You're obviously right that the conservative propaganda machine has an
undue influence (I don't know any intellectuals who would dispute
that--you're hanging with the wrong crowd), but only, I think, because the
listeners don't make use of any alternative sources, not even the nightly
TV news, bad as that is.

It might be useful to remember that until fairly late in the Vietnam war
the majority of public sentiment supported it. And that even at the end of
the war a substantial minority (I would venture that it was at least as
large a proportion as the triumphantly misinformed in the poll reported in
the Inquirer) wanted us to stay and finish the job. So the problem goes
back to before Vietnam. Are you old enough to remember backyard bomb
shelters, or the significant support for McCarthy, which believed as he
pretended to that the US faced the immanent threat of a communist takeover?
How about all those who believed that unionization was an anarchist plot
directed by foreigners?

Let's also remember how few vote in this country, and how ill-considered
their vote often is. California is about to recall its governor because
he's not at the moment popular, although he won reelection a year ago by a
landslide. The signers of the recall petition, which would allow the
election of a new governor by a plurality in a special election which will
have a miniscule vote (the media--the mainstream conservative
media--estimate that the new governor could win with as little as 2 % of
the electorate), have no understanding of the chaos they're initiating
(even the conservative media are against this one). But lack of knowledge
doesn't keep them from signing.

Even among the educated there's a frightening lack of awareness of the
realities--I mean the simple mechanics--of the system. The idiots with a
gleam in their eyes who voted for Nader, for example, with no thought for
the consequences. Check out the consequences.

Mark



At 01:50 PM 7/6/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>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