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Sep. 17th, 2001
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Sep. 17th, 2001 07:35 pmI've been giving Bush's capabilities the benefit of the doubt, and I'm continuing to do so, but man...he has got to be the worst speech-giver since Nixon. I dunno if a smooth, effortless charisma such as Clinton's would be better...or just be so much empty fakery and propaganda.
Speaking of. The propaganda machine is now on and humming. The "Wanted Dead or Alive" speech, as painful as it was watching Bush stutter it out live, is now safely chopped into righteous sound-bites and played every fifteen minutes on the news sources. Lest we get annoyed at the fakery of propaganda, this is actually a primal course of action, and perhaps a very safe one. Whenever large beasts clash in nature, there is almost always a formal and florid display of the willingness to fight. The goal (and the hope) is that one side or the other will back down, to avoid injury, which is a very common occurrence. Afghanistan is faced with the choice of almost certain attack, or losing face by turning over bin Laden. Today, Afghanistan very slightly blinked -- they decided that they'll ask a committee of Islamic clerics if it's morally okay to give him up (as opposed to, say, blowing up thousands of foreigners). This is a face-saving move, a possibility that they may back down because of Allah or moral reasoning, instead of American demands.
This is the useful side of propaganda -- the "white lie" aspect of it -- when propaganda is used as a tool to demoralize the enemy to the point where lives are saved. "Sticks and stones will break our bones, but empty words may save both our asses." The dark side of propaganda comes when it is used to distort information to the allies, to the propagandist's own citizens. That the enemy is not human, that the war is going much, much better than it truly is, that atrocities are not being committed, these distortions in the long run prove to be disastrous when the truth is exposed; a much greater liability than a tool, and the mark of the desperate.
In this Information Age, the truth has a better chance of seeing light sooner rather than later.
Speaking of. The propaganda machine is now on and humming. The "Wanted Dead or Alive" speech, as painful as it was watching Bush stutter it out live, is now safely chopped into righteous sound-bites and played every fifteen minutes on the news sources. Lest we get annoyed at the fakery of propaganda, this is actually a primal course of action, and perhaps a very safe one. Whenever large beasts clash in nature, there is almost always a formal and florid display of the willingness to fight. The goal (and the hope) is that one side or the other will back down, to avoid injury, which is a very common occurrence. Afghanistan is faced with the choice of almost certain attack, or losing face by turning over bin Laden. Today, Afghanistan very slightly blinked -- they decided that they'll ask a committee of Islamic clerics if it's morally okay to give him up (as opposed to, say, blowing up thousands of foreigners). This is a face-saving move, a possibility that they may back down because of Allah or moral reasoning, instead of American demands.
This is the useful side of propaganda -- the "white lie" aspect of it -- when propaganda is used as a tool to demoralize the enemy to the point where lives are saved. "Sticks and stones will break our bones, but empty words may save both our asses." The dark side of propaganda comes when it is used to distort information to the allies, to the propagandist's own citizens. That the enemy is not human, that the war is going much, much better than it truly is, that atrocities are not being committed, these distortions in the long run prove to be disastrous when the truth is exposed; a much greater liability than a tool, and the mark of the desperate.
In this Information Age, the truth has a better chance of seeing light sooner rather than later.