How to have all men against you

George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People (2001):

Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.

Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Wanderer and His Shadow"(1880):

How to have all men against you. -- If anyone dared to say now, 'Whoever is not for me, is against me,' he would immediately have all men against him. -- This does our time honor.

Aesthetic Ideology: The Politics of Language

Leading neocons exress despair at the Bush Administration's incompetence in Neo Culpa: Politics & Power.

As a literary critic with a keen interest in the relationship between affect and meaning, I'm intrigued by the implicit understanding of how language works in this quote by David Frum:

"I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."

Notice how Frum avoids talking about trying to convince Bush to believe in a particular position. Instead of referring to reasons and arguments, he imagines a sort of understanding via osmosis. In this fantasy, ideas are objectified as the foundational substance of words, and these ideas, once spoken, get absorbed by the body, like lotion. Indeed, it's not even clear that "understanding" is the right term here, since Frum talks about a feeling - a committed feeling - towards ideas rather than a belief in them.

Thank you, Mr. Frum, for providing a textbook example of how a neo-Platonic, logocentric model of language can prove to be disastrous.

Alternative Interrogation Techniques

Students in my American Literature and Culture class are busy compiling examples of various tropes, figures of speech, that turn up in their readings, both novels and nonfiction. Although I'm confident that most have a fairly firm grasp on euphemism, I'll have to refer them to the following article by Andrew Sullivan to demonstrate why the ability to identify tropes is no purely 'academic' exercise.

Sullivan's article addresses the ongoing debates in the United States regarding the legality of torturing terror suspects by drawing attention to the way ethical considerations have been circumvented. The torture debates have degenerated into battles over the Bush Administration's efforts to redescribe "torture" as "alternative interrogation techniques," "coercive interrogation," or "harsh interrogation methods." Could we find a more pressing, or dangerous, instance of euphemism?

In general, I'm no fan of Sullivan, a gay Republican whose endorsement of the GOP's homophobic platform seems awfully opportunistic and cowardly, but it's refreshing to hear a conservative citing Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" in opposition to Bushco's use of doublespeak. In contrast to the obfuscating rhetoric on torture issued from the likes of Rumsfeld and Bush, Sullivan's argument is straightforward: Torture by any other name is just as vile.

The problem is that the very act of debating publicly whether, in some instances, torture should be tolerated and permitted changes the parameters of what actions are permissible in liberal-democratic states. The unthinkable--state-sponsored torture--has now become a viable option.

Now that the Bushies have effectively legitimized torture, it will require a concerted political effort to make the practice taboo again. This effort will require people from across the political spectrum to collaborate. Most likely, in a familiar political paradox, in the United States it will be a conservative politician like John McCain, who has acquired a certain kind of political capital that will prevent him from being branded as being "soft on terror," that will be most effective in leading the opposition to state-sponsored torture.

When Bathos Trumps Analysis: Remembering 9/11

For the commercial broadcast media, the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks provided an opportunity to boost ratings through sentimental remembrances that compelled viewers "to think instead of feel." For Susan Douglas, a profession of communications at the University of Michigan, the lack of journalistic integrity has perpetuated the circulation of propaganda, misinformation, and lies that have served the Bush Administration, if not the United States, so well during its reign.

With a couple rhetorical questions, Douglas suggests how the media should have responded after 9/11, had they taken their mission to inform the public seriously:

How might the broadcast media have analyzed the path since 9/11 if it were non-commercial, not so craven for ratings and had the stomach for self-examination? Might we see an examination of the collapse of journalistic skepticism and backbone in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, or an expose of the Bush administration's blanketing the media with propaganda and PR techniques, or an explanation that bush squandered every ounce of goodwill we had in the aftermath of 9/11, or a reflection on the unnecessary killing of so many U.S. troops and Iraqis, or a condemnation of our country's use of torture?

Thus, the tragedy of those victims who lost their lives in the 9/11 attacks is compounded by a subsequent tragedy: the lack of fair, accurate and thorough reporting on the Bush administration's "War on Terror."

Douglas's call for analysis over bathos is sound, but it will take systemic structural changes in our corporatized, profit-driven media if we're to see the kind of informative, investigative journalism that we need.

One looming problem: Who will subsidize a media independent enough to produce intelligent, analytic investigative journalism, which is, of course, much more costly than producing news programs that superficially cover events?