"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." Thus spoke the leader of the free world in 2005. Like so many of Dubya's utterances, this one invites study. What, if anything, do the words mean? Do they mean that government involves a constant repetition of fact in order to stay a jump ahead of (i.e., to leapfrog) propaganda? Maybe, but the President said "catapult," not "leapfrog." To leapfrog a thing is to hop over it. To catapult a thing is to send it flying. The likeliest paraphrase of the Presidential phrase seems to be: To make a point in politics, you've got to lay it on thick. "It" would refer to truth and propaganda as one and the same thing – an impossible semantic merger, if a familiar political one.
It has indeed been a challenge to distinguish truth from propaganda this already old-feeling young century – the Bush team has had a busy five years at the siege engines. As the President keeps reminding us (over and over and over): "It's hard work." So much truth/propaganda to lob, so little time. The 2000 election, Enron, Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, September 11, weapons of mass destruction, war, Mission Accomplished, more war, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Falluja, Katrina, wire-taps, corruption – to date the public has enjoyed a virtual blizzard of truth on such developments, and can expect three more years of snow.
The suggestion that truth and propaganda are the same thing, at least in the President's line of work, is an interesting one. People in other lines of work, the pitiable suckers living out there in reality land, or reality TV land, or wherever it is that "the people" hang out, tend to be stuck with less interesting, more conventional language boundaries. Truth, says the dictionary, refers to things that are true (not a difficult notion to grasp in most lines of work). Propaganda, in contrast, refers to "ideas or statements that may be false or exaggerated and that are used in order to gain support for a political leader, party, etc." If the President had heeded a dictionary, his sentence could not have stood. It would have been obliged to read either u2018For the truth to sink in you gotta catapult the truth'; or u2018For the propaganda to sink in you gotta catapult the propaganda.'
Let's allow that politics necessitates some degree of coupling between truth and propaganda, and that a forked tongue is standard equipment among catapult operators. That granted, if you were responsible for pitching truth/propaganda to (at) the public and beyond, how would you go about it? Colin Powell, concerned about America's image in the Middle East, suggested that what we really need is a good "re-branding," and Madison Avenue types were enlisted to tackle it. The Pentagon opted for people like Christian Bailey, a young Briton offering "tailored intelligence services" for "government clients faced with intelligence challenges." Characteristically faced with one, the Pentagon paid Bailey a million dollars to plant rosy stretchers in the freshly liberated Iraqi press. Bailey was ultimately exposed. There was a tendency among readers to smell rat instead of rose.
Those in charge of forking out truth/propaganda seem surprised to discover that the audience (the forked-over) can generally round up enough collective brain cells to differentiate between the two. On the heels of September 11, the government decided to publish "Hi" Magazine. "Hi" was intended to win youthful Middle Eastern hearts and minds with pages devoted to the glossier joys of American democracy. Alas, nobody read "Hi," which has just been dumped. It cost roughly 15 million dollars to get "Hi" off the ground and nosedive it back again. Who could have known it wouldn't fly? Just about anybody, really. Truth/propaganda of whatever flavor still trips little flashing LIAR lights in the minds of most people, who tend to dislike being treated like chumps. Governments might consider throwing an occasional information straightball (not to mention refraining from striking wildly at information supplied by goofballs like "Curveball"); the standard forkballs are no longer finding the plate.
Noam Chomsky recently noted that if the U.S. government is truly interested in reducing the threat of terror, there is a straightforward and obvious step to be taken: to "stop acting in ways that – predictably – enhance the threat." In other words, to stop acting in ways that leave so many people stumped as to who the bad guys are. A few weeks ago at least 18 Pakistani civilians were collaterally damaged by a CIA drone in an attempt to remove a terrorist who wasn't there. Put another way, 18 human beings minding their own business were murdered in a terror strike devised and delivered by a group claiming to be passionately opposed to terror. What can be said to the families, friends, and neighbors of the dead? Sorry? It was a mistake? Here's a check worth 18 souls? But the Bush league doesn't do sorrow, and has yet to acknowledge a mistake – perhaps this compassionately conservative administration will yet find it in itself to send the Pakistanis some back issues of "Hi."
The United States government doesn't need a facelift, re-branding, or cosmetic makeover to solve its image problem. It needs to start acting like it really believes in the freedom and democracy it can't stop talking about. It could stop talking, meanwhile, about the hearts and minds out there to be won as if they were scalps or votes, and start behaving responsibly and intelligently enough to suggest that it has a functioning heart and mind of its own. Instead, it "kind of catapults the propaganda" in ongoing devotion to what it considers its own interests, and takes the liberty of calling ours.
February 3, 2006
