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by Caroline Arnold
"The president makes policy decisions based on what the best policies for the country are, not politics."
- White House spokesman, in response to allegations that scientists have been pressured by the administration to change scientific conclusions that don't support Bush policies, 2/21/05
"We're an empire now, ... we create our own reality."
- unnamed "senior advisor" to President Bush, 2002.
These quotes recall the joke about the man who tried to take his elephant into the city park, only to stopped by a policeman who told him elephants were not allowed in the park. Unfazed, the man pointed to a slice of bread on the elephant's forehead and another on its tail, and countered: "This is not an elephant. It's a sandwich."
Folks, we have a problem. To cite a familiar cultural myth/metaphor, there is an elephant in our living-room - the White House - that is trampling our carpet of grass-roots freedom and mutual responsibility, destroying the furniture of Constitutional rights, eating our lunch and our children's heritage and converting them into manure. It has also brought the infection of war to our neighbors, killing their children - and some of ours --and making a terrible stink in the world. And in addition, this elephant is hijacking the very language we need to talk about it and hacking the realities we need to deal with the mess.
Take language. Is language a tool of control for a political agenda, or is it a vehicle for independent thought and exchange of information that enables people to organize and govern themselves? Is it a means of hacking reality and promulgating authoritative Truths and Virtues, or a mode of inquiry and deliberation by which we forge agreements about a common reality and share responsibility for truth and goodness? Is it to be used ratify and defend leaders' selected social/political institutions, moral values, economic doctrines, or political ideologies, or should it encourage and empower the people to develop institutions, values and democratic processes to manage their society themselves? Should language be owned and managed by an elite few or should it be free and 'open-source' to the many to give scope to their minds, hands, imaginations, hopes and collective wisdom? Does language serve the powerful or the people?
Like George Lakoff , in his excellent "Don't Think of an Elephant", I see the elephant in the White House using language systematically to destroy institutions that empower people to organize and govern both their personal lives and the lives of their communities. Everything that helps people cope with shared problems and common risks - Social Security, Medicare, public education, public transportation, public radio & TV, safe sex, environmental protection - is threatened by framing those issues with language like 'privatization', 'family values', 'tax relief', 'pro-life', "Clear Skies".
The very systems by which we perceive reality are being hacked by virtuosos of language in the pay of this elephant. They have created made-for-TV realities like:"Mission Accomplished", and patriotic wars that kill thousands to create peace and democracy (and isn't in the budget,); nuclear weapons (ours) as ensuring safety , torture as necessary but trivial (and besides we would never allow it), and outright fictions like WMDs..
Organizational guru Margaret Wheately has observed that we tend to think of large organizations or governments either as a machine/monarchy or as a living organism/democracy. The former view is based, she says, on entrenched Western cultural beliefs in "individualism, competition, and a mechanistic world view"; it assumes that people are cogs in a machine that must be governed by engineers using a "Command & Control" system. The latter view is founded on belief in human traits of "cooperation, caring, and generosity", and assumes that people are intelligent, creative and adaptive, and will survive and prosper when given freedom from outside control, the ability to act locally, and networks through which information flows freely.
It appears that the elephant in the White House is of the first sort, convinced that God has given it command and control over the entire planet and that it can engineer peace, prosperity and good fortune for all mankind, forever. (Or, failing that, the right to hack human language and culture to make it seem that way.)
We may (and do, endlessly) argue about the validity and virtue of a machine/monarchy elephant controlling our lives. Yet there is a simple biological reality working in favor the living organism/democracy model of self-
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