Saturday, November 27, 2004

Why Bush's America Feels Like Orwell's 1984

by Jonathan Greenberg,
author of “America 2014: An Orwellian Tale."

As President Bush moves to implement what he proclaims to be his “mandate,” millions of Americans find ourselves baffled that so many of our fellow citizens could have voted for a leader whose tenure has been marked by a series of failures and deceptions. For an answer, I suggest that we look to George Orwell’s 1984, and to the triumph, this election season, of a little known but essential component of the Republican right agenda known as ‘perception management.”

Perception management, in short, operates under the principle that truth is unessential.  Truth simply becomes what the Party is able to convince the electorate is true. During Bush’s first term, the President and senior Administration officials practiced perception management every time they announced their certainty that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, as well as connections to Al Q’aeda and the September 11 attacks.

In the end, there were far more Bush voters who believed these widely-televised deceptions than those who understood the facts. A CNN exit poll found that 81% of Bush voters believed that the Iraq war was part of the war on terrorism, even though after exhaustive research, Iraq has never been found to have sponsored a single act of international terrorism.

The closest thing to an admission of a “perception management” strategy came from a recent New York Times Magazine article, in which a senior advisor of the Bush Administration scoffed at Americans who exist in ‘the reality based community,” who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality. That’s not the way the world works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

A government that creates its own realities is frightening. But even more alarming—and more mystifying to American voters who don’t buy into this reality —is that 59 million of our fellow citizens voted to re-elect George Bush, despite overwhelming evidence of what could politely be called contradictory truths.

George Orwell provides a ready answer.

A central premise of the Big Brother world of 1984 was what Orwell called “Doublethink,” defined in the book as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

In the mythical empire of Oceania in 1984, citizenship meant “not thinking—not needing to think.” The government of Big Brother alternates between war and alliance with two competing empires. At one point, the enemy changes in the middle of a patriotic speech, and the audience immediately accepts the new reality. They have no choice. In 1984, according to Orwell, “The heresy of heresies was common sense.”

The Bush Administration has been tremendously successful at convincing its supporters to suspend common sense. Last month, a survey by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes found that 72% of Bush supporters believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for producing them (25%). This survey was done after the widely-reported results of the CIA’s “Duelfer Report,” an exhaustive $1 billion investigation, which concluded that Hussein had dismantled all of his WMD programs shortly after the 1991 Gulf War and never tried to reconstitute them. The Duelfer Report also found that Saddam Hussein did not support Al-Qaeda terrorists.

When asked whether the U.S. should have gone to war without evidence of a WMD program or support to Al-Qaeda, 58% of Bush supporters polled said no. Yet these same voters support the war, suggesting an inability, or refusal, to accept “discernable reality.”

This is no accident. For three years, the President and his Administration have used every opportunity to manage the perceptions of the public by distorting facts. Even after the conclusive CIA report, Bush and Cheney deliberately fused the war in Iraq with the war on those who caused the September 11 attacks. And who can forget the certainty with which the President declared, a few months after the Iraq war began, that “We found the weapons of mass destruction.”

We have all heard the litany of assertions by this Administration that Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States, that the United Nations inspection program to disarm Hussein of weapons of mass destruction had failed, and that the Iraq War was necessary to prevent terrorist acts on American soil. Not one of these assertions was true. The truth, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil revealed last year, was that at their first cabinet meeting in January, 2001, the Administration was planning to go to war against Saddam Hussein—nine months before the September 11 attacks.

Even the Administration’s pursuit of Al Q’aeda could have been culled from Orwell’s 1984, where ‘Ignorance is Strength” was another key Big Brother slogan. Right after September 11, the President swore that he would stop at nothing to get the perpetrators of the attack.  This was right after his Administration allowed a plane full of Saudi Arabians, including bin Laden’s relatives, to fly out of the U.S. without being questioned by the F.B.I. Then, six months later, while laying the ground work to divert most of our country’s military resources to a war against Iraq, Bush said of bin Laden, “He’s a person who’s now been marginalized...I just don’t spend that much time on him...I truly am not that concerned about him.” By April, 2002, Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Myers followed that with: “The goal has never been to get bin Laden.”

When Orwell created Doublethink and the dark world of 1984, he was satirizing the future of Stalin’s Soviet Union. It is a sad time for America when his message applies most fittingly to our own country.

Thursday, November 18, 2004

I thought only fascist governments did this

I thought it was one of the hallmarks of dictatorships that they would display images of the “Maximum Leader” or “Der Führer” - Doesn’t this seem more like something like you would expect to see under the regime of say, Saddam Hussein, or Mao, or Stalin?

Or maybe a banana republic - complete with Banana Republicans - this was a Clear Channel (a company that held rallies for Bush, advertised on their stations) billboard in Florida, with the caption “A political public service message brought to you by Clear Channel Outdoor.”

Excuse me, I gotta puke…

- Bob Woods

Sunday, November 14, 2004

Some things to Do Before the Inaugural

1. Get that abortion you’ve always wanted.
2. Drink a nice clean glass of water.
3. Cash your social security check.
4. See a doctor of your own choosing.
5. Spend quality time with your draft age child/grandchild.
6. Visit Syria, or any foreign country for that matter.
7. Get that gas mask you’ve been putting off buying.
8. Hoard gasoline.
9. Borrow books from library before they’re banned - Constitutional law books, Catcher in the Rye, Harry Potter, Tropic of Cancer, National Geographic, etc.
10. If you have an idea for an art piece involving a crucifix - do it now.
11. Come out - then go back in - HURRY!
12. Jam in all the Alzheimer’s stem cell research you can.
13. Stay out late before the curfews start.
14. Suck up to your neighbors now, BEFORE they turn you in to Homeland Security.
15. Go see Bruce Springsteen before he has his “accident.”
16. Go see Mount Rushmore before the Reagan addition.
17. Use the phrase - “you can’t do that - this is America.”
18. Have that last drink with your Muslim friends.
19. If you’re white - marry a black person, if you’re black - marry a white person; if you’re gay, get married in Massachusetts; if you’re transgendered, move to Canada.
20. Take a walk in Yosemite, without being hit by a snowmobile or a base-jumper.
21. Enroll your kid in an accelerated art or music class.
22. Start your school day without a prayer.
23. Pass on the secrets of evolution to future generations.
24. Learn French. Or German.
25. Attend a commitment ceremony with your gay friends.
26. Take a factory tour anywhere in the U.S.
27. Try to take photographs of animals on the endangered species list.
28. Take photographs of Democrats.
29. Visit Florida before the polar ice caps melt.
30. Visit Nevada before it becomes radioactive.
31. Visit Alaska before “The Big Spill.”
32. Visit Massachusetts while it is still a state.
33. Download a copy of the Constitution on an encrypted CD-ROM and hide it.
34. Play with a dreidel.
35. Masturbate, before Chief Justice Scalia makes it illegal.
36. Visit Congress and Supreme Court before it is disbanded.

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Psalm 2004

Bush is my shepherd, I shall be in want.
He leadeth me beside the still factories,
He maketh me to lie down on park benches,
He restoreth my doubts about the Republican party,

He guideth me onto the paths of unemployment for the party’s sake.
I do fear the evildoers, for thou talkest about them constantly.

Thy tax cuts for the rich and thy deficit spending
They do discomfort me.
Thou anointeth me with never-ending debt,
And my savings and assets shall soon be gone.
Surely poverty and hard living shall follow me,
And my jobless children shall dwell in my basement forever.

Amen

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

"Apres moi, c'est deluge"

Last evening, Sam and I went over to the house of some friends to watch the election returns. There were about 15 of us there, mostly Democrats and independents, and as the evening went on, we were heartened by some of the local results, but appalled by the national.

This morning, I have nothing but despair for the future of this country - Bush will rule with no checks or balances. He has his one-party government, and will certainly get to tip the Supreme Court even farther to the right. More Patriot Acts, more civil rights lost, more environmental destruction, more neocon wars and less truth in the news…

It’s called fascism, and it comes in on the feet of fear, abetted by those who give into it.

Remember, the people of Germany thought they were doing the right thing. Are we any better than they, now?

For those who voted for Bush after buying into his lies - they have now also taken on his hubris as well - his lies are now their lies. His crimes are now their crimes, his greed is now their greed. His murders are now their murders. His guilt is now their guilt.

These things are not ours, we who voted for hope instead of fear, who voted for real change instead of chump change, who voted because we believe in democracy instead of demagogery…

- Bob Woods