…as a post about politics since, strictly speaking, I’m not commenting only theorizing.
While discussing the Cartesian Nightmare that our media has become, my friend - a noted ethnobotnist and philanthropist (well, ok, he teaches high school Spanish, but he’s a helluva songwriter and a mean black jack player) - and I decided that the problem with political discourse in this country is an ontological one.
The Neocons, the Dominionists and their state-sponsored corporate backers have, as Lackoff so deftly explains, systematically commandeered the means of distribution of information (and, as payback, the pliant legislature has granted the corporations that own the vast majority of media nearly unlimited copyright power and longevity over the last 15 years).
Slowly, starting in the Reagan/Bush the Elder era, the very words we use to describe things have mutated - terrorist in place of insurgent, “clean skies initiative” instead of “air pollution increase,” to the point where it has become difficult to talk about - and hence think about - issues without the reality warping frames our leaders have set about them.
Concurrently, the events of September 11th provided the needed emotional catalyst to puncture the “willful” part of the willful suspension of disbelief. Whereas before the Towers fell there were plenty of true believers in a the Right’s causes, they lacked the emotional firepower to clean out the corners of dissent both within their own ranks and without. Now that American lives have been lost, here and abroad, now that we’re in a shooting war, one with no end even imaginable, it’s an easy leap from choosing to believe in a reality devoid of facts because you want to achieve certain ends to telling everyone that - since all versions of reality are equally valid and it is in fact a choice - you’d better choose the version of reality that helps our men and women on the ground, the corporations that make us all rich, and naturally our Dear Leader.
Essentially, what the Neocons, Dominionists and their state-supported corporate backers have done is to take post modernism at face value: “facts” are a matter of perspective and reality is plastic. This is why the war in Iraq is righteous despite the lies that precipitated it; why “intelligent design” is worthy of being taught in our schools; why global warming requires more study before the US gets some skin in the game. In the name of “balance” our nation’s media has played right along, and been rewarded with favorable legislation and privileged access; more money and more power, in other words.
I think if you asked most Americans, they have some inkling that the president misled them about Iraq, that creationism is not really what anyone would call a science and that there must be some reason all these foreign countries are willing to spend money to fight global warming. But the brilliance and horror of what our leaders have done is relegate doubts about matters of fact to “mere” subjective opinion. Which means that people can chose to believe what they want to believe regardless of the facts of the situation, irrespective of reality itself. Enough of the electorate believe that the world, that history, is as they’ve been told. The have opted into this reality spun for them nearly out of whole cloth like some pack of Kierkegaardian lemmings.
In other words, if the Bible or President Bush the Younger or those who interpret the holy writ of either say it’s so, it’s so. If the “facts” don’t fit this worldview, well then, sir, the facts must be in error.
