At 11:49 AM 7/6/2003 +0100, Douglas wrote:
>Thought this article might interest you.
>
> > WASHINGTON - A third of the American public believes U.S. forces
>have
> > found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll.
> > Twenty-two percent said Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons.
> >
> > But such weapons have not been found in Iraq and were not used.
Indeed, as Anny notes (or so I read her), statistics can be
skewed. Deliberately or by "accident"?
Did the great showman Phineas T. Barnum have it right? "There's a sucker
born every minute."
Or the journalist H. L. Mencken: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating
the taste of the American public."
I keep trying to sell the presumed intellectuals I know the idea that in
America at least you cannot understand the mentality of public
consciousness without paying at least some attention to right-wing talk
radio, Fox News, and conservative print media. I am talking about such
personalities as Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and the unique
voice of the aptly-named Michael Savage. They are joined in print by Ann
Coulter, who makes even Savage look like a poster boy for the ACLU: this
is, after all, the woman who defends as a great hero the late Sen. Joseph
McCarthy and who stated in an interview that she wished the Oklahoma City
bomber Timothy McVeigh had blown up the New York Times building.
Nothing whatsoever happens to or is done to these people except their
listenership grows and money pours into the coffers of the radio and TV
stations that employ them. They have the nerve to suggest that they are
oppressed by a predominantly liberal media the existence of which they
cannot substantiate, but their claim is accepted as a secular Nicene Creed
by their listeners who find them the voices of "true Americanism."
My only explanation is guesswork. In the same way that the American South
labored for years under the shadow of the Civil War, the Lost Cause, so now
the country labors--and is likely to do so for years to come--under the
greater specter of Vietnam. America since 1973 has struggled not to
rebuilt its sense of self as a nation, but has instead attempted--like a
dog coming out the anesthesia in the vet's office--to find its lost balls.
The people who gravitate to the Limbaughs, Hannitys, Savages, and Levins
are people who carry an unhealed psychic wound. The former Roman Catholic
priest, Eugene Kennedy, who about a year ago published a remarkable if
imperfect book, "The Unhealed Wound," spoke of the Catholic Church
suffering a collective form of Amfortas' (or Anfortas') wound in the
Parcifal legend: an unhealable wound through the
genitals. Kennedy--sometimes pushing too hard--suggests that the Church's
inability to deal with sexuality is its own unhealed wound. One might say
(okay, I DO say) that the Vietnam War is our national unhealed wound, our
spear in the groin that has "unmanned" us. Since 1973 we have not known
how to adjust or rebuild our sense of nationality (as opposed to
nationalism). Jimmy Carter engaged in a pathetic and disastrous military
exercise in Iran. Ronald Reagan--easily the best rhetorician since John
Kennedy--took on stupid little adventures like Grenada and specialized in
The Great Phrase: "Mr. Gorbachov...tear down that wall!" Bush Senior was
undercut by his economic incompetence and outright lying on taxes. I
loathe Bill Clinton to see him as the Great
Peacemaker. Mogadishu? Serbo-Crotia? And Bush the Younger...well, we
have Iraq, the country we're there to liberate from Saddam...who has a bit
too conveniently disappeared in much the same way it was far to easy for
the government to ignore warnings of terrorist attacks focused around late
summer 2001.
But the spin campaign has gone a long way to restoring what we think of as
"national pride." "Oh, the WMDs are there, we'll find 'em." Now anyone
who questions the reasons and rightness of the war is, in Coulter's word, a
traitor. I have been an American the full 59 years of my life. I remember
the anger at dissent that accompanied Vietnam. I have never seen anything
like this: not my patriotism but my very right to call myself an American
being challenged by a bunch of radio hacks, product pimps with a 50,000
watt transmitter.
But there is a corps of people who need this. They have felt
disenfranchised. They have seen their jobs disappear. They they are
whipped up to hate not only American dissenters but the people they believe
those dissenters represent: holders of H1B visas, Mexican illegal
immigrants, the French, the Germans. NEVER the corporate power brokers who
pilfered their own companies, never the military machine that taken their
children, never the policy of a State that cannot function without defining
for its citizenry what does and does not constitute valid argument, i.e.,
there IS no valid argument. There are weapons of mass destruction because
Donald Rumsfeld says so. And if there aren't, it is because we
deliberately give Saddam way more than enough time to get rid of them
because, for whatever reasons, a live and kicking Saddam is somehow useful
to our interests. He's rather like Goldstein in 1984--he and Osama bin
Ladin, whom I would guess we have no intention of ever finding. If we'd
wanted to, we could have before he wreaked the havoc he did.
Ken
-------------------------
"If you think you're in control, try giving orders to your cat."--Anonymous
Kenneth
Wolman http://www.kenwolman.com
http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
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