The 'game'
My first glimpse of Glenn Greenwald’s A Tragic Legacy came in a short excerpt published in the Huffington Post just as the book hit the stores. The excerpt addressed the possibility of a war with Iran, and it featured this paragraph as a summation of the ‘mind set’ hovering in the administration’s ether on Iran:
“Iran is governed by Evil leaders. They are the moral and practical equivalent of Hitler's Nazis. They are intent on regional, perhaps even world, domination. They are so insane and so Evil that they will attack other countries with nuclear weapons even if it means that they would then be annihilated. Particularly if they acquire nuclear weapons, they would pose a grave, imminent, and undeterrable threat to the United States. Their leaders do not fear death, and in fact crave it as a result of their religious extremism. They cannot be negotiated with because they are both Evil and deranged. The only feasible course of action with Iran is to treat it as a Nazi-like enemy, refuse to negotiate, and stop it by any means necessary, which -- due to its leaders' inability to be reasoned with -- inevitably requires "regime change," by military confrontation if necessary.”
The paragraph initially prompted this response:
<<It is an interesting bit of business. Some of it is plausible, if hyperbolic. Too much of it is extreme to the point no one could offer it as argument to any even marginally reasonable audience. Nevertheless, it is highly consequential. Think about how the Iraq war was sold to us. A set of plausible statements was made. These were then woven through with artful and vivid imagery whose net effect was to produce a state of mind quite like that one would arrive at if one swallowed the set of propositions above whole. Isolated statements following this formula need not be all that alarming, but should it become pervasive . . . . .>>
I have just concluded the whole of A Tragic Legacy, and, while all of it is excellent, Chapter 4, on the possibility of war with Iran, should be read by every American. I had not been aware that so much material, essentially re-running the ‘game’ played to get us into Iraq, is out there already. It is (surprise, surprise!) in the writings of those same Neocons who drove the Iraq war. While statements on Iran from key players, including Bush and Cheney, have been heard from highest levels of this administration - echoing exactly the same line seen from the Neocon pundits - what has not happened (so far) is a great fusillade, consistent and persistent, from all consequential levels of the administration.
What I want to do is reflect a bit on the ‘game’.
I have proposed before that the public dialog in democracies can be prejudiced by the emotional power of past traumatic events, now deeply lodged in the popular imagination. For example, WWI - understood as a colossal folly - shaped and limited the debate in both Europe and America throughout the 1930’s. Avoiding the last ‘Great Mistake’ led, as we know all too well, to a new one - to new trauma with all its attendant emotional furies. Those emotions were born not simply of the horrors of war, but of the unprecedented terrors and brutality of Hitler and the Nazi regime. And emotions arose, as well, when what was understood to be wise caution by Europe’s statesmen, came to be seen, in retrospect, as cowardice before an aggressor, defined by the litany: Chamberlain, Munich, and appeasement. It is beyond dispute, of course, that 9/11 was also a traumatic event, engendering sheer horror and outrage, and rendered all the more powerful in America by our historic isolation from foreign attack.
So imagine now the impact of a ‘game’ in which a sketchy assemblage of ‘facts’ - on Iraq or Iran - invoking terrorists and 9/11, becomes wreathed in artfully contrived, emotionally charged imagery, tying it to Hitler and the Nazis, Chamberlain and appeasement. Do you remember your terror, shock, and fury after 9/11? How does being faced again with Hitler and his Nazi hoards impact your imagination? How does the prospect of repeating Chamberlain’s mistake at Munich make you feel? Public attention, after 9/11, has been consistently assaulted and distracted by references to these past traumas. This powerful brew all too easily inclines us towards a mode of feel and react, and even panic response. A panic response is, of course, then brought forward: WAR. [Recall in Ron Suskind’s ‘The One Per Cent Doctrine’, the Bush administration official who asserted (in effect): you analyze, we act, trapping you in our reality.]
In a true emergency, panic response – even the ‘last resort’ of war – is understandable. But, if there is time for reasoned analysis, for careful consideration, no responsible governance could fail to engage it. Any governance that did so fail, in matters of such consequence, should be dismissed out of hand. The perfidy of this administration lies in the fact that it has, with such persistence, played exactly the ‘game’ described above, prejudicing us away from serious and careful consideration of our choices.
One would not, in general, expect this kind of business to work its ways with us for long. In matters of this consequence, we would expect to break free of such beguilement. But that does not appear, even now, to have happened. One reason for this may lie in the particular course our political dialog has taken over the past 30 years or so, and another in the nearly rigorous polarization of that dialog. They are not unrelated.
The current nature of our political dialog was presaged by a book whose title said it all. The book was by a one time Philadelphia Inquirer Op-Ed writer by the name of Joe McGinniss. He was excellent in that short form, but with this book he broke through to a higher level, and a national audience. The title of his book was ‘The Selling of the President’. It dealt with the 1968 campaign, and specifically with Richard Nixon.
The idea, once articulated, is obvious. Use proven Madison Avenue techniques to get voters to ‘buy’ your candidate. Every election from then to now has seen the influence of this strategy rise to higher and higher levels. Elections have become a thing of blink-of-the-eye images and sound bites. See, feel, vote! Our so-called debates limit the candidates to pitifully short one, two and three minute stretches. Anything more extended happens only in (all too often) carefully controlled - even staged – ‘town meetings’ or ‘open forums’. Nothing on the order of the Lincoln/Douglas debates seems even remotely possible, and far too few of our candidates strike us as possessing even a minimal capacity for extended discussion. The net result is that we have become accustomed to making the critical choice of our political representatives on the basis of virtually instantaneous gut reactions. We impulse buy our leadership.
What secondarily has come to happen, however, is less obvious, but more disturbing. Selling not a candidate, but policy with Madison Avenue techniques. I will contend this began to fall into place in the 1970’s as a vast storehouses of right wing money began to focus began on getting its agendas adopted by the country. This extended to establishing an archipelago of right wing organizations and think tanks, e.g. the Federalist Society, AEI, The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute, etc. to work out not only doctrine and dogma, but develop it in ‘saleable’ terms. Their 'product' would be accepted – even demanded(!) – by the American public. [Just consider the ‘Death Tax' gambit] The defining effort, however, became the creation of a vast media empire, enfranchised with the end of the ‘fairness’ doctrine in broadcast media, and the discovery of personalities who could put across ‘the message’ (chiefly on talk radio) 24/7. The unifying strategy behind all of these efforts was simple: we have a product to sell and Madison Avenue knows how to sell things. Whether selling a candidate or a policy, the techniques remain the same: fast ‘gut’ emotional appeals to trigger an impulse buy. Don’t think. React. NOW!
[Thinking is for woosies! Or, to put it artfully: ‘thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’re with the pale cast of thought’]
Think of it, the most serious and consequential decisions addressed, not by substantive debate, but by the techniques used to sell you cigarettes, soda pop, and candy bars. Our founding fathers could not have imagined it, and frankly – at least with respect to policy – neither can we. Thus we were blind sided into a (nearly) unilateral War with Iraq in the first quarter of 2003.
Keep in mind, I do not propose we are in anything like a ‘Pavlov’s Dog’ reality. Informed opposition challenged the Iraq War from the beginning, and continues to do so till this day. [If not successfully enough, as yet.] We have, nevertheless, been disarmed by the presumption that no responsible American governance would even contemplate playing the ‘game’, rendered more susceptible by the sound bite nature of current political dialog, and have fallen into a trap that consistently prejudices us away from hard and careful thought about the most serious matters.
I will withhold judgment on whether this is by conscious design, Neocon self-delusion, or some combination of the two. It has unquestionably been the observed practice. We are all the poorer for it - and all the more in peril for failing to break free of it. When will we realize our vast advantages over a rag tag and seriously fragmented foe, offering little to the people of its own world beyond pyrotechnic nihilism and stagnation in a life closed to all of the opportunities the modern world opens for people? When will we stand up, take mature stock of our situation, and begin to act with the judgment and confidence appropriate to our strength, abilities and manifest accomplishments?
When will we WAKE UP?
Having just written the above, I discovered this in the July 10, 2007 New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/arts/10west.html?pagewanted=print
The above was posted to a forum where objections were raised that what I termed 'the game' was merely propanda, practiced by both sides of the political asile, and in no way novel, or any big deal. This seemed something of a misreading of what I had described, and promted further consideration on my part:
Rhetoric is the art of political discourse. Propaganda might be understood as rhetoric’s bastard stepchild. It dishonors itself as political discourse because it is understood to be intentionally fraudulent, and generally relentless about it to boot. Whatever may be true elsewhere, we generally don’t think of the governments of modern liberal democracies as employing propaganda. They do of course, but we reserve a right to cry foul, and our leaders should understand that. If they go too far, they can be called to account.
Political and social propaganda do have a long history, just consider Hogarth and Dickens. But that is legitimately considered to be argument by alternate, and yes(!) prejudicial, means. Hogarth clearly solicits scorn, and Dickens sympathy, but not a panic response. They prejudice our thinking, and hope to influence it, but neither wants to stampede his audience past thinking about the matters at hand. In fact they hope to make you reflect. What I described as the ‘game’ kicks the can much further down the road. Tied to great trauma, it excites strong emotions, and doesn’t want you to reflect at all ( “thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’re with the pale cast of thought”). Its objective is to deflect thought, if not bypass it altogether.
What shocked about the ‘daisy/mushroom cloud’ assault on Goldwater was precisely its blatant use of Madison Avenue techniques. It was, in its moment, considered to be something quite new under the sun: propaganda on steroids. It was a reply, in effect, to a Goldwater rhetorical flourish: ‘extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice’. Given the Goldwater’s identification with aggressive Cold War positions (of the’ roll back the Iron Curtain’ sort), the commercial did dramatize the question of just how far the candidate might go, and what fate he might tempt. It certainly shocked when it appeared, and it was surely a low blow to an honorable and decent man.
On the other hand, surely no one proposes we have been well served by a debate on war and peace over Iraq and Iran driven by artfully crafted 'low blows'.
I have not made the point that the use of Madison Avenue techniques in re Iraq, Iran, and Islamic radicalism, is a neocon only thing, but that it was – and remains - their practice with those matters, dominating all else. The tragedy is that nearly the whole of our political discourse, not only that surrounding Middle East policy, has been taken up with this kind of engagement. This ‘propaganda on steroids’ has systematically, and all too successfully, prejudiced our debate away from serious and sober thought just when it was urgently needed.
The beau ideal of rhetoric is understood to be use of fact, logic and reason to make an argument, and only then to rise to eloquence and the evocation of emotion. Propaganda selectively culls facts, burlesques logic, leans very heavily on emotion, and occasionally even rises to eloquence. The Madison Avenue ‘game’ short circuits straight to quick hit emotion. ‘W’s prepared addresses are propaganda, not infrequently rising to eloquence. But they are woven through with Madison Avenue ‘quickies’: exactly the stuff of sound bites.
John Kennedy’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”, might be best taken to heart by asking ourselves first to become well informed citizens. Then to further ask that, on important issues, each of us work out – alone, with only our conscience for company - where we stand. Finally, to take our conclusions out to others and defend them, but with a willingness to clarify where substantive objections are made, and alter where persuasive arguments are encountered, or if new information is discovered.
Dialog is useful, and the charge of 'merely propanda' led , I believe, to a clearer specification in re what I have termed: the 'game'.
4:57:22 PM 
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