The first rule of political discourse is to be as vague as possible. George Bush, the master of this technique (or just a natural), began a war in Iraq March 20th, 2003. For two and a half years he kept the war machine running strong by sticking doggedly to this rule, saying nothing but vague yet decisive sound bytes.
I'll summarize his strategy in those years: Go, fight, win.
Good plan. Let us hope that political speech is completely bankrupt, because for political speeches to get any more meaningless or pedestrian than they already are, politicians will have to use gibberish (which I think Bush is working on).
November 30th, 2005 Bush finally put out his official strategy guide for achieving his goals in Iraq, following all the bullets with bullet points. I'm going to leave the discussion of his strategy guide for another day, but I'll say that if you are familiar with any video game strategy guides, you will no doubt be disappointed with this one. You don't stand a chance of saving the princess with it.
I'm getting sidetracked though, this isn't supposed to be about Bush. What I was really thinking about was political speech. Political speech is empty, duh, but why is that? I think if anyone is to blame it is the media, especially television. Television's tendency to sensationalize and take things out of context is poison to a democracy. A fundamental idea in democracy is that no single person has all the answers. We have to have a forum for discussion, get out different ideas and vote on the best one. This doesn't work if nobody can say anything without getting whacked over the head with a newspaper, and in Pavlovian fashion people avoid saying anything. Ideally a leader when asked a question will answer the question openly, and the media rather than trying to exploit the answer for a story can sensibly point out weaknesses and allow the leader to adjust their position accordingly during the course of the discussion. Instead, our leaders stand up at press conferences, which are a sort of TV-era running of the gauntlet.
I think I could talk about that for a long time, but I won't. I just wanted to mention a potential light at the end of this tunnel. Before Television media our democracy was still a place for people to have real debates, and ideas would go forth and do battle. Then television ruined it (go read Walter Cronkite's autobiography for more on this). Now that the internet has begun to revolutionize the media I hope that we can reclaim our democracy as a staging ground for good ideas. The internet, with its instant access to contextual information (think Wikipedia) might be just the forum for politicians to begin speaking again. The question is, who will be the first to ditch the double talk?
Down with television!
1 comment:
What got me thinking about this was reading the cover article of this week's Newsweek, "After Bush, How to Restore America's Place in the World" by Fareed Zakaria. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19001200/site/newsweek/ I was utterly refreshed by how upbeat it was. One of the main points was about how Bush and many other prominent Republicans have used fear as one of their main techniques for getting what they want. Fareed has lots of great quotes from Giulani on the campaign trail to illustrate this. It made me think about the kind of power Televison gives to those who know how to exploit it. Making democracy, which is a participatory form of government dependent on Television, which is a passive media source seems like such a bad idea.
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