The shifting sand upon which our democracy has sunk is a 20th-century concept: professional lying. "Public relations," they would rather you say. As an arts writer, I deal with "publicists" every day, people who tell me the band they represent is the best band since 1780. Their jobs are mere exaggeration in service of getting some press for a musician who probably is mediocre. I don’t mean them. I mean the people chronicled by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, who’ve penned several volumes covering some of the worst abuses of the PR industry, from its earliest days helping mining companies avoid accountability for the deaths of miners to later efforts like rebranding dangerous toxic sludge as a helpful substance.
These are the people who think Orwell’s talk of "Newspeak" is a how-to, not a warning, the people who got a gutting of the Constitution rebranded the "PATRIOT Act," who called a pollution-enabling bill the "Clean Air Act." It would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous. And George W. Bush’s administration, according to the GAO, spent $1.6 billion dollars in just the first half of 2005 on public relations and related attempts to manipulate the press and the public. It’s stunning how incompetent Bush is when you think that even with such incredible spending to convince us all of his rightness, he’s still one percentage point away from Nixon’s disapproval ratings.
Surely marketing is not somehow inherently evil. But there comes a moment of decision for some of those who engage in these activities, a moment in which they choose, maybe not even fully aware of their choosing, to allow the goals of faceless corporatism to trump what they know to be basic decency and common sense. I’m sure many a marketer hews out a happy career helping Joe Bob’s Furniture make bad TV ads, and never does anything more evil than forgetting to pay a parking ticket.
But then there are those who help George Bush call war "liberation," and call domestic spying the "Terrorist Surveillance Program." Their individual actions probably seemed reasonable to them at the time, especially if they believed themselves to merely be furthering the goals of a political party they supported. But it is the accrual of many banal acts that sometimes produces the greatest evil.
I’ve been, I’ll admit, pretty glum under my 10 gallon hat lately, glum about the terrible cul-de-sac our nation seems to have navigated itself into. I’m afraid the abyss Senator Frank Church spoke of back when he helped craft the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has been crossed:
“I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
Yesterday’s revelations of domestic spying via satellites that can see through cloud cover, forest canopy and even concrete seemed like the crossing. There is no place where your actions cannot be monitored by your government now. Big Brother really is watching, from 200 miles up. Surely this madness will someday end, but there’s no telling how many years will pass first. How can the American frontier spirit remain alive when there is no frontier, when we exist in something like a giant glass jar with no exit? This is deeply depressing stuff.
Someday–a day which will, I hope, arrive without further attacks on this country–we will be forced to embrace a notion which should not be radical: violence begets terrorism. Terrorists are madmen, but it is not heresy to say that our killing of Muslims, now a daily occurrence, contributes to the ill will that fosters Muslim radicals. Only when we address that will terrorism cease. In the meantime, divesting ourselves of all our privacy and shoring up hyper-technological methods to sift information and discover who will become a terrorist will not take away the threat, nor, I believe, can any such method be completely effective.
Congress won’t impeach Bush. This madness will continue. I only hope this will all stop far short of the excesses and abuses that have historically always accompanied the acquisition of such unbridled power over the lives of others. History does not support my hope.
