Chapter VII, Part 1
VII. Discursive Themes of Social Division
VII.A
Tracking social discourse
1.
In recent decades, the ideological polarisation between right versus left in
English-speaking societies (and many others) has been drastically overlaid by the economic
polarisation between top versus bottom.1 If the ideological centre
seems to be in remission, so does the economic ‘middle class’. Those
politicians on both right and left who align themselves with the top and against
the bottom create a hollow ‘new left’ cloning the old right, and a vitriolic
‘new right’ moved over to the far right. The latter are obsessed with money
and power, and with an agenda to abolish every trace of the social safety net by
their Orwellian term ‘welfare reform’, which would, among other things
[1989] get rid of Aid to Families with Dependent Children,
make cuts in Medicaid and turn it into a block grant, cut home heating
allowances and food stamps, and deny assistance to welfare moms who can’t find
work.2
Apparently,
the vaunted ‘compassionate conservatives’ at the top of the world’s
richest country want America’s ‘unfortunate’ to be not just poor, but
destitute; not just sick, but untreated; not just cold, but freezing; not just
hungry, but starving. Not just the ‘survival of the fittest’, but the
extinction of the ‘unfit’.
2.
Thus intent is chillingly plain in the voting record of the now supposed
‘Vice-President’ Richard Cheney, who when in Congress consistently voted
against the civil rights programs, federal immunization program, school lunch
and child nutrition programs, support services for the elderly, family violence
prevention programs, college student aid programs, adult education, bilingual
education, the Equal Rights Amendment, minimum Social Security benefits, the
Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Superfund hazardous waste
cleanup program…and (almost alone) even against the bans on armour-piercing
cop-killer bullets and on guns that fool metal detectors.3
3.
If Cheney often lost on these spiteful votes, supposed ‘President’
George W. Bush often wins by acting through executive order with no vote.4
Just in the first few months ‘in office’, he slashed the budgets of
libraries, public housing repairs, child abuse programs, workforce training for
the dislocated, renewable energy research, fuel efficient cars, the
Environmental Protection Agency, the Community Access Program, the Girls and
Boys Club of America, the Childcare and Development Grant — even
though, all put together, the money thus ‘saved’ couldn’t make a dent in
the trillion-dollar deficits projected from his binges of ‘tax relief’ for the
very rich.5 And don’t bother ask the ‘President’ why, since he
is evidently misled by his title of ‘commander in-chief’ to regard
government as a military operation:
[1990] I’m the commander, I do not need to
explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being President.
[…] I don’t feel I owe anyone an explanation. (speaking to the National
Security Council)
The
rolls of the victims of these cuts by a chest-beating ‘compassionate
conservative’ and ‘education president’ were already long by 2003,
just for example: 33,000 in child
care programs; 332,000 in home heating programs; 36,000 in meals for minors
programs; 8,000 in homeless child education programs; and 50,000 in after-school
programs (Bushwhacked).6
4.
Surely the increasing disproportion between the tiny empowered minority
scrambling to the top and the vast disempowered majority slipping toward the
bottom is flagrantly incompatible with both the theory and the practice of
democracy. Public and private discourse become steadily more conflicted as
discursive strategies or themes compete to inform or 'disinform' the population,
to legitimise or illegitimise some position or proposal, all of which raises a
veritable gamut of social, political, and economic issues for an ecologist study of text and discourse. In
this chapter, I shall raise some of these issues and identify and illustrate
some strategies of discourse and counter-discourse which inhabit them, reserving
for later the in-depth analysis of individual texts.
VII.B
Modes of speaking 1: Strategies for inclusion and exclusion
5.
First, we can review some strategies you can use to include or empower yourself,
usually excluding or disempowering others, at least by implication. Self-promoting
tells how superior you are, as is common in the discourses of public relations
such as advertising [1991] and politics [1992].
[1991] We are absolutely the best service available to help
fight or beat a speeding ticket […] without you discussing your speed or
driving, [by finding] rules, regulations or procedures that ‘they’ have not
followed (Ticket Killer)www
[1992] We are the most
environmentally friendly Agriculture Ministry in Europe. (Minis-ter John Gummer,
who ate a hamburger and force-fed another to his 4-year old daughter on British
TV in 1990 to ‘prove’ that mad cow disease poses no danger to humans)
With
everything claiming to be ‘the best’, a special irony inheres in the
Collocation ‘nothing but the best’ which returned 74,226 hits from AltaVista
on the Internet, glorifying music, dogs, knives, furniture, health care, real
estate, football camps…
6.
Academic discourses too become self-promoting as they are increasingly colonised
by public relations:
[1993] Northface
University is establishing the finest university in the world for software
developers. […] The courses are fast-paced, utilize leading edge technologies,
and reinforce best practice skills. […] Students are mentored by some of the
most well-respected thought leaders in the software industry.www
[1994] With our reputation as one of the UK’s leading
centres of teaching excellence and research innovation, we’re making a lasting
impact on the next generation of innovators and business leaders (Sheffield City
Polytechnic)7
Staff must do their own self-promotion on ‘evaluation forms’
inquiring how we have ‘improved our teaching and research’ since the last
evaluation and plan to do before the next (should any time and energy remain
after filling out the piles of forms).
7.
Patronising seeks power by disempowering others. You can address them as
ignorant
or
stupid
[1995];
or
you
can
loftily
bestow
praise
like
a
special
favour [1996].
[1995] You are patronising me […] far more that any sexist male could. I am a woman with a brain, […] I do not require anyone to decide which bits of books I can manage to read without straining my poor little intellect to the breaking point. (Elizabeth Elliot)www
[1996] ‘You grow quite professional as a landlady. I hear
on all sides of the excellence of your establishment.’ Wilson knew she was
being patronised if not mocked outright (Lady’s Maid)
The
term originated as a process of social or financial support from a powerful
‘patron’, but the current sense suggests tendering unwanted or irrelevant
support.
8.
Jargonising seeks power by deploying a strenuous style of gratuitously
technical, obscure, or pretentious expressions to empower insiders and
disempower outsiders. Legal discourse or ‘legalese’ has been one prime
domain, viz.:
[1997] Financial products supplied
by a financial supply facilitator are not financial supplies. However, a supply
of an interest facilitated by a financial supply facilitator is a financial
supply by the financial supply provider if the supply of the interest is one to
which regulation 40-13 applies. (Australian Treasurer on the Goods and
Services Tax)
[1998] Trial court did not abuse its discretion by ordering a post-judgement
temporary injunction to enforce a permanent injunction that was part of a final
judgement when the court made adequate findings that the permanent injunction
was violated and tailored the post-judgement injunction to only enforce the
provisions of the permanent injunction. (Minnesota Court
of Appeals in the Minneapolis Star Tribune) 8
The
jargonising of discourses in statistics can be wondrously theoretical, since they don’t need to directly
confront reality or address the public, e.g.:
[1999] Randomization defines the parameter of interest
expressed as a function of multiple endogenous variables. It orthogonalizes the
treatment variable simultaneously with respect to the other regressors in the
model and the disturbance term for the conditional population. (Randomization)www
Recently,
too, the jargon of computer ‘technospeak’ has scaled new depths:
[2000] CGMud is a free,
softcoded system with a cached on-disk database and dynamic single inheritance,
supporting graphical I/O via a custom client. (CGMud)www
[2001] The ABC-PDQ 381 environments into hex and
alphageomosaic applications virtualized to PIA DIP switch functionality at 120010
baud. (XERCOM in InfoWorld)
Unlike the discourses of
law or statistics, these are, perversely enough, intended to attract paying
clients and customers, who, if they can’t understand them, can at least be too
impressed to resist or to ask unwanted questions.
9.
The term shoptalk can designate discursive strategies of a professional
group to facilitate insider use rather than to impress each other or outsiders.
An engaging example stems again from the computer industry, but from the
community of ‘hackers’,
defined by themselves as persons who ‘program enthusiastically (even
obsessively)’, or ‘enjoy exploring the details of programmable systems and
stretching their capabilities’.9 (The term should not be confused
with the journalistic misuse of ‘hacker’ for the ‘cracker’ who breaks
through the computer security codes.) Their shoptalk described in [2002] fits
their occupation of manipulating symbol systems as ‘languages’ of the
computer.
[2002]
Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and inventive in their
use of language. [They] regard slang formation and use as a game to be played
for conscious pleasure. Their inventions thus display an almost unique
combination of the neotenous enjoyment of language-play with the discrimination
of educated and powerful intelligence.
Shoptalk
terms devised to designate people may be Ameliorative for expert hackers
[2003-06] or Pejorative for people the hackers unwillingly deal with [2007-10].
[2003]
demigod: A hacker with years of experience, a national reputation, and a
major role in the development of at least one design, tool, or game used by or
known to more than half of the hacker community.
[2004] Jim Clark […] launched Silicon Graphics
Inc., whose high-powered computers transformed the way everything from
suspension bridges to jet aircraft get designed. […] But a successful
Healtheon IPO would put him firmly in the pantheon of high-tech demigods
(Business Week)
[2005]
language lawyer: A person who is intimately familiar with many or
most of the numerous restrictions and features (both useful and esoteric)
applicable to one or more computer programming languages.
[2006]
The C++ Programming Language is excellent reference for language
lawyers as well as a good tutorial for newbie [beginner] users
(DWM)www
[2007]
code grinder: A suit-wearing minion of the sort hired in
legion strength by banks and insurance companies to implement payroll packages and other unspeakable horrors.
[2008]
Many of the college graduates with Computer
Science degrees these days are code grinders
with no understanding or enthusiasm for an aesthetic engineering solution.
(Perry E. Metzger)www
[2009]
marketroid: A member of a company’s marketing department who promises
users that the next version of a product will have features that are not
actually scheduled for inclusion, are extremely difficult to implement, and/or
are in violation of the laws of physics; or one who describes existing features
in ebullient, buzzword-laden adspeak.
[2010] Marketroids will take any documented file format with more than two users and declare it ‘standard’.
(John Foust)www
Pejorative too are the
terms for the practices of jargonising:
[2011]
cybercrud: Obfuscatory tech-talk. The computer equivalent of
bureaucratese.
[2012] The headaches of junkmail fibercrud pale beside the anxieties triggered by vivid multi-media cybercrud served up on optical disks and communication links. (Paul Saffo)www
[2013]
math-out: A paper or presentation so encrusted with mathematical
or other formal notation as to be incomprehensible. This may be a device for
concealing the fact that it is actually content-free.
[2014]
The only problemo is both these examples of the Adaptive Vector Quantizer are a math-
out, and I cannot decipher to
layman’s terms the algorithm supplied. (Bryan Reinhardt)www
Whereas
euphemism primly masks the pejorative (like throwing people out of work)
(VI.48f), shoptalk playfully mocks the pejorative, partly to poke fun at
products that plague the practices of hackers. Puns abound. ‘MS-DOS’ becomes
‘mess-loss’, ‘mess-dog’, ‘mess-dross’, and ‘Domestos’ (the
toilet cleaner), because of ‘its single-tasking nature, its limits on
application size, and its nasty primitive interface’. ‘FORTRAN becomes ‘Fortrash’,
because of ‘its primitive design, gross and irregular syntax, limited control
constructs, and slippery, exception-filled semantics’. ‘IBM’ is said to
stand for ‘Inferior But Marketable, ‘Insidious Black Magic’, or ‘It’s
Been Malfunctioning’, for making machines that hackers find ‘underpowered
and over-priced’; ‘the designs are incredibly archaic’, and ‘you can’t
fix them’ because ‘source code is locked up tight’.
10.
These functions set shoptalk clearly apart from the other discourse strategies reviewed above. It
promotes solidarity among insiders and deconstructs the power-seeking
pretentiousness of patronising and jargonising, which is disdained by hackers as
‘bureaucratic bafflegab’
as well as 'cybercrud'. Though shoptalk does tend to
exclude outsiders, its purpose is programmatically inclusive:
[2015] Hacker culture [is] conscious of some important shared
experiences, roots, and values; it has its own myths, heroes, villains, folk
epics, in-jokes, taboos, and dreams. The special vocabulary of hackers helps
hold their culture together — it helps hackers recognize each other’s places
in the community. […] A sense of community may be hackerdom’s most valuable
intangible asset.9
Similarly,
the hacker community is undeniably a power group, but they earn their status far
more legitimately than some bombastic ‘authority’ who produces discourse
like [1997-99]. Their specialised knowledge and experience are products of
intense and arduous training, and empower the rest of us who must depend on the
electronic industry to minimise the drudgery of producing texts and images, and
communicating over vast distances. And they resist intrusive projects like the
‘computer
forensic laboratories for seized or intercepted computer evidence’ created by
the Patriot Act (VII.109.6.1) or the ‘New American
Century’ plan to ‘seize total control of cyberspace and the Internet’
(VII.97).
[2016] There’s nothing that gets
people in the high-tech world more excited than Big Brother and the misuse of
technology, especially by the federal government. (Wade Randlett at DigitalConsumer)www
Indeed, hackers may prove to be the prime force of resistance, always devising ingenious means to protect the privacy of citizens and ferret out ‘top secrets’ of governmental and military misconduct.
VII.C
Modes of speaking 2: Strategies for displacement
11.
Next, we can review some strategies for saying one thing to avoid saying another
that might cause difficulties. Here too, you may be empowering yourself and
disempowering others, but less overtly, e.g., making yourself look good just by
making others look bad. Since the terms for describing are mostly not stabilised,
I shall improvise, mainly by creating brisk analogies to ‘doublespeak’ as
publicised by the US National Council of Teachers of English.
12.
The term doublespeak itself was coined after Orwell’s ‘newspeak’
plus ‘doublethink’ in the novel 1984, and serendipitously links with
‘doubletalk’: using language to create a misleading and soothing alternative
to some straightforward and pejorative reality — like providing a discursive
veneer of official theory to mask operational practice. One US survey from law,
business, economics, and politics concluded that ‘doublespeak has become the
language of public discourse, the language we use to conduct the business of the
nation’ (William Lutz).10
13.
In its more extreme modes, doublespeak can be utterly mystifying. The text
[2017] on the back of former US ‘draft cards’ seems designed to make sure
you won’t know how to ‘appeal’ (and won't), whilst [2018] leaves you dazed
about the forces that are (or maybe are not?) menacing ‘enunciatory
modality’.
[2017]
A personal appearance before the appeal board may be requested if you are
eligible to request an appeal to the appeal board. You may appeal to the
appeal board without requesting a personal appearance before the appeal board,
but if you wish to appear before the appeal board, you must specifically ask for
the appearance in addition to requesting an appeal.
[2018] If, for
a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline, soon the
repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition,
spurious authorities, and classification can be seen as the desperate effort to
‘normalize’ formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that
violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality. (Homi K.
Bhabha The Location of Culture)
But
often you can make a canny guess, e.g., that [2019-20] are about people dying.
[2019]
Patient failed to fulfill his wellness potential. (entry in doctor’s chart
after the patient died)
[2020] rocket
boosters […] have an explosive force upon surface impact that is sufficient to
exceed the accepted overpressure threshold of physiological damage for exposed
personnel. (Air Force letter)
14. Unquestionably, doublespeak is a royal strategy of US ‘administrations’ on touchy issues. Bush Sr. pledged ‘no new taxes’ during the 1988 election campaign and for his 1991 budget, which hid $21.7 billion of them behind the locutions ‘receipts proposals’ and ‘user fees’; elsewhere, he spoke of ‘revenue increases’ and ‘passenger facilitation charges’. Under Reagan, tax increases were first ‘revenue enhancement’, then ‘receipts strengthening’; under Clinton, a ‘wage-based premium’. Lunging obsessively in the opposite direction, Bush Jr replaced ‘tax cut’ connoting pain with ‘tax relief’ connoting a cure for pain.
15.
Doublespeak has been craftily combined with jargonising (in the sense of VII.8)
by coining outlandish technical terms to implicate power and authority whilst
camouflaging what is meant. Peace was ‘permanent pre-hostility’, and combat
was ‘violence processing’ (Pentagon). Bombs were ‘vertically deployed
anti-personnel devices’ (U.S. Army). The invasion of Grenada was a ‘pre-dawn
vertical insertion’ (State Department). The narrowly avoided nuclear explosion
at Three Mile Island was a ‘spontaneous energetic disassembly’ (Metropolitan
Edison). Mercenaries in Nicaragua were ‘unilaterally controlled Latino
assets’ (Central Intelligence Agency, hereafter CIA). A bill collector was a
‘persistency specialist’ (Chase Manhattan Bank). Road signs were
‘ground-mounted confirmatory route markers’ (Massachusetts Department of
Public Works). Fleas were ‘hematophagous arthropod vectors’ (American
Journal of Family Practice).
16.
And doublespeak terms positively abound for laying off employees, already
sampled as euphemisms back in VI.48, as when corporations issue denials like:
[2021]
These are called schedule adjustments, not layoffs. (Stouffer Foods)
[2022]
This was not a cutback or a layoff. It was a career-change opportunity.
(Clifford of Vermont)
Exquisitely
quaint doublespeak for layoffs were a ‘normal payroll adjustment’
(Wal-Mart); a ‘career transition program’ (General Motors); ‘management
initiated attrition’ (IBM);
‘negative hiring’ (Peoria, Arizona Police Dept.); ‘release of
resources’ (Bank of America); and ‘decruiting’ (Council of Residential
Specialists).11
17.
Plain language, in contrast, unmasks corporate cynicism, as when John Brink, CEO
of Consolidated Freightways, posted a hotline for 17,000 employees to call
on
Labor
Day
2002
[2023],
eliciting
a
neat
quip
from
the
Teamsters
Union
[2024].
[2023]
Thank you for dialing in this holiday weekend. I hope you and your family and
enjoying your time together. I have some extremely urgent and sad news to share
with you today. […] Your employment ends immediately. (Associated Press)
[2024]
That’s
like
telling
your
wife
you’re
getting
divorced
on
Valentine’s
Day.
(Carlos
Ramos)
In
return, plain language is surely the fitting medium for the real human
consequences of layoffs, e.g., after a survey among 63,000 Safeway
‘ex-workers’:
[2025]
suicides, attempted suicides, divorces, broken families, whole towns devastated
economically, [whereas] executives at the top shared a personal gain of $800
million. (Susan Faludi in the Wall Street Journal)
18.
Perhaps bubblespeak would be an apt companion term for unmitigated hot
air, a cordial ally of doublespeak. Here, absurdly vacuous or tortuous
explanations (official theory) are offered because forthright ones (operational
theory) threaten the interests of a speaker or authority. A crass infringement
of constitutional rights empowering the ‘Department of Justice’ to monitor
communication between prisoners and their attorneys (should any be allowed) was
‘promoting justice’ [2026]. ‘Capital punishment’ honours ‘the sanctity of human life’ [2027].
‘Patriotic
folks’ couldn’t
serve in Vietnam because the US military was totally filled by
‘ghetto youths’ out for fast bucks [2028]. ‘Environmental
criminals’ are ‘decent people’ [2029]. ‘Toxic’ pollution in the
workplace promotes the workers’ ‘health’ [2030].
[2026]
Its purpose is to encourage full and frank communication between and their
clients and thereby promote broader public interests in the observance of law
and administration of justice. (Upjohn County vs. United States)
[2027]
Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.
(Orrin Hatch)
[2028]
So many minority youths had volunteered for the well-paying military positions
to escape poverty and the ghetto that there was literally no room for patriotic
folks. (Tom Delay on why he and Dan Quayle avoided military service in Vietnam)
[2029]
Environmental crimes are not like organised crime or drugs. There you have bad
people doing bad things. With environmental crimes, you have decent people doing
bad things. (Deputy Assistant Attorney General Barry Hartman)
[2030] When the Office of
Management and Budget blocked […] the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration from establishing lower exposure limits for more than 1,000 toxic
substances used in industry and agriculture, […] the Office of Information and
Regulatory Affairs ruled that workers will be better off exposed: […]
‘because of intense competition, companies cannot raise their prices to pay
for the cost of the new regulations [and] would have to cut wages and jobs, [so]
workers would have reduced incomes, thus affecting their health.’ (New
York Times)
Never
mind that companies are gleefully ‘cutting wages and jobs’ anyhow, whilst
‘regulations’ are in fact being gutted
by the Bush-Men (cf. VII.66f, 72. 80).
19.
Bubblespeak rose to historic significance when the ‘Supreme Court’ justified
unconstitutionally stopping the vote count and in effect appointing Bush Jr to
an illegitimate presidency:
[2031] The
counting of votes that are of questionable legality does, in my view, threaten
irreparable harm to the petitioner [Bush] and to the country by casting a cloud
upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election. (Justice Antonin
Scalia)12
To
appreciate the rich irony of the bubblespeak from Scalia — whose own son Gene
worked for the law firm representing Bush’s ‘petition’ to the Court — we
need merely sample the public discourse showing that precisely ‘votes of
questionable legality’ produced Bush’s Florida ‘victory’ by an official
margin of 592, viz.:
[2032] Of the 2,490 overseas ballots that ended up being
included, […] 344 had no evidence of being cast before election day; 183 were
postmarked in the US; 96 lacked witnesses; 169 came from unregistered voters; 5
came after the November 19 deadline; and 19 were cast on two ballots. All these
violated Florida law, yet were all counted for Bush. (Michael Moore)13
[2033]
In Seminole County, the elections supervisor (a Republican) had illegally
allowed two GOP operatives to ‘correct’ thousands of pre-printed absentee
ballot applications mistakenly showing birth dates instead of the
legally-required voter IDs, without [which] the law says the applications are
automatically void (John Dee in lumpen magazine)
[2034] In Okaloosa County, the Republican elections
supervisor sent out absentee ballots unsolicited in response to
change-of-address notifications, a practice that was bizarre and illegal,
contributing to an 81%, 8,600 margin in absentee ballots for Bush in that
County. (Washington Post)
[2035]
In Bay County, which has more registered Democrats than Republicans, a suitcase
full of absentee ballots was illegally turned in, contributing
to a 9,000-to-3,000 margin in absentee ballots for Bush. (courtroom deposition
of GOP
operative Michael Leach)
And so on. Even these ‘questionable votes’ were modest compared to the mass of non-votes reported in Britain at the crucial time but not in the major US media.14
[2036]
Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush had ordered county elections officials to erase
57,000 voters from voter rolls, most of them Black, […] on grounds they are
felons. […] The company that came up with this rotten little ‘purge’ list
has, under threat of suit from the NAACP, confessed that the total purge
targeted 94,000 voters — and that, at outside tops, only 3,000 may be illegal
voters. (Greg Palast on BuzzFlash)
Again
with rich irony, Scalia was right that counting votes that proved Gore had
actually won would indeed ‘cast a cloud’ on Bush’s ‘legitimacy’; but
then so did the Court’s violation of the core principle of democracy — the
right of the citizen to vote and have your vote counted honestly. And, as amply
emerges from discourse data I cite, the ‘Bush administration’ is doing more
‘irreparable harm to the country’ than I could have imagined, and so far
getting away with it. As we shall see, the ‘White House’ spews forth a
relentless torrent of deceitfully worded assaults on constitutional rights,
consumer health, worker safety, and the environment.
20.
The combined weight of these voting violations presents a discursive dilemma of
what to call Bush Jr, since you can only be ‘president’ if you won the
election; you cannot just be appointed by a Supreme Court packed with right-wing
allies. Designations like ‘Thief-in-Chief’, ‘a trespasser on federal land,
a squatter in the Oval Office’ (Michael Moore), though apt enough, might seem
confrontational. For my part, I merely put quotation marks around the titles in
his ‘Administration’, whose domination by ‘Justice’ and ‘Defense’
has earned it the designation of ‘junta’
and its ascension that of a ‘coup d’état’ from various commentators.15
If
such terms sound inapplicable to America, a little-known ‘coup’ was actually
planned in 1934 to kill the New Deal and restore the gold standard, as revealed
to
Congress
by
Major
General
Smedley
Butler
of
the
US
Marine
Corps:
[2037] Butler
testified that bond trader Gerald MacGuire had approached him in the summer of
1933, claiming to represent wealthy Wall Street broker Grayson Murphy, Singer
sewing machine heir Robert Sterling Clark, and other unnamed men of wealth.
[…] MacGuire asked Butler to lead an army of 500,000 veterans in a
march on Washington, D.C. […] Butler eventually deduced that the real goal was
a coup d’état to take Roosevelt captive, and force reinstatement of the gold
standard. […]. The plotters would keep Roosevelt as a figurehead until he
could be ‘encouraged’ to retire.16
Is
it un-American for the president to be a figurehead for tycoons and the
military? (No-brainer of the year.)
21.
If such ballot abuses don’t recur in 2004, then it may well be because there aren’t
any ballots — only computerised ‘voting
machines’ from GOP-friendly companies like Diebold and ES&S,
whose potential for election fraud — already a Republican speciality perfected
in Florida — is known to be infinitely greater:17
[2038]
The computer programs that tell electronic voting machines how to record and
tally votes are allowed to be held as ‘trade secrets’. […] The companies
that make these machines insist that their mechanisms are a proprietary secret.
Can citizen’s groups, or even election officials, audit their accuracy? Not at
all, with touch screens, and rarely, with optical scans, because most state laws
mandate that optical scan paper ballots be run through the machine and then
sealed into a box, never to be counted unless there is a court order. (Bev Harris in Scoop)
[2039] Diebold Election Systems
had been storing 40,000 of its files on […] an obscure site never revealed to
public interest groups, but generally known among election industry insiders,
and available to any hacker with a laptop. […] These files amounted to a
virtual handbook for vote-tampering: diagrams of remote communications setups,
passwords, encryption keys, source code, user manuals, testing protocols, and
simulators, as well as files loaded with votes and voting machine software.
(same)
Reports
of incidents like the following need not seem so ‘weird’ after all (so who
needs the Marines?):
[2040]
In Alabama, Democrat Don Siegelman won the election for governor and went home.
The next morning, 6,300 of his votes were gone, and Republican Bob Riley took
the job instead. A recount was requested, but denied. (Vox Populi)www
[2041]
If you pressed the Democrat’s name in some counties in Texas, the
Republican’s name was chosen. And in Cormal County, Texas, three Republican
candidates won by exactly 18,181 votes apiece. ‘Isn’t that the weirdest
thing?’ County Clerk Joy Streater asked at the time. ‘We noticed it right
away, but it is just a big coincidence.’ […] But it gets even more amazing:
in two other races elsewhere in this great nation, Republicans won by — wait
for it — 18,181 votes. (same)www
[2042]
A recent fund-raising letter written by Diebold’s chief executive Walden
O’Dell said he is ‘committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to
the president next year’. (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
[2043]
There is a complex connection between the companies that make voting software
and machines and the GOP, [which] makes sense of some of the most astonishing
out-comes of 2002, where vast majorities of black voters voted for anti-black
candidates, or where
Republican
votes
skyrocketed
and
Democratic
numbers
plummeted,
reversing
historic
trends,
or
machines
tallied
more
votes
than
were
cast.
(Counter-Punch)www
(That
‘big coincidence’ in [2041] was a gem of bubblespeak too.) So now we can
also wonder what to call this ‘Republican Congress’ and its ‘majority
leaders’. At all events, ‘machine politics’ has acquired a nasty new
meaning.
22.
To judge from the Internet, Bush Jr has created his very own idiom — Dubyaspeak,
a pungent personal mix of doublespeak and bubblespeak.18 He vows that
the US is the foremost ‘peacekeeper’ despite his two devastating wars (so
far); [2044]; or that the power crisis in California was due to insufficient
equipment [2045] and not to the machinations of Bush’s pals and sponsors in
the energy industry, as confirmed elsewhere [2046].
[2044]
Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace to
enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment.
[2045]
The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants
and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants.
[2046] After
deregulation, […] the small coterie of plant owners held California’s power
systems hostage. They could name their price and they did: $9,999 per unit of
power — 30,000 percent above the old regulated price. [At] Duke Power
of North Carolina, its managers simply threw away the spare parts needed to keep
the plants running [and] ordered them to shut down a plant during a shortage (Best
Democracy)
Like
the election fraud itself, dubyaspeak is rarely deconstructed by the
conservative mass media, who after all worked their, erm, heads off helping to
get him ‘elected’ [2047-48].
[2047]
Reporters have to find a way to turn the nincompoop they bashed through the
election into something resembling the leader of the free world (David Carr in
the New York Times)
[2048]
Fox News formally declared Bush the winner [and] other networks ran like
lemmings after Fox; […] John Ellis, the man in charge of Fox’s election
coverage, [is] a first cousin of George W. and Jeb Bush (Stupid White Men)
23.
Fibspeak is public lying for private or political motives.19
[2049] There is no conclusive evidence that nicotine is
addictive; […] and the same thing with cigarettes causing emphysema, lung
cancer, heart disease (Rush Limbaugh) [More than 1,000 Americans die each day from smoking-related causes. –
LifeClinic.com]
[2050] The US gives far and away more tax
money to foreign countries than anyone. (Bill O’Reilly) [The US gives a
smaller fraction of its gross national product than any other developed country
– Institute for Policy Studies]
[2051] There are more American Indians alive today than
there were when Columbus arrived. (Limbaugh)
[Today, less than 2 million can claim ‘Indian’ ancestry; in 1492, it
was between 5 and 15 million – Bureau of Indian Affairs]
[2052] There are 100,000 abductions of
children by strangers every year in the United States. (O’Reilly) [There were
134 in 1999, and 93 in 2000.]
[2053] 800 babies a year are being left
in dumpsters in Washington, DC (Newt Gingrich) [Four babies were found in
dumpsters that year, all rescued and cared for Newt’s favourite enemy, the
Clinton federal government]
[2054] Conceptions from rape
occur with the same frequency as snowfall in Miami. (Bush nominee Judge Leon Holmes on denying abortion to rape victims) [Each
year in America over 30,000 women become pregnant from rape or incest; snow
falls in Miami roughly once ever 100 years – American Journal of Obstetrics
and Gynecology]
[2055] There have been reports coming out of the White House
of damages [committed by departing Clinton staffers] up to $200,000; […]
obscenities scrawled; […] viruses in the computers (Grover Norquist) [no
damage was done to the White House – General Accounting Office] [Untended
irony from Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street
Journal: ‘it’s worse than anyone is saying — the Bush people being
discreet’.]
Fibspeaking
about Enron and the Bush ‘energy plan’ was routine [2056] until a memo from
Enron Chairman Ken Lay to ‘Vice President’ Cheney was published in the San
Francisco Chronicle and
from there in the Fact Sheet of the Committee
on Government Reform, US House of Representatives (31/01/
2002) [2057].
[2056] What was put in the energy plan was put in at the
need to help address an energy shortage in America, not as the result of a
request of any one company or any one person. It was done because it’s the
right policy for the country. (Ari Fleischer)
[2057] Contrary to the
White House claim, the
White House
energy plan incorporates
the vast majority
of Mr.
Lay’s policy recommendations, [such
as] to exercise federal eminent domain authority to override state decisions on
siting of transmission lines, to reject price controls on electricity as a way
to mitigate the California energy crisis, and
to speed
permitting of new
energy facilities.
(Fact Sheet)
And
fibspeak too is another hallmark for choicest Dubyaspeak:
[2058]
By far the vast majority of my tax cuts go to those at the bottom (debate with
John McCain) [The bottom 60% got just 14.7% – Citizens for Tax Justice]
[2059]
Our
first goal is clear: We must have
an economy that grows fast enough to employ every man and woman who seeks a job.
(State of the Union address, 2003)
[By February 2004, 3 million jobs had been lost under Bush’s policies —
‘the worst overall job growth rate under any president in 58 years’ –
AFL-CIO]
[2060]
I have sent you Clear Skies legislation that mandates a 70 percent cut in air
pollution from power plants over the next 15 years. (same) [Bush’s New Source
Review proposal is ‘the most sweeping and radical assault on a Clear Air
programme and environmental law enforcement since the inception of the EPA’.
– John Walker of the National Resource Defense Council]
[2061] I
believe in the results of focusing our attention and energy on teaching children
to read. [He slashed $39 million from federal spending on libraries, and
proposed eliminating the ‘Reading is Fundamental’ programme, which has
distributed 200 million free books to low-income children since 1966.]
To
say that the fibspeak of Bush Jr would fill a thick book is no mere
exaggeration, because it already has: The Lies of George W. Bush: The
Politics of Deception.20
24.
The cowed press uses doublespeak to frame fibspeak:
[2062]
Examining
Bush’s
statements
on Iraq and on tax cuts, [David E.] Rosenbaum ‘found little that could lead to
a conclusion that the president actually lied.’ Instead, he suggested that
Bush was guilty of ‘selective emphasis’; any answer on whether he ‘stepped
across the line’ into unacceptable manipulation ‘can probably be answered
conclusively only by historians when all the evidence and consequences are
known.’ (New York Times)
Similarly,
it was euphemistically said of Bush’s statements that they ‘appeared to
contradict the events’; or that he had ‘ embroidered key assertions’, ‘taken
some liberties’, ‘omitted qualifiers’, or ‘simply outpaced the facts’;
or
that his
‘rhetoric’ had ‘taken some flights of fancy’ (Dana
Milbank in the Washington Post). Compare the reverse flagelation
of a Democratic president:
[2063] Clinton’s ‘calculated, sustained lying has
involved an extraordinarily corrupting assault on language, which is the
uniquely human capacity that makes persuasion, and hence popular government,
possible.’ (George Will in the New York
Times)
In the final days of hyping his war against Iraq, Bush vowed that ‘the days of deceit and denial are long gone’. Top that for unintentional irony!
25. In fraudspeak, you hypocritically
profess standards or principles (theory) contradicted by your own
actions (practice):
[2064] The poor feed off the largess of
this government and give nothing back (Rush Limbaugh) [He formerly collected
unemployment payments]
[2065] Racial paternalism and its unintended
consequences can be as poisonous and pernicious as any other form of
discrimination (Clarence Thomas) [Thomas was admitted to Yale Law School in 1971
through affirmative action]
And
yes, national leadership leads again:
[2066] Any time an officer of a publicly
held corporation sells stock we ought to know within two days. (Wall Street
speech) [Aware it was illegal, Bush sold his own stock in the imploding Harken
Energy Corporation for $848,560 to an anonymous purchaser und did not disclose
to the Securities Exchange Commission for 8 months.]21
[2067] Inherent in these principles must
be the interests of the small shareholders. (same) [He left them holding the bag
when he dumped his stock just before Harken tanked and the share price plunged]
[2068] We ought to look at people who are trying to avoid US
taxes as a problem. [Harken had set up a subsidiary in the Caymans when he was
on its board – ]
[2069] This tax relief is for everyone
who pays income taxes. […] Ninety-two million Americans will keep this year an
average of almost $1,100 more of their own money. (State of the Union, 2003)
[80% of Americans get less than this ‘average’. More than half of all
taxpayers get less than $100. Almost a third get nothing at all. Meanwhile,
millionaires get tax breaks averaging $90,000.
– Citizens for Tax Justice]
[2070] We continue to work together to keep Social Security sound and
reliable. (same) [The costs of his tax cuts alone exceed by three times the
entire projected shortfall in Social Security – Paul Krugman, Professor of
Economics, in the New York Times].
26. Flakspeak (after the anti-aircraft cannon
for shooting at people above you) or attackspeak
can designate
discourse
moves whose intention is to reduce and debase the human value of a person or
group (I.38; VIII.28). It may be
delivered face to face (or by e-mail) with the usual tired buzzwords:
[2071] Get out of my studio before I tear
you to fucking pieces. (Bill O’Reilly to Jeremy Glick, whose father died in
the 9/11 attacks but who opposed the war on Iraq)22
[2072] Saw you on Donahue with
your liberal shit. Blow it out your ass, dickhead! (anonymous e-mail to
political satirist Al Franken)
[2073]
You fucking Communist cunt, get out of here. (Richard Scaife,23 heir
to the Mellon fortune
and
bankroller
of
far-right
‘think
tanks’,
to
Nation
Senior
Editor
Karen
Rothmyer,
who
asked
him
to
‘explain
why
do
you give so much money to the New Right?’)
[2074] You fucking son of a bitch. I saw what you wrote. We’re not going
to forget this. (Bush Jr to Wall Street Journal writer and editor Al
Hunt, who had merely omitted Bush Sr from his list of presidential candidates in
1988 and favoured Jack Kemp)24
27.
Public discourse has become stridently confrontational as ‘conservatives’ of
the ‘New Right’ — better
dubbed the ‘New Rant’ — make
flakspeak their preferred discourse mode [2075], as some acknowledge with
consummate chutzpah [2076]:
[2075] Ted Olson [now Bush’s Solicitor General] actually
wrote articles anonymously in the American Spectator
[and] charged the Clintons with a multitude of felonies, including […]
the years in jail that, in his opinion, they ought to have served. (David Brock25
on BuzzFlash)www
[2076] We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals — and turn
them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship. (Grover Norquist of ‘Americans
for Tax Reform’)
Discursive
strategies of ‘pre-emptive defence’ (to use a bellicose term of the current
‘administration’) have widely created a myth of ‘liberal bias in the
media’, so that reports exposing conservative lies and misdeeds will appear to
lack ‘objectivity’ and ‘balance’ — virtues the conservatives
self-righteously claim to uphold.
[2077]
Conservative news organizations are popular because they feed the rage. We bring
the pain to the liberal media. […] We’ve created this cottage industry in
which it pays to be un-objective […] Criticize other people for not being
objective. Be as subjective as you want. It’s a great little racket. (Matt
Labash of The Weekly Standard)
The
twisted conservative bias in the media can thus be camouflaged behind tireless
indignant laments of a ‘liberal bias’26 — undermining
in advance potential reports of conservative misdeeds whilst forgetting the merciless media flak unleashed even in the generally staid New York Times
against Bill Clinton (‘the
worst human being ever to occupy the White House’ – George Will) and Al Gore
(‘Obsessive
Loon at the Edge of Madness’ – Maureen Dowd). ‘The right-wing critique of
liberal journalism is bankrolled by organisations obsessed with smashing labour,
deregulating business, and putting corporations firmly in command of society’.27
28.
No blow seems too low for the far-right flakspeak of public figures. The
Democrats in Congress were ‘sick, pathetic, incompetent, tax-spending
traitors’ (Gingrich on the 1990 budget debate). The Environmental Protection
Agency was ‘the Gestapo of government’, and the Nobel Prize committee were ‘Swedish
environmental extremists’ (Tom Delay). Feminists were ‘feminazis’, ‘obsessed
with perpetuating a modern-day holocaust’ (abortion) (Rush Limbaugh). Black
civil rights leaders were ‘race-hustling poverty pimps’ (C.J. Watts, sole
black Republican Representative in Congress). And private flaking on the
Internet against ‘Democrats’ dishes out the most-simple-minded smears
imaginable:
[2078]
Voters
are getting a new message: Democrats are crooks.
(OpinioNet)www
[2079]
The
Democrats
are
truly
beginning
to
resemble
the
Mafia. They are barely a political party anymore, opting instead to become a
criminal enterprise based on the maintenance of power at any cost. (Daily
Rant)www
[2080]
Democrats are communists in all but name. (Free Republic)www
[2081] Democrats are racists and hate
blacks. They want to keep blacks down. (same)
Perceptive
commentators and opinion surveys agree that the Democrats’ real failing lies
in abandoning the left and its traditional interests in labour, social progress,
and the environment, and avidly competing with the Republicans in abjectly
pandering to ‘corporate America’ at the top (VII.1)28
— surely anything but ‘communists’!
29.
The extremes to which flakspeak stretches public credulity by no means render it
harmless. Fabulously rich right-wing sponsors of ‘foundations’ and ‘think
tanks’ — actually stink tanks — have hoisted flakspeakers into
powerful positions, such as talk show hosts on radio and television, or authors
of books that become ‘best-sellers’ because those same sponsors buy up
enormous quantities, viz.:
[2082]
Allen Neuharth, president of the Freedom Forum foundation, has repaid $20,000 he
took from the Forum for a secret buy of 2,000 copies of his autobiography, Confessions
of an S.O.B., in hopes of boosting it onto the best-seller list. (Treasure
State Review)
Despite
a rabidly anti-intellectual slant in New Rant discourse, those same sponsors
fund Cash-For-Bash
‘intellectuals’
as ‘fellows’ or ‘research scholars’ in ‘institutes’ and
‘centers’ with innocuous-sounding names like ‘Heritage Fund’, ‘American Enterprise Institute’, or ‘National
Center for Public Policy Research’ (as opposed, say, to the ‘Millions for
Minions and Billions for Bigots Fund’, the ‘Shaky Foundation’,
‘Disinformation Nation’, or ‘America’s Assassins of Character),
bankrolled by high rollers
like Mellon heir Richard Scaife, John M. Olin, or Lynde and Harry Bradley, all
of whom fervently believe the right-wing ideology holding that their money
confers the power to dictate the political agenda of the whole society if not
the whole world. (cf. I.16). The ‘research’
attacking social enemies is welcomed and disseminated in journals with their own
innocuous-sounding names, like the National Review, the New Republic
or the Weekly Standard (as opposed, say, to the Nastiest Rebuke, Snooty
Bubblespeak, or Cheeky Slander — or even Calumny Columns).
30.
Being the home of the most articulate resistance, universities are also the home
of New Right beachheads that invite these ‘intellectuals’ to speak on the
‘decline of higher education’, always with the same anti-left flakspeak:
[2083] Beginning in the mid-1960s, the left made a
concerted effort to take over our colleges and universities. […]
They’ve trampled free speech, virtually banished conservative
professors, and turned our schools into little more than huge megaphones for
anti-American rhetoric from coast to coast. (David Horowitz)
This
modest speaker planned a one-man ‘information assault’ to
[2084]
investigate and expose the hiring practices and tenure selection criteria used
at universities and colleges; […] publish and distribute 300,000 copies of my
new booklet, ‘Political Bias in America’s Universities’, onto campuses in
every state; [and] conduct a National Survey On The State Of America’s
Universities [and] send the results to two groups that hold real power over our
schools: school alumni and state legislators.
Why
such untiring zeal? His website asks for ‘the $325,500 needed to fully fund
the National Campaign to Take Back Our Campuses’,29 so ‘please
make a contribution of $25, $35, $50, $100, or more,
if possible’ — though his ‘Center for the Study of Popular Culture’
has already gotten $10.2 million from ‘conservative foundations’ (Media
Transparency).www
Great rate for Rent-A-Rant.
31.
The same torrent of Cash-For-Bash funds a network of ‘campus newspapers’,
again with bland names. The first and most notorious was the Dartmouth Review, the ‘flagship of yellow journalism, academic
style’, which by 1992 had ‘received $300,000 from the Olin Foundation’
(Stanley Fish),30
and which ran a quotation from Adolf Hitler, no less, in its masthead on the day
commemorating the Jewish holocaust. Also, the Review
reportedly published private correspondence of gay students stolen by its
staff members.
32.
Amazingly, even some university presidents
may be spreading comparable disinformation, e.g., by asserting that today’s
campuses extend
[2085]
an immunity for whatever is said or done, responsibly or carelessly, within or
without the walls of academic freedom by persons unconcerned for the truth; who,
reckless, incompetent, frivolous or even malevolent, promulgate ideas for which
they can claim no expertise, or even commit deeds for which they can claim no
sanction of law. (John Silber in the Jewish World Review)
This
flakspeaker ruled Boston University for thirty years, indefatigable in his
‘attacks on scholarship produced by feminists, Marxists, multiculturalists,
and others who did not pass his ideological litmus test’ (Henry Giroux).
Perhaps the far-right ideal would be a campus where every crowd has a Silber
lying.
33. Predictably, print and airwaves reek with the closely related hatespeak,
which degrades whole types of people by criteria like race or religion:
[2086] Niggers are basically primitive animals. […] The Jew Marxists see the nigger as their instrument, as
their bullets, by which to destroy our society. […] I shudder to contemplate
the future under nonwhite occupation; rapes, murders, robberies multiplied a
hundred fold. (David Duke)
[2087] We should invade their countries, kill their
leaders, and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about
locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. […] We killed
civilians. (Ann Coulter on anti-American Muslims)31
Even
these conventional bugbears attract less frenetic venom and unprincipled lunacy
from the New Rant than do the ‘Liberals’, who get branded as ‘nothing less
than Communists, Socialists, and Dictators’ (Limbaugh).32
We are straightfacedly asked to believe they ‘take sheer joy in telling
lies’; they ‘hate America’ and ‘society’; they ‘seek to destroy
sexual differentiation in order to destroy morality’; and they ‘want to take
more of our money, kill babies, and discriminate on the basis of race’
(Coulter, Slander). Or
again, they ‘despise freedom because they despise morality’ (huh?); they
‘seek to disarm individuals and render them powerless before the thugs,
thieves and murderers who rule the inner cities’; and so on ad nauseam
(Limbaugh again).
Slander indeed, but whose and of whom?
34.
What strikes me most about flakspeak and hatespeak is the motivation gap:
why anyone could conceivably want to ‘destroy morality’, deliver us
up to ‘thugs,
thieves and murderers’, and so on. The only answer from the ‘New Rant’
slander-blender is to portray its enemies as monsters of inhumanity, e.g. as
‘intellectually dishonest, unprincipled, mentally immature, spoiled
children’, or as ‘members of the self-deluded, isolated and ill-educated
Professorial Class living in their government financed socialist Ivory Towers’
(Limbaugh again); or again as ‘drunkards,
drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular
humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy money changers, revolutionary assassins,
adulterers, and homosexuals’ (Pat Robertson). Such scum ‘champions
sucking the brains out of little babies’ (Coulter); and ‘encourage
women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy
capitalism, and become lesbians’ (Robertson). If this hatespeak points to the
final solution of simply killing off the Liberals [2088], some ordinary citizens
got the message, witness a lighted rent-a-sign in the Ozarks [2089]:
[2088]
We need […] to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize
that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright
traitors. (Coulter)33
[2089] Anti-war demonstration to be held at old slaughterhouse. All liberals
and commies come and line up against the wall.
(commented by Izard Wizard)www
35. Surely, the dominant goal of flakspeak and hatespeak is to simply block rational dialogue or discussion with opponents whose intelligence and integrity have been dragged through the filthiest mud (I.38; VII.26ff; VIII.28). There only remaining discursive space has the unappetising option of responding with flakspeak, e.g., designating Bush Jr. an ‘AWOL, unelected, strutting popinjay’ (Nashville Files); a ‘know-nothing fundamentalist fitness freak’ (Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian); a ‘dangerous, arrogant, foolish, bible-belted fundamentalist, right-wing warmongering fanatic’ (Labour MP George Galloway in the Independent); and the ‘greatest threat to life on this planet that we’ve most probably ever seen’, running ‘the most corrupt and racist American administration in over 80 years’ (London Mayor Ken Livingstone in the Independent). But then these responses happen to ring true, at least for me.
36.
While the strategies reviewed so far are deliberate and malevolent, flubspeak
is accidental and
embarrassing when you say some
obtrusively wrong thing. Words get interchanged with similar sounds but
disparate meanings [2090], with Bush Jr still flaunting his famed flair for
leadership [2091-95].
[2090] We shall reach greater and greater
platitudes of achievement [plateaus] (Chicago Mayor Richard Daly Sr)
[2091] I was trying to convince those
college students to accept my tenants. [tenets]
[2092] A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness. [antidotes]
[2093] The law I sign today directs new
funds and new focus to the task of collecting vital intelligence on terrorist
threats and on weapons of mass production
[destruction]
[2094] However they delineate, quotas, I
think, vulcanize society [polarize]
[2095] We cannot let terriers
and rogue nations hold this nation hostile
[terrorists, hostage]
Flubspeak in print interchanges Homonyms [2096-99] and
even Antonyms [2100-03].
[2096] Gorillas vow to kill
Khomeini (Valley Independent)
[guerrillas]
[2097] School superintendent stood on principal
in Michigan (Times Chronicle) [principle]
[2098] Jobless Rate Sores (New
York Post) [soars]
[2099] The second was a musical number
entitled ‘London Derriere’ (Charleston
Gazette) [Londonderry Air]
[2100] Cure Sought for Rural Health
(Kansas City Star) [illness]
[2101] FDA demands leaky condoms (American
Medical News) [leakproof]
[2102] Ancestors of Civil War vets
meet annually (Daily Star) [descendants]
[2103] School board member suspected of honesty
(Southern Carolina News) [dishonesty]
Privileged
irony intrudes when flubspeak leads to accidentally telling the truth (Bush Jr
yet once more):
[2104] I was running against peace,
prosperity [and then brought wars and record deficits]
[2105] Ann [Veneman] and I will carry out this equivocal
message to the world: Markets must be open. [He imposed protectionist tariffs on
steel and then dumped them.]
[2106]
I think if you say you’re going to do something and don’t do it,
that’s trustworthiness.
[He said he was going to reduce CO2 and then reneged, declaring it
isn’t pollution.]
[2107] I am mindful not only of
preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors. [He blocked the
congressionally mandated release of papers from Reagan-Bush administration,
including his own father’s.]
[2108] For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. And we’re going to do something about it. [As governor of Texas, Bush signed one bill repealing the ban on concealed weapons, and another expressly okaying them in hospitals, amusement parks, and, yes, churches.]
37.
Triviaspeak falls between deliberate and accidental when saying what is
achingly obvious and uninformative, such as relations between natural cause and
effect [2109-11]; or is circular by definition, with Bushspeak right on cue
[2112-14].
[2109] Tester links pygmy defect to
shortness (Evening Press)
[2110] Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures (Daily
Sun)
[2111] Carcinogens Cause Cancer, Says
Book (Contra Costa Independent)
[2112] A surplus means there’ll be money left over. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be called a surplus.
[2113] It’s very important for folks to
understand that when there’s more trade, there’s more commerce.
[2114] I hope
the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as
opposed to failure.
38.
All these discursive strategies for displacement in the service of power and
exclusion have become so influential in public and political discourse that an
agenda for shelving them in favour of ecologist strategies would doubtless be
dismissed as ‘naive’, as if the path of ‘wisdom’ must lead to pomposity,
deceit, greed, slander, and hypocrisy. I would retort it is far more naive to
imagine that a social minority who exploit discourse for ruthlessly widening the
gap between insiders and outsiders and proliferating intolerable extremes of
poverty and misery can continue to dominate a democracy and escape massive
social backlash (I.24). And for all their money and media pull, these
perpetrators and their backers are a small minority indeed. Even the
‘victory’ that handed the US Congress to the far right in 1994 occurred only
because 60% of eligible citizens did not vote at all:
[2115] Of the
four out of ten people who did vote, two and a fraction marked the Republican
box. But half of those told exit pollsters they were not voting for the
Republicans (much less Newt’s ‘Contract With America’), they were voting against
the Democrats. So the GOP’s claim to the mantle of power came down to only one
out of ten eligible voters — the same minority of true believers, party
activists, corporatists, and ‘geeks in golf pants’ (Garrison Keillor) that
always vote Republican. (Yellow Stripes)34
The vast majority of sincerely committed citizens are simply waiting to vote for a genuine left (though few would use the term) — for a sincere populism that honestly delivers on civil rights, worker benefits, consumer health, and environmental protection, all now under fierce discursive attack, as we shall see in the following sections.
Click here to go to Chapter
VII, Part 2