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Scheherazade in the White House (Le Monde article)

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panzerfaust Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-18-08 11:18 AM
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Scheherazade in the White House (Le Monde article)

"How George Bush’s wartime administration used a magician, Hollywood designers and Karl Rove telling 1,001 stories to sell the invasion of Iraq.

A few days before the 2004 presidential election, Ron Suskind, a columnist who had been investigating the White House and its communications for years, wrote in The New York Times about a conversation he had with a presidential adviser in 2002. “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people ‘who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, ..."


From http://mondediplo.com/2008/01/04scheherazade

Truth, and Reality, will out: Though perhaps not in time.


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rodeodance Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-18-08 11:28 AM
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1. The campaigns create their own realites also: but hope for the Dem "reality" this
time around.
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rodeodance Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-18-08 11:32 AM
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2. Rove applied the “Scheherazade strategy”:


........According to Ira Chernus, professor at the University of Colorado, Karl Rove applied the “Scheherazade strategy”: “When policy dooms you, start telling stories – stories so fabulous, so gripping, so spellbinding that the king (or, in this case, the American citizen who theoretically rules our country) forgets all about a lethal policy. It plays on the insecurity of Americans who feel that their lives are out of control” (6). Rove did this with much success in 2004 when Bush was re-elected, diverting voters’ attention away from the state of the war by evoking the great collective myths of the US imagination.

As Chernus explains, Rove was “betting that the voters will be mesmerised by John Wayne-style tales of real men fighting evil on the frontier – at least enough Americans to avoid the death sentence that the voters might otherwise pronounce on the party that brought us the disaster in Iraq.” Chernus believed that Rove invented simplistic good-against-evil stories for his candidates to tell and tried to turn every election into a moral drama, a contest of Republican moral clarity versus Democratic moral confusion. “The Scheherazade strategy is a great scam, built on the illusion that moralistic tales can make us feel secure, no matter what’s actually going on out there in the world. Rove wants every vote for a Republican to be a symbolic statement” (7). This August Rove was forced to resign by Democrat members of Congress. He announced his decision with an admission which could have applied to all his work: “I feel like I’m Moby Dick… they’re after me.”

Translated by Morag Young

Christian Salmon wrote Storytelling, la machine à fabriquer des histoires, La Découverte, Paris, 2007

(1) Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W Bush”, The New York Times, 17 October 2004.

(2) Jay Rosen, “The Retreat from Empiricism and Ron Suskind’s Intellectual Scoop”, The Huffington Post, 4 July 2007.

(3) David Blaine, Mysterious Stranger. A Book of Magic, Villard Books, New York, 2002.

(4) Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Penguin Books, New York, 2007.

(5) Ibid.

(6) Ira Chernus, “Karl Rove’s Scheherazade Strategy”, Tomdispatch.com, 7 July 2006.

(7) Ibid.
END


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rodeodance Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-18-08 11:33 AM
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4. Thanks much--REC
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Taverner Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-18-08 11:33 AM
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3. Excellent article!
One to bookmark...
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Mountainman Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-18-08 11:38 AM
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5. I keep wondering why so many of us did not fall for this and so many other like the freepers did.
What is it in us or them?

You can fool some of the people all the time.
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