The crayon box that colors American zeitgeist may be the overarching prize of this year’s election, and what keeps our current societal shot-callers awake at night is a hazy indication that Obama’s election may fundamentally change the texture of our national narrative – a change that threatens to upset the fragile perquisite of who defines how we see ourselves and our nation’s place in the world.
For the tumultuous first years of the millennium, this defining external has been circumscribed by the “noble lies” of neoconservative operatives, public and private. Up to now – this year - neocons have maintained solid control over crucial, bellwether policy decisions by establishing the very parameters for debating their characteristics.
In short: They’re the ones telling the American story, the ones shaping the visage we present to ourselves – and the world.
Nowhere is this more evident than in contemporary American foreign policy. Under stewardship of the Bush Administration, and supported by reflexive like-mindedness in the media, this country has embarked on an international crusade that applies pre-emptive military operations to bring errant regions and nations the sometimes questionable bounties of democracy, as well as establish nothing less than an imperial American ascendancy around the globe.
Supporting this grand, bloody enterprise is a jerry-rigged scaffolding of philosophical gatekeepers, policy hacks and obsequious media giants. They all think and say the same thing, and expect the rest of us to play along. It’s reminiscent of the sing-song truisms spouted by the old ‘60s lefties – as if they’d all memorized the same slogans at the same solidarity summer camps, humming Pete Seeger songs and making s’mores ‘round the ol’ campfire.
Although this propaganda factory has been seriously impaired by the diminishing integrity of the war on terror, it still cranks along almost eight years downwind of Bush’s first inauguration. Almost by reflex, an Associated Press story earlier this week about how little is expected to change or improve in U.S.–Russia relations under the future regimes of Dimitry Medvedev and the newly elected American president sourced as an “expert” Leon Aron of the arch-neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. If that think-tank outfit sounds familiar, it’s to where Paul Wolfowitz shrank back after getting canned as World Bank president. This egghead collective occasionally issues manifestos denying global warming and toting up reasons to support the surge - real credibility-builders.
But no matter how wrong the neoconservatives continue to be, they thrive. Big time. Weekly Standard publisher Bill Kristol pimps the war long and hard, sees the GOP majority in Congress splatter like a fat bug on a biker’s teeth – and gets rewarded with a column at the New York Times. Charles Krauthammer, Max Boot and David Brooks still pull facts out of the air and imagine a never-never land just beyond the rainbow, where dreams come true and the Israeli PM is again Netanyahu. And they continue to get high-grade employment and gasbag air time.
The stagnant, ingrown nature of the press/think tank/government axis has reduced in the heat, boiling off to toxic virulence. This tight little In Crowd addresses itself – and neither talks nor listens to anyone else. The overweening rule: When in doubt acquiesce to the powerful. Well… more plainly: Bootlick.
Glen Greenwald at Salon.com documented this phenomenon earlier this year, with “...In one of the ultimate paradoxes, for American journalists - whose role in theory is to expose the secrets of the powerful - secrecy is actually their central religious tenet, especially when it comes to dealing with the most powerful. Protecting, rather than exposing, the secrets of the powerful is the fuel of American journalism. That's how they maintain their access to and good relations with those in power.”
This is group-think triumphant. There is no deviation from the accepted agenda. It’s as if all the power brokers, all the informed insiders, have been stretch-limo’d to an exclusive uptown club for a snooty, boozy party at which chummy in-jokes prevail and cocktail produce is communally nibbled. In these rarified environs, no sector gets more back-handed contempt - even more than readers, audiences and constituencies - than bloggers.
This knee-jerk distaste for the keyboard revolution involves more than a little fear. The Internet first diluted then atomized the influence of the mainstream media. Information consumers can keystroke directly to the sources of news, call up public and private reports and even trade opinion without intervention by the always-suspect middle-man of the establishment press. Accelerating the dissolution of their power was a concurrent tabloidization of the news, in which insignificant details of any subject are sensationalized and the presentation of facts is replaced by the distortions of spin.
The media’s only recourse is to discount the validity of the Blogger Nation, and clumsily attempt to reset the standard of what constitutes journalism. On Greenwald’s chart of such antics, a convenient compass is Time’s Joe Klein as he toes an invisible line in the sand and calls it “serious”. In Klein’s lights, there are Serious Journalists who Know Things and there are unserious bloggers who should be using the Internet to the limited extent of their deficient capabilities - downloading music and playing video games, finding animated screen savers in charming pastels and draining credit cards on big-tittie porn sites.
In this warped presentation, it’s not so much outright lying – although, there’s a lot of that – as much as deceit by omission. Chunks of recent history go missing. The truth is complicated and infected with the frailities of human nature. There are mitigations, tangled complexities and shades of grey. But from the American information industry, we instead get a world of stark black and white. Nuance? Schmuance! Accounts that corrupt and abridged can’t be accurate – factual – in any regard. It’s as if we’ve shown up to play basketball and get handed a quarter of a ball; it doesn’t take Niels Bohr to figure out anything less than a sphere won’t bounce right.
The focus of this press-public disconnect is the Iraq War. An enforced elephant-in-the-parlor blindness is applied to the origins of a conflict termed by one veteran American military officer “the greatest strategic disaster” in the nation’s history. When the casus belli of Iraqi WMD and connections to Al Qaeda were disproved, the affair is shrugged off as a “failure of intelligence” and forgotten (or, more accurately, deliberately ignored). Subsequent excuses for launching the war shift with startling frequency: It was designed to remove a terrible dictator; it was done to bring democracy to the Middle East, and, most cynically, the war is to function as a bait-and-switch diversion in the war on terror – we fight them there so we don’t fight them here.
Through it all, the press applies a rigid rule of absolute acceptance of every scrap flung out by the Administration. In his book about the media’s catastrophic failure of will, “So Wrong for So Long,” Editor and Publisher columnist Greg Mitchell provides a suitable quote by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly on the day before the invasion in 2003:
"If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation; I will not trust the Bush administration again, all right?"
Well, the Americans went in, Saddam was lynched and Iraq was “clean” of WMDs… and Bill O’Reilly continues to be one of the punditocracy’s prime boosters for the Administration.
Many sources, backtracking the neocons’ roots, have noted that many of the top bulls in the herd were students of the University of Chicago’s Leo Strauss and his throwback vision of powerful elites making secret policy – a measured academic avowal of bust-out obfuscation in government and social intercourse. Sobering lines from a 1933 Strauss letter leaves little doubt about his view of democracy:
"…Just because Germany has turned to the right and has expelled us, it simply does not follow that the principles of the right are therefore to be rejected. To the contrary, only on the basis of principles of the right – fascist, authoritarian, imperial – is it possible in a dignified manner, without the ridiculous and pitiful appeal to ‘the inalienable rights of man’ to protest against the mean nonentity."
If we apply such a perspective to, say, the press… is it really surprising we are constantly – relentlessly - distributed reams and reams of inaccurate nothing?
This screwy, alien component lashed to our national character has not gone unnoticed by the common folk. We have slowly, torturously become aware that our media is plagued with zero-balance credibility… And that the truth – unfamiliar and terrifying – occasionally splashes out and scalds them, whence they shrink into corners and dark shadows, like bloodsucking undead horrified at the sunlight that would sear them to husks.
There is no real, expectant conflation of an Obama presidency and the end of the neocons, but any alteration to the status quo alarms those for whom it is goldmine and sugar tit all rolled into one. And the candidate’s recent successes despite almost hysterical attempts to anchor him to the tactless comments of both his pastor and himself indicate the media noise machine finally may be getting some deliberate disregard in return.
