Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.63.0601121115490.13673@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: Culture of Lies
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 11:16:08 -0500 (EST)
Culture of Lies I was listening to the Colbert Report the other night; Carl Bernstein was on. He answered briefly and to the point. His take on Bush and company: lies. His take on current politics in this country: bought. These are corporate behaviors, or behavior-sheaves, interconnected modes of action. Corporations live them; lies are brought and formulated in the workplace as everyday matters. Ethics is compartmentalized and doesn't apply. Skip to Hiaasen's 60 Minutes interview and you'll find more of the same analysis. I lived within this culture when I taught at Florida International a few years ago. I was dismissed and the tenure-track line canceled as well. I was told by the department head the cut-back was financial and came from the dean. I was told by the union representative that the cut-back came from the department. When I took the job I was told that there was suitable equipment and funds for the position. When I arrived there wasn't any. My partner was told that a museology line was in place. There wasn't any. I was told I'd be given fund-raising contacts. There weren't any. The department announced to the local paper that it had built a new multi- media classroom; it hadn't. I was told my situation was my fault; was the dean' fault; was the department chair's fault; was the governor's fault. Whatever happened there, and I don't know to this day, I behaved ethic- ally (but neurotically); the surrounding culture didn't. It's easy to live according to the cover-up and the world's technologic- ally smarter than it was in Nixon's day. Lies are distanced through the media; you can believe you're behaving ethically because otherwise you're just speaking through a microphone. The public here buys into that; a recent poll for example shows that 56% of those interviewed favored government wire-tapping if needed. This is fundamentally against the principles of America, as is the notion of the collusion of religion and government, as well as military pre-emptive strikes. Growing up here means growing up through WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Nicaragua, Granada, Iraq, and hosts of other conflicts. We live within a militarism that has no need to pay attention to the local verbal conflicts here. The majority of Americans favor gun laws; we won't get them. The majority favors health care; we won't get it and we're told on one hand that seniors are given additional choices - at the same time the safety net is being eroded to nothingness. We're told we have a crisis of social security at the same time we're paying exponentially-increasing health-care costs and doctors and drug companies are getting richer. To give you again an idea from personal life - we live here in Brooklyn on around $18,000/year. My father pays my health care, or most of it. It's the rock-bottom at $6000 a year. There's also 'co-payments' every time I see a doctor or get medicine; there's a $100 deductible on drugs yearly. This is obscene; we're so far below the poverty level it's ridiculous, and at the same time, there's no safety net - yet we pay taxes to fund Halliburton and an outrageous deadly war in Iraq. In an idea world, Bush Inc. would be held accountable; he won't be. The culture closes, forecloses, on itself. It's everyday business, just like Nazism was everyday business. But this is in for the long run; these people are self-preserving. The scandals make no difference at all; the truth is always seen as contestable, just as Darwin or weapons of mass destruction are contestable. The culture of lies depends on one hand on a population willing to put up with autocracy, desiring autocracy, as the safety net disappears; it licks its masters because there's no other game in town, except religion, already bought and sold and integrated. The culture of lies depends on the other on a verbal sophistry which is based on a notion of the insignificance of truth; truth is reserved for one's inner soul, for the Rapture, for the back-room - men are like that. The lie is possible because the language of finance, not personal and verbal language, carries the greatest weight; it's not for nothing that we have expressions like 'the buck stops here' and 'the bottom line.' This is also the reason, by the way, that American political rhetoric is so filled with sports talk; the game plan is to win at any cost. Sublimating truth into the arena of arenas backs up a culture of gambling, the killer play (not unlike the killer app) - a culture in which ontology has shifted from the oath and linguistic performativity to stock-market performance. This is fundamental, however trite it is (i.e. 'money talks' which just about sums it up); the culture of lies _is_ a culture, and needs the security and stability of big money for those who play, or those who hope to play, it. It ensures it's the only game in town. On the farther end of the spectrum is the rest of us, lying as well for that matter, just as embedded. We're the embedded reporters in fact who bring back from Iraq what the government and military want us to hear; we're the 'crackers' and everyone else just getting by, moving through an increasingly implosive world of drought, extinctions, and information, leaving us behind. The superstructure has finally succeeded in taming the base; the base is whatever the superstructure says it is, until famine sets in, and then war - required as well by the superstructure. It's a different ball-game. There's no end to this analysis which has been told over and over again, and we continue to tell it, just was empathetic magic is based on repetition. It's no use, except for self-comfort late at night; the culture of lies will bring us increasing war, violence, violation of human rights, and poverty - all in the name of fighting terrorism, playing on the internet, living the good life, betting on the Superbowl, making sure we have 'no child left behind,' counting on the 'village' it takes to make a child, waiting for the Rapture, fearing the hyperbolic hyperviolent God fundamentalists purvey, and buying mostly on credit, houses, cars, SUVs, cable television, high-definition TV, Ipods, camcorders, computers, Internet connections, Caribbean cruises, ecotourisms (which are not that 'eco'), factory-'farmed' meats, hunting expeditions, fishing trips, visiting the natives, mega-speakers, cell phones, camera phones, text-messaging phones, video phones, back yard pools, swing sets, personal trainers, gym memberships, fashionable clothing, anti-fashionable clothing, guns, knives, sex-tapes, miserable health-care, processed foods, the latest cosmetics, unbelievably bad school systems, Bibles, church memberships, Wired magazine, Fortune magazine, Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, Reader's Digest, plastic toys, plastic toy guns, skate- boards, off-road vehicles (which tear up the wilderness), jet skis (which pollute the water), power-boats (which have wounded every single manatee still alive), yachts, cruise-control, lawsuits, and just about everything else that keeps the American public way down (and falling) on the quality- of-life index. This is the new world of freedom, as Absolut as it's going to get, and we'll do everything we can to get to the finish line.