The ongoing discourse about “cancel culture” and how to “take a joke” provides a chance to reflect on our continuing evolution.
All humor is based in pain. Much of it, in the pain of others. As Mel Brooks famously said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
Humans are always evolving as emotional and social creatures, always learning more about ourselves as individuals and a group, always moving forward. This means that some things lose their humor over time, again among individuals and in the culture at large.
One of the shifts we’re currently seeing is away from the schadenfreude of humor – the taking delight in someone else’s harm, rather than laughing with them and thereby at least in part at ourselves.
Consider the movie “Airplane!” There are three classic scenes in this movie, which still are funny in my opinion but would never get filmed in 2022: the “jive dudes,” the little girl with the coffee (“No thanks, I take it black. Like my men.”), and the panicking passenger getting the crap beat out of her. These scenes still play funny to me, and from what I see online people in 2022 watching them still laugh, if with a bit of cringe at the little girl.
Oh stewardess, I speak jive.
If you tried to put the jive dudes over as original work in a script today it would be shot down. Appropriation, patronizing, othering, racism – is it? or is it a joke on racism? or simply a bit of fun with caricatures of cultural difference, and the ‘racist’ aspect is something we’re superimposing because the men are black and they’re using a parody (they made up the lines) of what was called “jive” in the 70’s and we’d now call “African American Vernacular English” after figuring out “ebonics” wasn’t cutting it? – and great white hopes, portrayal of black men as incapable of communicating “properly.”
If my job is to vet project content for the probability of negative publicity I’m all over this, here in 2022.
Nobody – nor nearly nobody, I haven’t seen anyone take it on – is trying to “cancel” that retroactively, but if you tried to put it through a studio today they’d never let it pass…and it quite likely *would* create a bunch of rancor on social media as people debated whether Mrs. Cleaver was really an avatar for white supremacy.
The argument has merit, although I’m not sure you could really bring it home conclusively. You could make it strongly enough to cut the scene today using today’s values and mores, is the point.
This is the evolution of humor. We understand in 2022, because of 42 years of discourse between that scene and now, that while there is still humor there it’s also important to hold the ugly part to account and talk about it and understand it and maybe it evolves into something where perhaps if someone rebooted it today it’s more the white stewardess who couldn’t understand “jive” that’s the butt of the joke, something to mitigate the implication of punching down in the original.
I’m not trying to kill or cancel that scene, but I’m trying to say that humor, like all creative expression, *evolves* and when it evolves it’s generally because enough people finally figured out that the pain contained within some humor is a weapon, not a release; that people can truly be hurt by our words and portrayals of our perceptions of them so maybe we should try a little harder to not be dicks.
When I hear comedians, especially people like Bill Maher and Dave Chappelle who have been to some extent taken as progressive thought leaders, going on and on about “cancel culture” and “nobody can take a joke anymore” even as they crap all over everything people liked about them, what I hear is people who have become lazy, complacent, and selfish. They want to coast on EZ mode, doing the same routines (or at least sticking to minor variations on the same proven themes) over and over, while the audience is moving forward without them.
Humor is an expression of pain, and there are ways we can joke and reflect on being human and feeling pain, without inflicting it. With that said, those ways are going to change and shift and evolve too, and maybe something that’s pitch perfect today will be seen in twenty or forty years as almost criminally obscene, for better or worse, right or wrong.
Three words makes all the difference
Our job as people is to make sure we’re honest enough with ourselves to, in those moments, own our errors and do our best to set them right. Some of that has to do with the nature of our harm perception in retrospect; it’s hurtful but does it do harm? It’s hurtful to sexualize a pre-adolescent girl for humor, but was she harmed by it? Traumatized? (Did she even get the joke? And by the way, is it funny or not? Why?) What about the social impact, do we think there was a spike in human trafficking of little white girls to Africa in response to the coffee joke? (Let’s not forget the racism in play here, too.) The most likely reasonable answer to those questions is “no.”
Oh, just remembered the whole bit with Peter Graves and “have you ever seen a grown man naked?” Have to include that one, in this discussion. (Similar to the ubiquitous racism in two of the clips above, that one catches the casual homophobia prevalent at the time too.)
The entire humor in both of those bits is the uncomfortable, inappropriate tension. That’s the whole thing about it that makes you laugh. But it is too inappropriate to even tell the joke, in the light of our evolving understanding?
These kinds of questions are *always* in play. For instance I’m not sure George Carlin’s routine about the n-word is something he’d have done in the last decade of his life because we evolved to understand that word is hurtful coming out of a white mouth and directed at a black person, regardless of whether it’s “meant to be” or not. Carlin being a linguistic genius and also a bit of a trickster god on it, may have still done the bit…but I’m not sure. I think he would’ve put a great deal more thought into whether the joke (or the deeper points behind it) would be obscured or mitigated or negated by his use of that word, and most importantly whether his work could be used to “punch down.” I’m glad to have cultivated an audience that seems to have a pretty good instinctive grip on where the lines are and why.
When you stick to principle – “don’t punch down” – you’re less likely to make even an honest mistake, one borne of naive ignorance rather than malice, that hurts someone, and less likely to be whining about getting “canceled” while you’re selling out venues and appearing on every late night talk show. It’s still not easy mind you – knowing when you’re punching down is a function of empathy, which is also always evolving and refining – but it’s a good basic principle, and if you keep it in the back of your head while you’re doing your thing you’ll probably avoid saying anything you’ll wish later that you hadn’t.
Everybody’s wrong sometimes. There’s nothing bad about that; we learn from being wrong, or should.
Often you can get a sense of what’s motivating a person or entity by observing how they behave when they’re caught being wrong.
A longtime friend and supporter showed me this article in which a recent meme from longtime clickbait/meme farm The Other 98 asserting off-hand that “Funny how we haven’t seen a single American mega church offer ANYTHING to the Ukrainians…” is entirely debunked as without factual basis.
Followup shows that the page didn’t pull the image but rather changed the description…which is only useful when people have shared the description and not just copied/pasted the image as is the case more often than not. They could have just as easily thrown a DEBUNKED stamp on the original and edited that into the original post while deleting the first image entirely, but they didn’t.
This is why you can’t just go sharing everything that confirms your biases. There’s nothing about the underlying values the meme ostensibly represents that’s wrong, it’s just that someone was in a bigger hurry to push people’s emotional buttons for easy traffic – 22K shares last I looked – than to get their facts straight.
Perhaps my failure to adopt that attitude even as all of social media fell into it is why I don’t have 5 million people following me rather than 5 thousand aside from the big page where I’m a co-admin, but I also really like knowing that nobody can credibly accuse me of putting my own advancement, comfort, or benefit over the principles I believe in and the messages I’m trying to get into the world.
Everybody gets it wrong sometimes, including me, and that’s okay. It’s what you do about it that matters. The right way to deal with this would have been to edit the post and replace the image with one showing clearly that it had been debunked.
As it happens, I’ve been through this precise situation myself, probably a decade or so ago; back then it wasn’t possible to change the image in a post after it was posted, all you could do is delete it and just deleting it wasn’t sufficient to notify people it wasn’t accurate. I created a new corrected image and linked it in the description of the old, with edited text making clear that the original image was inaccurate and should not be used. Back then that was about the best you could do; the tools have since evolved.
As a source of information, If performative ass-covering while still trying to reap the benefits of your error is your first instinct, it’s probably time to take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself honestly what you’re really trying to do.
As an activist or activist organization it’s vital to keep your priorities straight and not do things like this, because every time you do you’re validating criticism from “the other side” that call you “fake news” or accuse you of “lying” or “misinformation” or “propaganda,” and not without solid merit to their argument. Journalism currently has a similar problem; sensationalism “puts asses in seats” but it’s not often accurate.
As a consumer of information it’s always imperative to make sure you’ve checked your facts – not just when something’s asserted that you don’t agree with anyway, but *even more so* when you do.
Understanding bias is a core component of information literacy, which is a critical life skill for the modern day and beyond. That very much begins with understanding our own biases, because those are the ones that are going to most often be used against us. This is something I’ve been teaching for a very long time, and is now one of the core concepts underpinning CUSTODE. Our vulnerability to being easily manipulated by mass media has far outpaced the growth of our ability to see through the malicious application of persuasive communication, and until we fix that none of the challenges we currently face will ever truly be resolved.
I have written pretty often over the years about conspiracies and conspiracy theorists and all that comes with them. (I know, bad form to not have hyperlinks, but as I write this I’m curating and don’t have anything at hand; I’m sure I’ll end up republishing something as I come across it going through my archives.)
There are some problems that I haven’t really talked about much, though, and that we don’t really talk about much, related to conspiracies and reality and abuses of power. On social media, a friend wrote:
“At what point will society treat conspiracy theorists for the mental illnesses they clearly have??”
This provoked a lot of thought, from multiple directions…and as usual, the direction my thoughts came from are a little different from any of the mainstream pro or con, and I thought it was worth discussing at length.
The first direction of my thought is that there are some issues with conspiracy theory that we don’t talk about enough. The biggest is that some events originally written off as conspiracy theory have proven true over the years: government mind-control programs; cover-ups of UFO encounters; poor black men given deadly diseases and left untreated for observation by the government without their knowledge or consent; the trading of arms to designated terrorist nations in exchange for hostages through a group of middlemen who were also in the middle of an ongoing coup attempt in central America…just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, right?
If we’re going to look down our nose and pooh-pooh conspiracy theorists – and quite often that’s the only reasonable response – we have to take a hard look at that reality. Otherwise, to whatever extent any of us knee-jerk a dismissive response to a conspiracy theory simply because it sounds implausible or violates our biases, we are vulnerable to manipulation, disinformation, and deceit – if in no other way than by omission.
So before we talk about how to apply our critical thinking skills to trying to get a handle on when something over the top might not be as far over as you think, let’s take a quick look at a few “wild conspiracy theories” that turned out to be anything but.
The Bad News
We all love to either laugh off a “crazy conspiracy theory” or dive right into it just to see how crazy it is, but sometimes it turns out things aren’t so crazy as they seemed on the surface. Here are a few prominent examples; I’ve included the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, and links, for each. All of the links should be live as well; as is the case with all wiki footnotes, they’ll link to a reference at the bottom of the main page, and you can go check it out yourself.
Project MKUltra – CIA doses people with LSD without their knowledge, and more fun. “Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra) is the code name given to a program of experiments on human subjects that were designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), some of which were illegal.[1][2][3] Experiments on humans were intended to develop procedures and identify drugs such as LSD to be used in interrogations in order to weaken the individual and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. The project was organized through the Office of Scientific Intelligence of the CIA and coordinated with the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories.[4] Other code names for drug-related experiments were Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke.[5][6]” (I’ve long had a low-key suspicion my dad was involved in this as a subject while a young Marine in the early 60’s, but he wouldn’t have said either way, if a) he was and b) he knew about it. He took his oaths pretty seriously.)
Then there’s the Tuskegee Experiment: “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male[1][2][3] (informally referred to as the “Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,” the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study,” the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male,” the “U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee,” or the “Tuskegee Experiment”) was an ethically abusive study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).[4][5] The purpose of this study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis. Although the African-American men who participated in the study were told that they were receiving free health care from the federal government of the United States, they were not.[6]” In short, they gave a bunch of black guys syphilis and let ’em run around with it for four decades, living their lives, and told them only that they were getting free government health care. Not only are the obvious problem obvious, but y’all wonder why poor black people don’t trust the government and medicaid. Literally sold these guys a story they were getting free health care from Uncle Sam, and not only used them as lab rats but sent them out into the world to infect others, all without knowing it. Our government did that.
These are all real things that really happened, and every one of them was dismissed for years as a wild-eyed conspiracy theory, something that simply could not be happening and no reasonable person would believe.
And yet…
But Wait, There’s More!
It goes on and on, right? You’ve got the Edith Wilson presidency, in which the wife of the President – who married him after he was elected as a widower, mind you – assumed the duties of his office without the slightest hint of or attempt at public consent or approval, after president Woodrow Wilson suffered a major stroke in October of 1919. Between then and January 1921, his wife – unelected, unannounced, unacknowledged, and with all the bravery and spirit and not a jot or tittle of legal or moral authority – assumed the duties of the presidency.
Say, have you heard about radium? GREAT for the skin!
Then there’s the cancer-causing properties of cigarettes. Most folks know that in the mid-20th century before official science linking lung cancer and tobacco use was established the tobacco industry did such insane things as hiring doctors to sell cigarettes. What many don’t know is that even into the late 1970’s – over a decade after the US Surgeon General had established the requirement of a health warning on all cigarette and cigar packaging – international tobacco companies conspired at the highest levels to minimize, hide, and obfuscate the health risks of smoking from the general public for the sake of maintaining their lucrative and addicted market share. I want to note here that I have distinct and reliable memories of some pretty questionable metrics around the “truth.org” anti-smoking ads that the tobacco companies were forced to create after the big class action settlement back in the ’90s. I’m having difficulty finding that information now, and it may be apocryphal, or the problem wasn’t as big as I remembered, or it was one of those jokes that got out of hand. (“Say, these anti-smoking commercials make me want a cig! Hahahah!” “Yeah hahahaha hey wait…”)
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident that started the Vietnam War is particularly interesting because of the way they used a legitimate incident to fabricate a second, more serious one that was then used as a premise to pursue military escalation, eventually leading to lots of dead kids, lots of rich military contractors, and lots of deformed Vietnamese babies (do not google “agent orange birth defects” if you’re not prepared to have nightmares. I’m not linking any relevant content; the hint is enough).
Then there’s the abandoned – thank $DEITY – Operation Northwoods, in which the US government proposed launching “terrorist” attacks against itself and blaming Cuba as a precept for war against that country. Of course the one most of us are most familiar with, the Iran-Contra affair in which the United States Government sold military equipment to sanctioned and open US opponent/critic Iran to fund the radical right-ring insurgent Contras in Nicaragua. Some of that entanglement also provided the pathway for the CIA to fund – whether intentionally or not remains an open question – a significant portion of the incoming crack cocaine in the 1980s, the devastating effects of which are still being felt. Nearly every word of those two sentences is a federal crime. The most instrumental person in those crimes, Oliver North, is now a well-known TV talking head who often tells us what we should think about the military, government, and ethics.
Many poor black people had claimed for years the feds were in on the crack situation and were blown off as…well, crackpots. Turned out they were right. As were the hippies and black radicals of the sixties who were accused of paranoia and fantasy when they told people they were being infiltrated and even directed by outside elements, probably the government.
And that’s not even the biggest fish in the barrel…
The Mother Of All Bullshit
Then we come to what I think of as the Big Daddy of them all, probably because it’s significant in my lifetime: the whole process by which we first sold biological and chemical weapons, fabrication equipment (and I mean entire factories), and even satellite intelligence which they then used to bomb the Kurds…and we then spent two decades destabilizing the region and (again!) inflating the bank accounts of military contractors at the unnecessary cost of hundreds of thousands of lives innocent or otherwise.
Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld meet in 1983, shortly after Rumsfeld as US Special Envoy to Iraq under the Reagan Administration pressured the State Department to normalize relations with Iraq sufficient to allow the sale of chemical and biological weapon components. Source video.
This one really fascinates me because we literally had public congressional hearings about it in which we seriously dragged out the receipts for things we sold to Iraq like botulism, anthrax, and a host of other nasties. You have Donald Rumsfeld, who would later become Secretary of Defense, unilaterally lobbying to have Iraq removed from the State Department’s list of terror-sponsoring nations in the early 1980’s as a specical envoy on behalf of the Reagan Administration. This allowed MIC profiteers – who in what I’m sure is just a giant coincidence also happened to be among the largest contributors to the political campaigns of Reagan and his allies – to sell various fun bits of weaponry to Iraq under the ruse of being “dual-use,” for instance how you can use Anthrax bacteria for agricultural research. The missile fabrication and guidance systems as well as the military intelligence they used to deliver their research projects to the Kurds also had, I imagine, some just barely plausible “other” application.
Now keep in mind this is all happening while we’re also equipping the Iranians, who are at war with the Iraqis and between whom the Kurds are largely stuck, with the equipment to prosecute their war against Iraq. We literally sold the weapons to both sides bumping up against the Iran-Contra scandal mentioned earlier. And that’s not even where it gets craziest.
During the first Gulf War, there was a problem with veterans exhibiting various sorts of symptoms consistent with exposure to biological or chemical agents. There were big ol’ congressional hearings about it, which included a stunning parade of the receipts from our deals with Iraq, some of which continued even after the end of the first Gulf War.
This, we discovered in 1993 during the congressional investigation into what was called “Gulf War Syndrome.” Included in the final report (colloquially called “The Riegle Report” after US Sen. Donald T. Riegle, who chaired the investigation) was a list of nasty little bits of stuff that will curdle your blood if you read it – the very same stuff that we first “suspected” had been “discharged” during Gulf War I, and then we “just knew” that Iraq had, and had used to “gas their own people,” as the precept to the second.
How did we know? It’s like Bill Hicks said, and exactly like that: We looked at the receipts. We sold that stuff to him. That’s how we knew so bad that he had it. We sold it to him, taught him how to use it, taught him how to make more, handed him a big stack of information screaming “THERE’S THE KURDS RIGHT THERE DON’T GO DOING ANYTHING TO THOSE PEOPLE YOU HATE WITH THOSE DEADLY FARM RESEARCH PROJECTS WE GAVE YOU” and then he did and we said “how dare you gas your own people you bastard” and killed him.
Not the story you were probably taught in school, if you’re young enough for this to have been history for you and not ongoing reality.
So one of the genuine problems with conspiracy theories is sometimes they turn out to be legit, and this just feeds the crazier stuff, and you never get to the juicy center of anything until it’s too late.
Maybe…that’s not an accident?
Meta-Conspiracy
I want to be clear at the outset that I’m not asserting anything here, just making some observations. Let I have to deal with the comment section going “hur hur you think there’s a conspirserary.”
But, consider.
The Bigfoots and Loch Ness Monsters, the alien abductions and crop circles, the shadowy men on a shadowy planet lurking in the shadows doing shadowy things and who knows what shadowy evil lurks in their shadowy hearts why The Shadow knows…do you ever wonder how that stuff helps invalidate and discredit legitimate information, like some of the things we talked about earlier?
The truth is out there, and usually much less boring than you’d hoped…but not always.
Because when you lump “giving black people free syphilis” and “literally selling weapons to both sides of a war and illegally in both cases at that” in with the chupacabra and the Jersey Devil, it becomes pretty easy to dismiss that stuff, doesn’t it? People right now think the coronavirus is a conspiracy. Most people – especially most white people – don’t realize that whole “CIA created the crack epidemic” thing is legit and proven, and at least one journalist was probably murdered for proving it.
Is it reasonable to assert that there are people out there deliberately keeping us distracted with nonsense and goofiness to both discredit genuine and well-founded concerns about abuses of power and to occupy our minds and keep us distracted from the “real enemy?” Probably not; there’s no evidence of it except the results. And, as one of my heroes George Carlin pointed out, it doesn’t require a formal, organized, overt conspiracy for people of like interests, like backgrounds, like social connections, and so forth to come to similar conclusions about the best way to protect those interests at the expense of others.
But isn’t it kind of funny we still think of the FBI infiltrating student groups, alien butt probes, the burning of the Koresh compound, Bigfoot, the MOVE bombing, Batboy, and the murder of Fred Hampton all in the same kind of general basket?
More to the point, isn’t it kind of funny that we don’t notice this more, talk about it more? And that’s what brings us to the last part of this conversation
How Can You Know?
We’re left then with one fundamental and disturbing question: for any given bit of information, how can we know what the truth really is?
Fortunately, although education has suffered greatly in the US over the last forty years (and maybe that’s a conspiracy too!), we still have the tools at hand to somewhat reliably weed our way through some of this stuff. Here are a few points for you to consider when weighing the evidence on any given questionable proposition:
Is there objectively verifiable proof? – one way or the other, what are the facts as best as you can determine them?
Have you checked your biases? – the number one place you can stop a bad or baseless theory in its tracks is with you not repeating it. Ask yourself why you want to support or oppose a given proposition. That’s not to say having a bias is bad; everyone does, whether they’re aware of it and honest about it or not. The point isn’t to “make sure you don’t have a bias.” The point is to make sure you’re identifying your biases and factoring them honestly in your critical thinking processes, and that very much includes making sure you apply the same degree of skepticism and analysis to things you like hearing as you do to things you don’t.
“Follow the money.” – don’t necessarily take this literally, or even as just a basic metaphor. Consider who benefits and who gets hurt if you do or don’t believe something. Consider whether anyone – a group, individual, vested interest – is pressuring you to feel one way or the other about it. Understand what people’s interests are, and what your own are, so you can understand the potential motivations for disinformation
Don’t get distracted. – consider that in any given situation, what you’re seeing as the dominant narrative or focus may be taking attention away from something that actually deserves that level of attention and isn’t getting it.
Common sense – the aphorisms all apply: if it sounds too good to be true it probably is, be wary of appeals to irrelevant biases like sex appeal or national pride or identity in an ethic, sexual, gender, religious, age, or other demographic
Get the tools! – Especially if you’re under 40 or so in the US, you probably didn’t get all the tools you need for good, clear evaluation of information sources in high school, and maybe even in college if you didn’t take a lot of communication-related courses.
One of the very best contemporary tools I can recommend is Robert Cialdini’s “Influence.” You should see an affiliate link (meaning I get a little bit if you order through that link) near this paragraph to the 6th edition on Amazon; at the time of this writing that edition is planned for release in a few weeks – the first substantial update since 5e in 2008 – but it’s not yet on the market. The previous edition was an excellent book used as a text for a class I took on social persuasion and influence in 2012, and it’s really fascinating – and more than a little scary sometimes – not only how susceptible we can be to compliance-gaining tactics, but how that remains true even when we know better. Again, you end up at that mirror. Cialdini’s “Influence” is a widely known and applied set of tools in the world of advertisers, marketers, MBAs, behavioral psychologists, sociologists, and more, and when you understand those tools and how they’re applied, you can see them everywhere. Many of us don’t even know we’re doing it when we are.
There are many resources to help develop your critical thinking and analytical skills out there, but for a single-book, reasonably easy to read and understand, that will rattle your preconceptions and get you thinking hard about what you’re doing, I can’t recommend anything more highly.
Conclusion
In the end there can be no question that media and information literacy, including the ability to parse through multiple meta-layers of disinformation and misinformation, will be critical life skills. Not all “propaganda” has a malicious motive; not all causes relying on noble motivations have noble motives.
That last part starts getting, again, into the question of the ongoing real-time, high-speed, self-aware evolution of the species to which I frequently refer in my writing and shows. For most of our history we’ve habitually reduced key questions to binary propositions – yes or no, black or white, up or down.
For the last few hundred years we’ve set the stage through philosophy and other endeavors for the elevation, wholesale, of the nature of our thinking to encompass a more spectral, multi-dimensional approach that is more in tune with the way the universe really functions, including understanding ideas like “place” and “purpose” in more effective and meaningful ways. I believe the near future of the species includes coming to real terms with concepts like compromise – what sort of behavior outside the norm are we willing to tolerate from our heroes, for example? Compare and contrast the cases of Gary Glitter and Jimmy Page and ask why one man has a career, and the other doesn’t, and whether that’s ethically legitimate. Don’t forget to get Lori’s perspective on the question.
Difficult and thorny questions that have a chance of not really leaving us feeling great no matter which way we go. But that’s what we’ve been equipping ourselves to handle for the last umpteen decades with literature and art and poetry and philosophy and the considerations of the Questions of the Ages.
Now we go from studying all this philosophy to truly applying it, so hitch up your getalong and dig in, kids, because it’s going to be a bumpy, confusing, and sometimes scary ride, but when it’s over you’ll be coming out into a much brighter world.
In this video holiday rant from December of 2009, JH goes off on racism, materialism, hypocrisy, and much more. Shot at Bronson Park in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
This is one of the first video rants I ever cut It’s very rough and honestly kind of sucks in retrospect – the subject isn’t of any great value (oooh, mtv doesn’t play enough music, standup comedians didn’t get enough mileage out of that by 1902 or anything). Still, it’s unquestionably me and my attitude, and of course by this point, in 2009, I’d been in and out of working in the wrestling business and the theater already, so cutting a promo wasn’t hard.
I miss my hair 😛
This was shot in Winters, California in June, 2009, on a VHS-C camcorder. I don’t believe I have the original footage anymore; I haven’t gone looking for it since I lost everything in Salt Lake City in 2018, but it may have ended up on the hard drive I lost then.
That shirt is my favorite and has its own funny story that I’ll tell some other time. It was a gift from my daughter when she was in high school. The irony that B&B is not, in fact, music is not lost on me.
Every six months or so, there’s another wave of clickbait and memes talking about “restore the Fairness Doctrine.” From this, one can reasonably conclude that there’s widespread support for this doctrine, and the public believes it should be “restored.” Even opportunistic politicians who know better will jump on this to give the impression they’re on the side of the people.
The public is wrong, and today we’re going to explore why.
“Wait,” some of you are thinking, “how can you possibly be against fairness?” That’s not what this is about, at all. Indeed, it’s the inherent lack of fairness that caused the thing to stop being enforced in the first place.
From the earliest days of broadcast media in the US, the FCC has had control over the “public airwaves,” ostensibly in the public interest. As part of this control, they developed and implemented the Fairness Doctrine. The airwaves were seen as a public resource, and the legal logic determined that the federal government, acting as the defender of the people’s interests, therefore had a right to regulate the content broadcast on those airwaves.
The wikipedia entry on FD summarizes it as well as I could: by the time it was implemented as a formal doctrine by the FCC in 1949, FD was “a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was—in the FCC’s view—honest, equitable, and balanced.”
The important phrase in that summary is “holders of broadcast licenses.” In the pre-cable era, all radio and television stations as well as the three major TV networks were required to purchase a license allowing them to broadcast on a given frequency. Adherence to FD was a contingency of that license, and if a broadcaster violated FD they were at risk of losing their broadcast license.
In the modern era, however, the majority of media is satellite radio, and cable and satellite television, and broadband internet. These media do not hold FCC broadcast licenses. You can’t revoke Fox News’ broadcast license (another empty pseudo-activist cry you’ll often see on social media), because they don’t have one. Instead they literally purchase specific bandwidth from the federal government, and they are then considered the owners of that bandwidth. It’s no longer “public airwaves,” but privately owned. This is more obvious in the case of cable television, but does also apply to satellite service – indeed, it’s probably fair to say that from a legal standpoint there’s no difference between the two, assuming both are privately owned rather than being owned and/or operated by the government (i.e. publicly).
Consequently, the FCC has exactly zero direct regulatory over content on these privately owned networks, and you do not want them to have that control. This concept is why you can see nudity on HBO, why you can order pornography from your local cable station, and why you can see other forms of “adult content,” be it sexually explicit or explicit violence, on your cable TV channels. It’s also what prevents the government from deciding that a Michael Moore documentary or a satire depicting national leaders in a bad light or a production of “1984” can’t be broadcast.
Digging Deeper: Why & How
The idea of protecting the “public airwaves” is based on the idea that, because that space is “public,” anyone with an operating receiver can access it, including children, with no further payment or access mechanism needed. The idea of not protecting private media in this way is based on the simple reality that you have to make a deliberate effort, and usually pay money, to access that content; your ten year old is not going to “accidentally” run into pornos on terrestrial radio or traditional television. Once you’ve paid for the service, the thinking goes, it’s up to you – not the service provider – to take the steps to ensure your kids (or you, or whomever) can’t access objectionable content. As an adult, you can choose to avoid that content; as a parent, you can employ an endless range of techniques to prevent your children from doing so.
It’s also well worth pointing out that the illegality of, for instance, child pornography or “snuff films” is not a function of FCC regulation but rather of other, existing laws. Those things are illegal outside the jurisdiction of the federal communication commission, therefore there’s no need for the FCC to create additional regulation forbidding them.
The FCC has no power at all to regulate the content on privately owned networks. They can’t tell HBO to not show boobs, they can’t tell your cable operator they’re not allowed to offer you “Resperm Of The Jedi.” That would be an egregious violation of the First Amendment; constitutionally, you have a right to create that content, and to view it, whether anyone else thinks it’s worthwhile or not, as long as other laws aren’t being violated in the process.
This brings us to the difficult reality of fairness doctrine: if you give the federal government the power to say Fox News can’t lie, you’re also giving them the power to say HBO can’t show nudity, or that I can’t criticize them on this website. Constitutionally there’s no way to have one regulation without making the other possible.
While we’re shutting down misunderstandings, the Fairness Doctrine was not “repealed by Reagan.” The FCC stopped enforcing it during the Reagan administration because it was patently unfair to terrestrial broadcasters; their ability to speak would be limited, but someone with enough money to make their own cable TV station (like Ted Turner and his then-emerging CNN) wouldn’t. Now you’ve created a money = freedom paradigm, and that can’t work in a free country. Any FCC rule created to regulate political speech would only apply to broadcast media – terrestrial radio and television, and the three “real” networks who actually own stations and distribute content to them. It would remain a free-for-all for everyone else.
The Fairness Doctrine was formally repealed by the Obama administration, because it was archaic, useless, and out of date.
If Not The Fairness Doctrine, Then What?
The solution is making the personal effort to become genuinely literate in media and information; to equip yourself with the tools to “think back” at misinformation and disinformation, to train your own mind not to simply accept a statement as true because it appeals to your biases, nor to reject it simply because it doesn’t.
Until we get our public education system back in working order so that this vital life skill is taught to all of us from the earliest age possible (for instance, we could start by teaching kids how to resist all the advertising aimed at them), the burden of that education is on each of us as individuals, and that can be a daunting task. It means breaking ourselves of the habit of trying to find push-button solutions to complex and difficult problems. It means admitting our fallibility and doing the hard work of setting aside our egos and pride, and it means spending a lot of time unlearning old falsehoods and re-learning some of the things we missed.
Modern Monetary Theory provides an excellent example for illustration. Most of us learned in middle school that Congress appropriates funding for all federal spending, but the reality that reveals went right past us. We still think of federal spending in terms of “my tax dollars,” but federal tax revenue doesn’t fund federal spending. Congress does. We know this, but we’re taught to avoid putting the pieces together to make a whole picture. We want to think of “our tax dollars” because we’re taught to believe that’s what gives us agency in government; that if we don’t pay taxes, we have no right to a voice. Problem is, that’s not true. Not only isn’t that true, but nothing that flows from that basic “spending my tax dollars” thinking is true. It’s not necessary to lay a heavy tax on the ultra-wealthy “to pay for” anything; the reason for progressive taxation is to stop too much money, and the power that goes with it, into too few hands. It doesn’t pay for anything; things are paid for when Congress says “pay for this,” and then the proper keystrokes are entered into the proper spreadsheets to create the dollars to “pay for this.”
It’s not the purpose of this article to get deep into MMT, but it does provide an example of the problems at hand, and their solutions. The primary problem at hand is we’ve been taught to think incorrectly; the primary solution at hand is to accept that reality and then do the work necessary to learn how to think correctly – to do the research, to be willing to admit to ourselves that we’ve been misled and misdirected, and to attain the knowledge necessary to fix it.
Fortunately, there are some excellent tools to help you achieve this. There are many, many books and websites out there dedicated to giving us those tools, but if I were to pick only one critical resource it would be a book by Robert Cialdini titled “Influence: Science and Practice. (disclosure: affiliate link)” This book not only gives an excellent foundation for identifying and neutralizing the compliance-gaining tactics employed by those who deliberately mislead, it’s also well-written to appeal to the casual reader as well as the academic, and the citations contained therein will take you through other important writing and writers like Korzybski’s theories of general semantics (a separate thing from basic semantics, the “meaning of meaning”), the theory of linguistic relativity (“communication creates reality”), and the work of philosophers and influencers like Edward Bernays (aka “the father of public relations.”)
If you visit and make studied use of the links in the above paragraph, you will develop the tools necessary to successfully resist attempts to disinform and misinform you, not in the sense that so many internet know-it-alls who get sucked in to ridiculous nonsense like QAnon and other conspiracy theories, but in a genuine, powerful way that will have a profound positive impact on how you process the information you consume.
That’s the solution to all of this, and it’s in your hands. Use it, and you’ll quickly stop relying on empty and unworkable but seductive “quick fix” ideas like restoring the fairness doctrine, and start vaccinating yourself against the overwhelming flow of disinformation that surrounds us all in the modern world.
Over the last few days, the hashtag-slash-movement #DefundThePolice has been making the rounds. Predictably and disappointingly, the Professional Left™ have been clutching their pearls and collapsing with the vapors because they just can’t understand why anyone would say something so radical.
Frankly, I’m sick of it. Folks in the audience, okay, I get that because that’s the narrative you’re fed and there’s little motivation to look outside it. People like Cenk Uygur at popular left wing media outlet The Young Turks, however, simply don’t have that excuse.
I want to be clear: I like Cenk. I like TYT. But it’s time we stopped letting them have those excuses. So here’s the basic breakdown:
– When you are negotiating, you always start from a position far in excess of what you actually expect. You want to pay ten bucks for that depression glass at the flea market, you start off by offering three and then haggle. This is the root of #DefundThePolice. It’s also a tactic that’s thousands of years old and there’s not the slightest excuse for anyone to not be aware of it.
– The “left” in the United States have always failed miserably in this regard, which is the root cause of what’s now known as the “Overton Window.” Like this:
Left: “fascism is bad.”
Right: “that’s very intolerant of you. Also, anyone who isn’t white and doesn’t own property is garbage.”
Left: “well, for the sake of upholding free expression, we guess we can allow some things to be said without accountability or challenge, if it’ll make you feel better and bring you to the table.”
Right, now at table: “Anyone who isn’t white and doesn’t own property is garbage.”
Left: “Well, that’s kind of racist.”
Right, now screaming, “anyone who isn’t white and doesn’t own property is garbage and how dare you call me a racist, that’s outrageously rude and we won’t stand forit!”
Left: “Well, we can understand that some people who aren’t white and don’t own property are garbage, so we can compromise on that. How about we only let you subjugate 90% of the non-whites, and agree that the 10% of them who own property aren’t garbage?”
Right: “Well, I never, how can you suggest that someone who isn’t One Of Us could be anything but garbage? You’re comparing us to garbage? And half those people don’t deserve their property anyway!”
Left: “Okay, we’ll give you half the non-white people’s property and agree that anyone who isn’t white and doesn’t own property is garbage, stipulating that garbage has rights too.”
Right: “No, garbage doesn’t have rights, you liberals are ridiculous! Now you want to give rights to garbage? You must be stupid, middle America will never allow that!”
Left: “Okay, we’ll compromise. We’ll take away half the property owned by non-whites and give it to you, and agree that everyone who isn’t a white property owner is garbage.”
The left then smugly announces they’ve forged a compromise with the right to secure the basic rights of white property owners. Progress!
That is an illustration of the Overton Window, and the right wing has owned it in the US since the mid-20th century at least.
With #DefundThePolice, someone on the left finally figured out how to play this game effectively. It’s intended to have shock value. It’s intended to jostle and upset and discomfort. Why? Because that’s what gets people talking, and it’s working. Dialogue is happening, people are being presented with propositions they believe unthinkable, and then when their attention is centered on the issue, being brought around to accepting basic realities about police and military over-funding, over-prioritization of punitive and authoritarian tactics instead of substantive and good-faith negotiation to ensure human rights are protected and the ideals of this nation upheld.
Note again: it’s working. People are having these conversations. Even the esteemed Mr. Uygur, in the middle of decrying and disclaiming the tactic, has done precisely what the statement is meant to do – get people thinking and engaging and talking about these issues, working toward real change, and being unafraid to be radical or outside the box.
What the people behind that movement-hashtag have done is deliberately stepped outside Noam Chomsky’s “range of allowable debate”:
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.- Noam Chomsky, ‘The Common Good‘ (p. 43)
This is a tactic employed many times by Bernie Sanders, with great success, and it will be successful here as well.
I’m not going to go into “what defund really means” because it means what it says. Police and paramilitary authoritarian agencies are far and away the most highly funded public service in this country, and those funds are tragically misallocated away from education, health care, mental health, social services, housing, food, transportation, and a thousand other things that actually do reduce crime.
Now we’re finally having that conversation in earnest, and we wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for those radical, “unworkable” hashtags and dialogues that are supposedly so self-defeating and off-putting.
QED: It’s working. And when we get to the “compromise” position instead of “well how about we just promise not to use the tanks unless we really really need them,” the compromise position is “get rid of all the tanks,” and the hard position is “or we’ll just get rid of your entire existence.”
That’s how we win, and that’s why #DefundThePolice, #AbolishPolice, and other “radical” hashtags and ideas aren’t just “not the wrong way to do this,” but the best way anyone’s even tried in a long, long time.
(Somewhat ironically, a technical error prevented me from getting an archive of the first night with the “new set.” I’ve embedded the livestream from Facebook here, but I’ve only got the last ten minutes locally and right now FB is not letting me download the video directly. If/when I can get this archived on YouTube, I will. For now, you can find it here: https://www.facebook.com/144898762238389/videos/496311224370776). Yes I know the audio’s out of sync.)
Why is Bernie running as a Democrat?
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders takes the stage on the first night of the second 2020 Democratic U.S. presidential debate in Detroit, Michigan, July 30, 2019. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
One of the most-often asked questions I see – or depending on who’s talking and what their purpose is, accusations – about Bernie Sanders is why he’s running on the Democratic ticket. There are a number of reasons, some easier to see and obvious, some not so much.
First and foremost, he’s running on the Democratic ticket because the two major parties have the process locked down and an independent candidate doesn’t have a chance in hell at winning.
Now maybe – MAYBE – if he finds a way to get on the national ticket without the democratic party at this point, if they decide to keep playing to power, depending on how things go over the next couple of months – after all this work and in this time of great crisis that screams out with the voice of millions that the things Sanders has worked for must be done now, it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility that he could win the electoral college as a write-in. He needs 270 votes. 9 states, for a total of 53 electors, don’t allow write-ins.
The rest – 483 – do, with various requirements. In Michigan, for instance, you have to file a letter of intent by the beginning of September and have a list of electors. Each of them must have been a resident of the congressional district for which they’re voting for one year, and a US citizen for ten. But right now I think the inclination of the campaign is to do everything possible to save the one remaining party structure that *could* be saved to energize a united President and Congress to get some things done. Certainly that’s not the Republicans, so the Dems are what’s left.
But in the end, Bernie’s allegiance is to this country, not a party. How that will lead him to decide the best way to pursue this situation, I don’t know. I think if he made sure to dot his I’s and cross his T’s he could be an eligible write-in candidate. Depending on how many districts in which he can win the popular vote at that point, he’s got a margin of 213 electoral votes to work with.
But in the end his allegiance is to doing the right thing for the people of this nation. He’s entirely uncorrupted by special interests.
That’s. Why. The. Party. Doesn’t. Want. Him. To. Win.
That’s why the power that props the party up, including all the media companies who make all the big campaign donations, do not want him to win.
That is why it does not require a conspiracy. The big money interests, including those who control most of the information you see, do not want a healthy, educated population. Having a healthy, educated population creates opportunity for you which means it creates competition for them in an “open market.”
This is not an open market. If this market was open, we’d all be making plenty. We’re not.
This is not a free country.
You are not free when you don’t have your health.
You are not free when you aren’t taught quality critical thinking skills. You can not be free if you can’t think clearly. You can’t think clearly if you’re surrounded by carefully crafted messaging with the direct purpose of keeping you stuck where you are and falling like you have been for decades.
It would be easy and poetic to say that we’ve become so advertising-besotted that we can’t tell a real message from an ad anymore, but sometimes poetry doesn’t tell the story. The reality is not that you are stupid.
The reality is that you have been kept ignorant. What you hear and see shapes what you believe, and no matter what your race, class, culture, identity, background, current status, that is the truth.
There is a very small group of people who control what you hear and see for their own interests. That is also the truth. In much the same way it does not require a formal conspiracy for like interests to pursue like ends, it does not require traditional authoritarianism to keep at least enough people at heel to discourage the rest who aren’t from rising up in protest.
One of the ways that works is through recursive authoritarianism. So and so has this going on at worked that could be improved or has ethical considerations that concern you, but it’s clear that your best interest, and the company’s, is to simply not acknowledge that out loud. So you agree to say nothing and now whatever your position, you have to use it to ensure nobody else does either. Authoritarianism.
You are constantly at risk of losing your livelihood if you do the right thing ethically when you’re doing business. I have been constantly paraphrasing a line from Robert Heinlein lately: the survival of the species is the only universal morality.
Willful ignorance – the selfish pretense to stupidity
A whole BUNCH of people are about to hit what a lot of people, including people like me, have lived with most or all of our lives. It is not going to be pretty.
And where we are mostly not prepared is in our own minds and hearts to just admit that we have been wrong, and do something about it.
You are watching everything change, right now. It is changing precisely because IT HAS TO.
It’ll happen the easy way with good leadership – leadership that has consistently stood *against* all these abuses of power and resources, who has consistently worked in the best interests of *the people* and *the nation* and long-term sustainability and health and education and all the other things that go along with REAL freedom.
This is not an acute problem. This is the predictable result of a systemic problem. We can face that, or we can KEEP trying to pretend “it can’t happen here, not to us, we’re good people, my deity wouldn’t do that to me, we’re just trying to [insert euphemism to rationalize all the ego-driven bullshit of this planet], we’re doing the right thing, all these people who want all these changes are just self-interested, I just want what’s best for me.”
What’s best for all of us is to start working together instead of against each other. Abundance is everywhere. We have everything we need. We just refuse to let go of the things we don’t, because they’re comfortable. Because of that, we’ve all become far LESS comfortable than if a few of us weren’t so obstinate about their comfort.
The future is scary. The unknown is scary. The future is unknown. What is known is that we are at a key point in human history when we can no longer continue to pretend and act at the game of political leadership. We must lead, individually starting with ourselves, and in the world starting with a capable, competent, non-nonsense president who walks into the office with zero allegiance to anyone but the people who elected him.
The global coronavirus pandemic absolutely must be dealt with in an immediate fashion, and it is – as much as the ham-handed boobs currently running the country can manage it. But we absolutely must not ignore the lessons it brings, because frankly there will be more if we don’t re-prioritize IMMEDIATELY. To simply deal with the immediate problem is to remain unprepared for the next one.
Bernie Sanders understands that and is doing his best with a system that has been corrupted almost beyond repair. Personally, I hope if he loses the Democratic nomination he chooses to move forward as a write-in candidate in any state where he can’t get on the ballot as an independent, immediately if he loses the Democratic primary, which *right now* it appears he may, but we’ll have to see what happens. The concept of faithless electors exists, too. We have no idea how the national conventions, which are traditionally where the nominations take place, will turn out yet. A lot can change between now and then. I think it would be a mistake to start running independently *before* the official things are officially official, unless they try to drag ass past the deadlines for indys or write-ins to get on ballots.
But if they officially reject Sanders as a nominee…boy. I just can’t see him as head of the Senate. That’s not his job. And the offer would have to be made – which would immediately break Biden’s campaign promise – and he’d have to accept, neither of which we know anything of right now.
This started out being a “classic” repost and by the time I got done fixing the twenty-year-old writing, it was a new article. The original article has been reposted as originally written in late 2001/2002, at this link. Doublespeak (2001)
Doublespeak is the art and subterfuge of using language to misdirect, misinform, or flat-out lie. It often involves logical fallacy, intentional appeals to emotion over fact, and other crimes against critical thought. It can take the form of euphemism, “soft” language, the use of words and phrasing that have a high emotional valence but low informational content to appeal to the baser instincts rather than the intellect.
As a huge fan of artists like George Carlin and Bill Hicks, the use of language and euphemism is simultaneously fascinating, horrifying, and hilarious to me. The contortions people will go through to avoid acknowledging a simple reality are just insane.
A great example of this came up in my personal life while this article was in draft: apparently it’s now fashionable to refer to yourself as “sober” if you’ve used “hard” (physically addictive) drugs in the past (e.g. opioids, amphetamines and methamphetamines, cocaine) but now you only smoke pot.
This is, of course, absolutely silly; a self-serving, dishonest, manipulative, and disingenuous word game played by addicts (and I am one so please spare me the complaints about your value judgements relating to that word) so they can pretend their addiction is somehow “different” from the addiction that has social stigma attached. You’re not sober if you’re high – that’s not even an observation, it’s a tautology. No amount of self-serving wordplay will change that – and in the context of addiction, it’s potentially fatal bit of self-deceit, due to the nature of addiction and what it does to the thought processes of the addict.
This underscores just one of the reasons doublespeak is so insidious and harmful; it helps people maintain self-destructive lies. What amazes me is people craft these excuses for their spin and jive, and they’re all self-serving bovine excrement. “I don’t want to be stigmatized as an addict; so I just stigmatize everyone else who’s an addict and then reject that label for myself because I’m better than those people I’m unfairly stigmatizing in the very process of complaining about being unfairly stigmatized.” And we’ve become so corrupted in our thinking that people don’t even hear themselves when they say this stuff.
Fundamental Dishonesty
Doublespeak is destructive in that it is essentially dishonest. It can be, and often has been, used as a tool of manipulation by governments and other leaders and officials to attempt to avoid consequences of egregiously terrible actions by making them sound less terrible. It is this particular aspect of doublespeak that will consume most of the rest of this article.
Each year, the National Council of Teachers of English announces the Doublespeak awards. They describe the award as “an ironic tribute to public speakers who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-centered.”
Without further ado, I present you with some shining examples of doublespeak.
President George Herbert Walker Bush – When the US invaded Panama in 1989 to bring Manuel Noriega to justice for allegations of drug trafficking and a host of other charges, Bush was positively bent over backwards trying to avoid using the word “invasion.” Instead, he “sent troops down to Panama.” He “deployed forces.” He “directed United States forces to execute…preplanned missions in Panama.” Never once did we “invade.”
During his campaign for President in 1988, Bush swore that there would be “no net loss of wetlands.” After he took office, he “clarified” his promise to really mean there would be no net wetlands loss “except where there is a high proportion of land which is wetlands.”
In English, this means “except where the protection is needed most,” like the Alaskan Tundra, the Florida Everglades, and the Outer Banks and Great Dismal Swamp areas of North Carolina.
After the first US-Iraq War in 1990 (as Bill Hicks pointed out so eloquently, even referring to this event as a “war” is an exercise in doublespeak), Bush proposed a Middle East disarmament initiative that was supposed to stop “the proliferation of conventional and unconventional weapons in the Middle East.” Less than a month after this proposal was made, the Bush administration announced plans to sell over $5 billion in new weapons to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.
President George W. Bush – Ol’ Gee Dubya’s presence on the awards list should come as no surprise. Indeed, I predicted it in the original (2002) version of this article:
Although he hasn’t won one yet, I suspect that GHW’s little boy is gonna get a nomination himself, for declaring a war on terrorism and then announcing the sale of 50 brand new F-16’s to Israel, a country which is by any standard engaged in terrorist acts, covertly and overtly. Even more disconcerting is the fact that this author is questioning whether to delete this entry altogether, because one of the first acts in the “war on terrorism” was to make dissent against the actions of the US Government in this “war” a crime in and of itself.
Bush II ended up winning twice by himself, and once with his entire cabinet. Among the linguistic felonies NCTE selected:
In 2003, NCTE’s award centered around the heavy euphemism employed in the search for Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (which, at the time of this writing 17 years later, still haven’t been found). Use of phrasing like “a growing fleet of…aerial vehicles” and the assertion that “Iraq continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised” were complete fabrications, with these and many others intended to suggest that we actually knew the weapons were there but hadn’t found them yet, when the functional reality was that all we knew is that we had sold Iraq various materiel that could be used to create weapons, but never had any evidence they had done so.
I will bolster NCTE’s award citation by pointing out that one of the most egregious uses of doublespeak in the contest of the second Iraq War was Bush II’s repeated reference to Saddam Hussein “gassing his own people,” “a murderous tyrant who has already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people,” and so forth, but never once mentioned that not only did we sell them all of the gear and intelligence they used for those attacks, it was Bush’s own Defense Secretary, Don Rumsfeld, who demanded Iraq be removed from the State Department’s list of terror sponsoring nations so we could sell that materiel to them, back in 1983 when he was acting as Special Envoy to the Middle East under Ronald Reagan.
Bush’s 2006 award was given in recognition of his September 15, 2005 speech regarding Hurricane Katrina, in which he made lovely, flowery remarks about poverty and racial discrimination and how we needed to ‘confront this poverty” and “rise above the legacy of inequality…” a week after he signed an executive order allowing federal contractors rebuilding from Katrina to pay less than the prevailing wage, suspending a sixty-four year old law to do it.
But wait, there’s more!
More Examples
I don’t want to get into the underhanded and dishonest game of simply re-writing press releases and calling it original work; you can view the historical list of winners of the Doublespeak Award at the NCTE website.
There are, of course, plenty of examples that haven’t won awards.
President Bill Clinton – Many readers here should be able to remember Clinton’s most egregious assaults on critical thinking fairly well. His most famous, of course, came during the Lewisnki scandal, during which Clinton (and his wife, Hillary) engaged in some of the most comical linguistic calisthenics ever recorded. Clinton’s initial position was that he was entirely innocent of wrongdoing, going so far as to say “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinski” during a press briefing prior to the 1998 State of the Union address. It subsequently came to light, however, that Clinton was deliberately misleading. He later testified that his intent was to use the definition of “sexual relations” laid out in the investigation documents, which were worded in such a way that, by the letter of the given definition, simply receiving oral sex was not “sexual relations” because Clinton didn’t touch any sexual part of Lewinski’s body, and the definition given during the impeachment investigation required that touch to qualify as “sexual relations.”
Several months later, Clinton finally admitted that “we did have a relationship that was…inappropriate,” but this was only after a series of grammatical distortions that confounds description. Aside from the core deceit, other “highlights” of this episode include Hillary’s “vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring…” interview, and the infamous exchange described in the Starr Report where Clinton’s prevaricative response to a question about whether a lie had been told went as follows:
QUESTION: “Your—that statement is a completely false statement. Whether or not Mr. Bennett knew of your relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, the statement that there was no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form with President Clinton was an utterly false statement. Is that correct?”
CLINTON: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word is means. If is means is, and never has been, that’s one thing. If it means, there is none, that was a completely true statement.
No matter your definition of “is,” it’s safe to say that the above is a prime example of doublespeak.
President Jimmy Carter – In late 1979, when the US military failed miserably in trying to recover US hostages being held in Tehran, Iran, Carter reported the action as an “incomplete success.” Carter went on to justify the government bailout of the Chrysler corporation by saying that “this legislation does not violate the principle of letting free enterprise function on its own, because Chrysler is unique in its present circumstances.” Like his successors, Carter was less than forthcoming about foreign diplomatic policy relating to arms reduction. He bragged that his administration never supported “nations which stand for principles with which their people violently disagree, and which are completely antithetical to our principles.” In spite of this heroic stance, the US under the Carter administration continued to provide aid both military and financial to some 26 governments which were known to systematically violate the unalienable rights of their people.
Lest we think this is only about Presidents, let us turn our attention to the Judicial Branch and the 1991 US Supreme Court – The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution reads as follows: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
In 1991’s case of Harmelin v. Michigan, the Supremes heard a case in which the defendant had been sentenced to life without possibility of parole for possessing 672 grams of cocaine. In their ruling, it was decided that while such a punishment might be cruel, it was not unusual, and therefore it was constitutional.
The logic behind this ruling, in simple English, is that as long as a punishment is frequently inflicted, it is constitutional, regardless of how cruel it is. Perhaps our founding fathers should have said “cruel or unusual…”
The court also offered an early preview of the current kerfluffle at the southern US border and the endless game-playing about refugees seeking asylum.
In 1980, the Refugee Act was passed, authorizing political asylum to a person with “a well-grounded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, membership in a particular group, or political opinion.” In a small town in Guatemala in the late mid-80’s, Jario Elias-Zacarias, 19, was attacked by masked guerrillas wielding automatic weapons in his home. The guerrillas demanded that Elias-Zacarias fight with them against the Guatemalan government.
Rather than fight, Zacarias fled to the US to seek political asylum, but was denied. He appealed, and eventually the case made it to the US Supreme Court where Justice Antonin Scalia, in writing his judgment to deny the young man asylum, said that he had failed to show that the guerrillas would persecute him for his political opinions “rather than because of his refusal to fight with them.” Justice Scalia never got around to explaining how refusing to fight with rebel guerrillas against his government isn’t a political opinion.
US Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) – Hatch, a proponent of the death penalty, once said that “capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.” Read that again: state-sanctioned killing of human beings is “our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.”
We as a nation have become seduced by conspiracies. The latest: That BP is actually showing a *second* well in the gulf on their cameras, because the first is still leaking and they don’t want us to know.
Bullshit. We have to stop passing on bullshit information like this when there are important things we can be doing that actually matter and will make a difference to our ultimate survival.
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” Known variously as “Hanlon’s Razor” and “Heinlein’s Razor,” this basic idea forms a solid line between healthy skeptic and frothing whackjob. (On the ambiguity of sourcing; I first read the phrase, in precisely this working, in Heinlein’s “Time Enough For Love,” published in 1973; the Wiki article that insists on attributing the phrase to Robert J. Hanlon cites his first publication in 1980. While in fairness it must be said that the basic formulation is at least a couple of centuries old, if the choice is between Hanlon and Heinlein, Heinlein clearly gets the nod.)
– The wells in question are less than 250 feet from each other. Not “miles” as has often been asserted.
– Several of these videos tie everything back in with “The global banking elite.” This phrase inevitably proves, when one follows the trail of paranoid conspiracy theorism back from the person who utters that phrase to the identity of the “global banking elite,” to be “OMGJOOZ!” This has been so consistent that I don’t bother following the trail anymore when I see this phrase. I know where it’s going – to THE J0000Z THE EVUL JOOOOZ WHO CONTROL EVERYTHING IT’S THE JOOZ THE JOOZ THE JOOOOOOZ ZIONIST ROTHCHILD BILDERBURG CITY BANK OF ENGLAND FREEMASONS UFO’S BLACK HELICOPTERS AND JOOOOOOZ. F’n ridiculous bullshit is what it is.
– Nobody has managed to explain what purpose there would be to this GREAT BIG CONSPIRACY, nor have they explained how enormous companies with the power and resources to push governments around and demand carte blanche to destroy the planet at will for profit are suddenly so inept that a couple of rednecks and slackers with nothing to do but stare at a live fed of the ocean floor all day can see through their clever ruse…a ruse which is designed to what, convince us there’s no oil spill? If they were going to do that, why not do it two months ago? You know, before everybody started worrying about Armageddon, before BP took a multi-billion-dollar stock hit and destroyed their brand name, before people were pissed off and scared to actually start getting off their asses and thinking about how to reduce their dependence on oil? Because you know, THAT kind of conspiracy would have made sense. This is like a conspiracy to go close the barn door after the horses have escaped.
This horrendous catastrophe has emphasized, in the strongest terms possible without causing immediate profound loss of life, that we must eliminate our dependence on petroleum. Not on “foreign oil,” on oil period. It has shined a bright light on the stark reality that we must find alternatives to petrochemicals, and we must, immediately begin doing everything that we haven’t but should have been to reduce consumption, or these kinds of things will keep happening and building on other things until this planet is no longer suitable for human life.
People don’t want to deal with that. At ALL. They’d rather ignore it and fiddle while Rome – or Moscow – burns. Tell you the truth, I’d rather myself. I’m sure you would as well – who among us wouldn’t rather have fun than worry about all these heavy issues? I understand and I sympathize…but that attitude is so dangerous and so hypnotizing. You can already see it – the discussion has already begun to shift away from “we must reduce our consumption” to “we must find someone else to blame.”
Because we don’t want to blame ourselves. If we do that it means we have to give up our comforts and go through the difficulty and expense of learning new habits. It’s almost a really gigantic, society-magnitude manifestation of the suicidal hopelessness response. I’m sure you learn of this in Finland – the danger of being lost out in the cold and thinking “I’ll just lay down for a minute, a nap would be so nice,” and then you wake up with your ass frozen to death.
I’m afraid that’s what we’re seeing right now in many people, this kind of response. Ignore it and it will go away. Stop thinking about what I have to do to make my little difference and start trying to force the Big Evil Oil Company to solve everything. If we can just be angry enough at them we can make them fix it with their Big Evil Company magic and we’ll still be able to drive our Humvee’s and Escalades in the suburbs, we won’t have to change our own behavior.
We’re wrong. We will have to change our behavior. If we don’t, we will die. We must stop trying to divert our own attention from the things we need to do to stop abusing this planet.
