I know I have
been
crowing
about
hyperreality
a lot lately, and I apologize to those who are getting tired of the
term. But when Karl Rove goes on Charlie Rose to mind-wipe America
by insisting that Congress led the march to occupy Iraq and secure its
oil reserves, I'm pulled back into hyperreality's vertiginous vortex
without resistance. It is everywhere, kind of like The Force, or
Jesus. It's the webwork we're caught in, all of us. There is no
escaping it, especially if you live in the reality-based community.
After all, it was most likely Karl Rove himself who told Ron Suskind the following:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Creating reality? I thought reality created all of us -- before I read Jean Baudrillard or Aldous Huxley or Karl Rove or any number of hyperrealists who understand that perception is reality, as marketers and advertisers have been telling us for decades. And while Suskind was right to dredge up the ghost of the Enlightenment and empiricism, he forgot to mention that the former is just a word that fell apart under the weight of class and resource wars, while the latter is incomplete for our purposes. Empiricism, after all, can only get you so far, because you can't see or experience everything. And if you're relying on those who can experience more than you, in the end, you're merely relying on their word.
And we know how that usually turns out.
From the Declaration of Independence establishing equal rights for everyone except women, slaves or the Native Americans we nearly exterminated to control North America to the Constitution and Bill of Rights which still to this day cannot establish our total access to habeus corpus, free speech or any other rights, we are at the mercy of language and those who manipulate it for our lives. And Karl Rove? The dude knows how to manipulate with force.
He understands that, decades down the line, the party line on the Bush administration will blur, as Americans, who have a hard enough time remembering what happened to them yesterday, forget the intricacies and details of geopolitical dilemmas past. This is, of course, why America could get behind an invasion and occupation of Iraq, or the political assassination of Saddam Hussein, a man we placed in power for the specific purpose of controlling the country's oil reserves and murderously pacifying its populace, who themselves are drunk on thousands of years of tribal differences that amount to nothing. It is why they could forget, barely two years after 9/11, that Saddam had nothing to do with it at all. Or why they could forget that the Saudis, who bankrolled and mostly comprised the terrorist group that attacked us, were our real enemies.
It is also why Rove's Office of Special Counsel spent much time erasing every incriminating piece of email he could with the help of a group called, hilariously enough, Geeks On Call. The nerds gave his hard drive a level-seven mind wipe, I kid you not, which is what Rove and his pals have spent the last two decades giving an all-too-willing American populace, who woke up too late in the procedure to stop it. By the time their polled dissatisfaction caught up to "reality," Rove's hyperreality had already replaced it.
And it will again, if Charlie Rose is any indication. The media, to mangle McLuhan, is the message, Rove understands, and it doesn't matter how large the lie is. All that matters is that the media repeats it, over and over again. Eventually, through the powers of language, apathy and consumption, the lie will become truth.
So yes, hyperreality is here to stay for the reality-based community. The exponentially increasing ubiquity of the internet and media in American life mandates it. We unplugged from the real world and jacked into MTV's Real World a long, long time ago. Revisionists like Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch may not be anything new -- the Germans had Goebbels, the Romans had Nero, the Catholics have the Pope -- but in the information age, their reliance on erasure and drive-wiping is more than manipulative. It is inevitable.
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Also, your comment on consciences as being impairments to rational decision making was great.
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Just to clarify, I was referring to the lack of, or deficiency within, their conscience.
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Separating "emotion" and "intellect" into components isn't viable.
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What I find interesting is the battle that goes on in people between these components of their being. That's how cognitive dissonance can result. I've concluded that emotion trumps logic (intellect), especially when that emotion is fear. (Arianna has written posts on the lizard brain.) Conscience is also tied to emotion, since those who have strong consciences don’t feel comfortable engaging in unethical or immoral behavior.
So, what you see as separating components, I see as identifying parts that make up the whole.
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Separating the sociopaths from the normals works if the sociopaths are the only danger…The enablers are the thing.
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Something IS going wrong within the knowing enablers, either being ruled by greed for money/power or some other pressure acting upon them. They too, are able to disengage from their consciences. Jonathan Turley recently stated that Nancy Pelosi promised Bush that there would be no impeachment hearings during the rest of his term. Turley implied that Pelosi’s motivation was lust for power for the Democrats, not wanting to upset the apple cart for the Dems (I would argue that her inaction will do the opposite). Somehow, I think there is some fear involved on her part as she has seen Bush up close, and he’s way scary from a distance.
There are numerous manipulation tactics to be aware of such as lying (including by omission), denial, minimization, selective inattention, rationalization, diversion, evasion, covert intimidation, guilt-tripping, toxic shaming, playing the victim role, vilifying the victim, playing the servant role, seduction (charm offensive), projecting the blame, feigning innocence, feigning confusion, and brandishing anger (false outrage).
To learn about these tactics in depth, I highly recommend a book on Amazon called "In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing With Manipulative People" by Dr. George K. Simon.
- Tom
The only glimmer of hope in this, is that with the internet, people can readily look up all the speeches Bush gave to Congress and the American public, review his comments and urgency to get Congressional approval for a war in Iraq. Regardless as to what Rove says now, the records speak for themselves. He may hope that by visiting Bill O'Reilly and a few other spin media propagandists, the repetition of his lies may convince a few brain-dead, apathetic or lazy souls into actually believing him.
Rove is delusional, like Nero and Jesus, et al. It helps to be delusional when you work on creating "realities." Some delusional people work for good, some are harmless, and some rare few are among the greater monsters of history. Rove belongs in the last category. Let's he has exited the stage of history.
been fired some time ago. But most people are too aloof, don't care about politics, too busy to make a living, while always being brainwashed that the US is the best country,
and they believe it. You see, it does not take
all that much.
So far, so good.
Karl's has worked out quite well, actually.
It's like a Chinese finger puzzle, Karl.
Think about it.
Delusions of Grandeur
Illusions from the Ash Heap
Rove, thy name is nothing.
http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/morris/kelmscottjpeg/DSC_0233.jpg
GWBush.
Voters should have a class action suit against ad-man Rove and have his lying ass sent to jail.
Enjoy the Bush-Cheney out-of-control, deregulated, greed-driven, irresponsible
frat-bratty, war-profiteering economy.
And Arianna was dead right that this play might have actually grown some legs if these were still the days before all the meddling kids on the internet interfered.
if we want to be smart americans, we need to be able to learn and we need to be able to teach. right now, neither one of those happen very often in this country.
now let's all sing--
oh, i'm glad to be un-american . . .