An acquaintance of mine - let's call her Lisa - went to two town halls this summer along with friends to protest "Obamacare."  Lisa, a Republican, sought out the town halls of Democrat representatives not in her home district, but nearby so she could protest "socialism" where she felt it was being promoted: by Democrats, in Democratic districts, under the guise of health care reform.

She was not a constituent. She did not go to have a dialog. She went to shout her anger and "be heard."

When it was suggested that she and the other angry citizens who disrupted these events were part of something orchestrated by the insurance lobby, she became irate. "No insurance company told me to go do that," she declared. "It was my idea, and my friends'. We want to fight this thing."

I understand why Lisa thought she was acting as an independent Angry Citizen.  But frankly, the depth of ignorance in her perceptions and assertions is absolutely breathtaking. Worse, it is shared by the fractious herds of like-minded Angry Citizens who shouted such profundities in August as, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!"  - a pugnacious defense and endorsement of their beloved government-run socialist health care program, and the very same sort of thing they had come to protest against.

The cognitive dissonance in such scenarios is enough to make a thinking person's brain explode.  To spare myself just such an experience, my chosen remedy is to blog a bit about this phenomenon now. (I was too busy defending myself from imminent brain melt-down during August to muster anything cogent on the topic.)

Played Like a Cheap Fiddle

Now, at the remove of September, I think it is time to prod a bit at the citizenry's muddy thinking and unfettered emotionalism that enabled lobbyists and GOP leaders to play them like a cheap fiddle.  There are two groups that together created the August hysteria that largely shut down any real policy debate or discussion of real issues about health care.

One is the mass of individuals who tossed their brains out the window and ran on poorly rationalized ("justified") anger, swallowing lies whole and letting falsehoods become their basis for decisions and action.

The second, and more despicable, is the coolly calculating horde of propagandists and politicos of various stripes who planned and followed a strategy to mislead, stir up emotion on that basis, and point the impassioned result at the goal of derailing healthcare reform.  This is the group that is really to blame for fomenting and directing the angry herd response that resulted in town hall meetings so raucous that dialog was shouted down, congresspersons received death threats, and many meetings were canceled.

Fears, Exploited

Together, these instances perfectly illustrate how those in power manipulate security concerns to generate fear and its close cousin anger.  The end result is the expansion, consolidation, and reinforcement of power, and in this case the defense of their status quo.  It is a pattern that repeats again and again in American politics: conservative politics, at least, seems stuck in a chorus line singing "be afraid!," and has been for most of a century, now. (Indeed, the perverse longevity of this "approach" to politics and policy is one reason for my continuing fascination with the intersection between security, fear, and power.  I continue to be boggled by how few question the dynamic at all.)

So. Now that I have framed my interest in this issue, and made some claims about people being tools, I'll start getting into the whys and hows of that in my next post in this series.

Meanwhile, I will leave you with this thought from Walter Lippmann, a well-known columnist, reporter and writer from the 1920s and '30s, whose masterpiece Public Opinion dissected some of the dynamics of propaganda and politics well enough to inspire generations of Madison Avenue ad men and ambitious politicians.

"[W]hat each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him....The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do...[W]hat is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?"

- Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922)