- A few years sometimes make a big difference in human
affairs. A few years ago an American President was put through the 18th
century ordeal of impeachment, a vast, expensively-staged comic opera of
white manes waving and grave baritones intoning, over a dribble on a dress
and the lie he told to save himself embarrassment. Today we have a President
who has hurled the world into two dirty, pointless wars after what undoubtedly
qualifies as the longest sequence of public lies ever uttered in a free
society, and yet in his homeland he remains popular and is collecting enough
campaign cash to rival the Swiss bank balances of the Russian Mafia.
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- Leaders have always lied in times of war and when maneuvering
for advantage in international affairs, American presidents, despite puffed-up
claims to different moral standards, no less so than others. Usually the
lies they tell are not understood until years later. The lies then often
seem to become small, unimportant details in a history of big events. But
Bush has lied daily, doing it so awkwardly at times that you might think
everyone is aware of it, and it seems to make no difference to his political
standing.
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- What will Bush do with all the cash he is hoarding for
the next campaign? He will use it to practice the worst lying possible
in a democratic society, lying that subverts the intent of democracy, replacing
meaningful debate by the suggestions, half-truths, and staged images of
advertising and marketing. Perhaps, I should correct that to the second-worst
lying possible in a democratic society, for Bush, of course, entered office
with the worst lying, claiming to have won an election he lost by any sensible
reckoning.
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- Why are Americans not distressed at this? Because they
live in an intense field, an electromagnetic haze, of marketing, advertising,
and commercial propaganda twenty-four hours a day. Americans are so saturated
with this stuff that they regard it as normal communication.
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- But it is not normal. It is deliberate and manipulative.
At its very best, advertising is only ever half truth, telling a few favorable
aspects of something that deserves greater scrutiny. At its worst, it is
simply artful fraud and deception. But in no case is it truth or, perhaps
better put since truth is a large and difficult idea, honest communication.
Advertising, like its fraternal twin, propaganda, always has a purpose
other than helping you understand something. This other purpose is its
raison d'tre. Advertising wants to separate you from your money or, in
the case of politics, from your vote.
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- I've often chuckled over the way Americans used to get
so upset over the idea of Communist propaganda. While Americans decried
that propaganda, they themselves lived in a dense fog of advertising and
propaganda. Only the American stuff isn't quite so obvious as the ponderous
old Soviet stuff, at least to anyone immersed in it. It is far more artful
and effective. That friendly well-known face on TV is speaking to me, being
a friend to me in my isolation and loneliness, cares about me, why he's
even recommending something good for me. What a nice man.
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- In America, wave on wave of these smiling frauds sell
floor mops, breath mints, female hygiene, Christ, cancer treatment, hamburgers,
and presidential candidates.
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- An interesting story from Maine, a place that prides
itself on tourist billboards as having "Life the way it should be,"
shows, in another sphere of life, how people, responding to the intense
environment of advertising and marketing, sometimes act with no examination
of their actions. An otherwise very nice person was vigorously preaching
one day some years ago to an associate at work about his not using a paper-recycling
container in his office, an oversight that may have involved a few dozen
sheets of paper in a week.
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- Now this "environmentally-concerned" preacher
with her spouse had just built a large, brand-new house, a five-bedroom
monster for two people with no children. And where did they build it? On
the fringes of a suburban area that was already suffering from exactly
the kind of hopeless sprawl afflicting every other part of the United States
where life is not advertised as being "the way it should be."
They built on a one-acre site along a tiny road on the edge of a forest.
And how were they getting to work? Why, each drove his and her own gasoline-wasting,
road-wasting, polluting SUV.
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- An acre of land, of course, required a large, polluting
rider-mower just to keep the grass clipped. Their long driveway required
lots of private plowing in the winter. The small road leading to it required
the sprawled-out town to plow regularly for the benefit of a fairly small
number of people. So too for garbage pick-up, and indeed for every other
public service. And five bedrooms use a lot of heating oil and a lot of
air-conditioning. If these people ever do have children, they will require
bus service along thinly-populated roads.
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- But in their minds they are doing nothing irresponsible.
It is that fellow at work who refuses to use a re-cycling box that is irresponsible.
Of course the amount of environmental stress and strain caused by their
choices is at least a hundred thousand times greater than that caused by
the man without the box, but no real analysis takes place here. They are
immersed in suggestions of their lifestyle having an almost quasi-sacred
character to it, being fulfillment of that unexamined advertising slogan,
"the American dream," and they equally are immersed in suggestions
that things like recycling boxes in every office are very good things indeed.
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- I said this example was from another sphere of life,
but really it isn't. The energy to do all the things necessary to support
their sprawl-lifestyle, multiplied by tens of millions of other Americans
just like them, has to come from somewhere. Like Iraq or Iran or Saudi
Arabia. Pick your troubled part of the world and add the cost of America's
belligerent policies to keep it in line. But Americans rarely see the results
of these abhorrent policies, the mutilated children, for instance, of Iraq.
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- And the immense pollution generated by this lifestyle
has to go somewhere, but who cares just so long as you don't see it piled
up on your front lawn? It all gets taken away, to dumps, somewhere. And
the smoke from the power generators? Well, they don't build those in areas
like this. The green-house gases from burning all that gasoline and fuel
oil and diesel truck fuel? The wind takes it off somewhere. The road salt.
The insecticide. The weed killer. Well, they do their job and you don't
see the mess.
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- And that is the answer that explains America's system
of paid political lies: it does its job and you don't see the mess, at
least if you are not looking, and most Americans aren't looking.
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