Invisible Cities

I've been thinking about making this more or less a propaganda / PR weblog, pointing to items in the news which illustrate its workings. Mostly these are going to be about the corporate/Republican side of things, as a) that's the dominant side these days, and b) that's the side I'm ideologically predisposed to notice and gripe about. That doesn't excuse those more-than-occasional Democratic uses of propaganda: if you want truthful communications, you can't excuse those which you feel to be for a good cause.

Sometimes propaganda / PR is a matter of deliberate silence. In the recent run of sniper attacks around DC, it strikes me as interesting how quiet W has been on the subject. There was some blather early this week about the turrible tragedy, and how sickened he was, but by now these strike no one as very sympathetic. Then I remembered the NRA: conservatives always want to account for these kinds of events by bad character, and if we could just figure out who the bad guys are (perhaps by income level or race) and put them away, then it wouldn't matter who owned sniper rifles with scopes and silencers. Better to pick off your potential attacker at a distance of 500 yards . . .

Turns out the attack rifle used by the latest guys was a Bushmaster, manufactured by none other than Bush's campaign manager for the state of Maine! Buzzflash has the reference here.

The odd thing is that there is a Bush connection to Bushmaster. It is a connection that is darkly symbolic of the White House's craven subservience to the gun lobby. You see, Richard E. Dyke, the owner of Bushmaster Firearms, was the chief fundraiser for Bush in Maine, where Bushmaster is located, until July of 1999.

In case you think news items from Buzzflash are tainted, check with Salon: The point of reference in 1998 was a shooting event by Buford Furrow, who blasted away at a Jewish cultural center in Los Angeles.

Just three weeks ago, the manufacturer of the AR-15 Bushmaster rifle found in the van of accused killer Buford Furrow resigned suddenly and unexpectedly as presidential candidate George W. Bush's chief Maine fund-raiser.

Richard E. Dyke, the 65-year-old owner of Bushmaster Firearms in Windham, Maine, had given the Texas governor the maximum individual contribution allowed by law, $1,000, and had raised tens of thousands more for his campaign. And more was to come.

That was the plan, anyway, until July 21, when a reporter called the Bush 2000 campaign to ask about Dyke's role in Bush's road to the White House. Within a day, Dyke had resigned from the campaign. "I just don't want to be any baggage," Dyke told the Associated Press. "Young Bush doesn't have to justify why I was trying to help him."

Young Bush, again, wants to keep people thinking about taking out Saddam, not being taken out by demented souls whose task is made lots easier by the rifle manufacturers who have poured money into electing him.


glt 10:02 - [Link]
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Going through old e-mail, I found a link to a Guardian article that is still up. As is often the case with newspaper / magazine articles posted on the web, it's just print text scanned in. But the content is a good reminder of what you are actually getting in that McNugget. (Context is UK, but I'm confident that much of this applies in the US--perhaps worse.) Guardian story unfortunately titled "Fowl Play" (they couldn't resist).
glt 07:32 - [Link]
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And to counterbalance the serious posts below, here's a link to a new Warbot . . . Automated blather which isn't all that distinct from the supposedly intended blather.

A sample:
Dick Armey and John Walker Lindh: the odd couple
George Orwell has observed, "Democrats impose everything and share nothing."

We must protect pro-war war.

What a moment! What insouciance! What bias! What demagogy.
glt 08:13 - [Link]
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If you watch nothing but local TV coverage, you might be forgiven for not knowing that there's an election on. Martin Kaplan of the Annenberg School of Communication notes (in an interview with Tom Paine.com) that news coverage over the last 10 years has dropped to virtually nothing--coverage of governors' races, Senate races where close, and perhaps House races in a few places. Why is that?

Since national offices are so closely divided between Republican and Democrat (6 seats in the House, 1 seat in the Senate), we have what is in effect a national election. If both houses go Republican, W can have anything he wants, as the Republicans are disciplined (ruthless) enough to push through the rest of their program--permanent tax cuts for their donors, radically conservative judges, Middle East wars (oh, they did that one), limitations on lawsuits against HMOs and insurance companies, and other plans not yet announced. It might matter whether your local rep is Democratic or Republican, but if they want to be elected they have to BUY ADS.

In a nutshell, that's it: the less free time is available on the news, the more $ candidates have to spend to get noticed. This has changed candidates' behavior, according to Kaplan, so that they spend (even) less time interacting with the public in staged situations, more on raising money.

This cannot be good. How can we affect it?



glt 07:52 - [Link]
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Paul Krugman has a very long piece in the New York Times Magazine today [registration required; click on NY Times Mag window or search Krugman]. Topic is the increasing income disparity in the US, beginning in the 1970s but accelerating dramatically over the past few years--and if W and the House Republicans get their way, soon to be cemented as the tax cuts for the top 1% become set in cement.

Krugman argues that we have returned to a new Gilded Age comparable to that from post-Civil War times to the New Deal. From the New Deal through the '70s, those in power in corporations followed an ethic of moderation (relatively speaking); after that generation passed, greed was once more not only tolerated but encouraged.

Why does it matter? First, there is no such thing as a tax cut--there's only a tax shift. If our system allows the very very very rich to avoid paying taxes on their money, we either do without public services (think hospitals, care for the aged and disabled, etc.) or the 99.9% pay a disproportionate share--welfare for the rich. Second, this top .1% has become the driving force behind the Republican Party and its ideological machinery, buying intellectual rationalization through its think-tanks and endowed chairs, and pretty much outweighing the rest of the population through effective propaganda.

Think of what happens to a mathematical curve as it approaches but does not touch its asymptote: the values associated with .1%, .01%, .001%, become enormously higher than even those at 1% or 10%. That?s what is being duplicated in reality and built into legislation as well as social norms.

Here's the real account of '60s permissiveness: ?The story of executive compensation is representative of a broader story. Much more than economists and free-market advocates like to imagine, wages -- particularly at the top -- are determined by social norms. What happened during the 1930's and 1940's was that new norms of equality were established, largely through the political process. What happened in the 1980's and 1990's was that those norms unraveled, replaced by an ethos of ''anything goes.'' And a result was an explosion of income at the top of the scale.?

Another effect to note is ?the growing polarization of our politics -- our politicians are less and less inclined to offer even the appearance of moderation.? The vast majority of polarization has happened in the movement to the political right. There?s nothing like the noisy, extreme, belligerent talk radio types on the left, nothing like the noxious Phil Gramm or Dick Armey on the left, no conservative double-think tanks like the Heritage Foundation quoted by NPR on the left. Check out the editorial page of the Saginaw News, the newspaper whose service area includes the supposedly blue-collar GM town--main features are people like william Safire and James Lileks. When do you see anything like enven a centrist position except for letters to the editor? (Look at the print edition--the on-line edition does not include these op-ed columns.)

Calling this polarization masks the asymmetry of its drift?and the asymmetry is caused by the same phenomenon Krugman writes about throughout, the enormous growth of money at the top. But that disagreement is temporary, as he continues: "the polarization of politics has occurred because the Republicans have moved to the right, not because the Democrats have moved to the left."

The various apologists are going after Krugman now for his consistent and hard-hitting attacks on the obvious problems with W and his rich friends--e.g., Mickey Kaus in Slate. (Scroll down and click.) Remember the thugs who went to Dade County to shout down the recount? That's what we're going to see a lot more of . . . metaphorically in most cases, realistically as necessary.

glt 09:41 - [Link]
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One of my favorite books is Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, which consists of conversations between Marco Polo and Genghis Khan about cities which Marco has seen on his travels--all imaginary, all based on a certain premise, very Borgesian. It works well enough for purposes of this blog, I think.
glt 20:50 - [Link]
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