does not matter if he is a white, male, Christian Republican voter, and thus part of the most socially conservative demographic in America--he is Everyman.

Of course, logos tells us that no one is Everyman--and we should never forget that. Our very diversity is the whole point. If everyone really were the same, then the whole "Divine Right of Kings" ideology just might have worked. But it didn't. People had different ideas about God, and didn't like being killed for it. And thus, out of struggle, modern liberalism was born around the seed idea of tolerance and respect for difference and individual autonomy (and, hence, rights).

Which is why the right has it's own mythos that America is a "Christian nation" so they can totally ignore the fact that America is actually a secular republic--the first one born of the Enlightenment

The whole media swarm over Joe the Plumber was indicative of how fundamentally Versailles' two mythologies agree. And their agreement on Joe reflects a much deeper and broader agreement across the boards. The unquestionable virtue of Joe is the foundation on which our political establishment rests. For starters, because Joe is good, it is A-OK to kill off the original inhabitants of the land on which he stands. We are, after all, a nation built on genocide--and you can't have genocide without some powerful mythos going on.

Oh, sure, Joe's had his troubles. In an amazing turnabout, some actual journalism got done once Joe got his 15 minutes of fame. And all those bits and pieces of logos came out. His name wasn't Joe, he wasn't a plumber, he wasn't going to own the business, and even if he did, he wouldn't have had a personal income of over $250,000. He was, in short, totally bogus to the core. Who'da thunk it?

But even if you take solace from the fact of his swift unmasking--and I certainly do (in fact, I take downright glee)--it's still the case that Joe remains in archetypal form, serving these two, complementary mythologies. It's just that this particular Joe is a pathetic also-ran, a stooge for Simon Cowell to make merciless fun of. His pathetic failure does nothing to discredit either mythos that he helped to support, however briefly and ineffectively.

A low-level wannabe has been dismissed (although some still want to run him for Congress). The show itself goes on. The fault was not that he was a phony, a lie. The whole show is a lie. He was just a bad lie. One that didn't work very well. The search continues for a better one.

One cannot have a logos-centered political debate in which one simply looks at how things work in the real world. That would immediately show conservative economics to be little more than an elaborate con-game. It would be unthinkable--outside the framework of the double mythos of Versailles.

Likewise, a logos-centered approach to terrorism would nix the entire war-fighting approach, as a report from the RAND Corporation explained a couple of months ago (See my diary, "RAND: Not 'Wrong War' But 'War Wrong' For Fighting Terrorism".) Indeed, logos is the great unspoken in American politics today.

American Idol, now. That's the ticket.

Mythos In Action: A Peek At A Cog In The Rightwing "Voter Fraud" Machine

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

In my previous diary, "Mythos, Logos, Racism and the 'Voter Fraud' Fraud", I wrote about why the right is so unconcerned about the factually baseless nature of their claims. Rather than making an argument about facts, I argued, they are making an argument about the nature of the world as it should be according their own narrow-minded views. The world of facts is the world of logos, and they are operating from the world of mythos. As Karen Armstrong explains in The Battle for God:

Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshippers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence.

What they are doing with their voter-fraud claims is, quite simply, a form of myth-making. On the flip I take a look at an example that illustrates what this means and how it works.
As one reads or watches stories about "voter fraud" in the media, one is struck by how often various charges are repeated, as opposed to the stubborn fact that there's no case at all in the recent historical record of significant voter fraud. In my poking around, I stumbled on a website that clearly epitomizes this tendency, with the list below--though not enhanced with comments in red that I've thoughfully added.

I've found that a number of other site have simply copied this list, treating it as authoritative proof of... well, something. But to me, what it shows is simply that collecting a bunch of evidence that doesn't prove your point also doesn't prove your point. This, however, is simply evidence of a logos-style mindset. From a mythos perspective, the repetition of accusations, regardless of underlying facts, is what counts. It creates an air of sinister menace, operating in the meaning-making manner indicated by Armstrong above. And the fact that the "liberal media" may not take any of this seriously only serves to reinforce the mythos. And then when the "liberal media" does take it seriously, why then it's "even the liberal media was forced to admit...."

For the peddlers of mythos it's a can't lose proposition. Here then, is the list of accusations from the "Rotten Acorn" website (more about them below), with my handy little comments insterted in red:

State	Year	Details
AR	1998	A contractor with ACORN-affiliated Project Vote was arrested for falsifying about 400 voter registration cards.
COMMENT:		A contractor with Project Vote. Not ACORN.
CO	2004	An ACORN employee admitted to forging signatures and registering three of her friends to vote 40 times.
COMMENT:		An ACORN employee. Not ACORN.
	2005	Two ex-ACORN employees were convicted in Denver of perjury for submitting false voter registrations.
COMMENT:		Two ex-ACORN workers. Not ACORN.
FL	2004	A Florida Department of Law Enforcement spokesman said ACORN was "singled out" among suspected voter registration groups for a 2004 wage initiative because it was "the common thread" in the agency's fraud investigations.
COMMENT:		SUSPECTED. Of what? Nothing proven.
MI	2004	The Detroit Free Press reported that "overzealous or unscrupulous campaign workers in several Michigan counties are under investigation for voter-registration fraud, suspected of attempting to register nonexistent people or forging applications for already-registered voters." ACORN-affiliate Project Vote was one of two groups suspected of turning in the documents.
COMMENT:		"Overzealous or unscrupulous campaign workers" who MAY have been working for Project Vote. Not Project Vote itself, and not ACORN.
MO	2007	Four ACORN employees were indicted in Kansas City for charges including identity theft and filing false registrations during the 2006 election.
COMMENT:		Four ACORN employees. Not ACORN.
	2006	Eight ACORN employees in St. Louis were indicted on federal election fraud charges. Each of the eight faces up to five years in prison for forging signatures and submitting false information.
COMMENT:		Eight ACORN employees. Not ACORN.
	2003	Of 5,379 voter registration cards ACORN submitted in St. Louis, only 2,013 of those appeared to be valid. At least 1,000 are believed to be attempts to register voters illegally.
COMMENT:		Sounds pretty bad, but again, no indication that it was ACORN, rather than ACORN workers. I discovered that this account comes from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but could find nothing further about it in my initial search of their archives. However, they have recently editorialized against the GOP's baseless accusations against ACORN. Here.
NC	2004	North Carolina officials investigated ACORN for submitting fake voter registration cards.
COMMENT:		Investigated ACORN. This phraseology is so vague it's impossible to tell if ACORN was ever suspected of anything, or if it was just another case of bad employees. Regardless, this investigation started four years ago. If ACORN had done something wrong, we should have something more recent documenting that. Instead, we have nothing.
NM	2005	Four ACORN employees submitted as many as 3,000 potentially fraudulent signatures on the group's Albuquerque ballot initiative. A local sheriff added: "It's safe to say the forgery was widespread."
COMMENT:		Four ACORN employees. Not ACORN.
	2004	An ACORN employee registered a 13-year-old boy to vote. Citing this and other examples, New Mexico State Representative Joe Thompson stated that ACORN was "manufacturing voters" throughout New Mexico.
COMMENT:		An ACORN employee. Not ACORN.
OH	2007	A man in Reynoldsburg was indicted on two felony counts of illegal voting and false registration, after being registered by ACORN to vote in two separate counties.
COMMENT:		A man was indicted. No indication that he was convicted (he could have moved, it could have been a bad prosecution), or that he even attempted to vote twice. No indication of wrongdoing by ACORN.
	2004	A grand jury indicted a Columbus ACORN worker for submitting a false signature and false voter registration form. In Franklin County, two ACORN workers submitted what the director of the board of election supervisors called "blatantly false" forms. In Cuyahoga County, ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote submitted registration cards that had the highest rate of errors for any voter registration group.
COMMENT:		One indicted ACORN worker. Others accused. Errors are not fraud. There is no fraud accusation against ACORN here.
MN	2004	During a traffic stop, police found more than 300 voter registration cards in the trunk of a former ACORN employee, who had violated a legal requirements that registration cards be submitted to the Secretary of State within 10 days of being filled out and signed.
COMMENT:		A former ACORN worker. Not ACORN.
PA	2008	An ACORN employee in West Reading, PA, was sentenced to up to 23 months in prison for identity theft and tampering with records. A second ACORN worker pleaded not guilty to the same charges and is free on $10,000 bail.
COMMENT:		An ACORN employee. Not ACORN.
	2004	Reading's Director of Elections received calls from numerous individuals complaining that ACORN employees deliberately put inaccurate information on their voter registration forms. The Berks County director of elections said voter fraud was "absolutely out of hand," and added: "Not only do we have unintentional duplication of voter registration but we have blatant duplicate voter registrations." The Berks County deputy director of elections added that ACORN was under investigation by the Department of Justice.
COMMENT:		ACORN employees are accused of deliberately putting inaccurate information on forms, Not ACORN. The claim of a DOJ investigation means nothing, since this was precisely what the US Attorneys scandal was all about: the attempt to manufacture bogus charges of election fraud.
TX	2004	ACORN turned in the voter registration form of David Young, who told reporters "The signature is not my signature. It's not even close." His social security number and date of birth were also incorrect.
COMMENT:		Another case that indicates problems with an ACORN worker, but Not ACORN.
VA	2005	In 2005, the Virginia State Board of Elections admonished Project Vote and ACORN for turning in a significant number of faulty voter registrations. An audit revealed that 83% of sampled registrations that were rejected for carrying false or questionable information were submitted by Project Vote. Many of these registrations carried social security numbers that exist for other people, listed non-existent or commercial addresses, or were for convicted felons in violation of state and federal election law. In a letter to ACORN, the State Board of Elections reported that 56% of the voter registration applications ACORN turned in were ineligible. Further, a full 35% were not submitted in a timely manner, as required by law. The State Board of Elections also commented on what appeared to be evidence of intentional voter fraud. "Additionally," they wrote, "information appears to have been altered on some applications where information given by the applicant in one color ink has been scratched through and re-entered in another color ink. Any alteration of a voter registration application is a Class 5 Felony in accordance with § 24.2 1009 of the Code of Virginia."
COMMENT:		This sounds like one of the most serious/substantive claims made here, but again, there is no evidence against ACORN, and no mention of any further action. In contrast, here's a 2006 story from Virginia making much more serious allegations the other way. This story, too, appears to have been over-hyped, though there was some basis in fact. The sorts of GOP dirty tricks involved are seldom even considered "voter fraud," but they are, quite literally, fraudulent attempts to prevent legitimate votes from being cast.
WA	2007	Three ACORN employees pleaded guilty, and four more were charged, in the worst case of voter registration fraud in Washington state history. More than 2,000 fraudulent voter registration cards were submitted by the group during a voter registration drive.
COMMENT:		Seven ACORN workers. Not ACORN.
WI	2004	The district attorney's office investigated seven voter registration applications Project Vote employees filed in the names of people who said the group never contacted them. Former Project Vote employee Robert Marquise Blakely told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he had not met with any of the people whose voter registration applications he signed, "an apparent violation of state law," according to the paper.
COMMENT:		One ACORN worker. Not ACORN.

That's a truly impressive whole lot of nothing. But not if you're looking at it through the eyes of rightwing mythos. And that's just the point: the fact that it's factually vacuous means nothing at all in terms of mythos. It's totally irrelevant to the mindset of mythos.

About The Website's Owners

The website is the product of the Employment Policies Institute, about which Sourcewatch says:

The Employment Policies Institute (EPI) is one of several front groups created by Berman & Co., a Washington, DC public affairs firm owned by Rick Berman, who lobbies for the restaurant, hotel, alcoholic beverage and tobacco industries. While most commonly referred to as EPI, it is registered as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization under the name of Employment Policies Institute Foundation. In its annual Internal Revenue Service return, EPI states that it "shares office space with Berman & Company on a cost pass through basis". [1]
EPI has has been widely quoted in news stories regarding minimum wage issues, and although a few of those stories have correctly described it as a "think tank financed by business," most stories fail to provide any identification that would enable readers to identify the vested interests behind its pronouncements. Instead, it is usually described exactly the way it describes itself, as a "non-profit research organization dedicated to studying public policy issues surrounding employment growth" that "focuses on issues that affect entry-level employment." In reality, EPI's mission is to keep the minimum wage low so Berman's clients can continue to pay their workers as little as possible.
EPI also owns the internet domain names to MinimumWage.com and LivingWage.com, a website that attempts to portray the idea of a living wage for workers as some kind of insidious conspiracy. "Living wage activists want nothing less than a national livingwage," it warns (as though there is something wrong with paying employees enough that they can afford to eat and pay rent).

But to really grasp the fundamentally deceptive nature of this outfit, you need to read the history section, which begins thus:

The Employment Policies Institute was launched in 1991, around the time of the economic recession that led to the electoral defeat of then-president George Bush. EPI deliberately attempted to create confusion in the eyes of journalists and the general public by adopting a name which closely resembles the Economic Policy Institute, a much older, progressive think tank with ties to organized labor. In addition to imitating the name and acronym of the Economic Policy Institute, Berman's outfit even used the same typeface for its logo. In reality, the two groups have dramatically different public policy agendas. The Economic Policy supports a living wage and mandated health benefits for workers. Berman's organization opposes both and in fact opposes any minimum wage whatsoever.
In 1992, Los Angeles Times business columnist Harry Bernstein noted that EPI was using "misleading studies" to help put a positive spin on rising unemployment. "The conservative EPI, financed mostly by low-wage companies such as hotels and restaurants, is issuing reports the titles of which alone could help put a bright face on the miserable job scene," Bernstein wrote. "The latest one is 'The Value of Part-Time Workers to the American Economy.' It hails as a great thing the distressing growth of part-time jobs because they offer 'flexibility' in economic planning for both workers and companies, and say that flexibility is vital 'in the growing and increasingly competitive global economy.' Tell that nonsense to the more than 6.5 million workers forced to take part-time jobs because nothing else is available. That is an increase of more than 1.5 million involuntary part-timers since 1990, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says." EPI has been doing more or less the same thing ever since, sponsoring cooked studies and issuing tendentious sound bytes whenever attempts are made to establish healthcare or better wages for workers.

These are the slimeballs attacking ACORN, using everything but facts. They are despicable human beings, to be sure. But we should not let ourselves simply dismiss them as scum. They are scum, but they ways that they bamboozle people, the ways of mythos can be used to drive home truths, as well as lies. And if we want to win long-term, that is a lesson we must all take to heart.

Mythos, Logos, Racism and the "Voter Fraud" Fraud

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In early August, I wrote a diary, "Tales of the City IS Fiction-And Mythos", in which I discussed two modalities of understanding, "mythos" and "logos." I piggy-backed on Karen Armstrong's discussion of them from The Battle for God. I continued the discussion in a follow-up diary, "Cults And Culture". While a great deal can be said about these two modalities, I want to focus on rather specifically on certain characteristics of the two, and how they can illuminate the specific dynamics of the conservative/GOP "voter fraud" hoax, as well as shedding light on more general pattern of how conservatives routinely out-organize Democrats in framing issues.

As I'll explain on the flip, the mythos/logos duality offers a unique perspective on the dynamics of how rightwing repetition of patent falsehoods comes to overwhelm the sporadic presentation of well-documented facts on the left. This is the subtext of what's going on with the GOP's "voter fraud" fraud, and it should help us learn to be much more effective in fighting back.
Mythos And Logos Introduced

In The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong writes about the two contrasting modalities:

Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal. It was also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind. The various mythological stories, which were not intended to be taken literally, were an ancient form of psychology. When people told stories about heroes who descended into the underworld, struggled through labyrinths, or fought with monsters, they were bringing to light the obscure regions of the subconscious realm, which is not accessible to purely rational investigation, but which has a profound effect upon our experience and behavior.

The need for mythic understanding is deeply embedded in human nature. It sustains us in the face of chaos and confusion. But it can also lead us astray. What makes sense of our day-to-say lives is not necessarily true-in the case of slavery-based societies, for example. In such societies, the mythos usually declares that there are "natural slaves" who are incapable of thinking sensibly for themselves, and thus need their masters to make wise decisions for them. There may be all sorts of stories, from the mundane to the heroic to the utterly mythical, all reinforcing this particular view, both directly and indirectly. The stories all "make sense," they hang together in a web of mutually-reinforcing ideas, associations and impressions. They also recast the accidents of the social order in terms of eternal truths.

The fact that mythos can lead us astray like this does not negate the tremendous value it holds. Like fire, it can be terribly destructive, but it is impossible to conceive of human civilization without it. We have, unfortunately, been far more successful at taming fire than we have at taming mythos. We still have a long ways to go.

On the other hand, Armstrong explains:

Logos was equally important. Logos was the rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought that enabled men and women to function well in the world. We may have lost the sense of mythos in the West today, but we are very familiar with logos, which is the basis of our society. Unlike myth, logos must relate exactly to facts and correspond to external realities if it is to be effective. It must work efficiently in the mundane world. We use this logical, discursive reasoning when we have to make things happen, get something done, or persuade other people to adopt a particular course of action. Logos is practical. Unlike myth, which looks back to the beginnings and to the foundations, logos forges ahead and tries to find something new: to elaborate on old insights, achieve a greater control over our environment, discover something fresh, and invent something novel.

Precisely because logos is forward-looking, it was perhaps inevitable that logos would come to play a larger and larger role in understanding the world, and mythos would struggle to regain its stature by imitating or even impersonating logos. We can see this, for example, in the guise of "creation science." The very fact that fundamentalists feel the need to present the Biblical creation myth as a "scientific truth" is a tacit admission that science-a form of logos-possess a superior stature in our society. But traditional religious believers would never have made such a concession. The truly orthodox traditional believer would feel no need whatever to lower themselves into such a game-for that is how they would have seen it: reducing profound truths of the soul to mere matters of factual circumstance.

Of course, fundamentalists are often helped along in their error by those so enveloped in logos that they deny the power, importance and significance of mythos. Neither mode of understanding exempts us from folly.

There is a certain natural affinity between mythos and conservatism on the one hand, and logos and liberalism on the other, which can be seen in conservative references to ancient and eternal truths, and liberal references to reason, progress, and novelty. But thess are only general tendencies, as there many great liberal and progressive leaders who speak in terms of eternal truths, and plenty of conservatives in business and industry who are quite obsessed with progress. Still, the basic fit of these orientations is significant, and should not be ignored.

Conservative Mythos And Group Dominance

In their book, Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression, social scientists Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto develop a general theory of hierarchically-organized societies, in terms of a balance of hierarchy-enhancing (HE) and hierarchy-attenuating (HA) concepts and beliefs, which they refer to collective as "legitimating myths" (LMs). They are, in fact, legitimately seen in terms of mythos, because they serve to provide a framework of meaning that goes beyond any particular circumstance, grounding the particular in the universal. As Sidanius and Pratto explain it, these HE-LMs and HA-LMs serve to justify the institutions of society as well as individual practices, and they are, in turn, influences by individual attitudes, which are shaped by a variety of factors. The overall interaction of the elements of their theory is illustrated in the following diagram:

It's not my purpose here to delve into the innards of this theory. Rather, I bring it up because it helps us understand how sets of contrasting beliefs can coexist in the same social system, and indeed, work in a sort of balancing tension with one another-one set enhancing group differences, the other set reducing them. The set of attitudes that incline one towards embracing the HE-LMs is known as "social dominance orientation," ((SDO) )and it can be experimentally measured by testing how one agrees or disagrees with a predefined set of statements and expressions-the "SDO scale", which has evolved through a number of versions over the years. Here is an example, with the first 8 items being pro-trait and the last 8 being counter-trait, to eliminate what's known as "agreement bias):

SDO-6 questions
1. Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups.
2. In getting what you want, it is sometimes necessary to use force against other groups.
3. It's OK if some groups have more of a chance in life than others.
4. To get ahead in life, it is sometimes necessary to step on other groups.
5. If certain groups stayed in their place, we would have fewer problems.
6. It's probably a good thing that certain groups are at the top and other groups are at the bottom.
7. Inferior groups should stay in their place.
8. Sometimes other groups must be kept in their place.
9. It would be good if groups could be equal.
10. Group equality should be our ideal.
11. All groups should be given an equal chance in life.
12. We should do what we can to equalize conditions for different groups.
13. Increased social equality.
14. We would have fewer problems if we treated people more equally.
15. We should strive to make incomes as equal as possible.
16. No group should dominate in society.
Reference: Social Dominance, p. 67.

It is easy to see how SDO aligns with a conservative distrust of minorities and other outgroups, which is quite manifest in the attacks we're seeing against ACORN, and implication of hordes of black and brown people "destroying the fabric of democracy" as McCain himself has claimed. This is clearly reflected in the history of conservative opposition to power-sharing. This can be seen quite strikingly, for example, in the 1964 survey, reported in the 1967 book by Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion.

Free and Cantril found what is certainly a generalized opposition to power-sharing, in the form of thinking that relatively powerless groups have too much power:

But this tendency was strongly correlated with how conservative people were, as measured by the most stringent measure they had-conservatism defined operationally, in terms of opposition to social spending programs (65% of people registered as completely or predominantly "liberal" on this scale):

If one has this sort of basic attitudinal orientation, and if this orientation makes one more likely to embrace HE-LMs, then it is only natueral that conservatives would tend to embrace beliefs about minorities and other "subordinate groups" corrupting the political process through their involvement. This is, quite simply, a natural expression of their mythos. They embrace narratives that reinforce the mythos, and reject narratives that challenge it. Infornation content-which is paramount for the world of logos-is irrelevant to them.

In my second early August diary, "Cults And Culture", I quoted this important passage from Armstrong:

Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshippers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence.

This is something that movement conservatives understand instinctively. In the world of logos, repeating a lie doesn't make it true. But in the world of mythos, repeating anything makes it "true", because repetition shapes meaning, and meaning shapes reality.

And so movement conservatives tell their stories repeatedly without regard for whether they are factually true or not. Facts derive from the world of logos. But all that matters to them is the world of mythos. And in their mythos, white conservatives are the only real Americans, and everyone else is out to destroy America. Whatever story reflects that worldview is "true" to their mythos, and therefore "true" in the only way that matters to them. So they will repeat their actual lies over and over and over again, firm in their belief that everything they are saying is "true."

They did this repeatedly in their two-term effort to drive Bill Clinton from office. They've done it for decades now, pushing the myth of a Social Security "crisis" in order to destroy it. It's the basic formula on which virtually all their "think tanks" are founded: repeated messaging, regardless of empirical truth. The "voter fraud" fraud is simply the latest example to rocket to the top of public discourse.

For now, we have to fight back with everything we've got in the short run. But make no mistake, the GOP and the conservative movement will not let go of this unless we take it away from them and beat them over the head with it. Which is precisely what we should do.

We need to have some serious mythos mojo on the sujbect of voter suppression ourselves. This should be a major centerpiece of the next Congress, with hearings out the wazoo, not just in Washington DC where the Versailles media will try its best to ignore it, but in field hearings around the country as well.

And after the hearings, there should be legislation. Legislation to put the right to vote into the Constitution. Legislation to mandate the highest level of state responisibility to register people to vote. Legislation to ensure that voter ID laws come with strict provisions to ensure that the IDs are readily available at no charge. Legislation to mandate the highest possible level of transparency in the administration of voter registration and elections.

In short, there should be a major voting rights and election reform bill passed to address the full range of shenanigans and shortcomings that have come to light since the 2000 election. And it should be carried out in a manner that does everything possible to revive and reinforce the mythos of the civil rights movement.

Cults And Culture

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 18:51:08 GMT

In my earlier diary, "Tales of the City Is Fiction--And Mythos", I responded to a post by Emptywheel, "The Count of Monte Cristo Was Not Fiction" primarily by shifting focus from the fiction/fact distinction, which I agree is culturally conditioned, to the mythos/logos distinction as laid out by Karen Armstrong in her book, The Battle For God. In this diary, I want to advance another distinction, that between cults, which are deeply associated with mythos and culture, which properly functions to integrate mythos and logos.

My argument is that culture is necessary to prevent cults from becoming dangerous, and that the current failure of the Democratic-controlled Congress to hold the Bush Administration responsible can be seen as part of a broader failure of culture to prevent such danger.

My specific focus involves three aspects of culture: consciousness, critical engagement, and the capacity to mediate. By "consciousness," I mean an awareness of what narratives are doing, both as logos and mythos. This requires cognitive functioning at least at Kegan's Level 4, which takes the construction of social roles and relationships as object, on which it can reflect and act. (See "The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem", section "Cognitive Complexity II: Kegan's Subject/Object Model.") "Critical engagement" means that one not only has this capacity to reflect and act, but that one actually does so. And the capacity to mediate means that the culture itself provides tools, up to the level of institutions, such as courts, schools, legislatures, research institutes, etc. which can be used individually and collectively to ensure, among other things that mythos does not swallow up everything else, and that logos does not crush the life out of mythos.
Recap

My previous diary ended with the following two paragraphs, which help establish the relationship between cults and culture I will elaborate on below:

For me, the issue is consciousness. At this point in history it's simply impossible to keep mythos and logos in separate containers. Oh, you can do it sometimes quite well, there's no denying that. And you should. But there are simply far too many ways in which the two realms interpenetrate one another to ever put a stop to it, which is what Emptywheel's example of The Count of Monte Cristo says to me.
Fundamentalists are systematically dangerous precisely because they they're unconscious about how they have jumbled the two modes together. It's not the jumbling per se that's dangerous--although it can be. But if one is conscious, if one can critically engage, then one can confront and deal with the danger. These are key: consciousness, critical engagement, and the capacity to mediate, which implies an ability to hold others, and oneself accountable. These are the essential elements of culture that allow us to collectively and collegially and socially sort out the various narratives by which we make and remake our world.

Cults

In my previous diary, I quoted a passage where Emptywheel talked about The Count of Monte Cristo in the context of multiple different types of narratives about Napoleon that were circulating in Paris at the time. I quote now from the end of that passage, and continue to the next paragraph:

All these narratives about Napoleon usually get described as the cultural phenomenon that was the "cult of Napoleon" but, as events would later prove, that cultural phenomenon was in no way fictional.
In a world in which Jack Bauer has greater influence over our detainee policies than all the FBI's best experts on interrogation methods, we would do well to avoid the trap of "fiction" and "non-fiction."

I want to focus here on the word "cult". In the introduction to The Battle For God, Armstrong writes:

Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshipers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence. Myth and cult were so inseparable that it is a matter of scholarly debate which came first: the mythical narrative or the rituals attached to it.

This is, of course, presicely what conservatives feared about Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, as described in my previous diary. There is no doubt that Maupin developed a cult following, and even though the same word might not mean exactly the same thing, or function in exactly the same way, one can also say that sharing the experience of reading his work most certainly did work aesthetically upon his readers, "evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence."

Indeed, this can be said about gay and lesbian literature generally. The rapidity with which the gay and lesbian communities have formed has made the role of storytelling disproportionately more important than for other communities, but similar functions can clearly be seen in feminist, Black, Latino and other cultures. Meaning-making through narratives is an integral part of collective and individual identity-formation and reformation in opposition to identities imposed from without.

Cultic Knowledge--"24" And More

Now, about Jack Bauer. Can there be any other word for how his influence has spread than to refer to it in terms of a cult? And is there anything wrong with "24" that couldn't be handled with what I called for above--consciousness, critical engagement, and the capacity to mediate? That couldn't, in short, be handled by a truly healthy culture? It is clearly not a matter of logos driving Jack Bauer's influence on American interrogators. It most clearly is an unmediated mythic process quite in line with Armstrong's description:

Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshippers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence.

It is precisely this sense of "sacred significance" and "apprehend[ing] the deeper currents of existence" that explains, at least in part, the utter contempt for democratic accountability--including consciousness, critical engagement, and capacity to mediate--that has run rampant throughout the Bush Administration. This describes a wide range of different sorts of actors. It is broadly applicable to the cultic mindset of neo-cons descended from Leo Strauss, for example, but it also describes the relatively simple-minded zealotry of a Monica Goodling, and the crabbed legal reasoning of a John Yoo, as well as the mindset of the actual hands-on interrogation/torture teams.

The challenge here is simple: we have an administration that functions based on cultic "knowledge." As just indicated, the use of torture based on the model of "24" is but one example of this. And the administration itself is but a culmination of decades of movement conservatism, working through numerous different organizational and institutional forms, passing on various different forms of cultic "knowledge," and rationalizing the "protection" of such knowledge from any form of public scrutiny or accountability.

This is the big picture behind the Bush Administration's absolute refusal of any accountability to courts or Congress--the cult will not yield an inch to the critical and mediating demands of culture, which are absolutely necessary to safeguard the culture against takeover by cultic forces. And this is the big picture behind the Democrats repeated failure--or more accurately, refusal--to act according to their constritutional duty: it is an abandonment of the responsibilities of culture.

I want to be quite clear, I do not believe that cults are necessarily evil. They are not. In fact, they can be tremendously life-affirming, sources of profound meaning and connectedness. It is the failure to mediate their influence in various ways that facilitates the development of some cults into destructive channels. It is the responsibility of culture to ensure that cults may flourish without destructive influence, either on individuals, groups, or society as a whole.

Today, our culture is so diseased, so overwhelmed with the pernicious influence of movement conservatism and its myriad cults, that it readily attacks as cults those who are least cult-like and most logos-oriented, while defending true cults from even most cursory form of scrutiny. More generally, rational behavior is attacked as cultic, while cultic behavior is defended as beyond question.

Backstory

This is the great irony behind the rightwing obsession with the 1960s. While the right entirely ignores the major social accomplishments of the 1960s--the end of legal segregation, the promotion of equal rights for women, the rebirth of the modern environmental and consumer protection movements, etc.--it obsesses endlessly over generally cultural, non-political behavior. that often had a more or less cultic flavor to it, broadly identified as the "counter-culture." The right obsesses over the notion that the "counter-culture" has fundamentally corrupted the basically sound American culture--despite the fact that prior to the 1960s, white and male supremacy were endemic and rarely questioned.

Yet, for all its seemingly cultic character, the "counter-culture" produced very little in the way of enduring cults. It disseminated its influence on the wider culture, to be sure, but this occurred primarily through processes of cultural diffusion, in which practices spread because they are fundamentally compatible with the broader culture into which they spread.

This was not immediately apparent, of course There were intense narratives of otherness deployed against the youth "counter-culture." But these narratives were almost entirely bogus. Both the virtues and the flaws of the "counter-culture" had many more historical antecedents than the demonizing narratives of the time would admit, while what was new about it reflected a world-wide shift in values that would not become apparent until decades later with the advent of the World Values Survey. But even that shift in values had been anticipated by a long line of prominent American thinkers, from Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to the Transcendentalists, Abolitionists, and anti-imperialists of the 19th Century, and so on.

In contrast to all this, however, it was the right that proceeded to organize itself along cultic lines, in ways that grew increasingly elaborate and well-funded over time. By the 1990s, this culminated in a widespread militia movement, an insular talk-radio empire, and a multi-faceted cultic attack on the President of the United States that nearly drove him from office. Over and over again, plain facts were dismissed in favor of wild speculations, as documented by Gene Lyons in his book, Fools For Scandal and in the book he co-authored with Joe Conasan, The Hunting of the President. At the same time, the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming posed a real and growing threat to human civilization was dismissed as some sort of wild-eyed theory--as if the worlds climate scientists were all part of one big cult.

This was the background against which the Republicans stole the 2000 election, capped by a Supreme Court decision so lawless that it even declared itself not to be a precedent for any future decision.

But, of course when your worldview is entirely swallowed up in a cultic black hole, it is simply impossible to conceive of anything else. The only alternative to Bush stealing the election is Gore stealing the election-not a fair election, determined according to existing laws and legal precedents. And by the same cultic logic, since the Clinton impeachment was a baseless witch-hunt (whether admitted or not), any talk of impeaching Bush must also be a baseless witch-hunt. For the cultic mindset, there simply is no possibility of any alternative. Mediating the excesses of cultic activity-by the constitutional system of checks and balances, or the scientific system of peer review-is simply inconceivable. It must, instead, be a form of persecution from followers of another cult.

Thus, a crucial aspect of what we are fighting for today is the recreation of culture and its mediating functions, not to crush cultic practices, but merely to limit their destructive tendencies, which currently threaten to destroy the very Western Civilization they pretend to so vigorously defend.

Tales of the City IS Fiction-And Mythos

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 14:33:30 GMT

Emptywheel's response to Chris's diary,"The Rise of the Non-Fictional Aesthetic." was a fascinating read. I agreed with amost everything in "The Count of Monte Cristo Was Not Fiction", except for the title. In it, among many other things, she wrote:

And I mean it when I say, "the Count of Monte Cristo was not fiction"--even though it's one of the most compelling stories of all time and even though it gets stored in the juvenile fiction shelf of most libraries. "It's a book you read when you're fourteen," Slavoj Zizek scoffed to me once.
But the narrative was published in a newspaper. Not the kind of literary journal you think of when you thin of Dickens' serialized novels, but an honest to god daily newspaper, with each installment beginning on the bottom of the front page, just under the reports from Parliament.

Similarly, Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City --a Balzac-styledz portrait of intersecting gay and straight characters and cultures in 1970s San Francisco--was published in the San Francisco Chronicle, and while not a direct parallel to The Count of Monte Cristo, there are enough similarities that it immediately sprung to mind when I read this passage. Those similarities are perhaps best summarized by saying that both books, published in a newspaper, evoked and provoked a broadly-shared public mythos, a term explained below.

Emptywheel argues that the fact/fiction divide is culturally contingent, but I do not believe in so lightly dismissing the distinction simply because it is culturally contingent. More importantly, however, I believe that the distinction taps into--though it is not identical with--a much more fundamental distinction that I think can be very clarifying for us: the distinction between mythos and logos, which plays a crucial role in Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God, an invaluable book on the rise of fundamentalism since 1492 in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Down For the Count

Regarding The Count of Monte Cristo, Emptywheel goes on to show that its publication had profound implications:

This story, about a guy imprisoned at least partly because he once met with Napoleon, who then goes on to become a Napoleonic figure plunked down in "modern" Paris, appeared at a time when censorship laws dictated that you couldn't use the words "Bourbon" or "Republique" if you were writing things critical of the government. Dumas wrote the story after having met Louis-Napoleon, who was sitting in prison for one of his early unsuccessful coup attempts. But he wasn't the only one writing these Napoleonic narratives. Every single major daily in Paris--every one--was printing some kind of narrative about Napoleon in this period, whether they were "fictions," memoirs from Napoleon's brothers, race track reports using a horse named "Napoleon" as an allegory for speed and skill. These stories were all different conceptualizations of a certain kind of power that exerted tremendous influence in Paris at the time. All these narratives about Napoleon usually get described as the cultural phenomenon that was the "cult of Napoleon" but, as events would later prove, that cultural phenomenon was in no way fictional.

The same could be said of Maupin's work. It was, in fact, a mirror in which the city saw itself, a genuine sensation that captivated the city's attention. And when PBS broadcast it as a miniseries years later, it blew the lid off their usual ratings, while drawing a savage conservative counter-attack that derailed plans for PBS to air further sequels. (This was 1994, years before Ellen came out, or Will And Grace came on.) In fact, it seems quite commonplace for fact and fiction to interact like that, though rarely with such intensity that it becomes so obvious, even striking.

Rather than argue over the fact/fiction distinction, however, I want to shift focus to what seems a more fruitful and profound dichotomy, the aforementioned mythos and logos. For what I think is most essential that Emptywheel is pointing to is the power of mythos, and there is no denying its power to make history. The trick is making good history.

Mythos And Logos

In The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong discusses two distinct modes of understanding that have become confused in modern times--particularly (but by no means exclusively) by fundamentalists. (The introduction to her book is available online here, and presents the basic framework for understanding her argument, from which I'm going to quote.)

Armstrong writes:

We tend to assume that the people of the past were (more or less) like us, but in fact their spiritual lives were rather different. In particular, they evolved two ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos. Both were essential; they were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence.

Regarding mythos, she explains:

Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal. It was also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind. The various mythological stories, which were not intended to be taken literally, were an ancient form of psychology. When people told stories about heroes who descended into the underworld, struggled through labyrinths, or fought with monsters, they were bringing to light the obscure regions of the subconscious realm, which is not accessible to purely rational investigation, but which has a profound effect upon our experience and behavior. Because of the dearth of myth in our modern society, we have had to evolve the science of psychoanalysis to help us to deal with our inner world.

And regarding logos:

Logos was equally important. Logos was the rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought that enabled men and women to function well in the world. We may have lost the sense of mythos in the West today, but we are very familiar with logos, which is the basis of our society. Unlike myth, logos must relate exactly to facts and correspond to external realities if it is to be effective. It must work efficiently in the mundane world. We use this logical, discursive reasoning when we have to make things happen, get something done, or persuade other people to adopt a particular course of action. Logos is practical. Unlike myth, which looks back to the beginnings and to the foundations, logos forges ahead and tries to find something new: to elaborate on old insights, achieve a greater control over our environment, discover something fresh, and invent something novel.

And regarding their interaction:

In the premodern world, both mythos and logos were regarded as indispensable. Each would be impoverished without the other. Yet the two were essentially distinct, and it was held to be dangerous to confuse mythical and rational discourse. They had separate jobs to do. Myth was not reasonable; its narratives were not supposed to be demonstrated empirically. It provided the context of meaning that made our practical activities worthwhile. You were not supposed to make mythos the basis of a pragmatic policy. If you did so, the results could be disastrous, because what worked well in the inner world of the psyche was not readily applicable to the affairs of the external world.

While they didn't always manage to keep the realms separate, they didn't suffer from systematic and persistent confusion. That came about with the remarkable burst of progress made in Europe from the time of the Renaissance onward. The more it seemed that logos could do, the more mythos was diminished, and the more people tried to replace mythos with logos--or, to reinterpret mythos as logos, which is what fundamentalists do with "creation science", for example. Far from being traditionalists, Armstrong argues, fundamentalists are distinctively modern--they have utterly lost the pre-modern understanding of the two realms, as well as the taken-for-granted attitude that mythos is by far the more important of the two. Instead--although quite unconsciously--they believe implicitly in the absolute superiority of logos, and therefore feel driven to prove that their mythos is logos, because if it is not, then it is nothing.

For a pre-modern person of faith, it is hard to imagine a more blasphemous attitude. But you need an historical (logos-based) consciousness to even realize this.

The mythos/logos divide is not the same as the fiction/non-fiction divide. Fiction can be soaked in logos. Not just detective fiction, hard science fiction or social realism, but virtually any sort of fiction can be quite concerned with the logic of how things happen, or the specificity of physical detail. Our fictions as much as anything else have been impacted by the rise of logos, and the shrinking of mythos. And yet, there is a connection, still, that goes to the issue of purpose. Generally speaking, the purpose of fiction is to explore, create, define or lament the lack of meaning. In contrast, the purpose of non-fiction is to further the understanding of how things work--although, as a working 19th-Century style journalist, my own reporting is clearly intended to engage in meaning-making. I wouldn't have it any other way.

For me, the issue is consciousness. At this point in history it's simply impossible to keep mythos and logos in separate containers. Oh, you can do it sometimes quite well, there's no denying that. And you should. But there are simply far too many ways in which the two realms interpenetrate one another to ever put a stop to it, which is what Emptywheel's example of The Count of Monte Cristo says to me.

Fundamentalists are systematically dangerous precisely because they they're unconscious about how they have jumbled the two modes together. It's not the jumbling per se that's dangerous--although it can be. But if one is conscious, if one can critically engage, then one can confront and deal with the danger. These are key: consciousness, critical engagement, and the capacity to mediate, which implies an ability to hold others, and oneself accountable. These are the essential elements of culture that allow us to collectively and collegially and socially sort out the various narratives by which we make and remake our world.