Illusion's
Tomgram: Jonathan Schell on Bin Laden's illusions and ours
Quotes of the day:
"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. ‘We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''' (Ron Suskind, Without a Doubt, the New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004)
"[Before the war] Intelligence officials were convinced that American soldiers would be greeted warmly when they pushed into southern Iraq, so a C.I.A. operative suggested sneaking hundreds of small American flags into the country for grateful Iraqis to wave at their liberators. The agency would capture the spectacle on film and beam it throughout the Arab world. It would be the ultimate information operation… The agency believed that many of the towns were 'ours,' said one former staff officer who attended the session. 'At first, it was going to be U.S. flags,' he said, 'and then it was going to be Iraqi flags. The flags are probably still sitting in a bag somewhere.'" (Michael R. Gordon, Poor Intelligence Misled Troops About Risk of Drawn-Out War," the New York Times, October 20, 2004)
What a world! Everyone his own auteur. Everybody from CIA agents and Presidential political consultants to Osama bin Laden directing his own movie or unreality TV show. Of course, why should we be surprised? When it comes to saleable products, illusion Hollywood-style has been up there with weaponry as a major American export success for countless years. And the world has paid attention. I can't claim that Osama bin Laden ever saw The Towering Inferno or any of the action-adventure dramas where subways barrel down streets, blimps threaten crowded stadiums, or terrorists unleash nuclear weapons on an unsuspecting world. But retro-fundamentalist though he might be, and no matter how often he invokes the Arabian peninsula of centuries ago, he's a distinctly modern man.
Without the camera -- and the knowledge that, whatever you do wherever you are, the camera will somehow be there to catch the moment (viz. Abu Ghraib) and then the TV news will be ready and willing to play it again, and again, and again -- the attacks of 9/11 would have been almost inconceivable. They would have made next to no sense. They were, after all, planned and organized as fodder for the TV news, as Osama's Hollywood-style spectacle, his "export" to be viewed by the world. Similarly, George Bush's illusion-based bubble-presidency had been planned and organized as an ongoing spectacle of controlled imagery from early on -- from those imaginary mushroom clouds rising over our cities to that aircraft-carrier strut. After all, every publicly made argument for our little Iraqi war that won't end was an illusion, and that's stopped no one in the administration, then or now.
If there hadn't been an even grander illusion evoked by the event that began it all, nothing would have developed as it did. As columnist James Carroll writes this week in the Boston Globe:
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
Quotes of the day:
"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. ‘We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''' (Ron Suskind, Without a Doubt, the New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004)
"[Before the war] Intelligence officials were convinced that American soldiers would be greeted warmly when they pushed into southern Iraq, so a C.I.A. operative suggested sneaking hundreds of small American flags into the country for grateful Iraqis to wave at their liberators. The agency would capture the spectacle on film and beam it throughout the Arab world. It would be the ultimate information operation… The agency believed that many of the towns were 'ours,' said one former staff officer who attended the session. 'At first, it was going to be U.S. flags,' he said, 'and then it was going to be Iraqi flags. The flags are probably still sitting in a bag somewhere.'" (Michael R. Gordon, Poor Intelligence Misled Troops About Risk of Drawn-Out War," the New York Times, October 20, 2004)
What a world! Everyone his own auteur. Everybody from CIA agents and Presidential political consultants to Osama bin Laden directing his own movie or unreality TV show. Of course, why should we be surprised? When it comes to saleable products, illusion Hollywood-style has been up there with weaponry as a major American export success for countless years. And the world has paid attention. I can't claim that Osama bin Laden ever saw The Towering Inferno or any of the action-adventure dramas where subways barrel down streets, blimps threaten crowded stadiums, or terrorists unleash nuclear weapons on an unsuspecting world. But retro-fundamentalist though he might be, and no matter how often he invokes the Arabian peninsula of centuries ago, he's a distinctly modern man.
Without the camera -- and the knowledge that, whatever you do wherever you are, the camera will somehow be there to catch the moment (viz. Abu Ghraib) and then the TV news will be ready and willing to play it again, and again, and again -- the attacks of 9/11 would have been almost inconceivable. They would have made next to no sense. They were, after all, planned and organized as fodder for the TV news, as Osama's Hollywood-style spectacle, his "export" to be viewed by the world. Similarly, George Bush's illusion-based bubble-presidency had been planned and organized as an ongoing spectacle of controlled imagery from early on -- from those imaginary mushroom clouds rising over our cities to that aircraft-carrier strut. After all, every publicly made argument for our little Iraqi war that won't end was an illusion, and that's stopped no one in the administration, then or now.
If there hadn't been an even grander illusion evoked by the event that began it all, nothing would have developed as it did. As columnist James Carroll writes this week in the Boston Globe:
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
posted by T. Scott Brineman at 10:08 AM
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