Now
Available!
Dime's
Worth of Difference:
Beyond the
Lesser of Two Evils
Order Here!
Today's
Stories
October 12,
2004
Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz
"Indian
Country"
Bill and Kathleen Christison
Israel as Sideshow
October 11,
2004
Robert Fisk
Iraq:
Unforgivable Betrayals and Broken Promises
Kevin Pina
The
Untold Story of Aristide's Departure from Haiti
Patrick Gavin
Rethinking
Columbus Day
Chris Floyd
Tribes with Flags in the New Afghanistan
Daniel Wolff
Radioactive Money: Entergy, Political Cash and America's Most
Dangerous Nuclear Plant
Walter Brasch
The Only Ones Who Believe Saddam Had WMDs are Bush, Cheney...and
40% of All Americans
Mike Whitney
The Phony Afghan Elections: Ballot of the Disappearing Ink
Ari Shavit
"He Talks to Condi Rice Every Day": an Interview with
Sharon's Lawyer
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Debates and the Big Lie
Website of the Day
Dylan's Greatest Recording?
October 9 /
10, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
"There
Are No Innocents"
Paul de Rooij
Northern Ireland is Still the Issue: a Conversation with Gerry
Adams
M. Shahid Alam
Making Sense of Our Times
Laura Carlsen
Protest and Populism in Latin America
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: ASA Goes to Court
Col. Dan Smith
Bush's Credibility Gap
Paul Craig
Roberts
Faith-Based Economics
Greg Bates
What If Nader Critics Get What They Demand?
Joshua Frank
Cobb, the Greens and the Collapse of the Left
Felice Pace
Wilderness, Politics and the Oligarchy: How the Pew Charitable
Trust is Smothering the Grassroots Environmental Movement
Walter A. Davis
Of Pynchon, Thanatos and Depleted Uranium
William A.
Cook
The Agony of Colin Powell
Phyllis Pollack
Twas No Crank Call Love Affair: London Calling, 25 Years Later
Poets' Basement
Klipschutz, Albert, Ford
Website of the Weekend
Abu Ghraib: the Taguba Annexes
October 8,
2004
Jennifer Loewenstein
The
Israeli Invasion of Gaza
Moshe Adler
Edwards' Gambit: He Hoped No One Would Notice the Similarities
David Swanson
Media Blackout: Press Continues to Ignore Labor's Opposition
to Iraq War
Dave Zirin
CounterPunch Contest: Let's Name the New DC Baseball Team!
Rep. Ron Paul
The Draft is a Form of Slavery
William S. Lind
Keeping Our SA Up
Samar Assad
Kerry v. Bush: No Difference When It Comes to Israel / Palestine
Jim Ingalls
and Sonali Kolhatkar
The Elections in Afghanistan
October 7,
2004
Dave Lindorff
All
Out of Volunteers: A Draft is in the Air
Masha Hamilton
Fear in Kandahar
Christopher
Brauchli
Master of Corruption: the Ripening Scandals of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Is There Still Time to Impeach Bush?
Bruce K. Gagnon
Bombing the Panhandle: Fighting the Pentagon in Rural Florida
Meredith Kolodner
Where
is the Urgency?: The Anti-War Movement's Election Year Challenge
October 6,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
"Please,
Dude, Can I Take Them Out?": Targeting Civilians in Fallujah
Ron Jacobs
Going
Nuclear: the Ghost of Edward Teller Lives
Michael Colby
The National Flip-Flop: Suddenly Bush is Unfit to Lead?
Tarif Abboushi
More of the Same: Israel Wins the Debates
Matthew Behrens
Canadian Firms Profit from Iraqi Blood
Mike Whitney
Rethinking WMDs
John Pilger
Stealing Diego Garcia
Ben Tripp
Kerry's "Triumph"
Kevin McKiernan
Cheney's Poison Lab: Wrong Time, Wrong Target
Patrick Cockburn
Elections
Will Not End the Fighting in Iraq
Website of the Day
Is There an Islamic Problem?
October 5,
2004
Anthony Loewenstein
Rupert
Murdoch and the Marginals: "Personally Creating Outcomes"
Mark Clinton
and Tony Udell
The
Suicide of an Iraq War Veteran
Greg Bates
Trading
Idiots: an Open Letter to Eric Alterman
Dave Lindorff
What's
the Frequency, Karl?
Norm Dixon
Why Washington Won't Save Darfur Villagers
Larry Kearney
God Talk and Burning Children
Bill Linville
Dirty Politics in the Land of "Clean" Government
Gary Leupp
What
Edwards Should Ask Cheney
Website of
the Day
A Guide to Halliburton for Tonight's Debate
October 4,
2004
Diane Christian
The
Gates of Hell
Joshua Frank
An Interview with David Cobb
Doug Giebel
Incurious George: What If Bush Didn't Lie?
John Chuckman
Strange Victory: Sen. Obvious and the Pathetic Lump
Ramzy Baroud
Reverse the Picture: Anatomy of a Palestinian Outrage
Julia Stein
Remembering Mario Savio and the FSM
Sean Donahue
Outsourcing
Terror: Kerry and Special Forces
Website of
the Day
Mapping
Mt. St. Helens as She Rocks
October 2 /
3. 2004
Paul Wright
John
Kerry on Criminal Justice
Kathleen and Bill Christison
An Exchange with Israeli Historian Bennie Morris
Kathie Helmkamp
My Son Trent: a Marine Who Doesn't Want to Kill
Phillip Cryan
Indigenous Mobilization in Colombia
Lenni Brenner
The First Ex-Catholic Saint: Memories of Mario Savio
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: In Case You Missed "Montel"
Ron Jacobs
It Did Happen Here: When Neo-Nazis Terrorized Olympia
Ben Tripp
Sticker Shock
William S.
Lind
The Grand Illusion: Iraqi Security Forces
Dave Zirin
The Swindle of the Century: Baseball Comes to DC
Dave Lindorff
Lies from the Great Debate
Luscon Pierre-Charles
Haiti's Elections: a High-Tech Sham is Underway
Zoe Moskovitz
& Sasha Kramer
Separating Lies from Truth About Haiti
Nelson P. Valdes
Habana Night vs. Latin American Scholars in Vegas: 61 Banned
Cuban Academics
Alan Farago
The "Ownership Society" and the End of the Everglades
Nancy Haley
What is the Historical Jesus Trying to Tell Us?
Alex Billet
Long Live The Clash: London Still Calling After 25 Years
Steve Fesenmaier
Save and Burn: The War on Libraries
Poets' Basement
Smith, Holt, Albert
October 1,
2004
Steve Breyman
Kerry's
Missed Opportunities
Rose Gentle
My
Son Died for a Lie
Lee Sustar
Iran
in the Crosshairs
Ralph Nader
What
We Didn't Hear at the Debate: Where's the Exit Strategy?
Walter Andrews
We Are Less Secure Now Than Ever
Mike Whitney
Pandora's
Government
Mickey Z.
Debate
This
Saul Landau
The
Iraq Invasion: Lessons from the Pinochet Cases
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
October 12, 2004
Deconstructing
Bush
Truth
Lies a Political Spin Away in an Age of Absolute Crocks
By
PIERRE TRISTAM
Sometime between the My Lai massacre
and Watergate (or between the first and last episodes of "Here's
Lucy," if you like your contexts sanitized), Truth with
a big T took one between the eyes.
There were no such things as
moral or cultural absolutes anymore, no superior civilizations,
certainly nothing like Truth, Justice and the American Way, at
least not with a straight face. The old Enlightenment idea that
with enough education and experience we could judge and know
everything objectively was replaced with the "postmodernist"
notion that we can know nothing no matter how hard we try. Education
itself was suspect because you had to ask yourself who the educators
were, what motive they had up their sleeve to be telling you
that, say, Lincoln was a liberator but John Brown was just a
black terrorist (plenty of motives, it turns out).
In sum, all theories, all ideas,
all practices must more or less be respected, because all is
relative. As the literary theorist Stanley Fish once put it,
the death of objectivity "relieves me of the obligation
to be right;" it "demands only that I be interesting."
So goes the philosophy known as postmodernism, one of whose evangelists
(Jacques Derrida) just went to his final deconstructing place.
Actually, a little relativism
is a very good thing. It punctures old dogmas and gives a voice
to those who've been conveniently shut out. Americans' discovery
in the past few decades that there are such things as women,
minorities and cultures somewhat more complex than the Disney
canon at Epcot owes a lot to postmodernism. It had its excesses.
The 1990s' wave of "political correctness," those campus
speech and dating codes and such workplace Nazifications as "sensitivity
training," come to mind. But its own dogmas aside, postmodernism
had its uses. Conservatives, to whom dogma is second nature,
recognized in the trend a threat to their cherished assumptions
(America the fallible? Never!) and launched a war on relativism
in the 1980s, making it a slur synonymous with liberalism. They
blamed universities for undermining American civilization and
the media for playing along. It was the academic version of the
Grenada invasion (Could a bunch of obscure professors shedding
bad prose be that great a threat to an America that had God on
its side?). But it helped concoct the "culture war"
that has re-made the GOP in Joan of Arc's image.
The GOP lost the 1992 presidential
election in part because its crusading bombast alienated the
country. But like any political movement contrived of opportunism
rather than ideals, it did the next best thing. It got in bed
with postmodernist theories. Like Southern Baptists co-opting
rock 'n roll to the bilge of "Christian rock," the
conservative movement co-opted the joys of relativism to the
greater glories of Republican ideology. You could see it coming
when creationists quit talking in Medieval absurdities and adopted
the scientific-sounding language of "creative intelligence
theory." If it is all scientific opinion, they argued, then
fine: Treat our "science" as such and put us on an
equal footing with the other sciences. And there it was, the
transformation of crock into academic respectability. Fox News
is pulling the same rabbit out of its nightly slanders of journalistic
fairness and balance simply by branding itself fair and balanced.
The 9/11 commission was a more serious slander of objectivity.
By equalizing blame so scrupulously, by making it so relative,
it diffused blame to the point of whitewash while letting the
appearance of conciliatory responsibility seem nobler than
accounting for a catastrophe.
The same principle is at work
when the president tells his crocks -- about Iraqi "democracy,"
about Afghan "freedoms," about the "fairness"
of his plutocratic tax cuts or the greenness of his environmental
graveyard. What matters is what he says matters, not what objective
truths might say matters. Liberals were the first to discredit
objective truth. Conservatives are happy to play along so long
as they get to blast their creative misinformation and wanton
deception from behind the credibility of the presidential seal.
Given the press' unwillingness to call out liars in high places,
the president was, John Kerry's insolence aside, safe. Spin,
in short, is postmodernism at full blast.
"The diffusion of ideas
is propaganda, whether fascist, communist, or democratic,"
the great historian Jacques Barzun wrote many years ago. "The
democratic hope has always been to raise the standard of gullibility,
to sharpen judgment, to confront opposite propagandas."
The Republican success has been to lower the standard of gullibility,
to muddle judgment in the bullying language of fear, to make
confronting propaganda seem like an assault on patriotism. Democracy
has suffered. It is suffering, and it needs rescuing.
The greatest mockery is that this is the party claiming to be
spreading democracy abroad and protecting it at home. There may
not be absolute truths. But there are absolute crocks, and this
is one of them.
Pierre Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer.
Reach him at ptristam@att.net.
Weekend
Edition Features for September 18 / 19, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Forgeries,
Fingerprints and Forensic Fakery
Jeffrey St. Clair
High Plains Grifter: Bush's Mask of Anarchy
Patrick Cockburn
Into the Abyss: the Week Iraq's Dream of Peace Fell Apart
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: Financial Torture (Asset Forfeiture)
Joe Allen
The Comrades Kerry Abandoned: the Real Story of Vietnam Vets
Against the War
George Corsetti
Poletown Revisited: Finally, Some Vindication
Scott Handleman
The Knock-Knock of a Sledgehammer: Sequestered in Nablus
Richard Ward
Two Weeks in Beit Arabiya
Conn Hallinan
Ashcroft and Indonesia
Lori Smith
Health Care in America: And Then I Got Sick...
Dave Zirin
Hold the Booyah!: SportsCenter Out of the Middle East
John L. Hess
Rather Will Take the Heat, As Bush's War Deteriorates
Brian J. Foley
W is for Wimp: So Why do Manly Men Love Him?
Mickey Z.
Pat Tillman and Osama bin Laden: Odd Juxtapositions
Poets' Basement
Vest, Landau & Albert
Website of the Weekend
Eye on the NYTs
/
|