VLVL2 preliminaries: Guardian counterpoint to _1984_ Foreword

[pynchonoid]

Good article in today's Guardian, worth reading
together with Vineland and Pynchon's Foreword to
_1984_ for insights re Bush's America "circa 2003":

Trading on fear

>From the start, the invasion of Iraq was seen in the
US as a marketing project. Selling 'Brand America'
abroad was an abject failure; but at home, it worked.
Manufacturers of 4x4s, oil prospectors, the nuclear
power industry, politicians keen to roll back civil
liberties - all seized the moment to capitalise on the
war. PR analysts Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
explain how it worked. 

Saturday July 12, 2003
The Guardian 

[...] September 11 was frequently compared to the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, with White House
officials warning that the war on terror would be
prolonged and difficult like the second world war, and
would require similar sacrifices. But whatever those
sacrifices may entail, almost from the start it was
clear that they would not include frugality. During
the second world war, Americans conserved resources as
never before. Rationing was imposed on petrol, tyres
and even food. People collected waste such as paper
and household cooking scraps so that it could be
recycled and used for the war effort. Compare that
with the headline that ran in O'Dwyer's PR Daily on
September 24, less than two weeks after the terrorist
attack: "PR Needed To Keep Consumers Spending." 

President Bush himself appeared in TV commercials,
urging Americans to "live their lives" by going ahead
with plans for vacations and other consumer purchases.
"The president of the US is encouraging us to buy,"
wrote marketer Chuck Kelly in an editorial for the
Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune, which argued that
America was "embarking on a journey of spiritual
patriotism" that "is about pride, loyalty, caring and
believing" - and, of course, selling. "As marketers,
we have the responsibility to keep the economy
rolling," wrote Kelly. "Our job is to create customers
during one of the more difficult times in our
history." 

[...] It seems to be a law of history that times of
war and national fear are accompanied by rollbacks of
civil liberties and attacks on dissent. During the
civil war, Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of
habeas corpus. The second world war brought the
internment of Japanese-Americans and the cold war
McCarthyism. These examples pale compared with the
uses of fear to justify mass killings, torture and
political arrests in countries such as Mao's China,
Stalin's Russia or Saddam's Iraq. Yet these episodes
have been dark moments in America's history. 

[...] Corporate spin doctors, thinktanks and
conservative politicians have taken up the rhetoric of
fear for their own purposes. [...not to mention war
mongering P-listers who used these tactics against
P-listers who have opposed the wars on Afghanistan and
Iraq...] Even before 9/11, many of them were engaged
in an ongoing effort to demonise environmentalists and
other activist groups by associating them with
terrorism. [...] On October 7 2001, the Washington
Times printed an editorial calling for "war against
eco-terrorists," calling them "an eco-al-Qaida" with
"a fanatical ideology and a twisted morality".
Conservatives sometimes used the war on terrorism to
demonise Democrats. The then Democratic Senate
majority leader Tom Daschle was targeted by American
Renewal, the lobbying wing of the Family Research
Council, a conservative thinktank that spends most of
its time promoting prayer in public schools and
opposing gay rights. In newspaper ads, American
Renewal attempted to paint Daschle and Saddam Hussein
as "strange bedfellows". "What do Saddam Hussein and
Senate majority leader Tom Daschle have in common?"
stated a news release announcing the ad campaign.
"Neither man wants America to drill for oil in
Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge." 

[...] Since 9/11, laws have been passed that place new
limits on citizen rights, while expanding the
government's authority to spy on citizens. 

[...] As if determined to prove that irony is not
dead, the Ad Council launched a new series of public
service advertisements, calling them a "Freedom
Campaign", in July 2002. "What if America wasn't
America? Freedom. Appreciate it. Cherish it. Protect
it," read the tag line at the end of each TV ad, which
attempted to celebrate freedom by depicting what
America would look like without it. In one ad, a young
man approaches a librarian with a question about a
book he can't find. She tells him ominously that the
book is no longer available, and the young man is
taken away for questioning by a couple of government
goons. The irony is that the Patriot Act had already
empowered the FBI to seize book sales and library
checkout records, while barring booksellers and
librarians from saying anything about it to their
patrons. It would be nice to imagine that someone at
the Ad Council was trying to make a point in
opposition to these encroachments on our freedoms.

[...] The NBC report recommended axing Donahue because
he presented a "difficult public face for NBC in a
time of war ... He seems to delight in presenting
guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and sceptical of the
administration's motives." It went on to outline a
possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes "a
home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time
that our competitors are waving the flag at every
opportunity". [...] At the same time that Donahue was
cancelled, MSNBC added to its line-up Michael Savage,
who routinely refers to non-white countries as "turd
world nations" and who charges that the US "is being
taken over by the freaks, the cripples, the perverts
and the mental defectives". In one broadcast, Savage
justified ethnic slurs as a national security tool:
"We need racist stereotypes right now of our enemy in
order to encourage our warriors to kill the enemy."
[...] 

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,995669,00.html>


Pynchon, Foreword to _1984_:

"[...] With the homeland in danger, strong leadership
and effective measures become of the essence, and if
you want to call that fascism, very well, call it
whatever you please, no one is likely to be listening,
unless it's for the air raids to be over and the all
clear to sound. [...]  One could certainly argue that
Churchill's war cabinet had behaved on occasion no
differently from a fascist regime, censoring news,
controlling wages and prices, restricting travel,
subordinating civil liberties to self-defined wartime
necessity. 

{...] Doublethink also lies behind the names of the
superministries which run things in Oceania - the
Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth
tells lies, the Ministry of Love tortures and
eventually kills anybody whom it deems a threat. If
this seems unreasonably perverse, recall that in the
present-day United States, few have any problem with a
war-making apparatus named "the department of
defence," any more than we have saying "department of
justice" with a straight face, despite well-documented
abuses of human and constitutional rights by its most
formidable arm, the FBI. Our nominally free news media
are required to present "balanced" coverage, in which
every "truth" is immediately neutered by an equal and
opposite one. Every day public opinion is the target
of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright
lying, all of which is benevolently termed "spin," as
if it were no more harmful than a ride on a
merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us,
yet hope otherwise. We believe and doubt at the same
time - it seems a condition of political thought in a
modern superstate to be permanently of at least two
minds on most issues. Needless to say, this is of
inestimable use to those in power who wish to remain
there, preferably forever. [...] "






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