Corporate Detox

We, the ordinary people, are forced during every waking hour to see the world from the perspective of villains. We accept that perspective as reality as much as it suits us and as little as our intellect allows us to penetrate the veil.

Similarly, there are those who watch The Sopranos and, seeing the world through Tony’s eyes, start pulling for him. His fans gloss over his faults. They focus on his struggles with his enemies. They hope he succeeds in evading the law. They cheer for murder.

Then there are those who ingest mainstream news, corporate TV, advertisements, government provided history textbooks, etc., and start pulling for the corporate interests that run America. They root for successful air strikes on Iraqi villages, think poor countries should be happy to receive exploitative loans, and get pissed off at Russia for not wanting American missiles in its backyard.

The following is a brief overview of ways to build consensus by providing perspective through discussions with fellow countrypeople on some key topics. In the end, using refined arguments may be the equivalent of decorating the pebbles you throw at Tony Soprano’s advancing tank but…(I don’t know, but I don’t know).

Nationalism

Emphasize the distinction between U.S. government and U.S. citizens.

• Ask “What is America?” (best source: common sense; correct answer: it’s us.)
• Demonstrate that the United States is not a functioning democracy. (best source: public opinion polls)
• Explain U.S. imperialist history in terms that convey the difference between normal American citizens and the decision makers who claim to represent us. (best sources: Zinn, Chomsky, etc.)
• Emphasize the Constitution. It does generally side with the people, after all, in spite of being written by rich racists. Sure, no one’s read it, but it’s good in the same way that freedom and justice are good. (best source: The Constitution)
• When Americans think about war they generally think of sexy machines nobly conquering bearded evildoers. This is a lie. For every vanquished evildoer, there are hundreds of vanquished innocents. The American people do not approve of killing civilians. They never have. Studies show it. (a source: Tom Engelhardt analyzes the U.S. government’s use of air power against civilians here.)

Religion

Corporate/government behavior is the cause of most major problems social conservatives blame on the left.

• Abortion– a socio-economic problem, the main causes being the wealth gap, the so-called drug war, and dehumanizing corporate TV programs, among other things.
• Hollywood and MTV are not pushed on us by wacky hippy liberals but by amoral corporations. You know, the rich people who own all that stuff and make the actual decisions? Dumbasses like Tom Green wouldn’t have careers without rich corporate assholes.
• Video game violence– hmm…who’s behind that? Rich corporate assholes? What do you fuckin know!
• The breakdown of the family? Rich corporate assholes.
• Homosexuality? Oh whoops, never mind. Let’s forget I mentioned it.

Economics

Kill Horatio Alger.

• Demonstrate that objective and subjective factors in SES determination are not mutually exclusive. In other words, when Mariah Carey claims to be living proof that believing in oneself and following one’s dreams (subjective factors) are sufficient to achieve superstardom, she neglects to mention the causal role played by musical DNA and the high demand for singing prostitutes (objective factors). Both are important. Similarly, confident, driven athletes are more likely to perform than self-doubting, don’t-give-a-damn athletes while genetically gifted athletes are more likely to perform than less gifted athletes. Sounds pretty obvious, no? Pathetically, the (sometimes complete) denial of objective factors’ causal role in SES determination is one of the major pillars upholding our faux meritocracy.
• Being born into poverty is the primary cause of poverty. Bad character is not.
• Objective factors such as the drug war (waged by corporations for profit) and poverty (which is what happens when corporations have all the money) are indisputably more relevant and readily addressed causes of crime than bad character, which in turn is a major cause of corporate success.

The Canvasser

A sweaty college girl in a downtown Atlanta neighborhood, pamphlets and clipboard in hand, takes a seat on a park bench. It’s a July afternoon and it’s damn hot. She’s been walking since lunch. Her head’s a bit fuzzy from the heat, and images of blurry mansions cycle through her head, their long brick stairways always slithering upwards in fear of the street. She slaps a mosquito on her forehead, a little blood and irritation.

Finishing her bottled water, she gets up re-energized, ready to do some serious climbing. I still have 2 hours of daylight, she thinks, looking at her watch.

After a long climb, she recites some pre-scripted introductory remarks about saving the state park to a middle-aged man standing at the gate of his hilltop fortress. He writes a check for $50, half for the environment, the other half for the solicitor. Her first big score of the day.

He was surprisingly nice, she decides, as she follows a convenient path to the next house to avoid the long descent to the street. Knock, knock. No answer. A lone drop of rain smacks her forehead as she hurries on to the next mansion, again taking the high road. She hadn’t noticed the approaching clouds. This is gonna suck. She rings a bell and again, no response. Not home from your bullshit corporate job yet, huh, asshole?, she denounces the imaginary white guy.

Oh shit, she mumbles as a downpour hammers the sidewalk and she scurries to the next porch. A trio of brown-skinned workers below has made it to their Japanese pickup and packed themselves in tightly. An old woman looks out her window across the street. The canvasser clings to her clipboard, impatiently watching the rain assault an unusually bright green lawn, wondering if her boss will be pissed about her pathetic day’s work, her third bad day in a row.  This is a nice friggin’ porch. I wonder how much…wow… The dirty brown water, growing to a torrent, follows the winding steps to the street.

Media kind of Matters I guess

I remember following Media Matters’ 2004 coverage of the era-defining intellectual clash between John Kerry’s vehement defense of civil liberties and social justice, his insistence on drastically shrinking the military-industrial complex (warning, famously, that we must “avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty”) and bringing an end to the absurdly racist drug wars on the one hand, and George W. Bush’s concise articulation of the ethical foundations of a healthy society, on the other. Or maybe my memories of the experience are so painful that George Washington’s Farewell Address got inadvertently jumbled up with a bunch of Hollywood bullshit, obvious facts, and modified Enlightenment principles in an intoxicating cocktail my mind self-administered to numb the pain of…the Swift Boat diversion.

Media Matters flew right into that storm, using a delicate rational cotton swab to attend to Kerry’s shit-bespeckled face. They countered accusations by printing them verbatim, then systematically debunking them. It didn’t matter. After the media was finished validating Swift claims with their incessant “maybe it’s not true but (in a subtle whisper) maybe…it is” routine, only Kerry’s frighteningly white teeth could be seen. And who’s gonna vote for that?

After a 3 year break from politics/thinking, I revisited the Media Matters site again only recently. How are they doing? They’re still great compilers of the most egregious quotes by the Right’s defenders of the Christian virtues of peace, love, and putting your poor brown neighbor in jails, ghettos, and Guantanamos. I do have a few concerns, however:

1. Their aim is to get the Limbaughs to apologize and shut up (the Al Sharpton approach). Sounds like a worthwhile goal, of course, but the Limbaughs never mean their apologies, obviously, and the issues are rarely addressed, only buried. Political discourse becomes even more restricted. Populism needs to breathe. If you’re going to restrict its airways, you better have a good tactical reason. Is there such a reason?

There’s a risk, and I’m just speculating here, that even if you can bury the Limbaughs, the corporate media will simply resurrect them in a less patently obnoxious form — corporate reps who will support the same fucked up policies while more tactfully concealing their elitist motivations. In a sick Darwinian twist, increasingly more deceptive facades may evolve, at which point we’ll have to deal with Limbaugh 2.0.

Limbaugh is already a toned down version of himself. He doesn’t say “I hate black people. They all need to go to jail.” He says, “We need to put the rapists, murderers, and drug dealers behind bars.” He knows he means black people (or non-white, more accurately), his listeners know it, Media Matters knows it, but he doesn’t say it. When he slips up and makes statements that more or less give away his hand, Media Matters is waiting to catch him, which is comforting and troubling at once.

Is Media Matters further constricting democracy’s trachea? Are they whacking the less evolved corporate moles? Quite possibly.

2. They defend their candidates and their supporters to a fault. Here’s an example:

In a 60 minutes interview, Michelle Obama says, “I don’t lose sleep over [Barack possibly getting assassinated], because the realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know. So, you know, you can’t — you know, you can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen. We just weren’t raised that way.” Uber-racist Shelby Steele, discussing the interview in her book, writes, “[Obama] is telling the larger truth of black victimization in America. She is facilitating her race’s manipulation of the American mainstream.”

First of all, if black people are manipulating the mainstream, they’re doing a pretty shitty job.

Secondly, Obama’s comment, while not offensive, isn’t something that should be defended. Was Barack ever at real risk of getting shot at a gas station because of his brown skin? Comparing Barack’s situation to the very real threat of violence in troubled inner city black communities is disingenuous.

Media Matters would acknowledge as much if they weren’t knee-deep in America’s nastified political sludge, as likely to point out Democratic candidates’ flaws and deceptions as the candidates’ handlers.

Media Matters doesn’t lie. They’re consistently careful and technically correct (though they ignore context, when convenient, in favor of literalism). I’m glad to have them on my side and no one really knows the net effects of their efforts, which I’d guess favor the people.  They also have fine columnists, who work outside the basic “shut up, Matthews!” paradigm, to whom the above analysis doesn’t apply.  With W out of the picture, however, and the candidates all uncannily resembling each other, sacrificing honesty to the political gods no longer seems warranted.

Chalmers Johnson hates you for your freedom

According to Chalmers Johnson, the clouds hovering over America’s tomorrow will not be pink, fluffy or magical. There’ll be unicorns alright, as Americans will still be under the spell of corporate mythology, but they’ll be brandishing antiquated machine guns against a powerful Chinese army. And the streets will run red with unicorn blood.

Actually, he doesn’t predict a Chinese invasion, more of a Soviet style implosion received by the world with a similar level of enthusiasm. The military-industrial complex can’t be sustained. Military Keynesianism, as he calls it, is a tremendous economic liability, dragging the U.S. down while other giants race ahead. Well, Britain still hasn’t been invaded by its former oppressees (yet), so we’ve got that going for us.

(This Johnson’s one calm old dude, breaking down the impending disappearance from the American suburbascape of bottled water and spoiled punk teenagers like he’s telling his grandkids a twisted German fairytale.)

video Harry Kreisler interview

article “Going Bankrupt: Why the Debt Crisis Is Now the Greatest Threat to the American Republic”

Bush-league

The most relevant political continuum in contemporary politics is not that between left and right, but between rationally inclined and rationally disinclined.

Admittedly, this sounds like a flawed argument the moment one puts oneself near the better end of the continuum. It sounds like Bush-league, us versus them logic.

Here’s the difference.  Bush-league logic holds that there’s an us and a them, the us being good and the them being bad, and of course we (anyone who agrees with Bush) are the us, therefore we’re right about everything.  In other words, we’re good, therefore we’re good.

However, my claim is not the basis for any specific political argument. If one were to postulate this continuum, claim to be on the preferred end, then claim that as a result of this, one is correct about something, that would be Bush-league.  That’s not the implication here.    When I say that someone like Tony Snow is severely rationally disinclined, that’s not an argument against him.  One makes the judgment that he’s rationally disinclined based on his defense of rationally indefensible positions, not the other way around.  It’s simply, in attempting to answer the question, “why would he say that?,” the best hypothesis going.

Further, if I ever say anything that flies in the face of all evidence, like, for example, that the earth is less than 8000 years old, I’d hope someone would look into my motives for maintaining such a position.

And finally, I’m not favoring any particular viewpoint but a particular approach to forming one’s viewpoints.  Simply put, it’s a meta- argument.

David Brooks says: trust your gut

NYT’s Brooks writes:

“We voters — all of us — make emotional, intuitive decisions about who we prefer, and then come up with post-hoc rationalizations to explain the choices that were already made beneath conscious awareness.”

Good point. We should try to reverse this process when making voting decisions, beginning with questions rather than answers, and choose the people who represent the people’s interests, right?

“My own intuition is that this unconscious cognition is pretty effective. People are skilled at judging character.” (…especially when judging a group of people whose occupational success depends on their ability to deceive.)

Well, never mind, then.

Here’s the link.

Save the juvenile noses!

In previous posts, I’ve advocated treating conclusion-first argumentation as a distinct species of political discourse. In this post, I’ll try to further clarify.

For the sake of community and democracy, it’s necessary and advisable to communicate with individuals who steadfastly adhere to rationally indefensible political positions. It’s not, on the other hand, effective, necessary, or ethically sound to actually argue with them.

Time and again, one finds absurd positions treated by rational people as legitimate arguments. It’s not that rationally inclined people think it might be true that for example, GWB is the greatest U.S. President ever, but they do generally feel inclined to argue that he’s not.

In academic discourse, holocaust deniers aren’t taken seriously. In American political discourse, people who argue that the U.S. government’s motives are 100% benevolent are taken seriously. More accurately, they never have to explicitly make this self-evidently absurd claim. They simply replace U.S. government — by any reasonable account, at the very least, strongly influenced by corporate interests — with the vague, emotionally charged “America” (Mellencamp version) and find their position unassailable. Now, in attempting to speak accurately about the intentions of the U.S. government, you’re attacking the collective ego. You’re attacking the good people of Lansing, MI, Reedville, VA, and Austin, TX, as well as their ancestors, Olympic teams, and McDonald’s.

Presenting facts and evidence of neocon imperialist ambitions is one way to deal with the severely rationally disinclined (SRD). If however, as is generally the case, they’re seeing the world through the red, white, and blue lenses placed gently on their still-growing noses in their pre-critical years, they’re seeing your facts and evidence in red, white, and blue as well.  In red, white, and blue, there are lots of facts and evidence that look like evil, because there are lots of facts and evidence that counter the notion that America is 100% good.  Better to concern oneself with the glasses, how they got there, how they can be removed, and how their placement on future juvenile noses can be prevented.

Are you rocking or polluting the intertubes?

Who’s polluting the intertubes?

Here, the often interesting Frank Rich succumbs to microanalyzing a brief and meaningless exchange between Hillary and Obama. Hillary praised Obama, Obama was condescending, Hillary semi-cried. Rich mocks the “incessant video replays of Mr. Obama’s condescension” while joining the echo chamber. Focusing on politics over substance gets the audience to focus on politics over substance and further encourages the candidates to do the same. When the next exchange between the two is equally meaningless, perhaps Rich will acknowledge that he’s been part of the problem, but he’s more likely to mock the banality of others’ media coverage. If Rich were ever to accidentally read my work, I hope he’d do me the favor of calling me on the same thing.

Who’s rocking the intertubes?

Media Matters’ Jamison Foser provides a great example of the approach favored by propagantidote (whoops, did I just refer to myself in the third person?) when he breaks down Chris Matthews’ irrational Hillary-phobia. When someone’s talking crazy, instead of taking their arguments seriously, it’s preferable to try to figure out their motivations. Responding to Matthews with, “Oh, I don’t think Hillary’s a witch, she’s done lots of good things like, for example…” treats his absurd claim as an argument. And, you end up defending Hillary, which is what he wants. I contend that his claim doesn’t deserve such respect. By using Matthews’ own words against him, Foser demonstrates a fairly obvious pattern — Matthews has some serious fear-of-being-controlled-by-women issues. You don’t even have to get into any difficult and debatable psychological questions. Did he have a bad experience with a nun? Maybe, but you don’t have to prove it.

I’m not interested here in moralizing. Is Matthews is a bad person for this? Maybe, but that’s not the issue. Everyone’s irrational. But if you bring that irrationality in the political ring, it’s fair game because you’re hurting the rest of us. Kudos, Mr. Foser.

Naomi Klein squared off with Alan Greenspan in a Democracy Now debate. I don’t consider Greenspan to be rationally disinclined. Elitism, after all, makes sense for the wealthy and powerful. They run into problems when they try to argue that it’s good for the rest of us. As for this debate, Greenspan had no idea what he was getting himself into. Klein, who had already picked his book apart and had it sitting on the table in front of her, destroyed him with old-fashioned logic and evidence, quoting him frequently and holding him to his past statements and actions. Greenspan made two mistakes: he wasn’t prepared and he listened to the rationality of her arguments. A good elitist doesn’t actually listen. Bill O’Reilly, with half Greenspan’s intellect, would have stood a better chance with his sheer dickheadedness. Keep rockin’, Ms. Klein.

Rule #1: Avoiding the unmentionables is the best way to make them mentionable

Rule #1: When talking to severely rationally disinclined (SRD) people, don’t let them put you in a category.

Reason #1: Avoid the soundproof box.

If you tell someone you’re a liberal or a libertarian or an Al Franken fan or that you’re voting for Senator X, it’ll be very easy for them to find a soundproof box for you. There’s little if anything to be gained, from an argument or persuasive standpoint, from such a move.

SRDs use simple, formulaic 2 or 3 step reasoning processes, often pre-packaged by propagandists. These are vacuum-like in nature and are best avoided. Examples: Democrat=godless, godless=bad, Democrat=bad. Republican=rich assholes, rich assholes=bad, Republican=bad. Don’t tell your Republican neighbor you’re a Democrat or that you once voted for Bill Clinton.

Reason #2: You don’t get credit for Obama’s good points but if there’s anything about him you can’t defend, you’ll suffer for it. Of course, if your whole point is to convince someone to vote for Obama, this doesn’t apply.

Reason #2 is strategery-based only, which makes it a bit dirty. Reason #1 is legit, assuming you’re not using it in a salesman-like way, to bring someone to a specific viewpoint.  It facilitates discourse by avoiding language poisoned by propagandists.

beyond good and saddam

Let’s say someone murders your best friend. (Now that’s how you start a blog post.) Your outrage overcomes you and you want the murderer hanged from the highest thing that you can hang a murderer from. Understandable, sure. In such a case, your ability to consider the series of causes that led to the murderer’s actions is limited, to say the least.  It’s inhibited by strong emotional forces.  To approach the matter with an inquisitive mind involves crossing into a state of empathy with the killer.  Your feeling of outrage toward the killer, on the other hand, is comforting.  It reaffirms your somewhat shattered world picture, that it was right and the killer’s violent intrusion wrong.  Hate of the other is glue for the self.

The concept of evil, on the other hand, doesn’t require empathy.  It doesn’t require understanding either, as it’s simply the explanation given to what can’t be understood.  It also happens to be ridiculous.

Saddam Hussein had people killed habitually because the pleasure it afforded his ego (by helping him maintain power over millions of people, among possibly other things) outweighed the displeasure it forced on his conscience.  The events of his childhood, in combination with his DNA, a number of bad habit-forming decisions, etc., culminated in an antisocial menace with a conscience smaller than his balls.  The iron law of decision making – the (un)pleasure principle – doesn’t take plays off.  It doesn’t tell the coach it needs a breather and that evil should get his ass in the game.

Even suggesting this much in mainstream American discourse is unacceptable.  It breaks the no empathy rule.  You do have to, in a very abstract way, see the world from the madman’s perspective to understand him.

The goal of Propagantidote is to analyze the emotional points of resistance that prevent people, including myself, from thinking clearly on political issues and cause them to vote against their own interests.  More on evil and the us versus them mentality in the future.