David Horowitz and the art of the cheap shot

Oddly enough, just after posting two consecutive days on David Horowitz’s cheap shots against academics, yesterday I received the latest (May 6, 2005) issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education which featured a long cover story on him. (For someone who is constantly whining about not getting enough attention from academia, Horowitz seems to be extraordinarily successful in getting publications such as this to cover him and his ideas. See Michael Berube’s blog for a response.)
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Why David Horowitz attacks academia – part 2

I have been puzzled by the vehemence of Horowitz’s attacks on the academic life. After all, his accusations of faculty laziness are contradicted by actual studies. Jerry A. Jacobs (of the University of Pennsylvania) in his Presidential Address to the Eastern Sociological Society in February 2003 (and published in Sociological Forum, vol. 19, #1, February 2004), points out that college faculty work an average of nearly 55 hours per week. By contrast, professionals in other fields or managers worked nine hours per week less than college professors. His study also found that professors report that they feel constantly under stress of work-related pressures.

Of course each profession has its share of people like Wally (the character in the Dilbert comic strip) who do the minimum amount of work expected of them. I am sure academia has its representatives, though I am hard pressed to think of a single one of my colleagues in my whole academic career who comes anywhere close to the Beetle Bailey-like stereotype that Horowitz alleges is the norm.

I do not expect Horowitz to change his message simply because actual data contradicts him. As Graham Larkin (a professor of Fine Arts at Stanford University) points out in his article David Horowitz’s War on Rational Discourse that appeared in the April 25, 2005 issue of Inside Higher Ed, facts have never been an impediment to his diatribes. Horowitz’s strategy is to simply repeat things over and over again, even if they have been refuted. Since he is extremely well paid by a host of wealthy right-wing foundations that support organizations that provide him with platforms to keep him in the public view, his charges gain publicity well out of proportion to their actual merit or even their truth content.

It is easy to dismiss Horowitz as a crackpot who uses inflammatory rhetoric to get publicity. But somehow that seems insufficient to me. There is a vehemence to his attacks on academics that seem to require explanation beyond simple ignorance or that he is so naïve that he does not actually understand what a university is all about and about the extent of faculty work outside the classroom.

It is Michael Berube who, I think, nails the best possible reason for Horowitz’s bizarre attacks on college faculty. Berube teaches literature and cultural studies at Penn State and writes with a style and wit that I can only envy. Check out his blog to see what I mean.

In his essay Why Horowitz Hates Professors, Berube writes:

I think we’re finally getting to the real reason David hates professors so much. It has nothing to do with our salaries or our working hours: he hates our freedom. Horowitz knows perfectly well that I can criticize the Cockburns and Churchills to my left and the Beinarts and Elshtains to my right any old time I choose, and that at the end of the day I’ll still have a job – whereas he has to answer to all his many masters, fetching and rolling over whenever they blow that special wingnut whistle that only far-right lackeys can hear. It’s not a very dignified way to live, and surely it takes its toll on a person’s sense of self-respect.

Berube is right. Academics have the freedom, as long as they are not being outright offensive or advocating criminal activity or bringing dishonor to their institutions, to take positions on any subject, generally without fear of retribution from their universities. I can support evolution one day and, if I find some convincing reason to switch my views, I can oppose it the next. I can even switch my views without any reason at all, just for the fun of it, and the only loss I suffer is to my credibility. But people like Horowitz have no such freedom. They have to be very sensitive to what their paymasters want and take exactly that line or they get thrown out on their ear.

Actually, this thesis might explain a lot of the animosity that the Third-Tier Punditâ„¢ class have towards academics. All these commentators (and even reporters for the media) have a good sense of what their employers expect from them. It is the very predictability of their stances that gives them access to the media. If they start taking contrary position and become ideologically unpredictable, they risk losing their jobs. The Coulters, Malkins, and Goldbergs of the world cannot (for example) go beyond extremely mild criticisms of Bush or the Iraq war (even if they wanted to) because to do so would be career suicide.

It is true that there exists a doctrinaire left whose people also have similar constraints but those people do not have mainstream access, and most people have never heard of them. Most of the well-known people who are considered left wing by the mainstream media (such as Paul Krugman) are not as constrained in their views, because there is no equivalent to the scale of the right-wing foundations.

But academics (like Krugman) and more recently independent bloggers have no such constraints. It is because of this very lack of ideological oversight that universities can create new knowledge. It enables faculty and students to explore new ideas wherever it might take them. We are hired for our knowledge in physics or history or law, not for our ideological bent. But we also are expected to be public citizens and contribute to society, and this enables us to take stands on issues that may not be directly related to our academic research interests.

So is Horowitz’s crusade driven by faculty envy, as Berube suggests? It makes sense to me. Because even as college professors complain about the amount of work they have to do, I know very few who would switch out of this life and do something else. This is because the faculty life is, in fact, a great life. Horowitz thinks that we enjoy it because we can goof off. But only a person who hates his or her own job will have such a view of what constitutes an ideal working life. An ideal job is when what we do as work is what we would do for pleasure. And that is what draws people to teaching.

Those of us in academia think it is a great life despite the workload because it is rewarding to grapple with ideas, it is stimulating to work with students who look at things in fresh ways, it is gratifying to solve a research problem, it is exhilarating to publish articles and papers and books and feel that one is contributing to the store of the world’s knowledge.

We love our work and cannot imagine doing anything else. And, best of all, we can say what we honestly think about the important issues of the day. This must drive people like Horowitz crazy, and the result is not pretty.

Why David Horowitz attacks academia

Regular readers of this blog know that David Horowitz has been behind efforts to introduce the so-called Academic Bill of Rights, allegedly to “protect” college students from academic bullying by their professors. He has been going around the country, speaking on college campuses and to state legislatures, trying to place limits on what professors can and cannot say. In the process, he has also attacked what he considers the laziness of the academic life.

Horowitz resorts to his usual over-the-top rhetoric. He accuses faculty as follows: “Shiftless, lazy good-for-nothings? Try the richly paid leftist professors securely ensconced in their irrelevant ivory towers” and again “You teach on average two courses and spend six hours a week in class. You work eight months out of the year and have four months paid vacation. And every seven years you get ten months paid vacation.”

Such utterances perpetuate a strong misunderstanding about the nature of a university and of what faculty do. People who say such things see it only as a place where the only worthwhile activities occur in the classroom, and even then, they see the process of teaching very narrowly, as that of transmitting information. Hence they are baffled that college professors seem to spend so little time in the classroom, and see the whole thing as some kind of boondoggle.

People who think like this overlook the fact that faculty are not hired just to transmit knowledge. They are also hired to create new knowledge. Indeed that is one of the key functions of all universities, but especially research universities. This requires faculty to learn, and to keep on learning all their lives, and this requires time more than anything else.

It is for this same reason (that learning takes time) that students can get a degree without spending more that 15 hours or so per week actually in class, along with long summer breaks. This enables them to think and read and discuss ideas. (This is why I am always concerned about those students at Case who have double- and triple-majors and throw in a couple of minors as well. I admire their ambition, energy, and work ethic but am concerned that in the process of accumulating credit hours, they don’t have time to reflect on their learning, to toy with new ideas, and hence are not learning deeply enough.) So the logical end point of Horowitz’s claim should be that college students too are not spending enough time in class and are also “shiftless, lazy good for nothings.”

Universities have been the source of much of the new knowledge that has revolutionized our world. And the reason that they have been able to do so is because its faculty have been given the time to generate new ideas and put them to use. In Bertholt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo Galileo himself complains to his university chancellor that he was teaching so much that he did not have time to learn.

My father worked in a bank all his life. On his desk he had an ‘in’ box and an ‘out’ box. He would pretty much spend each day reading and signing off on papers, transferring them from the in to the out, and then he would go home, his work for the day done. His work was well defined and a ‘hard day’s work’ meant that he had been kept busy all day.

A faculty member’s life does not have that same daily rhythm. Faculty members also have things that they need to do each day (prepare for class, teach, grade papers, attend meetings, write committee reports, talk with students and respond to their emails). But these things come in waves and they have other duties that cannot be done in a nine-to-five time frame (such as write a book or research paper, solve a problem, prepare research proposals, do research). These things are carried around in their minds all the time. The stereotype of the ‘absent-minded professor’ has a kernel of truth but it is not that the professor is actually forgetful. It is that he or she is always thinking about the ideas of their discipline, wrestling with them, sorting them out, and this process is so engrossing that it can often drive other concerns from their minds. When I am working on a book or article, I can assure you that it is almost a full-time, 24/7 preoccupation. I think about it as I am going to sleep and it is the first thing in my mind when I wake up.

The difference is that most academics do not see this as ‘work’, if by that we mean doing something at the expense of something else that we’d rather do. We tend to love our ‘work’. This is what we live for and enjoy.

And perhaps, as we shall see in a later posting, this is what Horowitz really finds offensive about academics.

Private grief and public spectacle

I have not posted anything so far on the big story that seems to be consuming the whole country, which is the sad, sad case of Terri Schiavo. This is partly because I intended this blog to be more concerned with reflections on slower-moving themes, and not consist of commentary on current events (which other people have the time to do much better), and partly because I felt that there was nothing that I could say that would add anything of value to the substance of the case. I have no moral or ethical wisdom to offer that would help people decide what should be done with the feeding tube.

But the non-substantive issue that depresses me most about the Schiavo case, and caused me to break my self-imposed silence, is the public circus that it has become. I can completely understand the grief that the immediate members of the family must be experiencing. This is an awful situation and as far as I can see, there is no ‘right’ answer to this problem. Whatever the outcome, there is not going to be a victory or a defeat for anyone, and no right or wrong.

While we can try and wrap this event up in big, overarching issues of national importance or see matters of grand principle, at its core it is just the sad story of a family tragedy. As such it is something that the immediate family has to come to terms with, with whatever help and strength that they can get from their close friends, the medical community and, as a last resort, the law. What surprises me that so many people who have little or no connection to the family have got so passionately involved.

I am fortunate that I have never had to make a decision that directly affected the life or death of a human being, especially someone close to me. Making that kind of decision about my much-loved dog caused me so much grief that I don’t even like to speculate about it happening to people that I care about.

I think that it is very risky to predict what one would do if placed in the kind of situation faced by Terri Schiavo’s family. I think none of us really knows until we are actually in that situation, because it is so extreme, so far removed from what we have experienced before, that hypothetical speculations are useless in such cases. I would like to think that, finding myself in such a situation, I would behave bravely, nobly, and selflessly, but I really cannot know in advance. This is why I refrain from judging the people directly involved in the Schiavo case or other cases like that.

I have only sympathy for the members of families who grapple with end-of-life questions for their loved ones. If any friend of mine had to make such a decision, I would simply stand by them and accept whatever decision they made, without urging them on or trying to tell them what to do, because the last thing that grief-stricken people need is gratuitous advice coming at them all the time from all directions. The rest of us should simply be thankful that we do not have to make the kinds of agonizing decisions that they must make.

If Terri Schiavo’s parents were my friends, I would accept their decision in their time of need. If her husband were my friend, I would accept his decision too, even though what he has decided is the opposite of what his parents have decided. The reason for my apparent indecisiveness is because I cannot know what either of them should do since I am not sure that I know what I would do if I were in their shoes. But since neither are my friends, I would just leave them alone to let them work their way through this with their real friends and their doctors, without the intense media scrutiny they are currently experiencing.

I also have nothing but respect for those doctors (and judges and juries) who are required to be involved in such decisions. It cannot be easy to do so and the fact that they have been put in this unpleasant position should make us refrain from criticizing them just because they make decisions with which we do not agree.

In cases like that of Terri Schiavo, there is enough tragedy and sadness to go around without it also becoming a media circus. The best thing we can do may be to just leave the family alone.

POST SCRIPT

The invaluable Juan Cole has a very interesting post on how the mixing of public advocacy with private lives in the Schiavo case has disturbing parallels with cases that have occurred in the Muslim world, where fundamentalist clerics have used that mixing to interfere in the private lives of private citizens. That posting is a must-read.

The strange story of David Horowitz and the “Bush-as-war-criminal” essay

I apologize for the length of this post but I felt a responsibility (especially since I had a role in creating this rolling snowball) to provide a fairly comprehensive update on the convoluted, strange, and suddenly fast-moving, saga of David Horowitz, the organization he founded called Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), and the college professor who allegedly asked his class to write a mid-term essay on “Why George Bush is a war criminal,” and then gave an F grade to a student who had been offended by the assignment and had instead turned in one on “Why Saddam Hussein is a war criminal.”
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The questions not asked II – UN resolutions

It’s time to play another game of The questions not asked. This is where we examine the reporting of some news event and try and identify the obvious questions that should have been posed by the media, or the context that should have been provided to better understand the event, but wasn’t.

Today’s example is taken from a speech given by George W. Bush on March 8, 2005 and reported in the Houston Chronicle.

“The time has come for Syria to fully implement Security Council Resolution 1559,” Bush told a largely military audience at the National Defense University. “All Syrian military forces and intelligence personnel must withdraw before the Lebanese elections for those elections to be free and fair.”

…

Bush, in a speech touting progress toward democracy in the broader Middle East, did not say what might follow failure to comply.

At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan also left the question open. “If they don’t follow through on their international obligations, then, obviously, you have to look at what the next steps are,” McClellan said.

So what questions were not posed? What context was not provided?

One immediate answer is to compare the situations in Lebanon and Iraq. How can Bush say that the Lebanese elections cannot be free and fair because of the presence of 14,000 Syrian troops there, when ten times that many US troops were present in Iraq during that election in January, but those elections were praised?

But that question was not asked, the context not provided.

But there is another obvious angle to this particular case that was also overlooked, and that is the way in which UN resolutions are used selectively to justify US policy decisions.

UN resolutions routinely call, among other things, for the withdrawal of foreign troops from other countries. And given that the UN is, for want of anything better, the closest thing we have to providing a global consensus, such resolutions should be taken seriously.

But this is not the first time that UN resolutions calling for the withdrawal of occupying troops to be withdrawn have been defied. For example, Stephen Zunes, professor of Politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco in his article US Double Standards in the October 22, 2002 issue of The Nation magazine says that more than ninety UN resolutions are currently being violated, and the vast majority of the violations are by countries closely allied with the US. He says:

For example, in 1975, after Morocco’s invasion of Western Sahara and Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, the Security Council passed a series of resolutions demanding immediate withdrawal. However, then-US ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan bragged that “the Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. The task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.” East Timor finally won its freedom in 1999. Moroccan forces still occupy Western Sahara. Meanwhile, Turkey remains in violation of Security Council Resolution 353 and more than a score of resolutions calling for its withdrawal from northern Cyprus, which Turkey, a NATO ally, invaded in 1974.

The most extensive violator of Security Council resolutions is Israel. Israel’s refusal to respond positively to the formal acceptance this past March by the Arab League of the land-for-peace formula put forward in Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 arguably puts Israel in violation of these resolutions, long seen as the basis for Middle East peace. More clearly, Israel has defied Resolutions 267, 271 and 298, which demand that it rescind its annexation of greater East Jerusalem, as well as dozens of other resolutions insisting that Israel cease its violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, such as deportations, demolition of homes, collective punishment and seizure of private property. Unlike some of the hypocritical and meanspirited resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly, like the now-rescinded 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism, these Security Council resolutions are well grounded in international law and were passed with US support or abstention. Security Council Resolutions 446, 452 and 465 require that Israel evacuate all its illegal settlements on occupied Arab lands.

All the UN resolution pointed to be Zunes are very serious and are much older that the resolution 1559 being used against Syria, so that these violations are long standing. All this information is in the public record. Any reasonably competent journalist should know it and, when the administration (and this is done by both Republican and Democratic administrations) cynically invokes UN resolutions selectively to achieve narrow political ends, should be able to pose the relevant question of why only some UN resolutions have to be followed while others ignored.

But the mainstream journalists don’t do this. One question is why. But the more important question is, since they don’t do their job, what can we do to make up for it?

A Theory of Justice

I have to confess that this blog has been guilty of false advertising. On the masthead, of all the items listed, the one thing I have not talked about is books and it is time to make amends.

But first some background. Last week, I spent a thoroughly enjoyable evening having an informal conversation with about 20 students in the lobby of Alumni Hall (many thanks to Carolyn, Resident Assistant of Howe for organizing it). The conversation ranged over many topics and inevitably came around to politics. I had expressed my opposition to the attack on Iraq, and Laura (one of my former students) raised the perfectly legitimate question about what we should do about national leaders like Saddam Hussein. Should we just let them be? My response was to say that people and countries need to have some principles on which to act and apply them uniformly so that everyone (without exception) would be governed by the same principles. The justifications given by the Bush administration for the attack on Iraq did not meet those conditions.

But my response did not have a solid theoretical foundation and I am glad to report that a book that I have started reading seems to provide just that.

The book is A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, in which the author tries to outline what it would take to create a system that would meet the criteria of justice as fairness. The book was first published in 1971 but I was not aware until very recently of its existence. I now find that it is known by practically everyone and is considered a classic, but as I said elsewhere earlier, my own education was extraordinarily narrow, so it is not surprising that I was unaware of it until now.

Rawls says that everyone has an intuitive sense of justice and fairness and that the problem lies on how to translate that desire into a practical reality. Rawls’ book gets off to a great start in laying out the basis for how to create a just society.

“Men are to decide in advance how they are to regulate their claims against one another and what is to be the foundation charter of their society…Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, not does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like…The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.” (my emphasis)

In other words, we have to decide what is fair before we know where we will fit into society. We have to create rules bearing in mind that we might be born to any of the possible situations that the ensuing structure might create. Right now what we have is ‘victor’s justice’, where the people who have all the power and privilege get to decide how society should be run, and their own role in it, and it should not surprise us that they see a just society as one that gives them a disproportionate share of the benefits.

Rawls argues that if people were to decide how to structure society based on this ‘veil of ignorance’ premise, they would choose two principles around which to organize things. “[T]he first requires equality in the assignment of basic rights and duties, while the second holds that social and economic inequalities, for example, inequalities of wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society. These principles rule out justifying institutions on the grounds that the hardships of some are offset by a greater good in the aggregate.”

Rawl’s argument has features similar to that young children use when sharing something, say a pizza or a cookie. The problem is that the person who gets to choose first has an unfair advantage. This problem is overcome by deciding in advance that one person divides the object into two portions while the other person gets first pick, thus ensuring that both people should feel that the ensuing distribution is fair.

(Here is an interesting problem: How can you divide a pizza in three ways so that everyone has the sense that it was a fair distribution? Remember, this should be done without precision measurements. The point is to demonstrate the need to set up structures so that people will feel a sense of fairness, irrespective of their position in the selection order.)

All this great stuff is just in the first chapter. Rawls will presumably flesh out the ideas in the subsequent chapters and I cannot wait to see how it comes out.

I will comment about the ideas in this book in later postings as I read more, because I think the ‘veil of ignorance’ gives a good framework for understanding how to make judgments about public policy.

Urban legends in academia?

Did you hear the story about the college professor who asked his class to write a mid-term essay on “Why George Bush is a war criminal,� and then gave an F grade to a student who had been offended by the assignment and had instead turned in one on “Why Saddam Hussein is a war criminal�?

I wrote about this in an op-ed piece that appeared in today’s (March 4, 2005) Plain Dealer.

You will be asked by the site to fill in your zip-code, year of birth, and gender for some kind of demographic survey. It takes about 10 seconds.

Update on 3/14/05

I received a call today from a person associated with Students for Academic Freedom informing me that this op-ed had triggered the release of more information on their website, where more details are given.

Although the student referred to had not in fact given this testimony at the Colorado Senate hearings as had been alleged earlier, the level of detail (which had not been released until now) provided on the SAF website is sufficient to remove this story from the category of urban legends since it does give some names and places and dates. But a judgment on whether this constitutes academic bullying will have to await the release of the facts of the case on what actually transpired between professor and student. My contact at SAF says that the incident is still under investigation.

Update on the update (3/15/05): It gets curioser and curioser.

The blog Canadian Cynic reports that new information on this case has come out and that Horowitz is now backtracking on almost all of the key charges that were originally made. Canadian Cynic highlights Horowitz’s statements now that “Some Of Our Facts Were Wrong; Our Point Was Right” and “”I consider this an important matter and will get to the bottom of it even if it should mean withdrawing the claim.”

See the article on the website Inside Higher Education. It seems to be the most authoritative source of information on this case.

Content-free political labels

Here’s a quiz. Who said the following:

“In his inaugural address, Mr. Bush calls 9/11 the day “when freedom came under attack.� This is sophomoric. Osama did not send fanatics to ram planes into the World Trade Center because he hates the Bill of Rights. He sent the terrorists here because he hates our presence and policies in the Middle East.

…

The 9/11 killers were over here because we are over there. We were not attacked because of who we are but because of what we do. It is not our principles they hate. It is our policies. U.S. intervention in the Middle East was the cause of the 9/11 terror. Bush believes it is the cure. Has he learned nothing from Iraq?

In 2003, we invaded a nation that had not attacked us, did not threaten us, and did not want war with us to disarm it of weapons it did not have. Now, after plunging $200 billion and the lives of 1,400 of our best and bravest into this war and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, we have reaped a harvest of hatred in the Arab world and, according to officials in our own government, have created a new nesting place and training ground for terrorists to replace the one we lately eradicated in Afghanistan.”

Was this said by some radical leftist? Some long-haired peacenik? Ward Churchill? Actually, it was Pat Buchanan, a staffer for Richard Nixon and long-time Republican stalwart writing in a recent issue of the magazine The American Conservative.

Ok, here’s another writer:

“The US economy is headed toward crisis, and the political leadership of the country–if it can be called leadership–is preoccupied with nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.

…

Oblivious to reality, the Bush administration has proposed a Social Security privatization that will cost $4.5 trillion in borrowing over the next 10 years alone! America has no domestic savings to absorb this debt, and foreigners will not lend such enormous sums to a country with a collapsing currency–especially a country mired in a Middle East war running up hundreds of billions of dollars in war debt.

A venal and self-important Washington establishment combined with a globalized corporate mentality have brought an end to America’s rising living standards. America’s days as a superpower are rapidly coming to an end. Isolated by the nationalistic unilateralism of the neoconservatives who control the Bush administration, the US can expect no sympathy or help from former allies and rising new powers.â€?

Who is this Bush-hater? Michael Moore? No, it was none other than Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review.

The point of my using these quotes is to illustrate my view that the labels ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative,’ ‘Democratic’ or ‘Republican’ have ceased to be meaningful in identifying people’s political positions on many issues. They may have at one time identified particular unifying political philosophies, but now have ceased to have content in that there are no longer any clear markers that one can point to that identify those positions.

Not all political labels have ceased to have content but those four broad-brush categories in particular are used more as terms of political abuse than for any clarifying purpose. Their only purpose is to set up fake debates on television’s political yell shows. If you advertise that you have a liberal and conservative on your panel (or a Democrat and Republican), you can claim that your program is ‘fair and balanced’ even though both people pretty much say the same thing on major policy issues, differing only on minor tactical points or on style.

It makes more sense, rather than identifying and aligning with people on the basis of these meaningless labels, to form alliances on specific issues based on where they stand with respect to those issues. And when one does that, one finds that many of the old divisions melt away.

The greater danger of labels (whether they be of religion, nationality, or politics) is that they are used to divide us and herd us into boxes and make us think in terms of what we should believe and who are allies should be than what we really want them to be. They are being used as weapons to divide people into ineffective warring factions and thus prevent them from finding commonalities that might lead to concerted action.

I do not agree with Buchanan or Roberts on everything they say. On some things I strongly disagree. But unlike the members of the Third-Tier Punditâ„¢ brigade who should be ignored, they are serious people who often have useful information or perspectives to share and I read them regularly.

Dismissing the ideas of some people simply because of the label attached to them makes as little sense as supporting other people for the same reason.

Living in a reality-free world

Here is some news to curl your hair.

The Harris Poll® #14 of February 18, 2005 reports that:

– 47 percent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001;
– 44 percent believe that several of the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11 were Iraqis; and
– 36 percent believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded that country.

Virtually no one who has followed these stories believes any of the above to be true. And this poll was released just last week, long after the David Kay and Charles Duelfer reports were made public, putting to rest all the overblown claims that were used to justify the attack on Iraq.

Also something that experts do believe to be true, that Saddam Hussein was prevented from developing weapons of mass destruction by the U.N. weapons inspectors, is supported by only 46 percent.

How is it that so many Americans seem to be living in a reality-free world?

The reason is that such falsehood as the ones listed above are strongly implied by influential people and uncritically reported in the media, or influential people stay silent when such falsehoods are propagated.

Take for example a speech made just last week (on February 17, 2005) by California congressman Christopher Cox at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Michelle Goldberg of Salon was at the conference and reports his exact words: “We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and the facilities to make them inside of Iraq, and even more about their intended use, including that a plan to distribute sarin, and the lethal poison ricin — in the United States and Europe — was actively being pursued as late as March 2003.â€?

And who were the members of the audience who did not contradict Cox as this nonsense was being spouted? Michelle Goldberg reports that among those “seated at the long presidential table at the head of the room were Henry Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, Missouri Senator Norm Coleman, Dore Gold, foreign policy advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and NRA president Kayne Robinson.� Cox’s comments were made while introducing Vice President Dick Cheney, who gave the keynote address.

Now it is possible to carefully deconstruct the congressman’s words so that some semblance of truth can be salvaged. But that would involve re-defining words like ‘discovered’ and ‘weapons’ and ‘facilities’ and ‘plan’ in ways that would make Clinton’s parsing of the word ‘is’ seem like a model of transparency.

So what are we to make of political leaders who can say such deliberately misleading things? What are we to make of other politicians who know the facts but choose to remain silent while the public is led astray? And what are we to make of the national media who spend enormous amounts of time and space on issues like Michael Jackson’s trial but do not provide the kind of scrutiny, factual information, and context that would make politicians more cautious about what they say?

Politicians who mislead the public may be just cynical in that they know the truth and are just saying things for the sake of political expediency. But the danger with allowing this kind of talk to go unchallenged is that it creates an echo-chamber in which people hear the same false things from different directions and start to think it must be true. When people start believing their own propaganda, then they have entered a reality-free zone and this can lead to disastrous consequences.

George Orwell in his essay Politics and the English Language (1946) wrote “Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.� The sad truth is that Cox’s speech is by no means the only, or even the worst, example of this kind of linguistic chicanery. One has only to go back to the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq to see even more egregious examples of deception by the highest ranking members of the government, and timidity and silence from the supposed watch-dogs in the Congress and media.

Is it any wonder that so many people live in a world that does not exist?