Creeping Lies

After the 2000 election, stunned by the utterly surreal nature of American culture and its representations leading up to the event and then in the aftermath, I withdrew to a large degree from day-to-day political and social discourse. Like the architect of Dana Barrett’s building in Ghostbusters, I felt like society was too sick to survive. American society, anyway. We had, after all, just witnessed the theft of a national election through media manipulation and public self-delusion, and bald-faced gambits from the Bush camp that would have made Nixon himself take pause.

Superficially, it felt like the coward’s way out: I was taking my brain and going home. Withdrawal, however, had benefits. No more daily newspapers. No more CNN. No more pre-packaged bullshit propaganda videos on the evening news. No more puffed up journalists telling me which millionaire I’d love to have a beer with. I discovered more blogs, and European press outlets, and ordinary people with computers who thought clearly and spoke plainly and, like me, felt insulted and betrayed and couldn’t understand why everyone else didn’t.

And then things got even worse. Bush wasn’t content to be an idler and a dum-dum, but wanted to leave his greasy scuff mark on everything, including reaching into our homes, private lives, and to some degree, hearts and minds, and fucking with the stuff of our faiths: ideas and language. Bush—who I’m using as symbolic of a cabal of interests, not always in harmony—made it harder to think charitably about our fellow human beings. When was the last time you felt good about being an American?

And the press, not content to have elevated a fake, possibly retarded “cowboy” from regional joke to legitimate candidate, did an extended touchdown dance when “their” boy “won.” The thing about selling your virtue is, you can’t get it back. I wonder if—and this is certainly a moot consideration—the media actually fell for Bush (journalists certainly are not our best and brightest), or if it simply realized it had to continue to hold him up after the election because should the public find out what a phony the press had foisted upon the nation, journalistic credibility would be irreparably damaged? The result, in any case, is the same in terms of the path the press chose and the damage it has done to it and us.

During the period of disengagement I watched a lot of non-political TV. Nature shows, mostly. I hate birds. But I also hate cats. So much for nature shows. There are other shows about building things, catching things, and discovering things, but they fall short precisely because of their lack of political context. Crab fisherman? Are you a rabid Republican from Alaska who thinks women belong in the kitchen and that cigarettes should be free? You think we should drill ANWR? Also that the limits on commercial fishing are bogus? Wow. Compelling drama. I hope you fall overboard. NASA scientist working on a Mars mission? Eating up funding that could be used to help real people here on earth? Or are you a political appointee who is helping to prove that God created Mars on the fourth day, after farting out the moon? Or are you working on our missile shield which, thanks to Bush’s incompetence in handling Putin, it looks like we’re going to need sooner rather than later? Dork on a building show? You’re going to “explore” such mind-bending things as “how to drive a bulldozer” and “how to put up drywall”? Newsflash: most Americans are working class—we already KNOW how to drive a stickshift and use a screwgun!! Idiot!!

The last straw, though, was when one of the builder assholes did a show about building dams and levees. Naturally, he went to New Orleans, because, yeah, has there ever been a better model for levee-building than New Orleans? He led off with this line, “I’m here to show you how the Army Corps of Engineers is going to restore the levees to pre-Katrina levels!” He was very excited. So was I. I was jumping up and down and shouting, “’pre-Katrina levels’?!? They’re building the same levees that already failed??! What the fuck??!?”

Was this a case of one stupid guy hosting a stupid show? Or, was he parroting a line he heard from one of the FEMA guys he had to talk to in order to get access to the Corps of Engineers site? In which case—assuming it’s the latter—is the Bush administration still controlling even the most mundane facets of the media? This was on the fucking Discovery Channel, for Christ’s sakes!

Then, the capstone: the National Geographic Channel presented a one-hour (one fucking hour!) special called “The Road to War: Iraq,” which basically interviewed White House staffers and let them catapult the propaganda. We learned, among other things, that Bush was adamant about returning to the White House on September 11, 2001, but his staffers instead insisted he fly around the country and give the appearance he was running like a hemophiliac from a box of razor blades. See, this is the magic of the supine media: Andy Card can get on the National Geographic Channel (why? Why National Geographic??) and tell us in the same breath that the President makes all the decisions and is totally in charge, but that anytime the President looks like a fool it was some staffer’s fault. The question, the same question that has always hung over Bush’s head, remains: who the fuck is in charge here? Is the administration actually run by a strong decision-maker (in which case, based on his decisions, he’s utterly stupid) or is it run by lots of people, with many competing agendas, in effect rendering the executive branch incompetent? Stupid or incompetent. What a choice.

But I digress. We already know, in excruciating detail, how stupid Bush and his circus are. The point is that their agenda, that of promulgating the acceptance of mindbending idiocy by the press which then passes on to the public, is apparently working so well that the Discovery Channel and the National Geographic Channel are premising some of their programming on notions so incredibly and demonstrably false that one is stupefied to encounter them. On television, hardly the most subtle of information-delivery systems, it has become ordinary to club the viewer over the head with assertions that will stun him. Black is white. Up is down. The Pawn is the Decider is the Pawn is the Decider is the Pawn…