- It's the inviolable first rule of democracy that all
politicians will praise the wisdom of the people -- an effusive flattery
that intensifies when they ask "the people" to swallow something
exceptionally inedible. What the people never hear from anyone, or from
anyone with further ambitions, is the truth. If a public figure wishes
to leave the stage forever, a sound strategy is to offer his fellow citizens
a candid and disparaging assessment of their intelligence.In the aftermath
of the conquest of Iraq, as we awake to the bewildering possibility of
a United States of Asia, the patriotic pageantry and premature gloating
call to mind an obsession that once gripped the great French novelist Gustave
Flaubert. (In my recklessness I ignore the halfwit embargo on all things
French.) Flaubert, according to W.G. Sebald, became convinced that his
own work and his own brain had been infected by a national epidemic of
stupidity, a relentless tide of gullibility and muddled thinking which
made him feel, he said, as if he were sinking into sand.
-
- At his low point, Flaubert convinced himself that everything
he had written had been contaminated and "consisted solely of a string
of the most abysmal errors and lies." Sometimes he lay on his couch
for months, frozen with the dread that anything he wrote would only extend
Stupidity's domain. Flaubert became a scholar of moronic utterances, painstakingly
collecting hundreds of what he called betises -- stupidities -- and arranging
them in his "Dictionary of Received Opinions."
-
- The wondrous blessing God bestowed on Gustave Flaubert
-- and on America's own great chroniclers of contagious stupidity, Mark
Twain and H.L. Mencken -- is that they lived and died without imagining
a thing like Fox News. It's easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch's outrageous
mongrel, the impossible offspring of supermarket tabloids, sitcom news
spoofs, police-state propaganda mills and the World Wrestling Federation.
-
- Fox News is an oxymoron and Cheech and Chong would have
made a more credible team of war correspondents than Geraldo Rivera and
Ollie North. Neither Saturday Night Live nor the 1973 film Network, Paddy
Chayefsky's corrosive satire of TV news, could even approach the comic
impact of Geraldo embedded, or of Fox's pariah parade, its mothball fleet
of experts who always turn out to be disgraced or indicted Republican refugees.
If Ed Meese, Newt Gingrich and Elliott Abrams couldn't fill your sails
with mirth, you could count on the recently deposed Viceroy of Virtue and
High Regent of Rectitude, my old schoolmate Blackjack Bill Bennett.
-
- With its red-faced, hyperventilating reactionaries and
slapstick abuse of lame "liberal" foils who serve them as crash
dummies, Fox News could easily be taken as pure entertainment, even as
inspired burlesque of the rightwing menagerie. But the problem -- in fact,
the serious problem - is that Fox isn't kidding, and brownshirts aren't
funny.
-
- Harper's reports that Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly became
so infuriated by the son of a 9-ll victim who opposed the war -- "I'm
against it and my father would have been against it, too" -- that
he cursed the man and even threatened him off-camera. A Fox TV anchor,
one Neil Cavuto, celebrated the fall of Baghdad by informing all of us
who opposed the war in March, "You were sickening then, you are sickening
now." If reports are accurate, these troubled men are neither bad
journalists nor even bad actors portraying journalists -- they're mentally
unbalanced individuals whose partisan belligerence is pressing them to
the brink of psychosis.
-
- But the scariest thing about Fox and Rupert Murdoch,
the thing that renders them all fear and no fun in a time of national crisis,
is that they channel for the Bush administration as faithfully as if they
were on the White House payroll. Like no other substantial media outlet
in American history, Fox serves -- voluntarily -- as the propaganda arm
of a controversial, manipulative, image-obsessed government. To watch its
war coverage for even a minute was to grind your teeth convulsively at
each Orwellian repetition of the Newspeak mantra, "Operation Iraqi
Freedom." I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies; but if Joseph
Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have been indistinguishable
from Fox News.
-
- Fox's truculent patriotism is misleading, of course.
Rupert Murdoch is not exactly an American patriot, he's not even exactly
an American. Though he became an American citizen in 1985 (solely to qualify,
under US law, as the owner of a TV network), the Australian Murdoch was
already 54 and his tabloid formula had already polluted the media mainstreams
in Australia and Great Britain. Murdoch is an insatiable parasite, a vampirish
lamprey who fastens himself to English-speaking nations and grows fat on
their cultural lifeblood, leaving permanently degraded media cultures in
his wake. Rabid patriotism is a product he sells, along with celebrity
gossip, naked women and smirky bedroom humor, in every country he contaminates.
And a little "white rage" racism has always gone into his mix
for good measure. ("He tried so hard to use race to sell his newspapers
that he became known as "Tar Baby' Murdoch," Jimmy Breslin once
charged.)
-
- Murdoch's repulsive formula has proven irresistible from
Melbourne to Manhattan, and now, by satellite, he's softening up Beijing.
His great fortune rests on his wager that a huge unevolved minority is
stupid, bigoted, prurient, nasty to the core. In America today, it's hard
to say whether Rupert Murdoch is an agent, or merely a beneficiary, of
the cultural leprosy that's consuming us. But the conspicuous success of
Fox News, lamentable in the best of times, is devastating in a shell-shocked
nation that sees itself at war.
-
- It is and has always been true, in Samuel Johnson's famous
words, that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" --
by which, of course, Dr. Johnson meant patriotism as a political and rhetorical
weapon, not as a private emotion. Belittling other people's patriotism
to achieve political leverage is the lowest road a public scoundrel can
travel, the road where neo-conservative meets neo-fascist. In flag-frenzied
Fox, an unscrupulous administration found a blunt object ready-made to
hammer its critics.
-
- Liars With Secret Agendas
-
-
- Years ago in Moscow, at the dawn of perestroika, a pair
of Russian journalists showed me headlines from the New York Post that
made Kruschchev's "We will bury you" sound like "Have a
nice day." How can there ever be peace, they asked me, if America
hates us so much? Handicapped by the yawning gap between our respective
press traditions, I tried to explain that the Post had nothing to do with
our government or even the American media machine, that it was owned by
an Australian whose Red-baiting and saber-rattling was an act designed
to sell newspapers to morons. That he was unconnected to our government
was something I believed about Murdoch in 1984, though no doubt Ronald
Reagan was eager to naturalize a lonely immigrant with billions to invest
in right-wing media.
-
- But now? Is it sheer coincidence that the president's
stage manager, Greg Jenkins -- responsible for the notorious flight-suit
landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and for posing George Bush against
Mt. Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty -- was recently a producer at Fox
News?
-
- If these elaborate tableaus Jenkins choreographs for
President Bush seem clumsy, tasteless, condescending and insulting to your
intelligence, you must be some kind of liberal. They bear an uncanny family
resemblance to the red-white-and-blue show at Fox News, and heavy-handedness
has never harmed its ratings, nor the president's either.
-
- How stupid are we, finally, how easy to fool? Fox News
is run by the insidious Roger Ailes -- image merchant for Nixon, Reagan
and Bush senior, producer for Rush Limbaugh, newsman never -- and Fox is
not what it seems to be. It's not a news service, certainly, nor even the
sincere voice of low-rent nationalism. It's a calculated fraud, like the
president who ducked the draft during Vietnam, and even welshed on his
National Guard commitment, but who puts on a flight suit stenciled "Commander-in-chief"
and plays Douglas MacArthur on network TV.
-
- "I almost choked," said my mother's friend
Doris, who's 90. "I had to lie down." It's possible that even
old George Bush, who served with distinction in World War II, had to stifle
a groan over that one.
-
- The invasion of Iraq was in no way what it seemed to
be, either. Saddam Hussein was never a threat to the United States. His
"weapons of mass destruction" remain invisible, his terrorist
connections remain unproven, and he had absolutely nothing to do with the
destruction of the World Trade Center. Most cynical of all was the "liberation"
lie, the administration's sudden concern for the helpless citizens of Iraq.
Saddam, as grotesque as he was, wasn't getting any meaner, and "liberators"
like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were doing brisk business with him
when he was in his murderous, citizen-eating prime (and in Cheney's case,
as recently as 1999). It would take half a page to list all the US-sanctioned
dictators, killers of their people, who will be sharing hell's hottest
corner with Saddam Hussein.
-
- Liars with secret agendas are treating Americans like
frightened children. If that sounds like a cry from the Left, get a transcript
of Sen. Robert Byrd's remarks to the Senate on May 21. Byrd, nobody's liberal
by any stretch of the imagination, accuses the White House of constructing
"a house of cards, built on deceit," to justify its war on Iraq.
-
- According to polls, at least half of us were so eager
to be deceived, we believed the one lie Bush never dared to tell us, except
by implication: that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the terrorist attacks
of Sept. 11, 2001.
-
- According to a CNN poll, 51 percent believe this -- "The
Moron Majority," declares the headline in The Progressive Populist.
And at that point, like poor Flaubert, I feel the sand around my ankles.
I want to lie down and give up. On the wall above my bed of pain, two familiar
quotations: "The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and
assured for all time" -- Albert Einstein; and "Perhaps the universe
is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies." -- George Santayana.
-
- It violates democratic etiquette to call your fellow
citizens "idiots." (Unless they're liberals -- "We all agree
that liberals are stupid," writes Charles Krauthammer.) Fortunately,
the PC wordworks has coined a new euphemism to replace the ugly word "retarded."
It's "intellectually disabled," and we have it just in time.
How else could we describe a majority that accepts the logic of "supporting
the troops"? Protest as I might, a local columnist explained to me,
once the soldiers are "locked and cocked" I owe them not only
my prayers for their safe deliverance but unqualified endorsement of their
mission, no matter how immoral and ill-advised it may seem to me.
-
- According to this woeful logic, whoever controls the
armed forces in the country where you live owns your conscience and your
soul. It mandates unanimous civilian support for King Herod's soldiers
smashing Hebrew babies against doorposts. It holds our soldiers hostage
to silence our common sense, independent judgment and moral autonomy --
the foundations of each thinking individual's self-respect, not to mention
the foundations of every theory of democratic government.
-
- "To announce that there must be no criticism of
the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but
is morally treasonable to the American public," said President Theodore
Roosevelt.
-
-
- The Madhouse Choir
-
-
- They don't make Republicans like they used to. The troop-support
doctrine, so universally and smugly conceded, is logic for the intellectually
disabled, for people who've been hit in the head repeatedly with a heavy
shovel. The stupidity of those who buy it is no more astonishing than the
hypocrisy of those who sell it -- Republicans who preach our sacred duty
to the army's morale and simultaneously cancel $15 billion in veteran's
benefits and 60 percent of federal education subsidies for servicemen's
children. If you can't believe that, look it up.
-
- When is it too late to wake the sleeping masses? When
a Fox TV show for amateur entertainers turns up more voters than Congressional
elections? The marriage of television and propaganda may well have been
the funeral of reason. In the meantime, Iraq is a bloody mess and Afghanistan
a tragic mess, and most of the earth's one billion Muslims think the US
and Israel are trying to conquer their world and destroy their religion.
America's economy is suffocating ("A sickly economy with no cure in
sight" says this morning's paper), her currency is in free fall and
her reputation flies below half mast on every continent. We've been instructed
to hate the French, our allies since the days of Lafayette, because they
dared to tell us the truth.
-
- What our best friends think of us is epitomized by a
new play in Paris titled George W. Bush, or God's Sad Cowboy. Another in
London is called The Madness of George Dubya. Our only original enemies,
the terrorists of Al-Qaeda, seem to be thriving -- and quite naturally
gaining recruits. There's a chilling suspicion that major architects of
our current foreign policy are insane. Listen to Bush adviser Richard Perle,
known since his Reagan years as the Prince of Darkness: "If we let
our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't
try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage total war, (my italics)
our children will sing great songs about us years from now."
-
- Is that the children I hear singing, or the madhouse
choir? (Calling Dr. Strangelove. . .) But polls tell us that through all
the wars and lies and logical meltdowns that followed 9-11, 70 percent
of adult America declared itself well satisfied and well served.
-
- "I think it is terrifying," said the late Bishop
Paul Moore, a Yale aristocrat who, like most mainstream clergymen, did
not support the Bush wars. "I believe it will lead us to a terrible
crack in the whole culture as we have come to know it."
-
- I believe it has, and I believe that the split between
liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican is inconsequential compared
to the real fracture line, between Americans who try to think clearly and
those who will not or cannot. What hope, a cynical friend teased me, for
a country where 70 percent believe in angels, 60 percent believe in literal,
biblical, blazing Armageddon, and more than half reject Charles Darwin?
He didn't need to add that creationists, science-annihilating cretins,
have now recruited President Bush, who assures fundamentalists he "has
doubts" about evolution.
-
- Whether the president is that dumb or merely that dishonest
is beside the point. He knows his constituency. New research published
by the National Academy of Sciences asserts that human beings and chimpanzees
share 99.4 percent of their DNA. Would the polls (or the elections) change
if subjects had to submit to DNA tests to prove they possess the qualifying
.6 percent? American readers have purchased 50 million copies of Tim LaHaye's
gonzo Apocalypse novels, still more evidence that what awaits the United
States of America is not a physical but an intellectual Armageddon.
-
- Was it dry, desert sand or quicksand that the despairing
Flaubert imagined? When we look down, can we still see our knees? Novelist
Michael Malone, a notorious optimist, offered a faint ray of hope when
he urged me to ignore all the polls -- if the government has intimidated
most of the media, he argued, what makes you think the polls are credible?
-
- When the sand begins to grip us and no lifeline appears,
we clutch at straws. Yet there's anecdotal evidence that the polls could
be wrong. Brownshirts targeted the Dixie Chicks, and they survived handsomely.
At the Merle Watson bluegrass festival in rural Wilkes County, singer Laura
Love ridiculed President Bush from the main stage and harvested thousands
of cheers to perhaps a hundred catcalls. At a crowded bookstore in Charlottesville
last month, I tossed aside the book I hoped to sell and read a white-knuckled
antiwar essay I wrote in 1991. One woman walked out, but everyone else
applauded and grinned at me. Come to think of it, nearly everyone I know
hates these wars and these lies as much as I do.
-
- Are we so few, or are the numbers we see part of the
Bush-Fox disinformation campaign -- like Saddam's missing uranium and his
25,000 liters of anthrax? This faint last hope will be tested in the presidential
election of 2004. If the polls are right and Malone is wrong, as I fear,
it's going to be a long, sandy century for the United States of America,
for our children and grandchildren and all those sweet singing children
yet unborn.
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- Copyright © 2003 Creative Loafing Charlotte, Inc.
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