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A Nation Deceived |
Current rating: 0 |
by Andrew Bard Schmookler
(No verified email address) |
27 Oct 2004
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It is when people do not think critically that they are most manipulable, and fear is but one force that has eroded America's capacity for critical thought. |
Why will so many Americans buy images of national leaders that are so at odds with so much evidence?
This troubling question is crucial because the American democracy was founded on the notion that the truth will emerge in the deliberations of a free people.
Fear is surely a factor, especially so since our country came under attack three years ago. When we're afraid, we lose our tolerance for ambiguity. Black-and-white thinking is in: You're either for us or against us. When in the grip of fear, we crave certainty, because uncertainty magnifies the feeling of vulnerability. So a leader who shows no doubt, who doesn't even entertain second thoughts, is comforting for the fearful. The more afraid we are, the more we shift into a part of the brain where rational analysis does not govern.
It is when people do not think critically that they are most manipulable, and fear is but one force that has eroded America's capacity for critical thought. Over recent generations, the most mighty of our "educational institutions" - advertising - systematically has worked to teach us to mistake the appealing image for the reality, the sizzle for the steak. Those taught to buy cigarettes to make themselves glamorous can be persuaded to buy incompetent leadership to make them safe.
Many Americans more recently have been still further trained away from habits of critical thinking by the powerful subculture of intellectually irresponsible right-wing media.
For more than a decade, radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has taken millions of Americans on a daily excursion that panders to their prejudices, never challenging them to reconsider their ideas, always encouraging them to blame all their problems on identifiable others.
The voice leading them on these excursions radiates the aura of certainty, despite the vast ignorance underneath, and shows no scruples about distorting facts to reach a desired conclusion. These daily forays into comforting falsehoods have forged in the minds of millions of Americans a path down which fine-sounding messages unmoored from reality could more readily travel.
But there are still older paths in the American psyche that have been available for adept political manipulators.
One of the most powerful ways of bypassing critical rationality in America has long been the posture of religious piety and moralism. "These leaders must have integrity, they're so religious," I heard on a radio call-in show. People who have been betrayed by the false piety of the Jimmy Swaggarts and Jim Bakkers of the world will still assume that one who speaks often enough of his great faith can be trusted.
There is another venerable template in American political culture: the pattern of rhetoric by which governing elites inflame peripheral issues to distract their followers from seeing the truth of their exploitation.
In the South, race long served as the inflammatory distraction to enable the few to dominate the many. In our times, the pseudo-alliance to preserve white purity has been largely replaced by a pseudo-alliance to maintain moral purity. What's not noticed is that while the leaders just keep these hot-button moral issues (such as abortion and gay rights) festering, unresolved, they make sure that the agenda of the rich and powerful (the regressive tax cuts, the dismantling of environmental regulation, etc.) actually gets accomplished.
While the con itself is not new, the scope of today's successful deception of the American people is unprecedented.
The powerful used to just take what they wanted by the sword. The rise of democracy required the powerful to trade in the sword for the con job: Just manipulate the people into choosing against their true interests. It is only when the people can see through the lies that they can reclaim the power that is their birthright as citizens of this American democracy.
Andrew Bard Schmookler is the author of "The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution".
© 2004 Baltimore Sun
http://www.baltimoresun.com |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Clueless People Love Bush |
by Molly Ivins
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
27 Oct 2004
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Editors note: Last month, workingforchange ran a piece by comedian Will Durst entitled Stupid people love Bush. Unlike that piece -- which was satirical -- this piece is factual.
Oh, you sweet, innocent, carefree citizens in non-swing states. You have no idea how much fun and slime you are missing.
In the swingers, wolves stalk us mercilessly (as the pro-wolf lobby points out indignantly, no one has ever been killed by wolves on U.S. soil, but try arguing that in the face of the relentless new TV ad campaign). Breaking news everywhere -- 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq left unattended, stock market down to year's low, leading economic indicators down, more tragedy in Iraq, the Swift Boat Liars are back, more Halliburton scandal, George Tenet says the war in Iraq is "wrong" -- it feels like you're dodging meteorites here in the Final Days.
Actually, the best evidence suggests we need to slow way down and go way back, because far from being able to take in anything new, it turns out many of our fellow citizens, especially Bush supporters, are stuck like bugs in amber in some early misperceptions that have never been cleared up.
It seems the majority of Bush supporters, according to recent polls, still believe Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda and even to 9-11, and that the United States found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Many of you are asking how that could possibly be, since everybody knows...
But everybody doesn't know. There it is. And if you are wondering why everybody doesn't know, you can either blame it on the media, always a shrewd move, or take notice that the administration is STILL spreading this same misinformation.
Both Donald Rumsfeld and Bush have publicly acknowledged there is no evidence of any links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. However, as Dick Cheney campaigns, a standard part of his stump speech is the accusation that Saddam Hussein "had a relationship" with Al Qaeda or "has long-established ties to Al Qaeda." He makes this claim up to the present day. The 9-11 Commission, however, found that there was "no collaborative relationship" between the two.
Cheney, of course, also has never given up his touching faith that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, recently referring to a "nuclear" program that had in fact been abandoned shortly after the first Gulf War. Bush and Cheney misled the country into war using these two false premises, and it turns out an enormous number of our fellow citizens still believe both of them to be true. It's not because they're stupid, but because an administration they trust is still telling them both phony propositions are true.
Normally, when you get a situation like that -- where people are simply not acknowledging reality -- it is considered a cult, a form of groupthink based on irrational beliefs propagated by what is normally a charismatic leader. So those Kerry volunteers earnestly engaging Bush supporters on the latest outrage are way off base. They need to go all the way back to the Two Great Lies that got us into this: Many American soldiers marching into Iraq believed it was "payback for 9-11."
A third slightly blinding fact (to me) is that more people now think Kerry behaved shamefully in regards to Vietnam than did W. Bush. Incredible what brazen lying will do, isn't it?
A friend of Bush's dad got him into the "champagne unit" of the Texas Air National Guard, a unit packed with the sons of the privileged trying to stay out of Vietnam, and he failed to complete his service there. Kerry is a genuine, bona fide war hero. The men who served on his boat are supporting him for president, but those who didn't serve with him, who weren't there, who don't know what happened, have been given more credence. Wolves will get you!
In further unhappy evidence of how ill-informed the American people are (blame the media), the Program on International Policy Attitudes found Bush supporters consistently ill-informed about Bush's stands on the issues (Kerry-ans, by contrast, are overwhelmingly right about his positions). Eighty-seven percent of Bush supporters think he favors putting labor and environmental standards into international trade agreements. Eighty percent of Bush supporters believe Bush wants to participate in the treaty banning landmines. Seventy-six percent of Bush supporters believe Bush wants to participate in the treaty banning nuclear weapons testing. Sixty-two percent believe Bush would participate in the International Criminal Court. Sixty-one percent believe Bush wants to participate in the Kyoto Treaty on global warming. Fifty-three percent does not believe Bush is building a missile defense system, a.k.a. "Star Wars."
The only two Bush stands the majority of his supporters got right were on increasing defense spending and who should write the new Iraqi constitution.
Kerry supporters, by contrast, know their man on seven out of eight issues, with only 43 percent understanding he wants to keep defense spending the same but change how the money is spent, and 57 percent believing he wants to up it.
So what's going on here? I do not think Kerry people are smarter than Bush people, so why are they better-informed? Maybe a small percentage of ideological right-wingers don't believe anything the Establishment media say, but I don't think this is a matter of not believing what they hear, but of not hearing what's factual.
The great triumph of the political right in this country has been the creation of a network of alternative media. There are people who listen to Rush Limbaugh for more hours every day than the Branch Davidians listened to David Koresh. Watch Fox News, read The Washington Times -- hey, that's what the Bush administration does, according to its own words.
But it's not just the right-wing media purveying lies -- they are quoting the administration. These misimpressions come directly from the Bush administration, still, over and over.
© 2004 Working for Change
http://www.workingforchange.com |
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