Mute Button,
Democracy in Irons
excerpted from the book
Gag Rule
On the Suppression of Dissent
and the Stifling of Democracy
by Lewis Lapham
Penguin Books, 2004, paper
p90
General William Westmoreland
Without censorship, things can get terribly
confused in the public mind.
p92
The Wall Street Journal, probably the most widely read newspaper
in the country, heavily favors the conservative side on any and
all questions of public policy, and both the Washington Post and
the New York Times fortify their op-ed pages with columnists who
strongly defend the established order-William Safire and David
Brooks in the Times; Charles Krauthammer, George Will, and Richard
Harwood in the Post. The vast bulk of the nation's radio talk
shows (commanding roughly 80 percent of the audience) reflect
a reactionary bias, and so do all but one or two of the television
talk shows that deal with political topics on PBS, CNN, and CNBC.
p93
... the institutional media preserve the myths the society deems
precious, reassuring their patrons that all is well, that the
American virtues remain securely in place, that the banks are
safe, our doctors competent, our presidents interested in the
public welfare, our artists capable of masterpieces, our armies
invincible, and our democratic institutions the wonder of an admiring
world.
p93
The media compose the pictures of a preferred reality and their
genius is that of the nervous careerist who serves, simultaneously,
two masters-the demos, whom they astound with marvels and fairy
tales, and the corporate nobility, whose interests they assiduously
promote and defend. The trick is by no means easy. It demands
the skill of a juggler or an acrobat, but few of the well-paid
adepts admit to talents associated with carnivals and fairs. At
the awards banquets and on the annual pilgrimages to the mountains,
nobody mentions the media's embarrassing resemblance to a chain
of cut-rate department stores. Like all arrivistes jealous of
their places in the sun, the high-end columnists and anchorpersons
cast themselves in the most flattering available light as dignified,
professional gentlemen and gentlewomen trading at par value with
physicians, lawyers, and professors of theology-and they scorn
their clumsy and ill-bred relations who don't know when or how
to ask a question in the White House Rose Garden. It isn't that
the news media object to displays of immoral conduct but rather
that they think it their duty to protect the rulers of the state
from the howling of the mob, to preserve (for as long as is decently
possible) the precious and expensively manufactured images of
wisdom and power. They live in mortal fear of being made to look
ridiculous.
p98
Tom Wicker, Washington bureau chief for the New York Times.
In the end we are still part of the league
of gentlemen. The people who run the press-particularly the metropolitan,
largely capitalized institutions of the press-are part of it,
along with the people who run the government and the major businesses
and the big corporations .... We don't want to be out in front,
to attack the establishment, to criticize major institutions,
to be accused of endangering national security ... Sure, someone
could write a two-fine memo tomorrow and change the news policy
of the New York Times to be more skeptical and challenging of
established institutions. But they don't do it, not because they
couldn't do it, not because they don't have the power to do it,
but because they don't want to suffer more than the minimal necessary
disapproval of the league of gentlemen.
p99
John Swinton, the former chief of staff at the New York Times,
put the matter somewhat more plainly in a toast delivered to a
farewell banquet in his honor at the New York Press Club in 1953:
There is no such thing, at this date,
of the world's history, in America, as an independent press ....
The business of the journalist is to destroy truth; to he outright;
to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell
his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and
I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press?
We are the tools and vassals for rich men behind the scenes. We
are jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents,
our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other
men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
p99
Dan Rather speaking to John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper's
Magazine
"We begin to think less in terms
of responsibility and integrity, which get you in trouble... and
more in terms of power and money... Increasingly anybody who subscribes
to the idea that the job is not to curry favor with people you
cover... finds himself as a kind of lone wolf... Suck-up coverage
is in."
p102
As few as nine conglomerates now manufacture and distribute 90
percent of the country's news and entertainment product; three
corporations (AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft) manage 50 percent of
the Internet traffic ...
p103
During the weeks leading up to George Bush's presidential nomination
in the summer of 2000, the adjectives became more flattering and
submissive as he approached the rostrum in Philadelphia, the once
ignorant and boorish chieftain from the Texas plains becoming
more statesmanlike and wise at every step, until at last, on the
morning of his triumphant entrance into the city, the New York
Times on its front page welcomed "a man of dazzling charm,
tremendous social skills, a bold self-confidence, growing political
savvy, great popularity."
p103
The American news media are the product of the American educational
system, and their unwillingness to speak for themselves n Archibald
MacLeish's phrase, "to resign," even momentarily, "from
the herd") should come as no surprise. The dumbing-down of
the schools is neither an accident nor a mistake. We are a people
blessed with a genius for large organizational tasks, and if we
were serious in our pious mumbling about the need for educational
reform if we honestly believed that mind took precedence over
money-our schools surely would stand as the eighth wonder of the
world. But we neither like nor trust the forces of intellect-not
unless they can be securely fixed to a commercial profit or an
applied technology-and if most of what passes for education in
the United States deadens the desire for learning, the miserable
result accurately reflects the miserable intent.
No American schoolmaster ever outlined
the lesson at hand quite as plainly as Woodrow Wilson. While he
was still president of Princeton University, Wilson in 1909 presented
the Federation of High School Teachers with explicit instructions:
'We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and
we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of
necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal
education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual
tasks."
The pedagogues of Wilson's generation
recognized the possibility of unrest implicit in a too-well-educated
electorate, and they took it upon themselves to rig the curricula
in a way that discouraged the habits of skepticism or dissent.
p121
Among eligible voters in their twenties, only 13 percent cast
ballots in the 2000 presidential election; no more than 50 percent
believed that voting was important; 60 percent didn't know how
or when or by whom the United States had been brought into existence.
The official estimate of illiterate American citizens now stands
at 40 million, but because the statistics measure little except
the capacity to read road signs and restaurant menus, the number
is optimistically low. Complicate the proceedings by one or two
degrees of further comprehension (an acquaintance with a minimal
number of standard texts, the capacity to recognize a tone of
irony) and the number of people impaired by a lack of literary
intelligence probably comes nearer to 100 million.
As many as six out of ten American adults
have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the
nation's educational frontiers read like the casualty reports
from a lost war. The witnesses tell mournful stories about polls
showing that one quarter of the adults interviewed were ignorant
of the news that the earth revolves around the sun, about the
majority of college freshmen (68 percent) who have trouble finding
California on a map, about the high school girl who thought the
Holocaust was a Jewish holiday.
p130
The publication of Tom Paine's Common Sense in January 1776 kindled
the spark of the American Revolution, but the victory at Yorktown
in October 1781 brought its author little else except the prize
of unemployment. The incendiary polemic had proved useful to rebellious
colonists looking for a worthy cause; so had Paine's binding up
of the wounds of American defeat in battle with the composition
of The Crisis Papers that were passed from hand to hand around
military campfires at Saratoga and Valley Forge-"These are
the times that try men's souls"; 'What we obtain too cheap,
we esteem too lightly"; "Virtue is not hereditary."
The peace settlement killed the market for dissent. Once again
understood as a bad career move, unseemly displays of candor reemerged
as blotches on the smiling face of ambition; no longer was there
any profit to be gained from the circulation of possibly unsanitary
truths. To the propertied gentry in Massachusetts and New York,
Paine stood revealed as an idealist unfitted to the work of dividing
up the spoils-a man too much given to plain speaking, on too-familiar
terms with the lower orders of society and therefore not to be
trusted.
The reformulated set of circumstances
declared Paine's rhetoric superfluous, his services no longer
required by the lace-ruffled politicians, men like John Jay and
Gouverneur Morris, who feared the "democratic rabble"
in the streets of Philadelphia and thought that the newly acquired
American estate should be governed by the gentlemen who owned
it. Denied political appointment by an ungrateful Congress, the
progenitor of the American War of Independence sailed for Europe
in 1787, still bent on his great project of political transformation
and social change. In England he wrote The Rights of Man, the
book in which he sought to give programmatic form to his plan
for a just society and which, 150 years ahead of its time, anticipates
much of the legislation that eventually showed up in the United
States under the rubrics of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal-government
welfare payments to the poor, pensions for the elderly, public
funding of education, reductions of military spending, a tax limiting
the amount of an inheritance. The book appeared in two volumes
in 1791-92; the sale of five hundred thousand copies ranked it
the best-selling book of the entire eighteenth century and prompted
the British government to charge the author with treason and to
declare him an outlaw.*
Paine left for France in the summer of
1792, to find a joyous crowd of newly enfranchised citizens according
him a hero's welcome on the waterfront at Calais. To the makers
of the French Revolution, The Rights of Man bore the stamps of
hope and freedom, and as testimony of their appreciation they
promptly elected Paine to the political assembly then at work
in Paris on the construction of yet another new republic. He remained
in France for the rest of the century, arrested by Robespierre's
Committee of Public Safety when the revolution degenerated into
the Reign of Terror, writing the second volume of The Age of Reason
while in the Luxembourg prison awaiting a summons to the guillotine.
Together with Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin, Paine became one
of the most famous and best-loved figures of the Enlightenment.
Napoleon Bonaparte thought him the great contemporary apostle
of liberty, fraternity, and equality to whom there "ought
to be erected," in every city in the universe, "a statue
of gold."
p137
When carried into the arenas of foreign policy, the belief in
America's always perfect innocence supports the Bush administration's
doctrine of forward deterrence and preemptive strike. The immaculate
republic invariably finds itself betrayed, and because it has
been betrayed, it can justify the use of criminal means to defend
itself against the world's wickedness. American armies go forth
into the deserts of iniquity on behalf of all mankind, in order
to forestall any upstart challenge to America's unblemished moral
sovereignty. The imperialist line of thought was well entrenched
in Washington long before the terrorist onslaught of September
11, 2001. In 1993 the Pentagon released a policy paper, Defense
Strategy for the 1990s, that had been drafted two years earlier
by Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Paul Wolfowitz. The three authors
were then serving as senior counselors in the administration of
the elder President Bush; the document acknowledges and accepts
America's mission to rule the world, clearly setting forth the
theory of domination subsequently incorporated into what became
known, in the autumn of 2002, as the Bush Doctrine.
p139
In 1998, while serving as secretary of state in the Clinton administration,
Madeleine Aibright asserted America's right to use unilateral
force against Saddam Hussein because "we are America. We
are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into
the future."
p142
The ease with which the legislative measures attract nonpartisan
majorities bespeaks a politically demobilized society and reflects
the grotesque maldistribution of wealth that over the last thirty
years has transferred 80 percent of the country net worth to 10
percent of the citizenry.
p143
.. John Kenneth Gaibraith's observation that "the deepest
instinct of the affluent, whether in America, Germany, or Argentina,
is to believe that what's good for them is what's good for the
country." People supported by incomes of $10 million or $15
million a year not only enjoy a style of living unavailable to
those with incomes of $50,000 or even $150,000 a year, they also
acquire different habits of mind - they are reluctant to think
for themselves, afraid of the future, careful to expatriate their
profits in offshore tax havens, disinclined to trust a new hairdresser
or a new idea, grateful for the security of gated residential
protectorates, reassured by reactionary political theorists who
say that history is at an end and that if events should threaten
to prove otherwise (angry mobs throwing stones in third-world
slums), America will send an army to exterminate the brutes. Not
an inspiring set of attitudes, but representative of the social
class that owns our news media, staffs the government, and pays
for our elections.
p162
Whether we like it or not, the argument now going forward in the
United States is the same argument that put an end to the Roman
and Weimar Republics, built the scaffolds of the Spanish Inquisition,
gave rise to the American Revolution. If we fail to engage it,
we do so at our peril. It is not the law that takes freedom from
us but the laziness of our own minds, the unwillingness to think
for ourselves and so resign, even momentarily, from the herd.
p164
Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945.
What happened here was the gradual habituation
of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise;
to receiving decisions deliberated in secret, to believing that
the situation was so complicated that the government had to act
on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous
that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be
released because of national security .... I do not speak of your
"little men," your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues
and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to
think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need
to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think
about-we were decent people-and kept us so busy with continuous
changes and "crises" and so fascinated, yes, fascinated,
by the machinations of the "national enemies," without
and within, that we had no time to think about those dreadful
things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously,
I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?*
... To live in this process is absolutely
not to be able to notice it-please try to believe me-unless one
has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than
most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so
small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion,
"regretted," that, unless one were detached from the
whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the
whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures"
that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day
lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a
farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over
his head.
Gag Rule
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