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Wednesday, August 27, 2003 |
Running for a Good Cause
I’ve been away from my blog for a week. I’ve been preparing for, running, and recovering from participating in the Hood to Coast Relay race. It is the largest relay race in the world. One thousand teams from around the world, made up of 12 runners each, converge on Northern Oregon ro run this 198 mile race from the majestic Mt. Hood to the coastal city of Seaside and its beautiful beach. The proceeds for the race benefit the American Cancer Society.
While listening to a retro-radio station on Friday evening, in which a lady was complaining about how runners were being inconsiderate and causing an unbearable traffic jam, the DJ explained that the relay had raised over 3 million dollars. His reply to the lady-caller was simply to be patient and more considerate because this was a good cause. Our reply to the lady-caller would have been: "Pay 3 million dollars and I’m sure someone would let you stop traffic, too."
It took my team--the Leather Lungs and Jog Bras-- 28 hours and 12 minutes to finish the course. The winning team, the NCIC Allstars, finished in 18 hours and 48 minutes.
Despite having to deal with traffic on small roads; standing in long lines at the portable toilets and exchange points; running in the middle of the night on a gravel road amidst dust-filled air; running the longest leg of the course in the afternoon heat; and sleeping only two-and-a-half hours before having to get back on the course again; this is one of the best running events I’ve ever been apart of. Crossing my fingers I can do this again.
Lying for a Bad Cause
Last week, The Guardian printed an excellent article by the musician Brian Eno titled "Lessons on How to Lie About Iraq." It was then re-printed on TomPaine.com. Eno pens a valid new name for the propaganda of this age-- prop-agenda.
He defines it in this terms:
It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'.
He uses an example prior to the first Gulf War in which a fifteen year-old nurse, named Nayirah, revealed on national news that Iraqi soldiers storming into Kuwaiti hospitals, ripping babies out of incubators, and stealing the incubators. Eno writes: "[I]t turned out later [that Nayirah] was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and a member of the Kuwaiti royal family. Nayirah had been tutored and rehearsed by the Hill & Knowlton PR agency (which in turn received $14 million from the American government for their work in promoting the war). Her story was entirely discredited within weeks but by then its purpose had been served: it had created an outraged and emotional mindset within America which overwhelmed rational discussion."
Eno goes on to say that we were witnesses of similar deceits in the build-up of Iraq. "...[F]alse linkages made between Saddam, Al Qaeda and 9/11, stories of ready-to-launch weapons that didn't exist, of nuclear programs never embarked upon....many of these allegations were discredited as they were being made, but nevertheless were retold."
Eno also discusses that PR companies are used to create catch-phrases that appeal to our emotions, because, he writes, that "emotion creates reality" and "reality demands action."
[T]he PR companies helped finesse the language to create an atmosphere of simmering panic where American imperialism would come to seem not only acceptable but right, obvious, inevitable and even somehow kind.
Aside from the incessant 'weapons of mass destruction', there were 'regime change' (military invasion), 'pre-emptive defense' (attacking a country that is not attacking you), 'critical regions' (countries we want to control), the 'axis of evil' (countries we want to attack), 'shock and awe' (massive obliteration) and 'the war on terror' (a hold-all excuse for projecting American military force anywhere).
Meanwhile, U.S. federal employees and military personnel were told to refer to the invasion as 'a war of liberation' and to the Iraqi paramilitaries as 'death squads', while the reliably sycophantic American TV networks spoke of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' -- just as the Pentagon asked them to -- thus consolidating the supposition that Iraqi freedom was the point of the war. Anybody questioning the invasion was 'soft on terror' (liberal) or, in the case of the United Nations, 'in danger of losing its relevance'.
I thought Eno’s closing remarks were especially poignant. He relates how is eccentric uncle pulled him aside one day and told him that he was going to teach him how to lie. Not because his uncle wanted him to lie, but because his uncle wanted him to know when he was being lied to.
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