Obama and Nobel: Absurdity on Parade

Sometimes life's absurdities become so blatant, so consuming, that one cannot hellp but question the sanity of the world we live in. One cannot sanely sympathize with poor white people that protest against a lone black man because they envision some sort of holocaust against their meager existence while in fact this same man is tirelessly working to promote the fortune and power of the same white, Protestant men who've always held the same. How does one begin to argue with a man or woman who has been convinced to fight, sometimes violently, to promote someone else's interests to the detriment of their own?

How does one begin to argue with a nation of immigrants who believe to the core of their souls that this wave of immigrants are not lured by higher pay than they can find in their own country (thanks in part to US policies) but rather by a genocidal desire to murder their children? How does one convince a man like Rush Limbaugh or his drones that teenagers fight over stupid things like seats on a bus and that such an occurrence is not an indicator of a large-scale conspiracy on the part of all black people to exterminate the white race, as if whites were somehow on the precipice of extinction?

How, then, are we to respond to the news that a man responsible for widespread death in three countries, bellicose threats to another, and demonstrable loyalty to the position that you're either with the United States or you're dead receiving a prize for the propagation of Peace?

The President:

Let me be clear: I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.

Presumably, "all nations" is typical US code for those nations that agree with our foreign policy. One cannot believe that every Afghani who's had his home destroyed by American soldiers or paid mercenaries cheers "American leadership" as he watches the smoldering rubble of his former life.

The Orwellian construct, "War is Peace," is prescient here. Obama has yet to deviate from the neoconservative delusion that the only way to bring peace through the world is through endless war. Here, there is no alternative to the Bush worldview; a worldview which allows a man to stand above the fray, safely removed from danger, look over the smoldering of several countries and pride themselves on how much peace their weapons have wrought.

Part of the explanation of the prize was also Obama's supposed commitment to ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Of course, nowhere in that idealistic endeavor is the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons mentioned. That would just be insane. Ignorance is Knowledge.

All this lends credence to what C Wright Mills called "crackpot realism."

From the essay "On Knowledge and Power:"

It is not the barbarous irrationality of uncouth, dour Senators that is the American danger; it is the respected judgments of Secretaries of State, the earnest platitudes of Presidents...that is the main danger. For these men have replaced mind by the platitude, and the dogmas by which they are legitimated are so widely accepted that no counter-balance of mind prevails against them. Such men as these are crackpot realists, who, in the name of realism have constructed a paranoid reality all their own and in the name of practicality have projected a utopian image...

Or from The Causes of World War Three:

In crackpot realism, a high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands. In fact, the main content of “politics” is now a struggle among men equally expert in practical next steps—which, in summary, make up the thrust toward war—and in great, round, hortatory principles. (p. 86)

. . . The expectation of war solves many problems of the crackpot realists; it also confronts them with many new problems. Yet these, the problems of war, often seem easier to handle. They are out in the open: to produce more, to plan how to kill more of the enemy, to move materials thousands of miles. . . . So instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplification of known catastrophe. (p. 87)

. . . They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines. Being baffled, and also being very tired of being baffled, they have come to believe that there is no way out—except war—which would remove all the bewildering paradoxes of their tedious and now misguided attempts to construct peace. In place of these paradoxes they prefer the bright, clear problems of war—as they used to be. For they still believe that “winning” means something, although they never tell us what. (p. 88)

. . . Some men want war for sordid, others for idealistic, reasons; some for personal gain, others for impersonal principle. But most of those who consciously want war and accept it, and so help to create its “inevitability,” want it in order to shift the locus of their problems. (p. 88)

So, these politicians create their own reality, again in the Orwellian fashion, in which all anxieties, all uncertainties, are eliminated. From whole cloth, they create a world where victory and defeat fall along clearly-defined lines (though they are never able to express those lines to the public). In their world, enemies and friends are clearly defined, and the status of good and evil coincide perfectly. Circular logic dictates that friends are good, enemies are evil. That one defines the other does not seem to trouble their minds, from which they have systematically removed all seeds of doubt or attempts at objective definition.

Having created this reality, these politicians then foist it upon the world. This fabricated worldview becomes truth, rather than the reverse, and the world must subscribe to the reality as the politicians fight vociferously to defend their creation.

Once created, this worldview cannot be questioned. All positions must then flow forth from it. One must begin with the assumption that bombing villages breeds peace. One must subscribe to the notion that the countries with the largest nuclear arsenals are the natural leaders in the cause of reducing such arsenals (in those countries that don't have them). One must accept without question that no matter how poorly a war has been waged for nearly a decade, success (indefinable though it is) is just around the corner, if only a few thousand more soldiers can be brought ashore.

The most important feature of crackpot realism then, is the inability of observers to engage in any discussion which does not begin with the assumption of all that the crackpots have constructed. All discussion of foreign policy must begin with their fabricated premises, which ensures that such a debate cannot possibly progress. Much of the country, and apparently the world, fails to see this.

As long as discussion is constrained to the limits that the rulers set, "peace" is a fantasy. Indeed, mere mention of the word presents the speaker to the word as a wild-eyed naif unfit for public consumption. There is no reason for this to be. There is no reason that discussion should be constrained by bounds set by those who stand to profit most from its limitation. There is no reason that awards for peace should be awarded to a man who's only qualifications seem to be that he is the most eloquent of the ambassadors for the world of the crackpot realists.

When debate is artificially constrained, it ceases to be debate at all. It has become absolution of a vile worldview.

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What Orwell Didn't Know

The idea for this piece was stolen from the collection of essays by the same name. Overall a mediocre effort, but a worthy idea.

One of the first things that struck me about Orwell, as it does about many historical figures, is that both sides (in our polarized world, it is imagined that there are only two worldviews, to be taken in whole or not at all) claim him as their own. The right, recalling 1984 sees him as a virulent anti-Socialist and anti-Communist, though it is clear that it is the tyranny he opposes rather than the economics. The left, likewise, revels in his scathing of totalitarianism while simultaneously ignoring their own talent for the same. Orwell, himself, saw much the same pillaging of Dickens in his essay, Charles Dickens:

When Chesterton wrote his introduction to the Everyman edition of Dickens's works, it seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with his own highly individual brand of medievalism, and more recently a Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited efforts to turn Dickens into a bloodthirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as "almost" a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as "almost" a Catholic.

The argument is baseless from the start, as Orwell was writing for his own time, not to please one side or the other of this counter-productive, mundane, polarized muck we've found ourselves in. But also, one of his prevailing themes is the use of language and its effect as a vehicle for propaganda and abuse. Who, having witnessed the banality of our current campaign season, cannot see examples of Newspeak and Orwellian language in abundance? If not used explicitly for propaganda, then at least to obfuscate the fact that the speaker, while profusely spilling forth words, is indeed saying very little.

What is clear from Orwell's writing, especially Politics and the English Language, is that he would achieve no favor in either camp, Obama a master of flashy vacuousness, and McCain a great utilizer of phrases which have assumed meanings but whose definitions he intentionally fails to apply. Citing the lack of precision in his contemporary prose:

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.

Both Obama and McCain are guilty of this fault, neither wishing to attach their prose to a specific meaning, preferring instead to allow the listener to paint their own canvas of what they want to hear. Boxing in their rhetoric with the concrete would force explanation and only inhibit their ability to woo as many people as possible.

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

It seems that a men like John McCain and George Bush were no less prevalent in Orwell's time, as both embody Orwell's laments in the above passage. Both are rhetorical fans of freedom, democracy, and patriotism, but both are equally opposed to applying a concrete definition to the words. In speech, both are avid fans of Iraqi democracy and sovereignty. In practice, they see the country as nothing more than the 51st state which just happens to contain an obscene amount of oil. By throwing the words out, however, the listener applies their own meaning, and as such is capable of seeing a process in which 100s of thousands of Iraqis die as a humanitarian mission and "for their own good." Cluster bombs don't spread death, they spread democracy and freedom. The words, in true Orwellian fashion, hide from view the practical outcome of their true meaning.

Likewise, Obama is greatly aided by the fact that he, himself, is a blank canvas, which only further strengthens the effect of his equally-vacuous words and phrases. Obamas followers paint onto him their own hopes and dreams, their own wishes for a "new direction," and little attention is paid to his actual words. Much of the recent presumption of Obama flip-flops stems from the reality that many are hearing his words for the first time, although he has repeated them often.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

It is in this manner that killing thousands of people becomes an act of good will, the sending of other parents' children to die an act of bravery, the calling for the addition of troops and the addition of a new country in which to fight as anti-war. What's more, the electorate for the most part does not ask politicians to eliminate euphemism or vagueness. For the most part, the voting public has no more desire to see the dark face of reality than politicians have motive for giving it to them. As such, to a large extent, the American public censors itself and consigns itself to orthodoxy.

Controlling the public in a totalitarian world is simple, in democracy a little more tact is needed. Propaganda has developed since the time of Orwell in a manner which invites the target audience to do most of the censoring and imbibing of falsehoods themselves. Under the guise of a free society, the public is bombarded with false images and half-truths to the point that they censor themselves, they begin to take as fact total falsehoods without the ruling party lifting a finger.

Americans are bombarded with images of materialism on a daily basis, convinced that all they need to be happy is more toys, and in this pursuit they shed all skepticism of the political structure and cease to ask questions, preferring instead to chase pipe dreams and manufactured illusions. The public clamors for coverage of Obama's bowling average, engages in ritualistic shock at nearly every phrase consisting of anything more than pre-fabricated euphemisms and phrases, all the while ignoring any significant discussion of topics which might actually affect them.

Great pains are taken to paint the two candidates as inhabiting the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum, which sucks the public into a false, polarized debate which ignores virtually anything of substance and import. Presenting Obama and McCain as the extremes of acceptable thought rules out any possibility that the public might begin to think outside that range, might begin to question facets of the system itself. A public that willingly chases red herrings will keep quiet in the corridors of power. A public that censors itself won't ask questions or seek a return on the empty, vacuous rhetoric employed by politicians of all stripes.

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