In fact the author sees a grotesque kind of symmetry between the message McNamara sent with 600,000 tons of bombs that killed 10,000 Vietnamese when Nixon and Kissinger were negotiating for "peace with honor," and the 4800 gallons of gasoline Timothy McVeigh "backed" into the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City killing 167, or that were sent by Eric Rudolph acting to eliminate abortion rights by the killing of two in Atlanta's Olympic Park. In each case, the respective terrorists all apparently were "suing for peace with honor" on their own respective terms, and according to their own respective definitions of "peace" and "honor." No matter who is labelled terrorist, all messages were communicated in the same way: Ticky, ticky, Boom!! (Can you hear me now?)
Chapter V: Elfland
"Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it." (Max Frisch).
The author sees Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America," a jerry-rigged Rube Goldberg-like contraption, as just such empty technology: an amulet, as it were, fashioned by stringing together long strains of random pieces of magical sounding but unintelligible patriotic debris, whose very existence, no matter how senselessly arranged, is supposed to serve to exorcise all anti-democratic evil spirits.
What happened to the world governed by the telling of a consistent non-contradictory morally high level and intelligent sovereign story? Gingrich's "Magic Kingdom" fashioned of random word strings, is the same dreamlike images that float to the surface of MTV, with the same intrinsic value: none.
If only we could get Newt's word salads in the right order, they surely somehow would yield the gift of meaning, or surely we would find signs of settled beliefs, no? Newt's technopornographication of history and moral responsibility is America's newest pseudo-patriotic salvation, a last resort attempt to resurrect and purify the dead American soul.
Chapter VI: Eye Brow Pencil
"If one really wishes to understand the power of the press, then one must pay attention not to what it says, but the way in which it is listened to. ... It only cries so loud because its audience is becoming deaf." (Alexis de Tocqueville).
The late John F Kennedy Jr's magazine "George" was a political magazine advertised as being without politics. General Colin Powell, the black Ike, was a "political general," whose political opinions were neutered. Both operated out of a distant global Feudal City-State run by IBM, BP, and Citi Bank. Rumor has it that this City-State has been turned into a giant puppet show called America?
Chapter VII:Christmas Carol
"You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements." (Norman Douglas)
Phil Gramm, Newt Gingrich, Gordon Gecko, and Ebenezer Scrooge, together placed the Republican Party's "Contract with American" under the Christmas tree. It said: "A Christmas Greeting to all: Greed is good; honest work and charity are dumb; watering the flowers in the garden of ones own stock portfolio must be done carefully in the Spring, if we want to keep the global economy alive and well. Amen
Chapter VIII: Time Lines
"Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards." (Soren Kierkegaard)
The U.S. defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument. Other nations make do with bloodlines, a common store of language, inherited portfolios of ancestral myths, reaching back in time to the first Irishman or Korean.
But we only have the dialectic in which we try to frame the opposing principles of liberty and equality into a political architecture that best supports the cause of freedom. The theory seems to work in principle, but the practice? Well, 250 years has told us that that requires moral courage and bravery, something that apparently was not handed-down to us from the founding generation.
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