LAT: McClellan's 'Matrix' moment

[UpInArms]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-dery7-2008jun07,0,3419534.story

Sure, sure, truth is the first casualty of war, and politics is just war with a smile and a starched collar. But the burgeoning genre of Bush administration tell-alls, of which McClellan's is only the latest, paints a portrait of a White House utterly unconcerned with facts yet fervently attentive to public opinion polls. It is a White House whose solution to every unhappy turn of events -- the Iraqi insurgency, Hurricane Katrina, a moribund economy -- is to treat it not as a real-world problem requiring a real-world solution but as a glitch in the Matrix, "a perception problem" to be handled with the Message of the Day and the Theme of the Week.

The deeper story here is the shift from the Enlightenment worldview, whose commitment to reasoned debate and empirical truth used to be the cornerstone of our little experiment in democracy, to the faith-based worldview of fundamentalism -- not just the fundamentalism of the religious right but fundamentalisms of every sort. The Iraq war came about, in large part, through a harmonic convergence of personal passions, political agendas and ideological crusades, all faith-based rather than fact-driven. Bush, McClellan tells us, is a man who "convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment" and who "to this day ... seems unbothered by the disconnect between the chief rationale for war and the driving motivation behind it, and unconcerned about how the case was packaged."

Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and other saber-rattling superhawks were on a Mission From God to democratize the Middle East, police the globe and, not incidentally, found a star-spangled imperium. And Karl Rove's psy-ops team, of which McClellan was a part, intuitively embraced the postmodern proposition that the story shapes the reality.

As an unnamed Bush aide put it in a 2004 New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind, there are those who still live in "what we call the reality-based community," people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality," and then there are those who understand that "that's not the way the world really works anymore. ... We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

[Cronus Protagonist]

1. And Obama's Matrix Moment

(to come)

[Ghost Dog]

11. Here's another image for cinephiles:

(Thanks, UiA)

[Frances]

2. Good post

[patrice]

3. Bush "...unconcerned..." e.g. Bush the golf-martyr exlaining that playing golf LOOKED bad.

I was utterly surprised and AMAZED to hear him miss the point sooooooo completely, no depiction of "Shared sacrifice for _____________", just flat out: playing golf right now looks bad. He was totally clueless as to what our problems might be and what he might say to counter our perceptions of him.

Maybe that's the way you get when you've had people to wait on you your whole life.

"God" I hate Royalty of ANY stripe.

[tanyev]

4. LOL! Scotty's Secret Service code name was Matrix.

Funny.

[yurbud]

5. Best part: real world problems a glitch in Matrix, ''perception problem''

It is a White House whose solution to every unhappy turn of events -- the Iraqi insurgency, Hurricane Katrina, a moribund economy -- is to treat it not as a real-world problem requiring a real-world solution but as a glitch in the Matrix, "a perception problem" to be handled with the Message of the Day and the Theme of the Week.

[Uncle Joe]

6. This is a good column, but ironically the opposite of this paragraph is taking place.

"In "The Matrix," Laurence Fishburne parts the veil of illusion -- the computer-generated simulation that humanity experiences as reality -- to reveal the movie's post-apocalyptic world as an irradiated slag heap."

I believe in our case the people connected by their computers via the Internet are alerting the sleeping public to the false reality being spun to them by the traditional one way corporate media's ie; television, radio and massive newspaper chain's, generated simulation so adeptly used by cynical, corrupt and incompetent "leaders" in a quid pro quo or devil's bargain.

With so many people empowered with convenient access to information and the ability to compare their stories with instant two way communication and analysis on such a massive scale via the Internet, the false reality spins or bubbles don't hold up anymore and alarms are going off thereby waking or unplugging the sleeping people from the Matrix created by the corporate media for the sleepers to live in.

So oddly enough in this case, people connected by computers are working to save humanity from the destructive behaviors of those in government simply connected by selfish greed and their vainglorious lust for power. The old Machiavellian ways of divide and conquer will have a much more difficult time succeeding in the new world.

Thanks for the thread, UpInArms.

[Raster]

7. Oh man, I could not agree more! Thank God/Goddess and Al Gore!

Tradition corporate controlled media has been gamed deliberately to blunt it's effectiveness at presenting a truthful, non-biased accounting of the facts and encouraging varying opinion. Control the medium, control the message. The Internet has been the wild card. This is a medium--that up to now--was unable to be co-opted into just another propaganda outlet.

[UpInArms]

10. great summation of the real way that this bubble of insanity

has grown and now been (hopefully) popped by the reality that everyone lives in - I have felt the Alice in Wonderland through the looking glass feeling so many times in the past 7+ years -

I just hope we all make back through the passage before it's too late.

:hi:

[barbtries]

8. it must be said

in conjunction with these articles, that over 4000 americans and countless iraqis and Afghanistan citizens are really dead today, and they would not have been dead today if the gw admin had not decided that perception was more important than reality. the death toll should accompany every article. the american people need to be confronted with the pictures of the dead and how they died. it's time they were "enlightened" so this madness can come to an end.

i once had a boyfriend who was like that - it was more important how it looked, to complete strangers no less, than how it really was. after a miserable year i got out alive, but it could have gone the other way. i came to understand that he was seriously mentally ill, personality disordered. now our country is being run like that. it is truly sick.

[formercia]

9. Not a far reach for Junior

who began his budding career by screwing little old ladies out of oil leases. He was a con man from day one.

[windoe]

12. Only cold blooded people would choose to identify with the Matrix programmers

who were not even human but programs in a machine, created to maintain illusion, complete control and using people as batteries.

[Psyop Samurai]

13. Excellent find, and surreal... I mean, at long last, here it is...

...something approximating the truth, published in the corporate media, clearly stating that we've been living in a grotesque Orwellian nightmare, and yet, it's just another op-ed piece in the Saturday paper, and ho-hum, life goes on.

But there's a deeper meaning to this story. Like no administration before it, the Bush administration has mastered what the media critic Walter Lippmann called "the manufacture of consent" -- the use of "psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication," to muster mass support for elite agendas.

There it is, folks. But shhhh..., there's an election on, doncha know. And if the L.A. Times doesn't watch it, it may end up in the dungeon with all the rest of the stuff that "make us look bad". Psyops?..., elite agendas?..., oh my. Why, that's just crazy talk. :sarcasm:

But even Dery's account isn't fully accurate. For, as DU's Peace Patriot has repeatedly pointed out, they have not succeeded in manufacturing "consent", so much as manufacturing paralysis, by convincing people that they are isolated and powerless.

And I agree with barbtries above, except an account of the murdered is not nearly enough. We have ALL, to one extent or another, been victims of this criminal insanity, and I personally want damages.

Thanks for posting, UpInArms, and this should have gotten much more attention.