Category: Culture

Sophisticated propaganda vs. the plain old truth

I haven’t posted anything political for a while. Partly this is because the political drama has moved so fast and reversed so often that it has been a tough target. And partly it’s because the media and the American intelligentsia are finally getting things right.

For years, I felt like a voice in the wilderness. As a retired newspaperman, truth to me is sacred, and nothing makes me angrier than lies. And so for years I watched the media fall for the trap that right-wing propagandists had set for them. Journalists, including many of my old colleagues, fell for the notion that “objectivity” and “balance” required them to treat intentional deception as valid and reportable, with lies unchallenged. The clichéd way of saying it is, “Republicans, Democrats differ on whether earth is flat.” This journalistic “principle” held all through the Bush and Obama years. It enabled the sophisticated lies that enabled the Iraq war, and it enabled the right-wing strategy of paralyzing and demonizing President Obama (birtherism, etc.) and Hillary Clinton (Benghazi — boo!). The manipulation of the media (and therefore the manipulation of unsophisticated Americans by sophisticated propaganda) corrupted the 2016 election.

But finally an extremely unsophisticated and extremely stupid man named Donald Trump pushed things too far. Not only did the Washington Post and the New York Times enlarge their staffs (and their circulations), but also the truth suddenly mattered again, and lies could be exposed. It is a pure joy to watch this — our intelligence community supplying the truth, and our newspapers boldly printing the truth and calling lies what they are. This has been the blessing in disguise of the Trump era. The vile Republican Party and its propaganda machine overplayed its hand, and now the tables have turned.

As an amateur scholar of propaganda, another thing that greatly disturbed me over the years was Americans’ dangerous inability to recognize propaganda. Russian interference in the American election, and the injection of “fake news” into social media, is at last teaching most Americans an essential lesson about propaganda. Certainly there are still those who eat their propaganda for breakfast and relish it (they still think that Trump is their savior), but increasingly they don’t count. I am daring to hope that propaganda will never again be able to swing a national election in this country, which means that Republicans will never be able to win again. The simple truth is that Republicans cannot win elections without lying, and that Republicans have to lie about their political objectives to get support for their political products, products such as the Iraq war, or yet more tax cuts for the rich while cutting social services that their own voters depend on.

Yesterday, the Washington Post published a transcript of a secretly recorded conversation in which the Republican congressional leadership talked about Russian interference in American politics. They also talked about Russian propaganda:

Ryan and Rodgers are revealing here not only that they recognize propaganda, but also that they recognize sophisticated propaganda. We learned in the 2016 election that Republicans are entirely willing to go along even with subversive foreign propaganda if it suits their purposes and their power. It won them the 2016 presidential election. Now it has backfired on them. The Republican Party bent over for the Russians, tried to keep it secret, and then lied about it. Now they will pay.

The truth continues to dribble out, and we can’t take our eyes off the web sites of the New York Times and the Washington Post. When events like this are unfolding, I often go to right-wing propaganda sites such as the Drudge Report to see how they’re spinning it. As far as I can tell, at least today, the plain truth is overwhelming any attempts to respond with the usual right-wing spin and lies. For years it was the other way around, with right-wing lies spreading so thick and so fast that no one had the resources — even if they had the will — to shoot down all the lies. Right-wingers — for so long accustomed to overwhelming the rest of us with lies — are at last being overwhelmed by the truth.

Sophisticated propaganda is dangerous stuff. Since the rise of Fox News in 1997, sophisticated right-wing propaganda has dominated and corrupted American politics. Can we now dare to hope that, when Donald Trump goes down, he’ll take the era of right-wing propaganda and the Republican Party down with him?

I am daring to hope it.

UPDATE: This just in: Roger Ailes has died, just as I was finishing this post. What perfect timing. Ailes, as the evil genius behind Fox News, was more than anyone responsible for the propagandization of Americans and for bringing the American democracy to the brink of disaster. Not only did he make propagandization profitable, he also taught millions of Americans to prefer lies to truth. He prepared America for Trump and Putin. An era has truly ended.

Music, politics, and a smidgen of religion

Frankly, I am terrible at shooting and editing video. But I would like to get better at it. The abbey’s new satellite connection to the Internet is super-fast and, for the first time, makes it possible to work with video.

Here’s a wee practice video.

From the abbey organ, a Rodgers 730, this is a chorale prelude by J.S. Bach, BWV 644, “Ach wie nichtig, ach wie flüchtig.” The German hymn was written by Michael Franck in 1652. The English words are by an American, William Allen, who was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1784.

Adult spelling bee. We won!

Some months ago, friends from the Democratic Party mentioned an adult spelling bee here in Stokes that occurs each spring. It’s a fundraiser for the East Stokes Outreach Ministry, which provides food, household items, and other kinds of assistance for needy families. “Count me in!” I told her. Teams of four adults compete for the title of county spelling bee champs.

Last night, our team, “The Grimoires,” won the championship. Members of the team were Steve and Olivia Shelton (both retired music teachers here), and Ken and I.

It’s little events like this that help make rural living so much fun. There are many such fundraising events each year — music festivals, suppers, raffles (dinner included) and even a New Year’s Day dip in a lake at the top of Hanging Rock State Park.

As a child, my spelling bee record was pretty good, so it was great fun to do it again as an adult. All four of us got trophies. Here’s the word list:

abscess
barrette
cemetery
deductible
embarrass
facade
graffiti
harass
inevitable
judgmental
knead
lieutenant
massacre
miscellaneous
necessary
odious
paraffin
aficionado
belligerence
camouflage
decaffeinate
effervescent
facsimile
hemorrhage

7-1

Ken has been playing in a hockey league in a nearby city. I went to my first hockey game last night. Ken’s team won 7-1.

Also, Ken is mentioned in a piece in the April 24 New Yorker. The New Yorker piece is about van dwelling and how it has been commercialized in social media. Ken provides the authentic element for the story, since he lived in his van not as an edgy Bohemian lifestyle but for a more practical and frugal reason — to afford grad school.

Location, location, location


⬆︎ Gragg, North Carolina, with Grandfather Mountain (altitude 5,945 feet) in the background

If you’re shooting a movie, shooting on location costs a lot of money. But if you’re writing a novel, good locations cost nothing. The author is limited only by what he can imagine and describe.

As a rule, I like for the locations in my novels to be places that I actually have been to and seen. Book 1 of the Ursa Major series, Fugue in Ursa Major, mostly because the story is just getting started, doesn’t stray very far from Phaedrus’ cottage in the Appalachian backwoods — places such as Charlottesville, Washington, and the national forests of West Virginia.

Book 2, Oratorio in Ursa Major, travels much farther — the coast and highlands of Scotland, an oil rig in the north sea, and an enormous space ship in deep space billions of miles from earth.

Book 3, Symphony in Ursa Major, which is in progress and which I plan to release next year, will get deeper into the Appalachians and will return to Charlottesville and Washington. But we’ll also go to London for some scenes at Westminster, and we’ll also go to New Delhi. And we’ll get even deeper into space and learn much more about galactic history and politics when we visit the galactic capital.

Back in the 1980s, on my first trip to London, my Welsh friend in London, who was a lawyer and policy wonk, wanted to impress me, so he requested tickets from his member of Parliament to visit Parliament on the prime minister’s question day. The prime minister was Margaret Thatcher. The tickets were for the sergeant-at-arms’ private box. So I have seen a good bit of Westminster, including of course the greatest abbey in the world, Westminster Abbey. And I’ve heard Margaret Thatcher getting rough with the opposition in the House of Commons. In my archives, I have a copy of the Times of London from the next day, which includes a story on what Thatcher was asked and what she said.

I was in Delhi in 1994, and though I have not seen the government buildings in Delhi, I’ve seen plenty of Delhi’s streets and markets including, of course, Connaught Place.

In Oratorio in Ursa Major, there is a brief visit to the place I call the Pisgah abbey. In Book 3, we’ll return to the Pisgah abbey. This place is deep in the Pisgah National Forest of western North Carolina. The abbey is imagined, but the location is real. I searched out the location using Google Earth. I was looking for a small clearing in a deep valley, surrounded by high mountains. I wanted a location reachable only by winding, treacherous roads. I settled on Gragg, North Carolina.

On a trip to Asheville last weekend, I went to Gragg. The place is so remote that GPS cannot be trusted. At one point, GPS wanted me to turn left on a nonexistent road that would have sent me crashing down a forested mountainside. But I finally found a way into Gragg by going to the little town of Linville. From Linville, GPS gave me a route down into Gragg on roads that actually existed. The road — narrow and unpaved with lots of one-lane bridges — looped and wound down a mountainside and gave up about a thousand feet of altitude in five miles. There is a small settlement of people at Gragg and even a small lake. Gragg seems to possess the only fairly flat parcel of land for many miles. The road to Gragg is so steep that, when I climbed back up toward Linville, my little Smart car stayed in 2nd gear (of five) for almost the entire drive.

Writers and readers know how important a story’s settings are. Writers and readers also know that, for some reason, stories just work better when the plot moves characters from place to place. When characters are in the middle of nowhere, the author is probably exploring the characters’ inner lives, their motivations, and their inner obstacles. But if the story deals with larger, planetary issues, then you can expect the characters to show up in places where planetary power is concentrated. In Symphony in Ursa Major, that will be Washington, London, and Delhi.

Many writers (and films) have imagined what a galactic capital might look like. In Symphony, I’ll have my go at that.


⬆︎ A resident of Gragg, with his hoe.


⬆︎ The Blue Ridge Parkway, one of my favorite roadways in the world.


⬆︎ Gragg viewed in Google Earth


⬆︎ Westminster

The search for a lost heritage

Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth, by Mark Williams, Princeton University Press, 2016. 578 pages.

Like many people who have worked hard to understand how our Celtic ancestors lived, I regularly grapple with a smoldering fury. No matter what thread to the past we try to follow, we find it broken. “Broken” is too weak a word. The thread wasn’t merely snipped cleanly in two. Entire centuries have been deliberately hacked from the record and have been lost to us. We owe a huge debt to scholars such as Mark Williams who spend their lifetimes trying to reconnect the threads.

From genetic testing, because I carry the genetic marker for the Uí Néill family (carefully studied because it’s a royal genetic marker and is common in Ireland), it can be said with high confidence that my ancestors were in Ireland (probably the north of Ireland) before Patrick. For that reason, I take very personally the cultural catastrophe that the church brought to Ireland.

In this book, Williams brings us up to date on what scholars of the written record can tell us about pre-Christian Irish history, insofar as Irish history can be deduced by studying the rich body of Irish literature that was produced from around 500 to 1400 A.D. The catch, though, is that this literature was produced in the church’s monasteries, in the centuries after Patrick. Though surely the literature contains some older, pre-Christian elements, no clear or consistent picture of the past can be reconstructed from it. The stories are muddled, often contradictory, and they have been polluted with Christian allegory and snippets that appear to have come from Bible stories. And obviously, for someone who was writing in, say, 1200 A.D., the trail had gone cold, because the Christian subjugation of Ireland was well under way by 500 A.D.

Like it or not, that’s where things stand. The Celtic people of Western Europe know next to nothing about their pre-Roman past because the Celtic past was systemically expunged and can be glimpsed now only through a Christian fog. Williams acknowledges that those of us who make an effort to reconstruct the Celtic past have no choice but to speculate. Williams seems to respect that speculation, but he wants the speculation to be grounded in a scholarship that is up to date.

He mentions a movement that began in the 1980s that he calls Celtic Reconstructionism. “Celtic Reconstructionists,” writes Williams, “have tended to ally subjective feelings with thoughtful investigations of the writings of classical authors, archaeology, and comparative Indo-European mythology.” That’s pretty much my method, so I suppose I am a Celtic Reconstructionist. Most reconstructionists, I think, are searching for a religious practice with which to replace the poverty of Christian theology. My purpose, on the other hand, is to make use of the Celtic past in my novels and to encourage people to think about how the world would be very different without the imperial Roman religion, which was imported from a little cult in the Middle East and which is based on very thin and very silly texts. In his notes, Williams even includes a link to the web site of a Celtic Reconstructionist in Scotland whose work he clearly respects. Here’s the link, for those who might like to follow up: Tairis: A Gaelic Polytheistic web site.

Heritage supper

I know I’ve blogged about vegetarian (vegan actually) hot dogs before. Every now and then you’ve got to have one. Last night’s supper on the deck, near the grill, we called “heritage night.” The heritage here, of course, is Southern white trash heritage.

The vegan hot dogs come in a can. They’re made by Loma Linda, a Seventh-day Adventist company. The chili is homemade, using vegan burger that comes in a can, also made by Loma Linda. The hot dog buns are made by a local commercial bakery. The steak fries are from Ore-Ida.

That should take care of the hot dog craving for a couple of months.

An abbey literary update

Ken’s third book, This Land Is Our Land, has been in the final editing stages here at the abbey and is due at the publisher, Penguin Random House, next week. The book is scheduled for release in March 2018.

When the idea for this book was hatched last April, Ken was here at the abbey, traveling through on book tour for his second book. He had just published a piece in the New York Times, This Is Our Country. Let’s Walk It. After that piece was published, it was apparent that Ken had become the honorary owner of a “right to roam” movement in the United States and that a book on the subject was needed. Ken had no trouble at all selling his agent and his publisher on the idea, and in no time he had a contract to write the book.

A year ago, I would have assumed that this book would be a fairly bland and somewhat academic — but necessary — reference book for a new movement in need of a manifesto. But having read the manuscript twice during the past two weeks, I was reminded how Ken’s books always exceed my high expectations. It’s not just his superb research and the charm of his writing that make This Land Is Our Land such a good book. It’s also the way he surprises me, when I finally see the manuscript, with how deeply he delves and how high he flies, even though I was in on discussions about the book from the beginning. Though this book’s topic is seemingly narrow, Ken also has produced an incisive snapshot of contemporary American culture through the lens of our attitudes toward the land. And he has laid out a lion-hearted vision of a future America that is less insular and more benevolent.

If you’re not certain what a “right to roam” is, I’d suggest the New York Times link above. It’s not as radical a right as you might think. The people of England, Wales, Scotland, and Sweden have generous roaming rights, and even countries such as Lithuania and Latvia are far ahead of the United States with the right to roam.

This Land Is Our Land will be the fifth book to be born here at the abbey during the last four years. Ken’s other two books are Walden on Wheels (2013), and Trespassing Across America (2016). There also are my novels Fugue in Ursa Major (2014) and Oratorio in Ursa Major (2016). Symphony in Ursa Major is in progress and should be out next year.

On slamming doors

There are two things in the world that are guaranteed to make my blood pressure go from normal to nuclear in a fraction of a second.

The first thing is a crude right-winger throwing a talking point at me that he learned from Rush Limbaugh. We liberals are supposed to go down mewling and begging for mercy at the mighty power of right-wing talking points. I respond with involuntary rage, and maybe a fact or two that Rush Limbaugh didn’t think to tell them.

The second thing is the sound of a slamming door.

It has been many years, I’m happy to say, since I’ve heard a door slammed in anger. But a heavy door slammed carelessly — with a loud noise and the shaking of walls — spikes my blood pressure all the same.

I well remember the signs that used to be posted inside the doors of New York taxicabs: DO NOT SLAM THE DOOR. How I wanted one of those signs! I have the utmost empathy for those New York cab drivers. For one, the sound of the taxi door slamming is jolting to the driver even in the noisy context of New York City. And for two, it damages the door and the latch. The doors on old cars are almost always damaged (and thus close poorly) because people slammed them.

It’s very awkward, but if a houseguest slams an abbey door, I usually can find a minimally obnoxious way to restore peace and quiet. I try to find a way of bringing up the subject of two of the abbey’s exterior doors, which are pretty nice doors and which I never would have been able to afford had my contractor not bought them for me at a bankruptcy sale. The latch hardware is German (Hoppe multipoint latches). The lock cylinder also is German (CES Gruppe). When closed properly, the doors make a quiet little “snick” sound as the latches engage, like the door of a Mercedes.

When I was at the San Francisco Chronicle, we had a new Rolls-Royce for a few days that the auto editor was reviewing. I was impressed to see that the doors closed themselves. When you pushed the door almost together to close it, a closing mechanism would take over. I don’t know if the mechanism was electrical or hydraulic. But, untouched by human hands, the door would finish closing itself with a faint little snick of the latch.

I love the sound of a door that snicks. In the best of all possible worlds, all doors would close themselves and say “snick.”

Here in the South, back when people had screen doors, children (including me) were told a million times, “Don’t slam the screen door!” But screen doors, unlike other doors, had springs on them to close the door and keep the flies out. No wonder they slammed.

Whether car doors or house doors, it ought to be a universal rule (screen doors are an exception): Children should be taught to never “fling” the door so that the door closes from the inertia of being flung. The right way to close a door is to keep a hand on the door and slowly push it closed until the latch clicks. Or snicks. That works with car doors, too. Unless car doors have been damaged from slamming, they’ll close quietly and easily.

Schweinehunde?


A statue in Germany

In political conversations with friends during the weekend, I was reminded yet again of what a perplexing political situation we progressives are in — particularly if we are Democrats. Kinder souls than I (or maybe they’re just more naive than I am) insist that we must “reach out” to Trump voters, “connect” with them, try to understand their issues, etc. Others say that reaching out would be futile, that anyone who is incapable of seeing through Donald Trump is unreachable from the real world.

We progressives also have a big problem to our left. I call them “Bernie diehards” — blind and self-righteous idealists who wasted their votes on the Green Party (or who didn’t vote at all) and who could not see that they might as well have voted for Trump.

Probably the definitive piece scolding liberals for not reaching out to Trump voters is this piece in the New York Times by Sabrina Tavernise. There was a great deal of pushback to Tavernise’s mushy piece — for example, by Heather Digby Parton in Salon. I agree with Heather Digby Parton. The political challenge is not to reach out to Trump voters. Rather, the political challenge is to expose their crudeness and stupidity, politically destroy their con man hero, shame them, and push them back out to the margins of decent society. That’s where they came from, and that’s where they belong.

I came across a new word and a new concept this morning in a Slate piece, “How Hitler Conquered Germany: The Nazi propaganda machine exploited ordinary Germans by encouraging them to be co-producers of a false reality.”

The word is Schweinehund.

I don’t know any German, so I’ve had to use Google’s translator in trying to figure out what this word means to Germans and how the word has been used in talking about Nazis and Nazi propaganda. Schweinehund translates literally to pig dog or swine dog. It is sometimes translated as cur or bastard. I get the impression that Germans use the word fairly often. The derived term innerer Schweinehund also seems pretty common — inner pig dog. The inner pig dog, I think, refers to low human instincts that propaganda is designed to reach and that the Trump campaign was designed to reach. Trump’s closest advisers in the White House are people like Steve Bannon, whose very career has been producing propaganda to politically motivate and manipulate the pig dogs among us.

I should say at this point that talking about Hitler and the Nazis — long regarded as rhetorical overreach — is now absolutely necessary if we’re to understand the situation we’re now in. The people who were eventually effective against the Nazis were not people who “reached out” to the Nazis. They understood that not only was it not possible to reach out to the Nazis, but also that it was dangerous.

One such person who called out the Nazis right from the start — and with the right word — was Kurt Schumacher. He spent more than ten years in prison and concentration camps for it, and he was a witness at the Nuremberg trials. It was in 1932 that he said:

Die ganze nationalsozialistische Agitation ist ein dauernder Appell an den inneren Schweinehund im Menschen; und wenn wir irgendetwas beim Nationalsozialismus anerkennen, dann ist es die Anerkennung, dass ihm zum ersten Mal in der deutschen Politik die restlose Mobilisierung der menschlichen Dummheit gelungen ist.

Google’s translation:

The whole National Socialist agitation is a daunting appeal to the inner pig dog in man. And if we acknowledge anything in National Socialism, it is the recognition that for the first time in German politics the complete mobilization of human stupidity has succeeded.

As the Slate piece points out, Hitler and his propaganda people well understood that their propaganda had to be primitive to reach the “inner pig dog.”

Sefton Delmer led the British counter-propaganda effort during World War II. Delmer clearly understood that “reaching out” to Nazi supporters could not work, just as reaching out to Trump supporters cannot work today:

We do not appeal exclusively to their higher instincts, or their idealistic opposition to the regime. We try to exploit against the German war effort the ordinary German’s Schweinehund, his desire for self-preservation, personal profit and pleasure, his herd instinct to do as others do, and his ordinary human passions of fear, lust and jealousy.

Delmer’s insight explains quite well how the Republican Party and Donald Trump were able to reach Americans’ inner pig dogs, simply because Donald Trump and the Republican Party are willing to go as low as necessary to get power from the little people with which to serve the rich. Whereas we Democrats would never stoop that low. That is why I am convinced, as I said a few paragraphs above, that our political challenge is not to waste our time on trying to win them over, but rather to expose their crudeness and stupidity, politically destroy their con man hero, shame them, and push them back again to the margins of decent society.


Kurt Schumacher