DEAD PARROT BULLETIN
1/1/04
"HUNTERS"
What does it tell us about the current leaders of our democracy that they take so much pleasure in killing little birds? England's King George V, if memory serves, holds the all-time record for such massacres, with several hundred thousand attested victims. But now Bush and Cheney are coming up on the outside. The Week (12/26-1/2) reports that Cheney inflicted shock and awe on more than 400 pen-raised pheasants that were released into his gunsights at a Pennsylvania country club. His 70 kills, a spokesman said, were to be donated to "hunger-relief charities." The story does not record whether Cheney also shot "downer" birds, those too sick or aged to fly, or whether downers would in any case be permitted in the charity "food-stream." Bush celebrated New Year's by blasting some quail at the ranch with Florida accomplice and special Iraq envoy James Baker (NY Times, 1/1). According to the same edition of the Times, deaths of American soldiers in Iraq now stand at 479.
King George V, his official biographer tells us, was distinguished "by no exercise of social gifts, by no personal magnetism, by no intellectual powers. He was neither a wit nor a brilliant raconteur, neither well-read nor well-educated, and he made no great contribution to enlightened social converse. He lacked intellectual curiosity and only late in life acquired some measure of artistic taste." But he looked sharp in a military uniform, could handle a shotgun, and knew what empire was all about.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
September 13, NY Times, front page: A three-column color photo, above the fold, shows Bush doing his OK Corral strut in front of a backdrop of saluting soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division which, according to the caption-writer, "won some of the most important battles in Iraq." The story by Richard Stevenson notes that the men were coached by their commanders to interrupt Bush's speech with shouts of "Hooah," a jungle cry registering militant enthusiasm.
September 13, Boston Globe, p A16: A well-buried story by Jim Abrams details efforts by the White House and Republican leaders in the House of Representatives to disqualify as many as 1.5 million veterans from disability benefits. At $58 billion over 10 years, these benefits are too expensive for an administration that nevertheless is spending $87 billion in one year to shore up the wreckage it created by its unnecessary war.
READING RECOMMENDATION
Weapons of Mass Deception (Penguin USA, 2003) is itself a deceptively slight-looking book. The authors, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, edit a quarterly called PR Watch that reports on the public relations "industry." In Weapons, the most recent in a series of collaborations that include Toxic Sludge is Good for You! and the prescient Mad Cow U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?, they take on the PR campaign with which Bush and his advisers have attempted to promote and justify the Iraq war. At just 204 pages (plus another 34 of notes), the book will not serve as a doorstop; but it offers a great deal to think about.
Stauber and Rampton are at their best in deconstructing the language of mass manipulation, a language in which the lies are so deeply silted under layers of abstraction and euphemism and so impacted in a tangle of half-truths that bringing them to light requires diligent archaeology. A discussion of a report published in 2000 by the neocon Project for a New American Century is typical:
The PNAC report stated that the United States needs to "perform the 'constabulary duties' associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions." The phrase "constabulary duties" is a vague way of transforming U.S. soldiers occupying foreign countries into friendly neighborhood cops. "Shaping the security environment" is polite language for controlling other people at gunpoint, and "critical regions" is a nice way of saying "countries we want to control." Similarly, U.S. nuclear weapons--which would be called "weapons of mass destruction" if someone else owned them--are described as "the U.S. nuclear deterrent," while missiles with global reach are "defenses to defend the American homeland." How do they "defend" us? They "provide a secure basis for U.S. power projection around the world."
The authors might also have pointed out that 'constabulary duties' gives settings like Iraq a comic Gilbert-and-Sullivan air, as if all the nasty stuff flying around over there were only a theatrical effect and the dead would rise and the dismembered become whole again after the curtain dropped.
Come to think of it, one G-and-S lyric does summarize Bush's career quite aptly:
I thought so little they rewarded me
By making me the ruler of the Queen's nav-ee.
Read Weapons of Mass Deception if you still need to give a little shot of urgency to your sense of why we need to put these people out of office in November.
Happy New Year.