Prophecy and Profit

Remember at all times that in WSpeak, black means white. Obviously, Bill Frist speaks W. For him, a blind trust is one to be regularly reviewed using nearly two dozen letters from trust administrators.

Insider trading is not insider trading, but a sudden concern about potential conflict of interest. Frist was not capitalizing on knowledge that his daddy's firm was ready to bleed money--no! no! Bill is righteous man who is a prophet--literally one who foresees the future. Of course, his prophetic ability just happened to net him a tidy sum. Too bad Martha Stewart wasn't more righteous.

We must hope the evildoers of the ethics committee and public opinion don't collude to strip him of his office as speaker the righteous house. Alas, such was the fate of the previous speaker who righteously proclaimed the heroism of Strom Thurmond in serving the cause of racism. What do we call that in WSpeak?

Who needs "A Village"?

Hillary Clinton's book title,"It Takes a Village" struck the chord of community responsibility,which is a notion the Faux-Cons cannot abide. Who needs a village, indeed, who needs social security, or even a national policy and organization to respond to emergencies?

The new vision the Faux-cons are now preaching was precisely articulated by one of their main men, Darrell Issa, R=California. Today he said, regarding the deplorable national response to Katrina: "What you're seeing here is the reason that ... you need to count on yourselves because you can't count on Congress to be there for you," he said. "You have to be your own first line of defense." Listen closely to Chertoff, too, and you'll hear him say the same thing. The message for the next weeks and months for the right is this--the disastrous federal response can be spun as a new (and rational and, of course, "caring") notion that we are all on our own.

So, in fact, the blame game is being played big time by Brown, Chertoff, and Andrew Card who don't hesitate in point accusing fingers at Gov. Blanco (LA) and Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans. The door is open to push away any sense of national responsibility and ultimately allow federal agencies wither. In fact, the logical end of the Faux-Con ideology is "every person for themselves." The Superdome was a microcosm of such a condition and it was hell on earth. But just as the Patriot Act was the policy, nay the law, that emerged from the attack on the Twin Tower and Pentagon, we can at least expect the policy of individual responsibility in crisis to emerge from this.

Of course we all have some responsibility to take care of ourselves--lock your doors before leaving the house; look both ways before crossing a street...But we can't investigate the robbery when our houses are burgled anyway; when hit by a drunk driver, we can't be accused of not properly directing traffic! We do inhabit "villages" and the inhabitants of civil societies take personal responsibility for what they can, and they take communal responsibility, too. The second concern is what establishes and maintains humane and civil social structures.

Don't allow the new vision of "taking care of ourselves" to make us a country of paranoid, self-centered survivalists.

Trading On Confusion

The Bush administration has been, at points, clever in its use of words. Naming the PATRIOT Act as they did has paid big dividends, I think, as they attempt to sweep more power into non-legislative parts of the government.

A recent poll conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut found that only 42% of those polled could correctly identify its purpose of increasing surveillance of the general population. Among that group, 57% supported it, but 64% of those who couldn't say what it was about nevertheless supported it! Who wouldn't support a Patriot Act? That's like not spporting an Apple Pie Act or Baseball Act. So, the less the population understands, the better for BushCo.

Bush managed to make an unprovoked attack on Iraq because too many in the population couldn't distinguish Iraq from Al-Qeda. Too often, we as a people "don't sweat the details." Unless we start to demand more precision, we will continue to make ourselves victims of Bush's mushy thinking.

Guest Blog

The thrust of WSpeak has been to examine W's words and find patterns of use that, when exposed, provide some insight into his reality and the one he attempts to create for us.

Tom Englehart has done a terrific job of that recently, so I am posting a portion of his analysis of WSpeak. Englehart looks at the now threadbare phrases and themes W continues to use with decreasing success.

Englehart asks, [When y]our message, which worked like a dream for so long, goes off-message, and then what do you do?

This is, I suspect, exactly what growing numbers of Americans are experiencing in relation to our President. It's a mysterious process really -- like leaving a dream world or perhaps deprogramming from a cult. Once you step outside the bubble, statements that only yesterday seemed heartfelt or powerful or fearful or resolute truths suddenly look like themselves, threadbare and impoverished. In due course, because the repetitious worldview in the President's speeches is clearly a believed one (for him, if not all of his advisors) and because it increasingly reads like a bad movie script for a fictional planet, he himself is likely to look no less threadbare and impoverished, no less -- to use a word not often associated with him -- pathetic and out of touch with reality to some of those who not so long ago supported him or his policies.

Under these circumstances, it's worth taking a close look at his recent speeches and comparing his linguistic landscape with that of Cindy Sheehan, at the moment a stand-in for the mute (and previously somewhat hidden) American dead from his war as well as an encroaching Iraqi catastrophe.

George's World of Words

George Bush's speech-world remains anchored in the defining moment of his life, the attacks of September 11th, 2001 (cited 5 times in his VFW speech, 4 times in Idaho). It offers a landscape of overwhelming threat, but also of remarkable neatness. It paints a picture of a world embroiled in the first war of the 21st century, a war on a global scale, a war -- a word that peppers every statement he makes -- with multiple theaters ("from the streets of the Western capitals to the mountains of Afghanistan, to the tribal regions of Pakistan, to the islands of Southeast Asia and the Horn of Africa"). In his vision of our planet, a vast struggle on the scale of the Cold War, if not World War II, is underway, a Manichaean battle between two clear-cut sides, one good, one evil, in which you are either for or against. There can be no other choices between our mega-enemy, the terrorists, and us. As he put the matter in Idaho in reference to Iraq, the central theater in his global war, "The battle lines… are now clearly drawn for the world to see, and there is no middle ground."

The problem is that what the President "sees" and what Americans are now seeing seem to be diverging at a rapid rate. For George, the details matter not at all. You won't find any Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds at each other's throats in the President's Iraq, or unable to agree on a constitution, or at the edge of internecine warfare, or living in a country lacking electricity, oil, and jobs, or potentially installing an Islamic government in Baghdad allied to the neighboring Iranian fundamentalist regime, or any of the other obvious features of the present situation, most of which can finally be caught any night on the national news. In his Salt Lake City and Idaho speeches, the only "Iraqi" George even mentioned was a Jordanian, "the terrorist Zarqawi," against whom, in at least the President's fantasy life and in his recent radio address, Sunni and Shia Iraqis actually come together in mutual defense in a touching show of national unity.

In the President's world, there is just them, the enemy, aka the terrorists, and us, the people who (in a nearly copyrighted phrase) spread freedom to the rest of the world. When you look, for instance, at his speech in Idaho, the word terror (war on, sponsored, will be defeated) is used 13 times; terrorist or terrorists (threats, attack, murdered, harbor a, cells, defeat the, converged on Iraq, defiance of the, have sworn havoc, can kill the innocent, victory over, were to win, will fail, Zarqawi), 33 times; and terrorism (safe haven for), once -- for a total of 47 uses. (Now that's repetition for you!) However, in the remarkably equally balanced linguistic struggle between good and evil that weaves through the President's speeches, freedom (they despise our, spreading, spread the hope of, advancing the cause of, the march of) appears 37 times and, when free is thrown in, a triumphant total of 48 times. In addition, while the terrorists skulk in the shadows, freedom is no passive thing. It confronts, defeats, prevails, and conquers. No wonder they despise it so. (In the shorter VFW speech, the linguistic balance remains the same: terror and its cognates: 33; freedom with its fleet of frees, 36.) Add together the Idaho totals for the struggle -- 95 -- and you're talking about 1 out of every 48 words in that speech being either terror or freedom, with us or against us.

Admittedly, the President's speeches do sometimes show small signs of change at moments when reality forces its way onto the premises. For obvious reasons, for instance, weapons of mass destruction have disappeared from his speeches when the focus is Iraq (though mention Iran and…). Recently, Cindy Sheehan made herself such a thorn in the Presidential side that his speechwriters were forced to let him acknowledge the actual numbers of American dead. ("We have lost 1,864 members of our Armed Forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and 223 in Operation Enduring Freedom.") And the growing debate about withdrawal from Iraq, which began with unapproved statements from his own military, has forced the President's speechwriters to create a new jingle to describe our plan for the Iraqi future: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.".

In speaking off-the-cuff, as to the reporters in Donnelly last week, he repeats his usual words, phrases, and lines, mix-and-match style; still, it's easier in such a session (no matter how weak the questions lobbed at him) to sense an edge of confusion about how to make his world stand in some relation to reality. For instance, in the Donnelly exchange, which lasted 12 minutes including the niceties -- "Q: Any fishing? THE PRESIDENT: I don't know yet. I haven't made up my mind yet. I'm kind of hanging loose, as they say. (Laughter.)" -- he offered this strange, new explanation for the development of terrorism in the Iraqi neck of the woods:

"[W]e had a policy that just said, let the dictator [Saddam Hussein] stay there, don't worry about it. And as a result of dictatorship, and as a result of tyranny, resentment, hopelessness began to develop in that part of the world, which became the -- gave the terrorists capacity to recruit."

However, in his speeches, those perfect artifacts from another universe, delivered only before the most receptive audiences, usually under campaign-like conditions, everything is as the President wants it to be. There, at present, he inhabits a world that begins with the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 -- imagine how a Democrat might be pilloried for comparing the making of the already tattered "Islamic" constitution of Iraq (just hailed by Iranian Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who heads that country's ultra-conservative Guardian Council) to ours -- passes through World War II (where we successfully occupied two countries, Japan and Germany) and more or less ends in the glory days of the Cold War. Missing, of course, is the one "small" conflict that, right now, is on everyone's mind all over Washington, not to say the U.S. -- Vietnam. You won't find that name, nor words like "quagmire" or "bogged down" either.

The President's speech-world is a world of the will in every sense. (The terrorists typically try to break ours and get us to retreat.) In Idaho, he used will, as in "will of the majority," 6 times, but the will of the willed act (we will not allow the terrorists, America will not wait to be attacked again, will confront emerging threats, will stay on the offensive, will fight, will win, will be on the hunt, will prevail) 34 times. There may never have been political speeches that used the word in all its senses (except as a document of bequeathment) so often. In this tic, his speeches catch perhaps the most striking aspect of his administration since September 11, 2001 -- its driving urge to impose a worldview by force on the rest of the planet.

In speeches like those in Utah and Idaho, he offers up a warrior's world of words. The word war itself appears in his Idaho speech 26 times, along with attack, attacks, attacked (11), fight, fighters, fighting (10) , battle lines, battlefronts (2), struggle (2), strike (2), and one of his absolute favorites, the phrase on the hunt or alternately hunt down (we will stay on the, side by side with Iraqi forces, our common enemies), used 3 times. Of course, no war would be worth much if you didn't win (the war on terror, in Iraq), used twice, for which you need to defeat (the terrorists), wielded 9 times.

In the President's speeches, the world of "the enemy" or "the terrorists" is imposingly frightening, terrifying enough to fit the bill for any Evil Empire. Here is just a partial list of words associated with it from the Idaho speech:

Enemy (fight the, in our midst, across the globe, on many fronts): 6
Threat, threatened: 8
Fail (what terrorists will do in the end)/failed (as in, states -- what terrorists cause): 7
Brutal, brutality: 5
Violence (brutal, and extremism): 5
Kill: 5
Retreat (what they want us to do, back into the shadows): 5
Murder, murdered: murderous: 4
Destroy/Destruction (our way of life, havoc and, death and): 4
Hateful, hate-filled: 3
Dangerous (times, enemies): 2
Plotted, plotting: 2
Crushing/crushes (blow, all dissent): 2
Havoc: 2
Death: 2
Assassination: 2
Intimidation: 1
Extremism: 1
Evil (seen freedom conquer): 1

Between the two sides in this global war stand the innocent and, as it happens, we do share one thing in common with the terrorists in relation to the innocent -- a strategy (we've followed a clear), 4; (they have a, crushing blow to their), 2.

Fortunately, on our side of the ledger in support of our strategy to spread freedom and destroy the terrorists, can be mustered a powerful set of words that are ours alone:

Help, helped, helping: 10
Defend: 9
Protect, protecting (your neighbors, all Americans, the American homeland, our people, our cities and borders and infrastructure, against every threat): 8
Security (of every American, false sense of, to our own citizens, forces, for our children and grandchildren, for the election, of our country): 7
Democracy (link to any of the above as in "freedom and…"): 6
Hope (usually connected to freedom): 6
Secure (democracy, their freedom, the peace): 3
Mission: 3
Victory: 3
Homeland (American, the): 2
Progress: 1

On our side of the ledger, even God makes a series of cameo appearances (4).

You could yourself take the above words and phrases and, as you might a deck of cards, shuffle them into some of the countless combinations that make up any Bush speech or meeting with the press. And yet there is still a study to be done of how words live and die in given moments. After all, this President has spoken the words terror, war, and freedom literally hundreds of thousands of times since September 11th, 2001, and yet now they are visibly dying on the lips.

Cindy's World of Words

For a long time, George had a knack for speaking to audiences and seeming so personal, no matter how large his crowds, impersonal the setting, or scripted his performance. It was this sense of him that Cindy Sheehan seems to have begun to crack open. Put her words up against his -- she's willing to be no less repetitious, no less fierce in her view of the world -- and hers are the words that now feel personal, that come from the heart and cut to the bone, that connect. They seem like telegrams sent directly from reality, and from an irrefutable core of loss -- of lives, of safety, of security, of well-being -- that ever more Americans are beginning to fear is what George's world is all about. That's undoubtedly why the normal set of right-wing attacks and smears launched against Sheehan, however successful against others in the past, have simply not penetrated. Who, after all, can deny the reality of the individual world of the mother of a war-dead son?

And let's remember, we're talking about a woman who most distinctly does not live on a fantasy planet. Here's how she describes Bush's newest reason to stay in Iraq -- to honor those who already died there: "Since the Freedom and Democracy thing is not going so well and the Iraqi parliament is having such a hard time writing their constitution, since violence is mounting against Iraqis and Americans, and since [George Bush's] poll numbers are going down every day, he had to come up with something." Put that up against the President comparing the ethnic and religious horse-trading inside Baghdad's Green Zone to the American Constitutional Convention.

To illustrate her language, I've taken two brief, recent passages she wrote around the time the President made his speeches in Utah and Idaho. The first is a mere 225 words on "Coming Back to Crawford"; the second, just over 1,000 words and entitled "One Mother's Stand". I've treated them as a single document. Place this set of words against the President's above:

Son/sons (my, their, have been killed): 6
Daughters: 1
[Her son] Casey (Camp, love of): 7
Mother/mom (to feel the pain we feel, Gold Star, regular): 8
Parent/parents: 2
Children (lose their, my other): 2
Country (our, my, an innocent): 4
Grief (unbearable): 1
Pain (as much as I am, feel the, and heartache, feel their): 4
Heartache: 1
Love/loved (of Casey, peace and, ones): 6
War (senseless, George Bush's, his, insane): 4
Invade (an innocent country): 1
Monstrosity (of an occupation): 1
Lies (his): 1
Misuse and abuse (of power): 1
Killed/killing (in George Bush's war, Americans, continue the): 6
Died (Americans have, my son, others who have): 5
Death/deaths (sent him to, meaningless): 3
Responsibility (the president's): 1
Accountable (hold George Bush): 1
Cojones (I do have the… to tell the world that our "emperor" has no clothes): 1

It seems that George Bush was right. "You got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in." He (and his advisers and his speechwriters) simply forgot that others might also do the repeating.

The Wordless Dead Offer Their Own Form of Testimony

Increasingly, the American, if not Iraqi, dead are entering our world and, after a fashion, making themselves heard. Their eloquence lies in their very names, which appear daily in our papers, as they have for two years now. Here, for instance, are the names of the American dead, all thirteen from Arcand, Elden to Seamans, Timothy, reported by the Pentagon for the three days beginning with the President's VFW speech and ending with his Idaho speech. These were presented in a little box on an inside page of the New York Times with the following explanation: "The Department of Defense has identified [number] American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the deaths of the following Americans yesterday:"

August 23, 2005

Bouchard, Nathan K., 24, Sgt., Army; Wildomar, Calif.; Third Infantry Division.
Boyle, Jeremy W., 24, Staff Sgt., Army; Chesterton, Md.; Third Infantry Division.
Fuhrman, Ray M. II, 28, Specialist, Army; Novato, Calif.; Third Infantry Division.
Seamans, Timothy J., 20, Pfc., Army; Jacksonville, Fla.; Third Infantry Division.

August 24, 2005

Arcand, Elden D., 22, Pfc., Army; White Bear Lake, Minn.; 360th Transportation Company, 68th Corps Support Battalion, 43rd Area Support Group.
Cathey, James J., 24, Second Lt., Marines; Reno, Nev.; Second Marine Division.
Morris, Brian L., 38, Staff Sgt., Army; Centreville, Mich.; 360th Transportation Company, 68th Corps Support Battalion, 43rd Area Support Group.
Nurre, Joseph C., 22, Specialist, Army Reserve; Wilton, Calif.; 463rd Engineer Battalion.
Partridge, Willard T., 35, Sgt., Army; Ferriday, La.; 170th Military Police Company, 504th Military Police Battalion, 42nd Military Police Brigade.
Romero, Ramon, 19, Pfc., Marines; Huntington Park, Calif.; Second Marine Division.

August 25, 2005

Díaz, Carlos J., 27, First Lt., Army; Juana Díaz, P.R., Third Infantry Division.
Hunt, Joseph D., 27, Sgt., Army National Guard; Sweetwater, Tenn.; Third Squadron, 278th Armored Cavalry.
Lieurance, Victoir P., 34, Staff Sgt., Army National Guard; Seymour, Tenn.; Third Squadron, 278th Armored Cavalry.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War.

More Than Complicit Media

Associated Press reports that 10-12 papers rejected the July 26, 2005 Doonesbury cartoon because of its "toilet humor." Some just obliterated the word, "turd," arguing that the strip was fine without it. Wrong.

Censorship of that sort to protect the image of any public figure, especially the president is dangerous--leaning toward what the Soviets called a "cult of personality." The irony of the decision is that "turd" is Bush's word in his nickname for Karl Rove aka Turd Blossom. The media has failed to push probes of the Downing Street Memo and the outing of Valerie Plame to name the two most current and dangerous issues. Now, jokes about Bush, using his own words, seem to be off limits.

Many progressives have complained that the media have been too complicit with the administration's spin on issues. This goes beyond compliance to iniative--a scary development even if the issue seems trivial.

Wierd Science: A New Way of Knowing

What is happening in the culture of the U. S. today that makes so much room for the kind of thinking and speech that emanates from the Whitehouse and Congress? I’ve been puzzling for some time over how Bush and company get away with blatant use of newspeak. While Iraq, by every measure is in decline, Bush recently said he was encouraged by the significant progress being made there. No one calls for a psychiatric exam for the President even though that is crazy talk. In fact, the manner of speaking is now pervasive in other areas of government and, of course, has been pervasive in the corporate world since the turn of the 20th century and the invention of public relations.
Something about how we think and know has changed.

Prior to the Enlightenment, the narratives of scripture and myth and the testimony of people served as acceptable sources of knowledge. Talking about the nature of the world entailed making connections between the grand stories and the experience of people and their communities. Aristotle was a scientific authority, but he never conducted an experiment. Even as we headed toward the Enlightenment, fantastic accounts of the nature of the earth were accepted a true from sailors and traders who had traveled far and wide. Those stories were elaborated, embellished and, through commentary, connected to other accounts and to grander narratives of creation, for example, in the Old Testament. That is, people made sense of their own lives by seeing similarities in the lives of others (e.g. one’s troubles were like those of Job). Continuity of human experience made sense of it.

After Bacon and Descartes, how we knew the world changed considerably. Rather than similarity, our knowledge grew from perception of differences. Science is the measurement of difference and analytical thinking is grounded in articulating with precision differences in observations or experiences in controlled environments (which are different from everyday environments). Knowing by identification/similarity was replaced by interpretation of differences. A whole new way of knowing and talking about the nature of the world was constructed. It was a powerful tool for scientific and technological development (and related economic benefits of such progress) and thus became entrenched as our “stance” as beings apart from nature and even from others.

But, today, things have seemingly changed again. We are now encountering a new orthodoxy in politics and religion. The spread of conservativism seems to be global. The French, who recently said, “Non,” to the EU’s Darwinian, capitalist constitution are now considered out of step, frightened or old fashioned because they want to preserve workers’ rights, the collective power of unions, and a moderate standard of living. Much of the world seems determined to combine a new conservative religious motif with a capitalist, privatized, deregulated, “scientifically” designed economic model. What we are left with is a decontexutalized, disconnected commentary which is offered to the public. It is free of any deeply embedded mythology and is disconnected from lived experience of the larger public. Language now has no clear referent; hence no truth to carry and no point of critique by which such talk can be checked. Bush can claim to be a godly man, a believer in Jesus as his personal savior while lying repeated to the public about the actions and intentions of his administration without fear of critique. The lies told about WMD to get us into a war that been in the planning since the mid-1990s; the lies told about how tax-cuts would benefit all; the lies about the state of the environment to mitigate regulation of hydrocarbon pollution function as explanation at the moment and have no long-term negative effects on the administration.

The ghosts of religious certitude are taking a new form in the “certitudes” of capitalist globalization and “democracy” as unstoppable principles of good. The new narratives are being parlayed through the media of public relations and think tank white papers. A new way of knowing has been constructed by synthesizing mythical and scientific ways of knowing. It is weird science.

Bush's Empty Drawers--A Mystery Solved

On April 5, 2005, Mr. W went on down to Parkersburg, WV to do some investigatin'. He'd heard some bad things about that dang ole Social Security Trust Fund and he was determined to get the skinny on that deal.

After some hard investigatin' work, he tol' us all about what he found. He said,

“There is no "trust fund," just IOUs that I saw firsthand, that future generations will pay -- will pay for either in higher taxes, or reduced benefits, or cuts to other critical government programs.

The office here in Parkersburg stores those IOUs. They're stacked in a filing cabinet. Imagine -- the retirement security for future generations is sitting in a filing cabinet. It's time to strengthen and modernize Social Security for future generations with growing assets that you can control, that you call your own -- assets that the government cannot take away. (Applause.)"

We wuz all happy to know he tol' us the truth--Don't trust the gubment! We never had no U. S. Savings Bonds (mostly 'cause Papa's pension was spent up by the coal company) but we never did have faith that the gubment would pay its obligations. Now, its for sure, Mr. W tol' us and just in the nick o' time!

We don't have to pay no attention to that Soopreme Court nuther 'cause we is supposed to do what they say 'cause they say it. Mr. Delay, Mr. W's friend, tells us that the Fedr'l courts is all corrupted. Whoo-wee, it's all good news.

Mr. W came down and took a look an done shown us the truth--here's a picture of him with the proof--his empty drawers. Now you tell me there is a Social Security Fund! I don't think so.