LUDIC LOG

It seems quite appropriate that the French have decided to send a philosopher as their point man in Afghanistan, because the conduct of the entire war seems to be taking place in the realm of pure abstraction lately.

One of the problems with politics (well, one of the problems with life, for that matter) is that people are not so much dedicated to thinking through a decision until they arrive, by means of this process, at what they judge to be the best decision, as they are to simply seeking a justification -- or, if you prefer, an excuse -- for doing what it was they wanted to do anyway. By this means does politics become less the messy and difficult business of hashing out real-world solutions to abstract problems and more the neat and tidy business of coming up with abstract reasons for real-world actions, all of which sounds quite nice as long as you approve of those actions and don't think too much about the relative positions of the the cart and the horse in the whole scenario.

In one of the very few decent books written about the Reagan administration, a press aide to the President described the Cabinet and the party hacks of that era as "a PR outfit that became president and took over the country". Indeed it was, and it's still running the country 20 years later, so effective are its methods. Advertising culture and its full-on assault on the public's ability to make reasonable decisions has become so pervasive that the Bush administration naturally sees no reason to do any actual governing or problem-solving, when they can simply turn the PR machine on full blast in order to convince us that whatever nonsensical idea they're peddling at the moment is the right and true path. This is the world we've chosen to live in: it's beyond propaganda (which seeks only to emotionally inflame) -- it's publicity (which seeks approval, purchase, the voluntary hug of the whole wide world).

A justification for our bizarre actions must be sought; after all, only in dictatorships does the leader do whatever he likes whether or not the people like it. And this is America! We're a democracy, not a dictatorship. Our leaders still want to do whatever they like, but first, we must convince people that they should like it too. Otherwise, we might end up like North Korea (a.k.a. The Axis of Evil's Eastern Conference champion), with a leader -- unfairly elected and the son of the former head of state -- who is given to demented public utterances and unilateral decisions. So, like capitalism (which also has a history of doing whatever it wants, and then selling the public on the idea that it's what they want too), democracy gets the PR outfit rolling, so that the public is not given to fruitless questioning of the grand plan.

And they're doing a grand job. The conflation and inflation of enemies has worked like a charm (can it truly be less than six months since our national enemies have grown from "19 terrorists" to "the al-Q'aeda network" to "the Taliban and others who aid and abet the al-Q'aeda network" to "Islamic fundamentalism" to an "axis of evil" consisting of increasingly liberalized Islamic state Iran, non-Islamic fundamentalist Arab state Iraq, and non-Islamic non-Arab state North Korea?); Colin Powell has done his duty by giving a fiery speech in which he nicely sidesteps international condemnation of our unilateralist war fever by saying we'll "go it alone" and "do whatever it takes" to wipe out "international terrorism"; and the public seems to have wholly accepted that no one should be allowed to have "weapons of mass destruction" but responsible, accountable, non-axis-of-evil democracies like Pakistan, Israel and China.

Think of it: no one even questions the wisdom of conflating Iran and Iraq, even though they are diametrically opposed in government, language, politics, policies and society, and have fought a number of bloody wars. It's no longer subject to doubt that we will soon attack Iraq, despite their having done nothing to provoke us and despite the fact that every attempt to link them to the recent terrorist attacks has been laughable. Our elected leaders chanted, cheered and hooted at a speech in which North Korea -- a country which is even less of a threat to America than fellow non-threat Iran, a country so impoverished and racked with starvation that its arch-enemy to the south sends them thousands of tons of food -- was said to be part of an "axis of evil". Our president freely talks of the sanctity of individual rights and the primacy of the rule of law while he defies international law at every juncture, and declares himself to be the final arbiter of who is and is not covered by the Geneva Convention. The Palestinians and their (elected) leader have been fully transformed in the public consciousness from oppressed minority group to moral brethren to those who brought down the twin towers And I cannot recall a single article in any major newspaper that asks why Iraq is evil for attempting to develop weapons that the United States stockpiles in the thousands and tens of thousands.

And it didn't even take a single solitary vote! Who needs to ask the people what they think, when you can just tell them? God bless America.