Some notes on the campaign before I disappear for a while. ** I might not have e-mail access during September. I seem to be getting through alright today, but it probably won't last, and I'm better off without e-mail for a while anyway. So don't worry if RRE goes to sleep for a bit. Please keep sending me good stuff for the list, and I'll look at it all when I get back online. ** American culture is going insane. I'm not sure that I mean this in a clinical way, but I do mean it. In "The Divided Self", R. D. Laing described the experience of going insane, and I think that his model applies well. Insanity, he says, starts with "ontological insecurity", which is a doubt about whether one's own self exists. People who suffer from ontological insecurity are unhappy, and they may even be crazy, but they are not insane. Insanity starts when the individual decides that his or her own personality is evil, and that they are obligated to destroy it. American culture has always been prone to ontological insecurity, ever since Europe exported all of its religious fanatics to us. Not all religious people are crazy; indeed, true religion is the cure for craziness. Rather, Europe was raked for centuries by horrific wars and epidemics, and the cultural upshot of these experiences in a deeply religious and badly educated society was religious fanaticism. In the American context, religious fanaticism rapidly turned into a politics of conspiracy theories, and that politics has returned periodically to the surface ever since. Conspiracy theories are precisely but a kind of political psychosis driven by ontological insecurity: a doubt that the institutions of the country even exist. This takes extreme forms with wackos, mostly on the right but on the left as well, who believe that the United States Constitution was officially repealed in the 1930s, or any number of other wild scenarios. But ontological insecurity was also a dominant theme of 1990s mass culture, for example in the X-Files -- to be sure a great show, but very much a product of the encapsulated psychosis of American conspiratism. But it wasn't just craziness that came to the surface in the 1990s, but insanity as well: the delusional belief that one has an obligation to destroy one's own personality. And this insanity was found equally on the left and right. The self-destruction of the country's cultural personality is easy to find: look for either anger or humor that gets its bite by stigmatizing and then punching through some boundary of morality or conscience. On the left, the highest product of American cultural insanity is "South Park", whose humor consisted precisely of -- as the patter goes -- "breaking taboos". Why is it funny to see little kids cussing their faces off? Because it's a blow for freedom against the uptight ayatollahs of the religious right who don't like it. On the right, the highest product of American cultural insanity is Rush Limbaugh. His humor works the same way: those politically correct jerks on the left are oppressing us, so we have to stand up for freedom by, for example, instructing a black caller to get the bone out of his nose. In a normal world this would be racist garbage, but in the insane world of Limbaugh it's a courageous act of standing up to the intimidation of liberal thought control. The very fact that "they" don't like it *obligates* us to do it. This sense of continually, purposefully punching through the barriers of conscience is exactly the process of making oneself insane. It becomes a habit of mind, and as one's conscience is slowly cut away one becomes less and less capable of rational thought. Music critics feel a mindless obligation to make excuses for depraved song lyrics. Any concern for the suffering of an animal is mindlessly mocked as the product of animal rights wackos. And so on. As the insanity proceeds, public discourse become more and more disturbed, more and more irrational. Politicians and pundits can simply lie, saying things that are obviously not true, because they know that nobody in the media elite will have enough sense left in their heads to call them on it. The most primitive mechanism of public insanity is projection: the practice of systematically accusing "them" of doing whatever it is that you are doing. Projection arises as a special case of the general mechanism of destroying one's own personality. Here is how it works. Let's say that a voice in your head is telling you to commit some foul act, such as falsely accusing your opponent of claiming to have invented the Internet. Having largely destroyed your conscience, you will find this idea appealing. But, you will observe, if you do such a thing, then your opponent will accuse you of lying. In the pseudo-logic of insanity, people like Laing observe, words become concrete things, and concrete things can have only one location at a time. If we put the word "lying" over there, on "them", then we cannot be accused of lying ourselves. Projection, in other words, starts by rehearsing the line "they're really the ones who ...", and the professional destroyer of conscience will be certain to issue these accusations proactively. If you're conducting a dirty political campaign, or even if you're likely to be accused of dirty campaigning because that's what your father did, then proactively get out there and accuse the other side of being a dirty campaigner. Find tame members of the press who will print false articles alleging that your opponent is a thug. If you're going to spread lies about your opponent, get out there and falsely label him a liar. If your whole campaign is going to be based on character assassination, get out there and call for "a new tone" in politics, the innuendo being that your opponent represents the bad, old tone. Whatever you're planning to do, proactively pin it on "them" first. That's projection. It is the most primitive of mental processes, and it has become a high art. It has also become a widespread cultural form. I wish I had a dollar for every speaker of the new political jargon who has said to me, "you're really the one who ...". In fact, I can already hearing them saying it about the piece that I am writing now. After all, I *am* saying that they are themselves the ones who do all the things that they accuse others of doing. But the psychosis does not consist simply in saying, "you're really the one who ...". Rather, it consists in doing so automatically, habitually, and above all *falsely*. If two people are saying "you're really the one who ..." to one another, it should be possible to determine who is right, simply by looking at the evidence. So let's consider the evidence. And there's a lot to consider. Fully three-quarters of the press coverage of the Gore campaign has consisted of false attacks on his character. These numbers are like something out of communist Albania. Even the Center for Media and Public Affairs, which can find liberal bias in a bowl of Cheerios, has found extreme media bias against Gore. But we're not talking centrally about the media here -- although American media pundits are whole-heartedly engaged in the destruction of the national conscience -- but about candidates. And George W. Bush, whose surreal campaign compares to absolutely nothing that I have ever seen in my life, not even Richard Nixon's, not even George Bush Senior's, has been a fanatical practitioner of projection. The conscience-wrecking pundits constantly remark on what a clean campaign Bush has been running, and yet he and his people have been calling his opponent a liar just about every day since the campaign began. It's somehow in the nature of the new political jargon that nobody notices how routine and how offensive it is. In April, for example, Gore said that Bush's foreign policy proposals treat China and Russia as enemies. USA Today (5/1/00) quotes Condoleeza Rice as follows: [Bush] has said that China is a competitor and we should reach out to Russia. It is very much like the vice president to distort [Bush's] record. In other words, not just that Gore had distorted Bush's record, not just that Gore has often distorted Bush's record, but that "it is very much like" Gore to distort Bush's record -- an attack on his character, and on the thinnest of arguments. Of course, it's theoretically possible that these routine character attacks are right. But are they right in reality? The fact is, the Bush campaign is now preparing to broadcast television commercials that make two harsh accusations against his opponent -- both of which are false. Not just arguably false but straightforwardly false. This commercial makes the grave claim that Mr. Bush's opponent raised funds at a Buddhist temple. This is not only unproven, but as even prominent Republicans have observed, it is simply not true. The evidence is overwhelming -- it's not even a close call. Yet the media routinely refer to the Buddhist temple thing as a "fund-raiser", even though it was not any such thing. Most of the basic facts of the case are never reported, and those that are reported are routinely spun in the most deceptive fashion. The Bush advertisement's other claim is that Al Gore falsely claimed to have invented the Internet. This, too, is false. It simply never happened. The advertisement quotes half of a sentence, the first half of which makes clear what Mr. Gore plainly and obviously meant -- the accurate, true claim, forcefully acknowledged by the Internet's scientific leadership, that he did the pioneering legislative work that made the Internet possible. This is it: this is the Bush campaign's best shot, and all they've got is lies. And not just any lies, but projective lies: in order to lie about their opponent, they are accusing him of being a liar. Everything they say about their opponent is actually true about them. They are deeply disturbed. But it's not just them: it's a culture, a culture of insanity, something deeply rooted, even institutionalized, routinized in a thousand turns of phrase, a thousand points of spin, hundreds of words carefully twisted into dishonesty, and all of it motivated by the psychotic belief that thereby destroying conscience is a courageous, heroic act that God Himself, and the Constitution, and morality and justice and truth and honor, all of them, insistently demand of their humble servants. Is this a lot to hang on one commercial? It's not one commercial: it's a whole way of life. Let's listen to the disturbed thought processes in action. Here is Mr. Bush in a 9/2/00 New York Times article by Frank Bruni, who has written some of the most shocking propaganda in his favor: Asked whether he was raising questions about Mr. Gore's truthfulness, he said, "No, I'm just saying this is a man who'll say things, like, he's for campaign funding reform and then conveniently forgets he went to the Buddhist temple". But the ad was clearly, obviously "raising questions about Mr. Gore's truthfulness". It accuses him of "claiming credit for things he didn't do" and ends by displaying the phrase "Gorewillsayanything.com". A 9/1/00 Washington Post article says this: RNC spokesman Clifford May, noting that Democratic ads have assailed Bush, said, "We're showing Al Gore on a TV show speaking in his own voice. That's not an attack". One of the Bush campaign's tactics, endlessly repeated by the media, is to blur the distinction between "attacks" that disagree with Bush's policy record and proposals, which have indeed been insistent, and "attacks" on Bush's character, which have been almost nonexistent. But Mr. May's quote, which is *not* an aberration, goes much further, and claims that the advertisement in question is not an "attack" at all! The argument is that the ad cannot be an attack because it uses Gore "speaking in his own voice". But, of course, the ad does more than simply quote Gore, and when it does quote him it takes his words out of context and falsifies their meaning. This twisting of Gore's words has been a constant throughout the Bush campaign. For example, they routinely quote Gore's words in favor of eliminating the internal combustion engine -- something that is just short of a commonplace in the auto industry -- and paraphrases him as advocating the elimination of the family car. And then the Bush people, as part of the general pattern of projection, proactively accuse Gore of not knowing what words mean, just as they did to Bill Clinton when a lawyer paid by his political enemies asked him a very twisted, ambiguous, complicated question in a court case, one that used words in an artificial way that did not correspond to normal usage: he cut through the thicket of twisted language as best he could, to the point of trying to reason through what the questioner meant by the word "is", whereupon the practitioners of projection jumped on *him* for twisting language! This was such a success that now they're trying to do it again, twisting phrases such as "fund-raiser" and then falsely accusing Gore of having twisted them. I have been following these patterns for months now, and I find them tremendously disturbing. The good news is that they do not seem to be working. When the people finally got a chance to see Al Gore live, without the nonstop smears of the media, his message of democracy was a hit. It was quite the controlled experiment: no liberal media bias to blame this time. But the smear campaign is not over. The current media buzz is the remarkably positive coverage that Gore is supposedly getting, even though false attacks on his character continue to be printed and broadcast as truth every day. And now, in the darkest of all possible projections, we're hearing the first media rumblings that maybe Gore's mental health is suspect, given that he and his family went into therapy after his son was hit by a car. It's so twisted that I need to take a break from it, and that's what I'm going to do. I'll be back in a bit. Meanwhile, I can only trust in normal Americans to confront insanity with truth, and conservatism with democracy. Go to it. ** In response to my slightly facetious prognostication that... You'll wear devices that will feed your stats back to the doctor, and you'll have other devices that let you treat yourself, or at least be treated at a distance. one reader replied as follows: A colleague here in Pittsburgh has formed a company focusing specifically on the monitoring task that you describe above. This company is fabricating comfortable and fashionable devices that may be worn for substantial periods, feeding health measurements via radio to the net, where a web-based interface allows either the wearer or her doctor to monitor and analyze the results. The company is called BodyMedia. They have a sparse web site at "www.bodymedia.com". One of the founders is Astro Teller, a CMU PhD graduate and relative of prominent physicist Edward Teller. The world is not only weirder than we know; it is also weirder than we can know. ** Some URL's. media smear campaign Study Finds Media Boost Bush http://www.cmpa.com/pressrel/electpr2.htm Will Pseudo-Scandals Decide the Election? http://www.prospect.org/archives/V11-21/wilentz-s.html Tale of Two Press Corps http://search.ft.com/search/multi/globalarchive.jsp?docId=000817000445 Gore Media Coverage: Playing Hardball http://www.cjr.org/year/00/3/hall.asp wireless GPRS Takes Wireless into the Future http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2000/26/ns-16493.html Despite the Hype, Bluetooth Is Still Teething http://www.zdnet.com.au/equip/news/stories/au0003747.html Unstrung http://www.unstrung.com/index.php3 Physical Place and CyberPlace http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/individualism/article.html intellectual property wars The Right To Read: Time Limited Textbooks http://slashdot.org/yro/00/08/28/1158221.shtml sinister record industry lobbying http://www.salon.com/ent/music/feature/2000/08/28/work_for_hire/ Napster's appeal http://dl.napster.com/brief0818.pdf court decision in MPAA suit against DeCSS http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/courtweb/pdf/D02NYSC/00-08117.PDF everything else National Story Project http://www.npr.org/programs/watc/991002.storyproject.html LaborTech Conference, Madison WI, 1-3 December 2000 http://www.labornet.org/labortech/ Microsoft Word Documents that "Phone Home" http://www.privacyfoundation.org/advisories/advWordBugs.html Directions in IT and Writing http://www.rpi.edu/~geislc/IText/ Experts Cast Doubt on New York Plan to Fingerprint for Medicaid http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/08/biztech/articles/30finger.html Toward a General Modular Systems Theory http://www.findarticles.com/m4025/2_25/62197042/p1/article.jhtml Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q261/1/86.ASP Dealing With Community Data http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~danyelf/cscw2000/ Gel Pens Recalled by Colorbok http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml00/00169b.html Online Commerce Creates Strange Competition http://www.nytimes.com/library/financial/082400econ-scene.html Internet Geography Project http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~zook/domain_names/ The 100 Most Important American Musical Works of the 20th Century http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/vote/list100.html What the Internet Cannot Do http://www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/current/index_ld0592.html Pew Internet and American Life Project http://www.pewinternet.org/ end