John Chuckman OpeEdNews.com
A few years sometimes make a big difference in human affairs. A few years ago an American President was put through the 18th century ordeal of impeachment, a vast, expensively-staged comic opera of white manes waving and grave baritones intoning, over a dribble on a dress and the lie he told to save himself embarrassment. Today we have a President who has hurled the world into two dirty, pointless wars after what undoubtedly qualifies as the longest sequence of public lies ever uttered in a free society, and yet in his homeland he remains popular and is collecting enough campaign cash to rival the Swiss bank balances of the Russian Mafia.
Leaders have always lied in times of war and when maneuvering for advantage in international affairs, American presidents, despite puffed-up claims to different moral standards, no less so than others. Usually the lies they tell are not understood until years later. The lies then often seem to become small, unimportant details in a history of big events. But Bush has lied daily, doing it so awkwardly at times that you might think everyone is aware of it, and it seems to make no difference to his political standing.
What will Bush do with all the cash he is hoarding for the next campaign? He will use it to practice the worst lying possible in a democratic society, lying that subverts the intent of democracy, replacing meaningful debate by the suggestions, half-truths, and staged images of advertising and marketing. Perhaps, I should correct that to the second-worst lying possible in a democratic society, for Bush, of course, entered office with the worst lying, claiming to have won an election he lost by any sensible reckoning.
Why are Americans not distressed at this? Because they live in an intense field, an electromagnetic haze, of marketing, advertising, and commercial propaganda twenty-four hours a day. Americans are so saturated with this stuff that they regard it as normal communication.
But it is not normal. It is deliberate and manipulative. At its very best, advertising is only ever half truth, telling a few favorable aspects of something that deserves greater scrutiny. At its worst, it is simply artful fraud and deception. But in no case is it truth or, perhaps better put since truth is a large and difficult idea, honest communication. Advertising, like its fraternal twin, propaganda, always has a purpose other than helping you understand something. This other purpose is its raison d'
