This is Your Brain on War

Andrew Sullivan's defense of President Obama's claimed power to have American citizens assassinated nicely reveals much of the illogic behind, and many of the dangers inherent in, America's Forever War. Let's examine it point by point.

1. Assassination of American citizens, even if arguably extreme, has only been ordered applied, so far as we know, to four individuals.

When the government attempts to claim some controversial power, it tends to establish the alleged principle behind that power through the facts most convenient for its case. It's no coincidence, therefore, that the government has used Anwar al-Awlaki, whose name and face are a perfect fit for the popular image of Scary Foreign Terrorist, to make its case for a presidential assassination power. From a public relations perspective, it would have been more difficult to establish the power through the announcement of the impending assassination of someone named, say, Mike Miller, a white Christian. For the same reason, Jose Padilla was a good choice for the test case the Bush administration used to establish its power to arrest American citizens on American soil, hold them incommunicado in military facilities, and try them in military commissions. Similarly, the CIA was careful to introduce the news about its torture tapes with a low number -- just two or three -- and then, once the principle of the tapes had been established in the public mind, to mention the real (as far as we know) number, which was ninety-two.

Imagine you're a top West Wing spinmeister discussing how to recruit influence-makers into supporting the president's power to assassinate American citizens. Would you claim the power as broadly as possible, right up front? Or would you soft-pedal it, by initially attaching the power to one man with a dark beard and a scary-sounding name? The answer is obvious. Then, later, once the principle has been established, you can use it more expansively, knowing the influence-makers will have a hard time reversing themselves because, after all, they've already supported the principle, and knowing that the public will go along because now it's been properly inoculated against the shock of a full-blown admission.

But even leaving all that aside, the "but it was done to only a few people" argument is pretty weak. The acceptability of government conduct ought to turn on its legality, not on how many people were subjected to it. Presumably Sullivan wouldn't offer this defense of government conduct if the conduct in question had been torture, though of course this was a primary Bush administration defense of its torture regimen -- that only three people were waterboarded.

2. We know Anwar al-Awlaki is a member of al Qaeda because we can find information to this effect on Wikipedia and in independent news reports.

This argument turns on how much we ought to trust the government when it claims someone is so dangerous that the person merits extrajudicial killing (or, with regard to another power Obama claims for himself, so dangerous that he must be imprisoned forever without charge, trial, or conviction). Logically, I would expect that if the government has evidence compelling enough to justify assassinating (or imprisoning forever) an American citizen, the government would prove its case in court. And I'd be comforted if the government would take the trouble to do so, as I have an admittedly pre-9/11 attachment to the notion that, as the Fifth Amendment puts it, "No person... shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." In fact, given both the constitutional requirements and public relations imperatives in play, when the government refuses to make its case in court, I can't help but suspect just as a matter of logic that its case is in fact weaker than one might like a case for assassination to be.

It's especially relevant in this regard that Sullivan repeatedly bases his defense of the government's claimed power to assassinate Awlaki on Awlaki's alleged treason. Yet Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution provides, "No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court." So it's not just desirable that the government prove allegations like the ones against Awlaki in court; it's constitutionally required (and Sullivan himself seems uncomfortable with his call that Awlaki be executed on the basis of a Wikipedia entry and some news articles, because later in his post he suggests that the government does have some sort of duty to "reiterate" its case in court, if only as part of a more persuasive public relations effort. And note the use of that word, "reiterate" -- Sullivan seems to sense, correctly, that the news reports he cites as evidence are based, as such reports so often are, on government whispers).

So both logically and constitutionally, the government really shouldn't be assassinating American citizens just because Wikipedia and independent news reports claim they're doing bad things. But let's leave logic and the Constitution aside for the moment and instead examine the empirical case for trusting governmental claims that certain people are so bad they must be deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process of law.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld once assured America that the 800 or so prisoners we had locked up in Guantanamo were "the worst of the worst." It turns out not only that most of them were innocent, but that the government knew they were innocent. And indeed, most of them have since been quietly released. Guantanamo is, of course, just one instance, and the history of successive governmental lying is so long and consistent I always find it baffling when someone reflexively treats government claims as a sufficiently trustworthy basis for imprisonment and execution.

We've all had the experience of knowing someone who we realize over time has a tendency to fib. When we make that discovery, immediately thereafter we begin to discount that person's unverified claims. This is just a common-sense, automatic, adult reaction to experience in the world. And yet, when it comes to the government, no matter how many times we're subjected to much worse than mere fibbing -- whether it's Guantanamo, or WMDs, or the scapegoating and persecution of Steven Hatfill as the anthrax killer, or the Pat Tillman coverup, to name only a few of the more recent instances of government lies -- some people will continue to trust governmental assertions as though the government has an unblemished record of truth-telling. I don't know how to explain this irrational credulity. My best guess is it has something to do with denial born of the pain of knowing someone you'd like to trust is in fact a habitual liar.

3. It's okay for the president to order the assassination of Americans we know through Wikipedia and independent news reports are terrorists, as long as the assassinations are done abroad and not on US soil.

This is just incoherent. Why would it be okay to assassinate a treasonous, imminent threat to thousands of American lives when he's abroad, but not okay when he's on American soil? If anything, you'd think the treasonous, traitorous, threatening, inciting, dangerous, spiritual-advisor-to-mass-murderers (to quote Sullivan's case against Awlaki) terrorist would be even more of a threat in closer proximity to his American targets. Why would we want to offer such a dangerous terrorist sanctuary on the very soil he seeks to soak with American blood?

I like that last line. There's something satisfying about getting emotional and trying to whip up others, too (plus I'm a sucker for alliteration). All that logic and devotion to the Constitution was starting to tire me out. But look, the point is, if the president can order the assassination abroad of citizens because he deems them dangerous, he ought to be able to have them assassinated at home, too. Suggesting otherwise feels almost like the kind of dodge I discuss in my response to Sullivan's first argument about the assassinations being limited in number. The message is, don't worry, you asleep in your beds have nothing to fear from this program, which only applies abroad. But because the principle behind the power applies at home, too, eventually the program can be expanded everywhere. That's the way I'd play it, anyway, if I were introducing the program and trying to get the public comfortable with it.

4. We are at war.

This is really Sullivan's central claim -- after all, the title of his piece is "Yes, We Are At War," and he notes about a dozen times in the text itself that We Are At War. He offers some lip service to the notion that the war is not of the traditional variety, but the nature of this "war" is in fact the heart of the matter.

The laws of war don't require, and we don't expect, our soldiers to capture enemy soldiers who are firing at them on the battlefield. But what happens when we expand the concept of "war" to encompass the entire world? To continue for an indefinite period? And to include anyone, because there are no longer meaningful categories such as "soldiers" and "civilians?" That is, when there's no way of determining where the war is being waged, or against whom, or for how long?

It's hard to say for sure, because as far as I know outside Nineteen Eighty-Four it's never been tried before. But I can see some worrying trends. First, many people will start ignoring the Constitution and its requirement that only Congress can declare war. Yes, there were two Authorizations for Use of Military Force -- the first, against those who the President determined "planned, authorized, committed, or aided" the 9/11 attacks; the second, against Iraq. The first might apply to Awlaki, but it's telling that Sullivan doesn't ever bother to cite it. For many people, and I suspect Sullivan is one of them, war is more a state of mind than a condition of hostilities. How else to explain his claim -- which would be scary if it weren't so obviously absurd -- that, "There is no 'due process' in wartime"? The original legal authorization, such as it was, is forgotten, and "We Are at War!" becomes the all-purpose excuse for all government excesses and the all-purpose dismissal all civil liberties concerns.

(For more on this, I recommend Chris Hedge's superb War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning).

Indeed, one of the things that strikes me about the resort to war (and to violence and punishment generally) is that war is more an end than it is a means. Sullivan doesn't argue for war as a tool; he repeatedly argues for war itself:

"We are... at war with a vile, theocratic, murderous organization that would destroy this country and any of its enemies if it got the chance...

"The idea that this is not a war [is] a ludicrous, irresponsible and reality-divorced claim that I have never shared...

"I believe it is the duty of the commander in chief to kill as many of these people actively engaged in trying to kill us as possible and as accurately as possible...

"The point of targeting key agents of al Qaeda for killing is precisely to fight a war as surgically and as morally as we can...

"Treating this whole situation as if it were a civil case in a US city is not taking the threat seriously...

"And so the inclusion of Awlaki as an enemy is not an "execution", or an "assassination", as some of my libertarian friends hyperbolize. It is a legitimate and just act of war against a dangerous traitor at war with us and enjoining others to commit war...

"We ignore these theocratic mass murderers at our peril...

"We have every right, indeed a duty, to kill them after they have killed us by the thousands and before they kill us again."

Rather than articulating an objective (crippling al Qaeda? Reducing the threat of terrorism to manageable levels, as we do for crime? Ending tyranny in our world? Sullivan doesn't say), and then explaining why a given set of tactics is well-suited for achieving that objective, Sullivan repeatedly argues for war itself, and everything that war entails. And why not? War has its own logic, and with a war as all encompassing as the one we're in, that logic takes on a powerful and seductive life of its own. Once you accept, and embrace, that "We are at War," the rest, as they say, is just commentary.

Militarization and the Authoritarian Right

Yes, former Bush administration speechwriter and current Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen's demand that "WikiLeaks Must Be Stopped" is, as his colleague Eva Rodriguez notes, "more than a little whacky." But it's useful, too, because an infatuation with the notion of using the military in non-military operations, particularly domestic ones, is a key aspect of the modern American right and of the rightwing authoritarian personality. Examining Thiessen is a good way to understand both.

Thiessen lays out his premise in his first sentence: "WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise." The premise is silly -- unless the Washington Post for whom Thiessen writes and every other news organization that seeks and publishes leaks is a criminal enterprise, too (apparently Thiessen didn't bother to read 18 USC 793, which he cites as the basis for his opinion about criminality, citing it instead just to sound authoritative). But as whacky as the premise is, it's nothing compared to Thiessen's conclusion.

Which is: that the government "employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring [Wikileaks founder Julian] Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business." This notion -- that crime should be fought with the military -- is part of the creeping militarization of American society. You can see it, too, in rightist support for military tribunals to replace civilian courts in trying terror suspects; in the increasing militarization of our border with Mexico; in the numbers of soldiers deployed in American airports and train stations; and in then Vice President Cheney's attempt to have the military supplant the FBI in arresting terror suspects on American soil.

Thiessen tried to back away from his authoritarian argument when Rodriguez called him on it, but his disavowal rings false. First, Thiessen claims that when he said "military," he only really meant the National Security Agency, because (after all!) the NSA is part of the Department of Defense. But the NSA, which specializes in signals intelligence, would logically fall under the "intelligence assets" Thiessen had already called for is his op-ed. If all Thiessen had in mind was the NSA, the call for "military assets" on top of "intelligence assets" would be redundant. Second, Thiessen claims he was also merely referring to the Defense Department's Cyber Command. But if by "military assets" he meant only the NSA and the Cyber Command, why didn't he just specify these two in the first place?

Regardless, the Cyber Command has on its website the following (style, grammar, and clarity-challenged) mission statement:

USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes, and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full-spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.

This is one of the organizations Thiessen now wants to task with... law enforcement? That Thiessen believes it exculpatory to explain that he was merely calling for the use of the Cyber Command, in addition to the NSA and whatever other "military assets" he might have had in mind, to fight crime is as revealing as his argument itself.

In a probably futile attempt to forestall a barrage of partisan responses, I'll emphasize that the policies and views I describe above don't correlate neatly with either of America's two major political parties. President Obama, for example, has (in addition to escalating the war in Afghanistan and privatizing the one in Iraq) deployed the National Guard to the Mexican border, has secretly deployed special forces to 75 countries, and favors military commissions to try some terror suspects (and indefinite detentions and assassination for others, including American citizens). But the notion that Obama is by any meaningful policy definition liberal is at this point as laughable as it is baseless, and the popular view of Obama as a progressive is testament to the astonishing power of certain brands to outlast the loss of their underlying substance.

Still, my sense is that Republicans argue for authoritarian policies out of conviction, while Democrats cave in to them out of cowardice. The distinction is interesting, though of course in the end the result is the same. Either way, if you believe tasking America's military with investigating, pursuing, apprehending, holding, trying, and imprisoning criminal suspects and criminals is a profound and insidious threat to democracy, you'll fight this excrescence wherever you find it.

The Ministry of Truth

Recently, I had the good fortune to be invited by NPR to submit an essay on a favorite thriller of mine. I decided to write about George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is both an excellent thriller and an increasingly powerful and relevant political warning -- a combination readers of my latest novel, Inside Out, will know I find appealing.

Though I'm of course pleased that NPR decided to run the essay (which you can find here, along with an unrelated radio interview I did with Michelle Norris on All Things Considered), I'm also disappointed that NPR insisted on watering down the essay through successive drafts. The NPR editor I was in touch with, Miriam Krule, found the first three drafts "too political" (my response -- that an essay on Nineteen Eighty-Four that's too political is like an essay about the Bible that's too much about God -- was unpersuasive), and though Ms. Krule didn't articulate the precise nature of her objections, the parts of the essay that had to go nicely demonstrate what in this context "too political" really means. Here are two versions of the offending penultimate paragraph, neither of which NPR deemed acceptable:

As prescient as Orwell was about events, though, I believe his purpose wasn't so much to forecast the future, which might take many forms, as it was to describe human nature, which is immutable. So no, we don't have quite the kind of organized Two Minutes' Hate depicted in the novel, but it's impossible to recall the populace turning on our NATO ally France before our misadventure in Iraq, or more recently on our NATO ally Turkey over the Gaza flotilla incident, and not remember the scene in the book where a crowd instantly and obediently redirects its hostility from Eurasia to Eastasia. It's impossible to watch pundits like Tom Friedman, Jeffrey Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, and Bill Kristol—who were wrong about everything in Iraq—still being taken seriously as this time they agitate for war with Iran, and not imagine the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Truth sending the historical record down the memory hole for incineration. And it's impossible to look at people who can't see the obvious parallels I just described and not see Party members vigorously practicing their doublethink, by which they have "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Most of all, we have the language—the "newspeak"—Orwell predicted. No, there's no Ministry of Truth, but such an institution would anyway seem superfluous given that The New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post all now refuse to use the word "torture" to describe waterboarding, beatings, and sleep deprivation of prisoners, adopting instead the government-approved phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques" (as Chris Hayes of The Nation has observed, this is like calling rape "unilateral physical intimacy"). Even NPR, alas, has banned "torture" from its reporting. Escalation in Iraq is a "surge," prisoners are "detainees," assassinations are "targeted killings," and the 60,000 barrel-a-day ongoing undersea oil eruption is nothing but a "spill" or "leak." As bad as it is, imagine how much worse it might be if Orwell hadn't warned against it.

NPR wasn't objecting to my argument (Nineteen Eighty-Four's political warning is relevant today); they were objecting to my evidence (Tom Friedman et al's mistakes are disposed of as though via a memory hole; NPR and other named organizations are using government-approved Orwellian language). This matters not only because an argument's persuasiveness depends (at least to a rational audience) on what evidence is offered in support. It matters too because preferences like the ones Ms. Krule expressed tend to reveal an otherwise hidden media ideology, one more important and insidious than the left/right labels that are the dominant -- and distracting -- prism by which we generally classify people's politics. If you want to understand the politics of NPR and other such organizations, forget for a moment left/right, and focus instead on what might loosely be called an establishment ideology, for NPR is an establishment media player following establishment media norms.

What do I mean by "establishment media"? Newsweek's Evan Thomas, in the course of declaring himself an establishment journalist, put it well:

By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring.

At the government's urging, NPR has adopted Orwellian speech. It prefers to suppress this decision rather than debate it. It extends its injunction to similar decisions of peer organizations -- specifically, the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. No matter how outlandishly wrong and destructive a pundit's predictions have been subsequently proven, NPR believes it unacceptably indecorous for the pundit in question to be held accountable by name. Generally speaking, NPR is okay with evidence that might loosely be classified as "what," while being not at all okay with evidence that might loosely be classified as "who." I can't think of any media behaviors more revealing than these of an establishment ideology and bias.

Before the rise of the blogosphere, a writer had no real means of rejoinder to editorial decisions like NPR's, and even now, relatively few readers will come across the larger context within which my NPR essay was edited. Still, there's no question that the Internet, by democratically distributing a megaphone previously held exclusively by an establishment media which behind the left/right facade marches in ideological lockstep, is permitting unprecedented means of media accountability. Speaking of which: I just finished an advance reading copy of a superb critique of media bloviators: Barrett Brown's Hot, Fat, and Clouded: The Amazing and Amusing Failures of America's Chattering Class, which, by coincidence, includes chapters about some of the stunningly failed pundits whose mention in an essay NPR found "too political." I highly recommend this horrifying, hilarious, devastatingly persuasive book, which as Brown notes in his epilogue could not have been written in the absence of the Internet. And for another example of the increasing power of the Internet to foster media accountability, here's a video challenge from Brown to TNR's Rich Lowry, who could easily have provided the basis for an additional chapter in Brown's book:



Now, I don't mean to be too hard on NPR. First, as an establishment media organ following establishment media rules, NPR is hardly unique, as I hope the many other examples NPR edited out of my essay will demonstrate. Second, NPR has a lot of good and sometimes eclectic coverage, including their current "Vote for the 100 Best Thrillers Ever" campaign, in which, hint, hint, you can find my novels Rain Fall and Fault Line among the nominees, and vote accordingly.

A number of people whose counsel I value urged me not to write this post, lest NPR blackball me from future coverage. Obviously, I decided to take that chance. If I keep these thoughts to myself because I know where my bread is buttered, then by my own standards I'm part of the problem rather than the solution. And besides, at heart, I'm an optimist. I want to believe that eventually, media institutions like NPR will come to understand that public discussion of their pro-establishment ideology and practices will benefit not just their journalism, but their bottom line. After all, in the long run, media organizations perceived as subservient to the powerful, unwilling to debate their practices, and devoted to concealing the shortcomings of other establishment players, will be eclipsed by the blogosphere, which today engages in debate and accountability to which the establishment media seems not yet to aspire.

* * * * *

If you're curious, here's the unedited Nineteen Eighty-Four piece:

A lone man hunted by faceless government spies. A doomed love affair, its urgent moments stolen against a backdrop of terror and war. Surveillance, capture, torture, betrayal. If this doesn't describe a thriller, the thriller doesn't exist.

I'm talking, of course, about Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell's novel makes for such devastating political commentary that in spite of the classic elements I mention above it isn't usually recognized as a thriller. This is a shame, because in addition to its many other virtues, Nineteen Eighty-Four demonstrates the potential power of the form to deliver a dire warning in the guise of entertainment.

I first read the book in high school, and at the time thought of it almost as science fiction: commentary about events set in a remote future that hadn't come to be. There was no Big Brother. Certainly no one was staring back at me while I watched television. And relatively speaking, the country was at peace.

Of course, that was a long time ago. Now we have a civilian population eager to believe the president is "our" Commander-in-Chief, increasingly pervasive government surveillance, and a "long war" against a shifting global enemy so ill-defined it might as well be Eurasia and Eastasia.

Most of all, we have the language—the "newspeak"—Orwell predicted. No, there's no Ministry of Truth, but such an institution would anyway seem superfluous given that The New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post all now refuse to use the word "torture" to describe waterboarding, beatings, and sleep deprivation of prisoners, adopting instead the government-approved phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques" (as Chris Hayes of The Nation has observed, this is like calling rape "unilateral physical intimacy"). Even NPR, alas, has banned "torture" from its reporting. Escalation in Iraq is a "surge," prisoners are "detainees," assassinations are "targeted killings," and the 60,000 barrel-a-day ongoing undersea oil eruption is nothing but a "spill" or "leak." As bad as it is, imagine how much worse it might be if Orwell hadn't warned against it.

It's interesting to consider that Orwell addressed the major themes of Nineteen Eighty-Four a few years earlier, in his essay Notes on Nationalism. And yet Notes, as excellent as it is, is read much less widely. Why? Because certain themes resonate more powerfully when presented within the structure of a thriller—when brought to life in the conflicts and confusion of characters on the page. For readers, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a warning. For thriller writers, it's something to aspire to.

It's Just a Leak

One of the great things about being a novelist is that the form enables me to dramatize the way the government and establishment media collude to manipulate public opinion. The phenomenon of the mainstream media laundering government talking points into news in exchange for access to even more such talking points has been ruthlessly documented by many outstanding bloggers such as Glenn Greenwald, Dan Froomkin, Charles Kaiser, Jay Rosen, and Matt Taibbi. I hope to draw more attention to their work by my fictional -- or not so fictional -- representations of the actual process at work.

And so, here's what I imagine took place during a hastily convened April 20th late-night White House meeting of panicked BP executives, incompetent Mineral Management Service officials, and one very slick West Wing PR flack.

Flack: Calm down, everyone, calm down. I need to get the facts from you and if everyone's yelling, I can't. So simmer down, please.

[The room quiets down, the attendees grateful for someone giving them direction, any direction.]

Flack [pointing at the most senior BP executive]: Okay. What happened?

BP Exec [taking a deep breath and visibly attempting to calm himself]: We're not sure exactly. One of our Gulf of Mexico oil rigs, the Deepwater Horizon, blew up.

Flack: Don't say that. It didn't "blow up." That's not helpful.

BP Exec: What?

Flack: It... collapsed. You say it collapsed. If you say it blew up, you create scary images -- bombs, terrorists, 9/11. Collapse is better. Small things collapse, and when they do its discrete. You know, grandma passed out and collapsed. There isn't any fire or smoke. Better imagery for us.

BP Exec [not really getting it, but shellshocked enough not to protest]: Okay... the rig collapsed. It collapsed, and the explosion--

[Stern look from the flack]

BP Exec: Right, the "collapse" tore a huge fucking gash in the seabed, and--

Flack: Stop. First, we don't swear. Swearing is unprofessional, and above all, we have to look professional. Public confidence depends on our appearance of professionalism.

BP Exec: Are you fucking kidding me?

[Stern look from the flack]

BP Exec: Okay, sure, whatever, the collapse tore a gash in the seabed.

Flack [nodding]: Better. I like the way you got rid of the adjective "huge." Adjectives like that aren't helpful to us. In fact, I don't want you using adjectives at all. They make it sound like you're trying too hard. We'll manage this story with well-chosen nouns. Much more effective way to create a proper narrative.

BP Exec: "Proper narrative"? Look, there's a giant hole--

Flack: Stop. Giant is like huge. You need to stop describing things and just give me the facts.

BP Exec [raising his voice]: But I am giving--

Flack: There's no gash. There's no hole. What we have here, people, is an oil leak.

MMS Official: Leak? Have you seen the underwater video footage? That's no leak, it looks like a fucking... it looks like Mount Vesuvius erupting oil out of the seabed!

Flack [expression understanding and patient]: This is good, this is the place for you to get these mistaken words out of your system so you'll know never to use them again. "Erupt" is a very loaded word and as you correctly note, it immediately conjures up unhelpful images of volcanoes spewing lava. Speaking of which, "spew" is also an unhelpful word. Likewise, all forms of "gush" and "geyser." From now on, you will use two words, and two words only, preferably in their drier, noun form, to describe this incident: "spill" and "leak."

[The room is silent as the executives and officials try to understand the flack's point]

Flack: Spills are small and finite. If I accidentally knock over this glass of water, we'll have a spill. And the moment it's happened, it'll already be over. It'll just be a matter of cleaning it up. We've been using the phrase "oil spill" for decades for just this reason and it's been exceptionally effective at calming the public. We want people to understand that what's happening in the Gulf is far from unprecedented; it's just another oil spill, a significant one, certainly, but not qualitatively different from the many that have come before it. Leak is also fine because it conjures images of a ceiling dripping water that's being neatly contained in a pan on the floor. Leaks are small, slow, and containable, and we have to position those notions in the public mind with regard to this latest oil spill, too. The words we employ to do so will be crucial. Trust me, people, I'm far from new at this form of damage control, and you can believe me when I tell you that the nomenclature we deploy starting now will be our most powerful weapon in shaping public consciousness and opinion regarding the incident itself. Don't believe me? Note how I've deliberately referred to what happened as an "incident" -- a small, dry word that conjures no unhelpful imagery. "Event" would be too weighty a word, and I'm sure I needn't mention that words like "disaster," "catastrophe," or "calamity" would be extremely unhelpful.

[Silence in the room again, but several people are nodding their heads, comforted by the distraction of talking about the message, which the flack seems to know how to manage, rather than the substance of what happened, which they don't]

Flack: Now, how much oil is actually leaking?

BP Exec: God, we don't even know... our best guess at this point is, at least 60,000 barrel s a day.

Flack [shaking his head]: That's too much. We can't say that, at least not right away.

BP Exec: Well, it is what it is.

Flack: We don't know what it is. You just said yourself that you're guessing. We'll start with a low number -- let's make it a thousand barrels a day.

BP Exec: Look, you can't just say it and make it so. There's --

Flack: Isn't it true that the leak includes a thousand barrels a day?

BP Exec [snorts]: Yeah, and another 59,000 barrels on top of that.

Flack: We don't have to mention the second part. Not yet. In fact, doing so would be irresponsible because as you just pointed out, we don't really know. We're just guessing. So I want us to guess lower. We'll introduce the lower number into the public's mind to ease the entire incident into their consciousness. Once they realize there's a spill, we can gradually walk the number up without unduly shocking people. We'll be sure to use the word "estimate" in connection with all numbers to ensure we have the necessary flexibility to increase the number with the passage of time, as we gain more information.

MMS Official: I don't see what difference any of this makes. We're not the ones who are going to control the words that get used to describe this... this incident. The media will call it whatever they want.

Flack [chuckling at this display of incredible naivete]: Whatever gave you that notion?

MMS Official: Well, I mean, it's not like we can control the media...

Flack: "Control" isn't a good word. It sounds so totalitarian. "Persuasion" is much better.

MMS Official: Look, I don't care what you call it...

Flack: I called it "persuasion" when I got the media to describe our escalation in Iraq as the "surge." Strong, assertive word, don't you think? With such great inherent imagery of waves crashing powerfully against the beach, and then -- this is the best part -- receding! And with none of the unhelpful Vietnam associations of "escalation." And I called it persuasion when I got the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post to stop calling waterboarding "torture" and start referring to "enhanced interrogation techniques," instead. Who do you think got the media to call the people we've been holding at Guantanamo, Bagram, and the black sites for nearly a decade "detainees" rather than "prisoners"? Forgive me for boasting, but "detainee" was such a brilliant word... high school students get detained for failing to turn in their homework, so nothing but a big yawn from the public. And have you noticed that the media has dropped "assassination" and now uses the soothingly dry phrase "targeted killing," instead? Who do you think persuaded them to do that? And look at Israel's "Security Fence" -- my God, if you can get the media to refer to a double-lined, razor-wire-topped, 18-foot-tall concrete wall snaking for miles through the desert as just a "fence"... well, people, I submit to you that we can also get the media to refer to the Gulf incident as nothing but a spill or a leak, too. I guarantee you, two months from now, if you Google the phrase "Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill," you'll get 23 million hits, easy. The few instances you'll find of eruption, geyser, gusher and the like will be eclipsed and our job will be done.

[The room is silent. Attendees are nodding their heads in grudging respect at the flack's apparent mojo]

BP Exec: Okay, fine. But how do we stop the... leak?

Flack [shrugs]. My job is just to prevent public outrage and a meaningful discussion of the inevitable dangers -- sorry, "risks" -- of drilling for oil 5000 feet underwater and 18,000 feet below the seabed. It's up to you to stop the leak.

[Silence again. The attendees look at one another, their wide eyes moving from face to face]

Flack: You can stop it, can't you? I mean, it's just a leak, right?

For another depiction of the way the government and establishment media collaborate to launder government talking points, in this case regarding the missing CIA interrogation videos, here's the prologue of my latest thriller, Inside Out.

Torture Talisman, Torture Taboo

Recently an otherwise seemingly thoughtful person said to me, "I know torture ordinarily doesn't work because you can't coerce someone into giving you trustworthy information. But don't you think there are times when the government has to step over the line to save lives? You know, if terrorists have a nuclear bomb or something?"

The juxtaposition in his question is fascinating and not at all uncommon. It boils down to, "Intellectually, I know it doesn't work, but emotionally, I want to believe it can protect me anyway."

When we understand a thing is inert, but believe in its power anyway, the thing in question is commonly called a talisman. A religious symbol on a necklace. A weapon you won't be able to reach, or don't know how to use. The salutation "Be safe," as though saying it could make it so.

Torture.

The world can be a scary place, and the government often has an interest in making it more so. Truman "scared hell out of the America people" to get the Truman Doctrine through Congress; today, fear is kept at a simmer by announcements of color-coded threat levels; barking airport and subway reminders that we must be alert and suspicious; bellicose political rhetoric and op-eds about the imminent danger from Iran and Islam. In the face of so much fear, legitimate or manufactured, it's natural for the mind to grope for a source of comfort, like Linus pulling close his security blanket. If it really hits the fan, that anxious part of our unconscious tries to soothe us, there's that one thing we can turn to and count on to protect us.

The right, which is adept at telling its adherents what they want to believe (white Christians are a persecuted minority; the economy is being destroyed not by corporatism and crony capitalism, but by welfare queens and minority mortgage deadbeats; terrorists attack America because they hate our freedoms) has both met and increased the demand for a torture talisman by promoting fantasy dramas like "24" and torture-saves-the-day novels by writers like Vince Flynn and Brad Thor. Yes, Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh assure us, our enemies are as evil as they are committed to our destruction, but if we just "take off the gloves" and follow the lead of fictional characters like Jack Bauer and Mitch Rapp, we can make ourselves safe again. It's as simple and appealing a promise as the benefits of "Drill, baby, drill," and as destructive.

And it's a particularly pernicious promise because torture is not only a talisman, but also a hard-won taboo. Societies don't erect taboos casually, or against items devoid of psychological or emotional appeal. Taboos are instead emplaced with great difficulty, over a long time, against practices generational experience proves both terribly destructive and insidiously seductive. Torture was one such, prohibited even during the Revolutionary War, even during World War II, but then embraced by one weak and deviant administration and now held in reserve by another. Remember, Obama hasn't ended torture in America: doing so would require investigations and prosecutions, as the law itself demands. Rather, he claims merely to have "prohibited" it. Which sounds good, until you think about it for a moment. The old president permitted, the new president prohibits… what does that mean? That to both men, torture is not a matter of law, but simply one of policy.

What can be done? The answer will be different for everyone. You can donate to organizations like Physicians for Human Rights, projects like the ACLU's Torture Report, and bloggers like Marcy Wheeler who've done a great deal to uncover the truth of what America has done through torture to its values and its security. You can sign petitions and write to your senators and congressperson. I do what I can with my novels, writing reality-based thrillers depicting the real causes and consequences of torture to counter the fantasy narratives pedaled by the right. And I hope to continue to do so in partnership with terrific progressive publications like AlterNet, Firedoglake, GRITtv, and Truthout. The right has done America a lot of damage by cross-promoting its ideology through fiction. It's past time the left returned fire, using every tool at its disposal, including fiction, to restore America to safety and sanity.

(Originally published at The Nation)

Death-Defying Institutional Brands

I'm increasingly intrigued by the ability of certain brands to outlast the loss of their underlying substance. Facts are stubborn things, John Adams said, but sometimes, it seems, not as stubborn as brands. Let me offer a few examples, and then let's see if we can identify any principles at work behind the phenomenon.

1. The GOP as the Party of Small Government. Republicans -- not just Republican politicians, but ordinary Americans who are registered and vote Republican -- still believe the GOP stands for small government. And yet the small government party created an additional $5 trillion in national debt during its last turn in office. When George W. Bush became president, the national debt was under $6 trillion; when he left, it was close to $11 trillion. I guess you could argue that Democrats are even worse, but even if that were true, an accurate description of what Republicans stand for would be something more along the lines of "slightly less big government." But it's not true: just look at this graph, or at this chart. To find a notably fiscally responsible Republican president, you have to go back to Eisenhower. So at this point, if fiscal responsibility is an important measure of one's adherence to big or small government, the small government brand ought to attach to Democrats.

True, the national debt has continued to spike under Obama. We could argue about why -- whether, for example, the economic meltdown that occurred during the Bush Administration, for which Bush created the initial $700 billion TARP program during his last months in office, requires further fiscal stimulus to avert another depression. But even if you think Obama is even worse than Bush, that's a pretty thin basis on which to believe in the Republican small government brand.

Moreover, we're focusing here only on fiscal matters. If a new party entered the fray on a platform of torture, federalization of end-of-life decisions, federalization of marriage, imprisonment of suspects without trial, use of the military for domestic law enforcement, prohibition of drugs and SWAT raids into family homes to catch people smoking pot, empowering the State Department to strip Americans of their citizenship, and a trillion-dollar-a-year, million-and-a-half-man, eight-hundred-overseas-bases military, would you naturally feel, "At last! A party of small government!"? Yet these are all Republican policies. Again, Obama's record so far on war spending and civil liberties is as atrocious as (and in some ways worse than) Bush's, but Obama doesn't purport to be from the party of small government. Republicans do.

I suppose you could argue the Republican small government brand persists because the theory of the GOP is small government, with the problem being the corrupt way successive Republican administrations have implemented that theory. Maybe. But on that argument, shouldn't Communism continue to enjoy a solid brand, too? After all, "From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs" is a great theory, and was simply corrupted by Lenin, Stalin, and the various other heads of the Soviet Union. It's still a great idea, no?

That the GOP is still known as being more effective on national security -- the "daddy party" to the Democrats' "mommy party' -- is also impressive. If a Democrat had been in office on 9/11, or in 2006 when North Korea became a nuclear power, or if a Democrat had bungled Iraq and Afghanistan or let bin Laden escape from Tora Bora the way the Bush Administration did, it all would have been perceived as evidence, even proof, of Democratic fecklessness on national security. Instead, all of these events happened on the GOP's watch, with no apparent damage to the GOP's brand.

The GOP's reputation among the rank and file for sexual probity is also impressively resistant to contrary facts. There have been enough closeted Republican homophobes, outed Republican philanderers, and thrice-married matrimony traditionalists to form a parade, and yet the party still manages to wrap itself in a brand of "family values." And yes, you can point to Elliot Spitzer and John Edwards as counterexamples, but again, we're talking about brands -- particularly the power of certain brands to stay afloat despite being riddled with holes through repeated contact with contrary reality. What makes Republican sexual behavior remarkable -- in a way that Democratic sexual behavior isn't -- is that Republican behavior is contrary to the party's brand, yet seems to have little or no effect on it. In other words, John Edwards' scandal immolated his personal brand. But it wasn't relevant to the party's brand, because Democrats, unlike Republicans, don't try to sell themselves in "family values" wrapping. Likewise, Mark Sanford's own reputation for integrity was destroyed by revelations of his serial infidelity, but for some reason even an unending stream of Sanford-like sagas does nothing to diminish the GOP's ability to present itself as the party of family values.

The difference between individual brand vulnerability and institutional brand vulnerability is telling, I think, and I'll return to it in my conclusions.

2. Pundits as Wise. Judging from the volume of his book sales, there are a lot of people who think the New York Times' Thomas Friedman is a foreign policy expert, or at least a good writer (warning: the Matt Taibbi prose behind those last two links could cause dangerous convulsions of laughter). He's even thought of as a liberal. Yet Friedman, a prominent cheerleader for the war in Iraq, has changed his mind about the causes and consequences of the Iraq war so many times you'd need a flow chart to keep track (was it WMDs? Gifting Arabs with Democracy? Making them "suck on our big stick"?). He's written so many times over the course of years some version of "the next six months in Iraq will be make or break" that his ceaseless moving of the goalposts gave birth to the derisive term "Friedman Unit" to mean another six months in the future. I myself heard Friedman speak at Kepler's bookstore in Menlo Park in 2006, at which time he explained that "we're in the fourth quarter in Iraq." Maybe today he'd claim we're in overtime.



With this record, if Friedman weren't some kind of self-perpetuating institution -- if he were instead, say, a guy who popped into the neighborhood bar from time to time to talk politics -- he would long ago have been dismissed as drunk or deranged. People would find it bizarre and vaguely embarrassing that he felt compelled (and worse, justified) in continuing to opine on subjects about which he'd repeatedly, demonstrably, been proven wrong. They'd get irritated at his inability or unwillingness to honestly account for his frequent errors or to try to learn from them. They might turn away, or humor him, or buy him another drink in the hope that he'd pass out and stop talking. What they wouldn't do is take him seriously. And yet the Friedman Serious Foreign Policy brand seems largely untarnished by the actual performance that underlies it.

By the way, I've used Tom Friedman as a handy example, but there are countless others. In a hotel gym recently, I was forced to listen to Wolf Blitzer interview Michael Steele on CNN, and was struck by Blitzer's unfamiliarity with even the most basic elements of health care reform and by his unwillingness to engage Steele on Arizona's draconian "Walking While Latino" law in anything other than political horse race terms. I can't think of anything -- not an election, not a war, nothing -- that Bill Kristol has ever been right about, and yet he's still trotted out on the TV shows as some kind of political expert and has an op-ed column at the Washington Post. Karl "I'm entitled to THE math" Rove, whose strategies crushed the GOP in the 2006 midterms and lost the White House two years later, still appears on television as a political seer. Politico's Mike Allen is still called a journalist and a reporter when he has repeatedly demonstrated instead that he' Dick Cheney's stenographer. And with the notable and impressive example of Andrew Sullivan, I can't think of a single cheerleader for the Iraq war who has honestly grappled with the enormity of his error, or even just shown quiet evidence of having learned from it. They just go on bloviating as though nothing happened. I suppose it's good that people with so much capacity for error, so little aptitude for learning, and so nonexistent a culture of accountability became pundits rather than, say, air traffic controllers.

3. Smart, Savvy Financiers. It wasn't much more than a year ago that Wall Street's Titans of Capital were exsanguinating from self-inflicted wounds, to be rescued only by a monster taxpayer-financed anti-hemorrhaging operation (in other, less apocalyptic contexts, this kind of thing is called "welfare" or "unemployment insurance." But if the job being saved is that of a big, important banker, "TARP" just sounds so much better). Yet even a week ago, The Economist could say with all sincerity, "Writing [Goldman Sachs] off would be foolhardy. It has recovered from adversity many times. Its risk management is top-notch, its people super-smart..."

If AIG hadn't been given a huge infusion of public money, and if AIG hadn't paid $13 billion of that money directly to Goldman, Goldman would be dead now, done in by its own wrongheaded moves on subprime mortgages. Describing a bank that had to be saved via a taxpayer bailout from a greed- and stupidity-induced accidental death as "top-notch" at risk management and "super-smart" is a lot like describing as a "firearms safety paragon" a guy who drunkenly shot himself in the face and was saved only because a trauma surgeon with limitless quantities of spare hemoglobin happened to be standing right there when it happened.

Maybe what the Economist meant is that Goldman has been top-notch and super-smart in cultivating the kinds of political connections that, say, Lehman Brothers lacked. Okay as far as it goes, as long as we can also salute that firearms safety paragon for getting drunk and playing with loaded guns only when he's pretty sure a trauma surgeon is nearby.

I don't know for sure, but I'll bet if you took a poll today, a lot of people would agree with the statement that, say, Bob Rubin and Hank Paulson and Alan Greenspan are financial experts and competent economic stewards. They're not. The one thing they were paid to not let happen, happened. They missed what others foresaw, and in doing so nearly destroyed the global economy. Logically, you can't be Secretary of the Treasury or Chairman of the Federal Reserve, precipitate an economic catastrophe, and emerge with your reputation for competence intact. And yet, these men did.

(For more on this subject, I highly recommend Michael Lewis's "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine." You won't be able to put it down. Here's an excerpt.)

4. The Church as Good. I'm not Catholic, nor even religious, so maybe I'm missing something... but I don't understand how anyone can consider the crimes and coverups of the Vatican and still look at the organization as devoted primarily to the good of humanity. As a brand, Papal infallibility and the Indefectibility of the Church would also seem to have taken a solid hit. But my sense is that, for the most part, the Church is still thought of primarily as an instrument devoted to the glory of God rather than to the rather more earthly work of self-protection.

5. The Media as Liberal. Off the top of my head: Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Levin, Michael Savage. Quick, name their liberal counterparts -- the talking heads who exert such control over the Democratic party they receive apologies for apostasy from the head of the DNC. The "liberal" New York Times uncritically offered up (I was going to say regurgitated, but there was no evidence of digestion at all) government propaganda in the runup to the Iraq War. Today the paper refuses to use the word "torture" except when Chinese or Iranians are doing it. For Americans -- you guessed it -- it's just "enhanced interrogation," or, when the Times is feeling particularly feisty, "brutal interrogation." They hired Bill Kristol for the op-ed page (journalistic Stockholm Syndrome?), then replaced him with Ross Douthat, to write alongside David Brooks. CNN just hired Erick Erickson. The "liberal" Washington Post's op-ed page features a phalanx of torture apologists -- Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, Marc Thiessen -- plus George Will and David Ignatius, a columnist whose pronouncements read like that of an official CIA spokesman.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
CNN Hires Erick Erickson
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

In fact, as explained by one of the characters in my forthcoming novel Inside Out, a key function of any press organ unjustifiably branded "liberal" is to provide information laundering services to the government, converting what, if it came directly from the government, would be rightly understood to be propaganda, into apparently objective, disinterested "news" because it seems to be coming instead from, say, The New York Times. That the "liberal media" brand is useful to those in power might partly explain its durability. More on this below.

6. America as a Peace-Loving Country. I think my character Dox summed this up nicely in my book The Last Assassin:

"It's like America," he went on. "I mean look at us, we're always telling ourselves how peace-loving we are. 'We're a peace-loving people, we love peace.' I guess that's why we spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined, why we have over eight hundred overseas military bases in a hundred and thirty countries, and why we've been at war pretty much continuously since we were just a bunch of colonies. Shoot, you think if a Martian visited Earth and tried to identify the most peace loving culture, he'd pick the U.S. of A.? I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, mind you. We're a warlike people, it's obvious, we're good at war and we like it. I just don't know why we can't admit it to ourselves. I bet sales of Prozac would go down if we could."

Or, as another character of mine, Ben Treven, put it in Fault Line:

He thought about hate. America was hated overseas, true, but was pretty well understood, too. In fact, he thought foreigners understood Americans better than Americans understood themselves. Americans thought of themselves as a benevolent, peace-loving people. But benevolent, peace-loving peoples don╒t cross oceans to new continents, exterminate the natives, expel the other foreign powers, conquer sovereign territory, win world wars, and less than two centuries from their birth stand astride the planet. The benevolent peace-lovers were the ones all that shit happened to.

It was the combination of the gentle self-image and the brutal truth that made Americans so dangerous. Because if you aggressed against such a people, who could see themselves only as innocent, the embodiment of all that was good in the world, they would react not just with anger, but with Old Testament style moral wrath. Anyone depraved enough to attack such angels forfeited claims to adjudication, proportionality, even elemental mercy itself.

Yeah, foreigners hated that American hypocrisy. That was okay, as long as they also feared it. Odurint dum metutant.

7. The Pentagon as Trustworthy. Let's not even go back to Vietnam; we'll confine our examples just to our current wars, instead. So:

Jessica Lynch. Pat Tillman. The 2007 helicopter attack on Iraqi civilians. The Khataba coverup.

Have you ever known someone who lied even about small things? You immediately knew that person wasn't trustworthy, didn't you? And you didn't trust him thereafter, right? So what's different about the military?

8. Conclusions. What I see as the common element in all the gravity-defying brands described thus far is this: they all belong to institutions. The military, a party, the government, Wall Street, the Church, the media, the nation itself. We could quibble over the margins -- for brand purposes, is someone like Tom Friedman, so long associated with The New York Times and part of an entire class of foreign policy mandarins -- an individual, or an institution? The guideline that seems to be emerging, though, is this: the brands of institutions are relatively resilient.

We can test this proposition by comparing institutional brand vulnerability to individual brand vulnerability. Mark Sanford's prostitution scandal damaged his own moral brand, but seems to have done little damage to the moral brand of his party. You could argue that, well, of course Sanford's scandal would be relatively harmless to the party as a whole because its impact to the party is diluted: Sanford is his whole brand, and only a small part of the GOP. But remember, Sanford was no aberration. There have been many, many Republican sex scandals, a stream of Republican sexual hypocrisy, and not even taken together has it significantly impaired the GOP's ability to present itself as the party of Family Values.

I think celebrities provide another useful counterexample to the apparent durability of institutional brands. Tiger Woods' reputation for integrity -- a reputation worth millions in promotional contracts for companies like Accenture (which has taken to inane animal ads in Tiger's wake) -- was shattered by revelations of serial sexual infidelities. Lindsay Lohan gets drunk, or Britney Spears shaves her head, and their sweetheart images are destroyed.

The question, then, seems to be: Why are individual brands so fragile, and institutional ones so bullet-proof?

I think the answer lies in the relative importance of institutional brands to our overall worldview. It's possible to imagine a fan so attached to Tiger Woods' wholesome image that he would be devastated to learn the brand was a lie. But because a celebrity occupies a pretty peripheral place in the worldview of most people, for most people, a celebrity's fall from grace causes nothing more severe than morbid curiosity. With a celebrity, accepting the facts, realizing the brand was a lie, and getting on with things is easy.

Institutional brands, on the other hand, are much more tightly integrated with our worldview, and therefore our sense of self. So we're far, far more reluctant to change our minds about the real nature of our religious institutions, the protectors of our financial system, the pundits who reassure us they know what's going on, the political parties who are supposed to have America's interests at heart, the government that's supposed to be making sure the levees are sound, the oil rigs are safe, the financial system is stable, the nuclear stockpile is secure...

Gives you a headache, doesn't it? Almost makes you want to throw up your hands and hide under the couch. It can't be true. It can't be that bad. And so we find ways to believe it isn't. It would be a lot harder to get out of bed otherwise.

It's one thing to accept that a politician is trying to screw you. It's quite another to realize the screwing is being done by the entire party. It's one thing to accept that an administration is corrupt and incompetent. It's quite another to realize corruption and incompetence is endemic in the system itself. And it's one thing to imagine in some vague way that the country is steered by a benign establishment. It's quite another to accept that, as Simon Johnson of MIT argues and as Inside Out dramatizes, the benign establishment is in fact a rapacious oligarchy.

We're possessed of a built-in reluctance to accept the rotten substance behind the shiny surface of institutional brands. We hesitate to understand the ugly reality behind the pretty facade. I don't think this disinclination serves us well. Denial, as Dave Grossman has famously observed, has no survival value. If we want to survive our institutions, a good start would be seeing them for what they really are.

Advertising Bullshit

I just arrived home after a week on the road, part of it in London. At Heathrow, I was struck by two fantastically ill-conceived Accenture billboard advertisements. The first was a Photoshopped image of an elephant riding a wave on a surfboard. The caption read, "Who says you can't be both big and nimble?" The second was of a bunch of little fish swimming along in such a way that together, they formed the silhouette of a shark. "Is your business in shape to compete?" the caption asked. I gazed at these ads and wondered: how did we get to a point where a company like Accenture believes -- perhaps with reason -- that this kind of bullshit could be persuasive? Where the company quite possibly believes the bullshit itself?

Pause and consider this. Accenture wants to make you believe in the improbable proposition that their company is both big and nimble. They seek to do so not specifically, but indirectly, by persuading you that big and nimble is at least a possibility in general. And to demonstrate the existence of this general possibility, for which any example at all would suffice as proof, they had to resort to creating a fake image of an impossible event. Who says you can't be both big and nimble? The people who created this ridiculous ad, that's who. After all, they obviously couldn't come up with an actual example.

As for the fish ad, what the caption should have asked, if it was to have any logical connection to the image attached it to, was, "Are your businesses collectively mimicking the shape of some other, larger business that makes its money in a way unconnected to yours, a business whose capabilities you can never perform even if you succeed in mimicking its shape?"

(At this point, defenders of wasteful advertising will likely argue that underlying illogic doesn't matter. After all, the images are memorable -- I'm writing about them, aren't I? But this is to excuse bullshit with more bullshit. An emotional pitch that's contradicted by logic is lazy. Emotion in the service of logic is the ideal. Of course, creating a pitch that's memorable because it resonates both emotionally and logically takes hard work. Serving up bullshit is ever so much easier. And if Madison Avenue advertising companies can get the Accentures of the world to pay for easy, why should the advertising companies try harder? Innate professionalism is rare; laziness and complacency are fast growing and can take root almost anywhere.)

There's so much bullshit, we don't even notice it anymore. Every movie, no matter how trivial, is a Major Motion Picture. Every business plan ever written boasts a World Class Management Team; every alliance is a Strategic Alliance. Toys r Us calls its customers "guests." Blockbuster Video advertises movies Available Now For Preorder. Domestic prisons are called Correctional Facilities (are the prisoners "correctees"?). A detainee, on the other hand, is a prisoner we're holding indefinitely without charge, trial, or conviction (I'm waiting for the government to take its cue from Toys r Us and perform an Orwellian upgrade -- referring to detainees as guests, instead). What others do with such people, we call a gulag; here, we have only detention centers. Nasty countries assassinate; we engage in sanitary Targeted Killings. Establishment is our word for what we call an oligarchy when it happens in Russia. Only dictatorships have show trials and kangaroo courts; we employ military commissions. Where others have tribes, we have factions. And of course we don't torture, preferring enhanced interrogation, instead. Soon we will have dissidents. What will we call them?

Surrounded by this miasma, what can be done? I don't know for sure. But I like to think that over time, if enough people call the government on its bullshit and the Accentures of the world on theirs, bullshit might gradually become less fashionable, as well as less effective. This post is my humble contribution to the cause.