wishes to leave the stage forever, a sound strategy is to offer his
fellow citizens a candid and disparaging assessment of their
intelligence.
In the aftermath of the conquest of Iraq, as we awake to the
bewildering possibility of a United States of Asia, the patriotic
pageantry and premature gloating call to mind an obsession that once
gripped the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert. (In my
recklessness I ignore the halfwit embargo on all things French.)
Flaubert, according to W.G. Sebald, became convinced that his own work
and his own brain had been infected by a national epidemic of
stupidity, a relentless tide of gullibility and muddled thinking which
made him feel, he said, as if he were sinking into sand.
At his low point, Flaubert convinced himself that everything he had
written had been contaminated and "consisted solely of a string of the
most abysmal errors and lies." Sometimes he lay on his couch for
months, frozen with the dread that anything he wrote would only extend
Stupidity's domain. Flaubert became a scholar of moronic utterances,
painstakingly collecting hundreds of what he called betises --
stupidities -- and arranging them in his Dictionary of Received
Opinions.
The wondrous blessing God bestowed on Gustave Flaubert -- and on
America's own great chroniclers of contagious stupidity, Mark Twain
and H.L. Mencken -- is that they lived and died without imagining a
thing like Fox News. It's easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch's outrageous
mongrel, the impossible offspring of supermarket tabloids, sitcom news
spoofs, police-state propaganda mills and the World Wrestling
Federation.
Fox News is an oxymoron and Cheech and Chong would have made a more
credible team of war correspondents than Geraldo Rivera and Ollie
North. Neither Saturday Night Live nor the 1973 film Network, Paddy
Chayefsky's corrosive satire of TV news, could even approach the comic
impact of Geraldo embedded, or of Fox's pariah parade, its mothball
fleet of experts who always turn out to be disgraced or indicted
Republican refugees. If Ed Meese, Newt Gingrich and Elliott Abrams
couldn't fill your sails with mirth, you could count on the recently
deposed Viceroy of Virtue and High Regent of Rectitude, my old
schoolmate Blackjack Bill Bennett.
With its red-faced, hyperventilating reactionaries and slapstick abuse
of lame "liberal" foils who serve them as crash dummies, Fox News
could easily be taken as pure entertainment, even as inspired
burlesque of the rightwing menagerie. But the problem -- in fact, the
serious problem -- is that Fox isn't kidding, and brownshirts aren't
funny.
Harper's reports that Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly became so
infuriated by the son of a Sept. 11 victim who opposed the war -- "I'm
against it and my father would have been against it, too" -- that he
cursed the man and even threatened him off-camera. A Fox TV anchor,
one Neil Cavuto, celebrated the fall of Baghdad by informing all of us
who opposed the war in March, "You were sickening then, you are
sickening now." If reports are accurate, these troubled men are
neither bad journalists nor even bad actors portraying journalists --
they're mentally unbalanced individuals whose partisan belligerence is
pressing them to the brink of psychosis.
But the scariest thing about Fox and Rupert Murdoch, the thing that
renders them all fear and no fun in a time of national crisis, is that
they channel for the Bush administration as faithfully as if they were
on the White House payroll. Like no other substantial media outlet in
American history, Fox serves -- voluntarily -- as the propaganda arm
of a controversial, manipulative, image-obsessed government. To watch
its war coverage for even a minute was to grind your teeth
convulsively at each Orwellian repetition of the Newspeak mantra,
"Operation Iraqi Freedom." I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies;
but if Joseph Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have
been indistinguishable from Fox News.
Fox's truculent patriotism is misleading, of course. Rupert Murdoch is
not exactly an American patriot, he's not even exactly an American.
Though he became an American citizen in 1985 (solely to qualify, under
U.S. law, as the owner of a TV network), the Australian Murdoch was
already 54 and his tabloid formula had already polluted the media
mainstreams in Australia and Great Britain. Murdoch is an insatiable
parasite, a vampirish lamprey who fastens himself to English-speaking
nations and grows fat on their cultural lifeblood, leaving permanently
degraded media cultures in his wake. Rabid patriotism is a product he
sells, along with celebrity gossip, naked women and smirky bedroom
humor, in every country he contaminates. And a little "white rage"
racism has always gone into his mix for good measure. ("He tried so
hard to use race to sell his newspapers that he became known as 'Tar
Baby' Murdoch," Jimmy Breslin once charged.)
Murdoch's repulsive formula has proven irresistible from Melbourne to
Manhattan, and now, by satellite, he's softening up Beijing. His great
fortune rests on his wager that a huge unevolved minority is stupid,
bigoted, prurient, nasty to the core. In America today, it's hard to
say whether Rupert Murdoch is an agent, or merely a beneficiary, of
the cultural leprosy that's consuming us. But the conspicuous success
of Fox News, lamentable in the best of times, is devastating in a
shell-shocked nation that sees itself at war.
It is and has always been true, in Samuel Johnson's famous words, that
"patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" -- by which, of course,
Dr. Johnson meant patriotism as a political and rhetorical weapon, not
as a private emotion. Belittling other people's patriotism to achieve
political leverage is the lowest road a public scoundrel can travel,
the road where neo-conservative meets neo-fascist. In flag-frenzied
Fox, an unscrupulous administration found a blunt object ready-made to
hammer its critics.
Years ago in Moscow, at the dawn of perestroika, a pair of Russian
journalists showed me headlines from the New York Post that made
Kruschchev's "We will bury you" sound like "Have a nice day." How can
there ever be peace, they asked me, if America hates us so much?
Handicapped by the yawning gap between our respective press
traditions, I tried to explain that the Post had nothing to do with
our government or even the American media machine, that it was owned
by an Australian whose Red-baiting and saber-rattling was an act
designed to sell newspapers to morons. That he was unconnected to our
government was something I believed about Murdoch in 1984, though no
doubt Ronald Reagan was eager to naturalize a lonely immigrant with
billions to invest in right-wing media.
But now? Is it sheer coincidence that the president's stage manager,
Greg Jenkins -- responsible for the notorious flight-suit landing on
the USS Abraham Lincoln, and for posing George Bush against Mt.
Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty -- was recently a producer at Fox
News?
If these elaborate tableaus Jenkins choreographs for President Bush
seem clumsy, tasteless, condescending and insulting to your
intelligence, you must be some kind of liberal. They bear an uncanny
family resemblance to the red-white-and-blue show at Fox News, and
heavy-handedness has never harmed its ratings, nor the president's
either.
How stupid are we, finally, how easy to fool? Fox News is run by the
insidious Roger Ailes -- image merchant for Nixon, Reagan and Bush
senior, producer for Rush Limbaugh, newsman never -- and Fox is not
what it seems to be. It's not a news service, certainly, nor even the
sincere voice of low-rent nationalism. It's a calculated fraud, like
the president who ducked the draft during Vietnam, and even welshed on
his National Guard commitment, but who puts on a flight suit stenciled
"Commander-in-chief" and plays Douglas MacArthur on network TV.
"I almost choked," said my mother's friend Doris, who's 90. "I had to
lie down." It's possible that even old George Bush, who served with
distinction in World War II, had to stifle a groan over that one.
The invasion of Iraq was in no way what it seemed to be, either.
Saddam Hussein was never a threat to the United States. His "weapons
of mass destruction" remain invisible, his terrorist connections
remain unproven, and he had absolutely nothing to do with the
destruction of the World Trade Center. Most cynical of all was the
"liberation" lie, the administration's sudden concern for the helpless
citizens of Iraq. Saddam, as grotesque as he was, wasn't getting any
meaner, and "liberators" like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were
doing brisk business with him when he was in his murderous,
citizen-eating prime (and in Cheney's case, as recently as 1999). It
would take half a page to list all the U.S.-sanctioned dictators,
killers of their people, who will be sharing hell's hottest corner
with Saddam Hussein.
Liars with secret agendas are treating Americans like frightened
children. If that sounds like a cry from the Left, get a transcript of
Sen. Robert Byrd's remarks to the Senate on May 21. Byrd, nobody's
liberal by any stretch of the imagination, accuses the White House of
constructing "a house of cards, built on deceit," to justify its war
on Iraq.
According to polls, at least half of us were so eager to be deceived,
we believed the one lie Bush never dared to tell us, except by
implication: that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
According to a CNN poll, 51 percent believe this -- "The Moron
Majority," declares the headline in The Progressive Populist. And at
that point, like poor Flaubert, I feel the sand around my ankles. I
want to lie down and give up. On the wall above my bed of pain, two
familiar quotations: "The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable
and assured for all time" -- Albert Einstein; and "Perhaps the
universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies." -- George
Santayana.
It violates democratic etiquette to call your fellow citizens
"idiots." (Unless they're liberals -- "We all agree that liberals are
stupid," writes Charles Krauthammer.) Fortunately, the PC wordworks
has coined a new euphemism to replace the ugly word "retarded." It's
"intellectually disabled," and we have it just in time. How else could
we describe a majority that accepts the logic of "supporting the
troops"? Protest as I might, a local columnist explained to me, once
the soldiers are "locked and cocked" I owe them not only my prayers
for their safe deliverance but unqualified endorsement of their
mission, no matter how immoral and ill-advised it may seem to me.
According to this woeful logic, whoever controls the armed forces in
the country where you live owns your conscience and your soul. It
mandates unanimous civilian support for King Herod's soldiers smashing
Hebrew babies against doorposts. It holds our soldiers hostage to
silence our common sense, independent judgment and moral autonomy --
the foundations of each thinking individual's self-respect, not to
mention the foundations of every theory of democratic government.
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, right
or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally
treasonable to the American public," said President Theodore
Roosevelt.
They don't make Republicans like they used to. The troop-support
doctrine, so universally and smugly conceded, is logic for the
intellectually disabled, for people who've been hit in the head
repeatedly with a heavy shovel. The stupidity of those who buy it is
no more astonishing than the hypocrisy of those who sell it --
Republicans who preach our sacred duty to the army's morale and
simultaneously cancel $15-billion in veteran's benefits and 60 percent
of federal education subsidies for servicemen's children. If you can't
believe that, look it up.
When is it too late to wake the sleeping masses? When a Fox TV show
for amateur entertainers turns up more voters than Congressional
elections? The marriage of television and propaganda may well have
been the funeral of reason. In the meantime, Iraq is a bloody mess and
Afghanistan a tragic mess, and most of the earth's 1-billion Muslims
think the U.S. and Israel are trying to conquer their world and
destroy their religion. America's economy is suffocating ("A sickly
economy with no cure in sight," says this morning's paper), her
currency is in free fall and her reputation flies below half mast on
every continent. We've been instructed to hate the French, our allies
since the days of Lafayette, because they dared to tell us the truth.
What our best friends think of us is epitomized by a new play in Paris
titled George W. Bush, or God's Sad Cowboy. Another in London is
called The Madness of George Dubya. Our only original enemies, the
terrorists of Al-Qaeda, seem to be thriving -- and quite naturally
gaining recruits. There's a chilling suspicion that major architects
of our current foreign policy are insane. Listen to Bush adviser
Richard Perle, known since his Reagan years as the Prince of Darkness:
"If we let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it
entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just
wage total war [my italics], our children will sing great songs about
us years from now."
Is that the children I hear singing, or the madhouse choir? (Calling
Dr. Strangelove. . .) But polls tell us that through all the wars and
lies and logical meltdowns that followed Sept. 11, 70 percent of adult
America declared itself well satisfied and well served.
"I think it is terrifying," said the late Bishop Paul Moore, a Yale
aristocrat who, like most mainstream clergymen, did not support the
Bush wars. "I believe it will lead us to a terrible crack in the whole
culture as we have come to know it."
I believe it has, and I believe that the split between liberal or
conservative, Democrat or Republican is inconsequential compared to
the real fracture line, between Americans who try to think clearly and
those who will not or cannot. What hope, a cynical friend teased me,
for a country where 70 percent believe in angels, 60 percent believe
in literal, biblical, blazing Armageddon, and more than half reject
Charles Darwin? He didn't need to add that creationists,
science-annihilating cretins, have now recruited President Bush, who
assures fundamentalists he "has doubts" about evolution.
Whether the president is that dumb or merely that dishonest is beside
the point. He knows his constituency. New research published by the
National Academy of Sciences asserts that human beings and chimpanzees
share 99.4 percent of their DNA. Would the polls (or the elections)
change if subjects had to submit to DNA tests to prove they possess
the qualifying .6 percent? American readers have purchased 50-million
copies of Tim LaHaye's gonzo Apocalypse novels, still more evidence
that what awaits the United States of America is not a physical but an
intellectual Armageddon.
Was it dry, desert sand or quicksand that the despairing Flaubert
imagined? When we look down, can we still see our knees? Novelist
Michael Malone, a notorious optimist, offered a faint ray of hope when
he urged me to ignore all the polls -- if the government has
intimidated most of the media, he argued, what makes you think the
polls are credible?
When the sand begins to grip us and no lifeline appears, we clutch at
straws. Yet there's anecdotal evidence that the polls could be wrong.
Brownshirts targeted the Dixie Chicks, and they survived handsomely.
At the Merle Watson bluegrass festival in rural Wilkes County, singer
Laura Love ridiculed President Bush from the main stage and harvested
thousands of cheers to perhaps a hundred catcalls. At a crowded
bookstore in Charlottesville last month, I tossed aside the book I
hoped to sell and read a white-knuckled antiwar essay I wrote in 1991.
One woman walked out, but everyone else applauded and grinned at me.
Come to think of it, nearly everyone I know hates these wars and these
lies as much as I do.
Are we so few, or are the numbers we see part of the Bush-Fox
disinformation campaign -- like Saddam's missing uranium and his
25,000 liters of anthrax? This faint last hope will be tested in the
presidential election of 2004. If the polls are right and Malone is
wrong, as I fear, it's going to be a long, sandy century for the
United States of America, for our children and grandchildren and all
those sweet singing children yet unborn.
Hal Crowther is the author of two collections of essays, Unarmed and
Dangerous and Cathedrals of Kudzu, and a winner of the H.L. Mencken
award for columnists. He contributes regularly to the Oxford American
and to Creative Loafing in Charlotte, where this article first
appeared.
--
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the
fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first
existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher
consideration" -REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN
"Capital should be at the service of labor, and not labor at the
service of capital" POPE JOHN PAUL II, On Human Work, p. 31
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is
a merger of state and corporate power" -BENITO MUSSOLINI.
"Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and
demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of
justice and mercy" -- WENDELL BERRY