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Dumbing
Down: America's Fast Food Electorate
April 24, 2002
By Christian Dewar
Recent articles by Ernest Partridge ("Don't
Just Get Mad, Get Smart") and Michael Gronewaller ("Don't
Get Smart, Get Stupid") raise interesting questions about
the tactics which liberals need to use to restore some semblance
of democracy to our nation. It is sad but true that liberals
probably have to 'dumb down' to get our message out to the
masses. More than half of the electorate voted for Gore but
there are many people who just don't have a clue as to the
destructive, corrupt nature of the Bush administration. As
H.L. Mencken once said, "No one in this world, so far
as I know has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence
of the great masses of the plain people."
Certainly, the media in the United States is partly to blame.
It is pathetic that it is necessary to follow the foreign
media to find out not only what we are doing in other countries
like Afghanistan or Venezuela but also here at home. One good
example of the dismal state of the U.S. media is their failure
to adequately cover the theft of the election in Florida.
Palast's findings of wide spread corruption were reported
on the BBC but never managed to filter back to the U.S. except
on the Internet. When the consortium of mainstream U.S. newspapers
finally did get around to releasing the results of their investigations
into the shenanigans of Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris, they
buried Gore's victory in the fine print.
Some of this ignorance is due to the 'bread and circuses'
factor. There are too many distractions vying for the attention
of American consumers such as sporting events, sit-coms, 'Reality'
programs, movies, videos, CDs or surfing the web. Americans
are also used to immediate gratification, whether it is fast
food, movies readily available on satellite television or
a faster modem connection to the internet. This is true with
the political discourse in this nation. We are used to getting
our information in neatly packaged sound bytes and photo ops.
We have become sort of a 'Fast Food Electorate'. It is as
if Americans suffer collectively from a plague of Attention
Deficit Disorder.
Another part of the reason is undoubtedly a lack of time.
Many people toiling long hours to make ends meet in the new
Bush economy are just too busy to stay informed. When they
return home from work, they want to relax and be entertained,
not to mull over events in the Middle East. It takes effort
to stay informed. It is much easier if Karl Rove just tells
us what to believe. Benito Mussolini once wrote that "The
masses have little time to think. And how incredible is the
willingness of modern man to believe."
It is these people that the Republicans have so successfully
targeted with the repetition of simple slogans such as 'reformer
with results' or 'compassionate conservative'. It is not that
these people subscribe to the anti-democratic ideas of the
Bush administration, it is just that they are too often suckered
into believing inane drivel - such as terrorists hate us for
our freedom and democracy or the simplifying of world politics
into the binary view that it is a matter of good guys versus
bad guys.
(Bonus quiz: Identify the person who said the following.
"The struggle between two worlds can permit no compromises.
It's either Us or Them!" If you understandably guessed Bush,
deduct ten points. It was Benito Mussolini discussing fascism
versus democracy, as opposed to God-fearing Americans versus
Evildoers.)
Of course, anyone who has bothered to inform themselves about
Dubya or followed his career by reading the Texas Observer,
The Nation, Molly Ivins, Lou Dubose, Mother Jones or any one
of many good sources, realizes that Bush is anything but compassionate
or a reformer. To most liberals, this mindless repetition
of inane slogans without substance seems boring and simple
minded, but as Madison Avenue has pointed out, it works. Hitler
wrote that, "Through clever and constant application of propaganda,
people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other
way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as
paradise." Republicans know the effectiveness of 'staying
on message'. They march in lockstep, even if it is a goosestep
wearing jackboots.
It seems quite possible that Karl Rove learned invaluable
lessons about propaganda from one of the foremost experts
in the field. Adolf Hitler wrote in "Mein Kampf" that "All
propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual
level, that even the most stupid of those towards whom it
is directed will understand it. Therefore, the intellectual
level of the propaganda must be lower the larger the number
of people who are to be influence by it."
The masses of Americans have been shown capable of swallowing
some pretty big whoppers. By constantly banging on the message
that the Clinton personnel trashed the White House, that Ken
Lay stayed in the Lincoln bedroom during Clinton's tenure,
that Gore claimed to invent the Internet, that Starr's $70
million dollar persecution of Clinton was about lying and
not an attempt to smear Clinton with the salacious, leering,
voyeristic, obsessions of a partisan witch hunter, Republicans
have convinced them that these are true.
Rove must have been taking a page from the Hitler playbook,
"Mein Kampf", which states that "The size of the lie is a
definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast
masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more
easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally
bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them
a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves
often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big
one."
It is also regretable but true that we are, in large part,
a country of lemmings. Many people are too lazy to become
informed. It is not that most Americans don't mean well, they
just cannot be bothered to put any effort in to discovering
the truth. These people are thinking with their brain stem
and not their frontal lobes. It is easier to have someone
else tell them what to believe, and if they deliver it in
a neat package with star-spangled wrapping, it is even that
more attractive.
The Republicans have certainly figured out this demographic
cross section of voting Americans. As Roger Ailes, the former
media consultant to Republicans and head of Fox (Fair and
Balanced) News once said, "People don't want to be informed,
they only want the illusion of being informed." Ailes
has been more than happy to oblige his audience with his brand
of Jerry Springer reporting. Thanks to the spendid coverage
of Gary Condit, shark attacks off the coast of Florida and
the latest 'Survivor' episode, Americans know more about Michael
Jordan than they do about the bellicose hawks in the Bush
administration who are sending America's sons and daughters
to war.
There is a sort of knee-jerk reaction that takes place with
these people. If they see a photo-op of George Bush with a
back drop of U.S. troops and American flags, they conclude
that Republicans are the more patriotic party, nevermind Bush's
dismal military record of draft dodging, unexplained absences
from duty, allegations of being AWOL, suspension from flying
after refusing to submit to drug tests and quitting the National
Guard two years short of fullfilling his committment. Because
Republicans have wrapped themselves up so tightly in the flag
and drapped red, white and blue bunting on their candidates,
somehow people interpret this as Republicans being the party
of choice for the military. U.S. troops would probably think
twice about supporting the Republicans if they knew Cheney
received five deferments to avoid going to Vietnam. They might
hesitate to support other draft dodgers like Tom DeLay, Jack
Kemp, Kenneth Starr, Trent Lott, Phil Gramm, John Ashcroft,
Paul Wolfowitz, Frank Gaffney, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Armey,
Bill Bennet and many others.
If Bush appears with Corretta Scott King to commemorate her
husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, people conclude that Republicans
are 'compassionate conservatives', nevermind their close ties
to Bob Jones University, the racist Southern Partisan, the
bigoted Council of Conservative Citizens (described as the
"uptown Klu Klux Klan") or the intense efforts of
the Bush administration to roll back civil rights and resegregate
the nation. These people don't want to take the time to learn
about Cheney's opposition to sanctions against South Africa
for their apartheid policies against blacks or his opposition
to the release of Nelson Mandela.
The same is true with Bush's campaign to woo the Hispanic
vote. He speaks a few words of freshman level Spanish and
appears with a Mariachi band and some people assume that Republicans
are the friends of Latinos. Knowledgable Hispanic activists
call this "Sombrero Politics." It is all cosmetics.
Anyone who has followed Ivins or the Texas Observer's coverage
of Bush's policies towards Hispanics know that he talks inclusion
but practices exclusion. Hispanics during Bush's tenure as
governor suffered in terms of poverty, health, insurance,
education, teen pregnancies, employment, etc.
If Cheney appears before a backdrop of police officers, these
people assume that Republicans must be tougher on crime than
the Democrats, never mind all of the additional police that
Clinton put on the streets for the effective community policing
programs. It would have taken a little effort to find out
that Cheney opposed a ban on teflon-coated bullets which can
penetrate body armor or that Cheney was opposed to banning
pistols made from synthetic materials that can evade metal
detectors. (How much easier would this have made Mohammed
Atta's murderous terrorist attack?) Do these people know that
Bush has been arrested at least three times and Cheney twice?
Do they know about the many allegations of cocaine and marijuana
abuse by Bush? Given Bush's record and background, it is quite
possible that Bush would have been disqualified had he tried
to become a police officer himself.
It would seem that if liberals want to start reaching these
voters, they had better start doing some serious underestimating.
This would require that we 'dumb down' the political dialouge
by using the sound bytes, slogans and photo-ops so effectively
wielded by Rove. The difference between the Republican and
Democratic message would be that ours would not have to be
false, misleading or a distortion of the truth as so often
seems to be the case in Bush's Orwellian statements.
For instance, most Americans probably want a clean, unpolluted
enviroment, fair elections without the corrupting influence
of massive corporate campaign contributions and a safer world
for their children. If informed, they almost certainly wouldn't
want a tax cut designed to give forty percent of the refunds
to the richest one percent. Americans don't want the Pentagon
to waste taxpayer money on obsolete, ineffective weapons such
as the Carlyles's Crusader cannon, simply because the president's
father works for the company. It is doubtful that they would
want to spend tens of billions of dollars for a 'Star Wars'
missile system if they knew that the tests had been rigged,
that results had been falsified, that it was easily duped
by decoys and that the only successful tests were as a result
of homing devices built into the incoming targets.
Most citizens of this country don't think that Ken Lay should
be able to write our national energy policy or gouge energy
consumers in California. The widepread sentiment is that Lay,
Fastow and Skilling should go to jail for the insider trading
that allowed them to become obscenely rich while Enron workers
lost their life savings. No doubt, many Americans would think
twice about voting for Bush again if they knew about his own
insider trading deals at Harkin and the crony capitalism that
made him rich. Most people would be appalled if they knew
of the bin Laden family's investments in Bush's failed oil
wells and his father's Carlyle investment group.
Any reasonable person would be reluctant to back Bush's plan
for the resumption of nuclear testing if they were told that
the previous explosions had exposed virtually all of the people
in the United States to radiation and that at a minimum, 11,000
people had died of cancer as a result of those tests. It is
hard to believe that they would back his abandonment of test
ban treaties or be in favor of the development of new nuclear
arms if they knew that this was destablizing relations with
other countries and leading to a new arms race. Bush is calling
for more nuclear weapons to be manufactured. Many people might
reconsider this if educated about the plutonium that this
would require. One of the most toxic substances known to man,
a half a gram of plutonium dispersed from the top of the Empire
State Building could kill tens of thousands of people if.
The half life is measured in the tens of thousands of years.
Additional production would make it much more likely that
terrorists could get their hands on it.
It would seem to most liberals that the issues are really
on their side. It is a matter of selling what is best to the
American people. In order to adopt this 'dumbing down' of
issues to target these apathtic and uninformed voters, progressives
would be wise to study a page from the late Lee Atwater's
play book. Atwater, of course, was one of the architects of
racist Willie Horton smear campaign against Dukakis. (Many
people aren't aware that George W. Bush collaborated with
Atwater on those ads.) Such a nasty, brutish approach to campaigning
is anathema to the sensitivities of most liberals but what
made it effective was that Atwater claimed he was going to
marry Willie Horton to Michael Dukakis which he did with a
shotgun wedding. It may well be time for Democrats, progressives,
liberals and Greens to go into the matrimony business themselves.
One corrupt politician at the turn of the century complained
that his constituents were illiterate and couldn't read the
editorials which denounced him but that the political cartoons
portraying him as a crook were killing him at the polls. This
concept could be used by Democrats. Bush needs to be indelibly
linked in the minds of the general population with his destructive,
dangerous policies. The web has hundreds of progressive site
and the number is growing in leaps and bounds. There is no
lack of creativity or originality. There are great cartoons,
articles and satire that skewer Bush succinctly. Progressives
need to target maintream of America and not just preach to
the choir. It is time for liberals to use those slogans, sound
bytes and photo-ops to marry Bush, his administration and
his cronies to their corrupt agenda.
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