Saturday Morning and All's Not Well

Though it’s less in vogue now than it was around the last election, there’s still a lot of liberal talk about “framing,” which is a clumsy, popularized idea derived largely from the insights of the last fifty years of critical theory, although the fans of framing discussions often speak of the notion as if it were something new under the sun. Meanwhile, those of us who wasted our time pursuing English degrees and suffered the inelastic slings and dull arrows of those ever-practical folks who felt our pretensions to politics were, well, pretensions, we’ve long understood that control and conformity are produced through language. That’s not to denigrate or ignore the power of physical force; states and societies have plenty of effectively coercive tools at their disposal—the power of the military, the power of the police, the power of the mob. But more powerful, pernicious, and omnipresent are the circumscribed discourses that we accept and internalize. Our speech, our writing, and ultimately our thoughts hew to the models we make with words. Beyond even the construction of national narratives and national myths, we abrogate our capacity for free thought by acquiescing—usually unknowingly; at least uncritically—to conventional descriptive parameters, and by extension conventional cognitive ones. Like The Dude said in The Big Lebowski: “Oh, yeah. My thinking about this case had gotten very narrow, man.”

So while Glenn Greenwald does his usual yeoman’s work on leaks, leaking, and leakers, he accepts too willingly the model of the-thing-is-broken. The Republican Party has abandoned its principles. The Democratic Party has lost its principles. The Press has been co-opted. The administration is going after leakers. The leakers are circumventing politicized authority to give information to the people. Whistleblowers act in contravention of authority. Authority punishes them for causing embarrassment. It’s perhaps a depressing narrative, but nonetheless an important one. It’s important because it permits Glenn Greenwald, democratic bloggers, certain libertarians, and a clutch of other groups to believe in an essentially straightforward remedy. While they understand the relationship between power, money, policy, access, and information to be deeply Byzantine, they can persist in thinking that the press, properly independent, can be retrieved and made to monitor the government; they can persist in thinking that the government, properly monitored, will act as it should; they can persist in believing that the people, properly informed, will punish the politicians and the powerful who stray from faithful protection of our essential freedoms.

Good luck with all that.

I wonder if it occurs to Glenn Greenwald, who’s fantastically intelligent, or to the fellows at Digby’s Hullaballo, who’re likewise quite brilliant, that the system (for lack, I admit, of a better or simpler term) is functioning as it should, or at least as it was designed to—or better yet, as it was redesigned to function, circa 1947 and the establishment of the national security state. I wonder if it occurs to them that the whole kabuki of leaks and counter-leaks, of secrets upon secrets, of commissions and congressional inquiries, of press sniping and press silence, in short, of everything that I and every other blogger bitches about daily has been designed and fed to us for the purpose of obscuring the true operations of power. Because the truth is that a society of 300 million people consuming a quarter of the world’s resources probably requires exactly the behaviors we despise in order to go on: the wars, the intrigues, the foreign governments deposed, the brutality, the irrationality, the posturing. I’m not sure that we appreciate just how rapacious a society we possess, and just how much fuel is required to feed the fires of the American Way of Life™.

I don’t claim this is an admirable or acceptable state of affairs. I think it’s reprehensible and unjust. We haven’t the right to sit like a ruling vampire above the other nations of the world. We ought to change ourselves into something more modest, less obsessed with consumption, more local, more decent, and more civil (and more civilized). Putting aside that sort of grand pronouncement, though, we are, at the moment, what we are, and it would do well to recognize that you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist of the “Earth is run by space-alien reptiles” variety to appreciate that behind the interchangeable marionettes of government, behind the petty scandalizing press, there does exist a nexus of moneyed interest that doesn’t give a damn whether the dauphin is at 90% or 30% percent in the polls. George W. Bush is just an instrument; fired CIA whistleblowers are just an instrument. Political squabbling is the instrumental tool through which our discourse is dissipated and diverted. It drives Glenn Greenwald to wonder why the press does what it does. It drives me to write endlessly on the foibles and flaws of the current administration. It distracts from the most frightening knowledge, which many of us possess as an inescapable intuition, which many of us likewise ignore as paranoia: not that everything is broken, but that everything is going according to plan.