- "This was the year when fakeness ruled: fake rationales
for war, a fake President dressed as a fake soldier declaring a fake end
to combat and then holding up a fake turkey."
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- Don't think and drive.
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- That was the message sent out by the FBI to roughly 18,000
law enforcement agencies on Christmas Eve. The alert urged police pulling
over drivers for traffic violations, and conducting other routine investigations,
to keep their eyes open for people carrying almanacs. Why almanacs? Because
they are filled with facts - population figures, weather predictions, diagrams
of buildings and landmarks. And according to the FBI Intelligence Bulletin,
facts are dangerous weapons in the hands of terrorists, who can use them
to "to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning."
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- But in a world filled with potentially lethal facts and
figures, it seems unfair to single out almanac readers for police harassment.
As the editor of The World Almanac and Book of Facts rightly points out,
"The government is our biggest single supplier of information."
Not to mention the local library: A cache of potentially dangerous information
weaponry is housed at the center of almost every American town. The FBI,
of course, is all over the library threat, seizing library records at will
under the Patriot Act.
-
- The blacklisting of the almanac was a fitting end for
2003, a year that waged open war on truth and facts and celebrated fakes
and forgeries of all kinds. This was the year when fakeness ruled: fake
rationales for war, a fake President dressed as a fake soldier declaring
a fake end to combat and then holding up a fake turkey. An action movie
star became governor and the government started making its own action movies,
casting real soldiers like Jessica Lynch as fake combat heroes and dressing
up embedded journalists as fake soldiers. Saddam Hussein even got a part
in the big show: He played himself being captured by American troops. This
is the fake of the year, if you believe the Sunday Herald in Scotland,
as well as several other news agencies, which reported that he was actually
captured by a Kurdish special forces unit.
-
- It was Britain, however, that pushed the taste for fake
to new levels. "Her main aim is to meet as many Nigerians as she can,"
the Queen's press secretary, Penny Russell, said of the monarch's December
trip to Nigeria. But just as Bush never made it out of the airport bunker
in Baghdad, the Queen's people decided it was too dangerous for her to
mingle with actual Nigerians. So instead of the planned visit to an African
village, the Queen toured the set of a BBC soap opera in New Karu, constructed
to look like an authentic African market. During the "fake walkabout,"
as the Sunday Telegraph called it, the Queen chatted with paid actors playing
regular villagers, while actual villagers watched the event on a large-screen
TV outside the security perimeter.
-
- But 2003 was about more than embracing fakery and forgery
- it was also about punishing truth-telling. The highest price was paid
by David Kelly, the British government weapons expert who killed himself
after he was outed as the source of a BBC story on "sexed up"
security documents. Katharine Gun, a British intelligence employee, faces
up to two years in prison for revealing U.S. plans to spy on UN diplomats
in order to influence the Security Council vote on Iraq. And in the United
States, Joseph Wilson, who told the truth about finding no evidence of
Saddam's alleged uranium shopping trip in Africa, was punished by proxy:
His wife, Valerie Plame, was illegally outed as a CIA operative.
-
- While truth did not pay in 2003, lying certainly did.
Just ask Rupert Murdoch. According to an October study conducted by the
Program on International Policy Attitudes, when it comes to the war in
Iraq, regular watchers of Murdoch's Fox News are the most misinformed people
in America. Eighty per cent of Fox News watchers believed either that weapons
of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, that there is evidence of
an Iraq-Al Qaeda link or that world opinion supported the war ó
or they believed all three of these untruths.
-
- On December 19, the Federal Communications Commission
gave Murdoch the right to purchase the top U.S. satellite broadcaster,
DirecTV. The FCC vote took place just five days before the FBI's almanac
bulletin, and they can best be understood in tandem: If books that fill
your brain with facts make you a potential terrorist, then media moguls
who fill your brain with mush must be heroes, deserving of the richest
rewards.
-
- When Bush came to office, many believed his ignorance
would be his downfall. Eventually Americans would realize that a President
who referred to Africa as "a nation" was unfit to lead. Now we
tell ourselves that if only Americans knew that they were being lied to,
they would surely revolt. But with the greatest of respect for the liar
books (Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Big Lies, The Lies of George
W. Bush, The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq et al), I'm no longer
convinced that America can be set free by the truth alone.
-
- In many cases, fake versions of events have prevailed
even when the truth was readily available. The real Jessica Lynch - who
told Diane Sawyer that "no one beat me, no one slapped me, no one,
nothing" - has proven no match for her media-military created doppelganger,
shown being slapped around by her cruel captors in NBC's movie Saving Jessica
Lynch.
-
- Rather than being toppled for his adversarial relationship
to both the most important truths and the most basic facts, Bush is actively
remaking America in the image of his own ignorance and duplicity. Not only
is it OK to be misinformed, but as the almanac warning shows, knowing stuff
is fast becoming a crime.
-
- It brings to mind the story about why Castilian Spaniards
pronounce gracias as "grathiath." In the seventeenth century,
the country was ruled by a monarch with a severe speech impediment and
a fragile ego. To flatter the ruler, it was decreed that everyone should
imitate the king's lisp and mispronounce their c's and s's.
-
- According to all reputable linguists, the legend is a
complete fake. But in Bush's America that should hardly matter.
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- Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo and Fences and Windows.
She is also a columnist with The Globe and Mail and with The Nation where
this article originally appeared.
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- Copyright © 2001-2004 the authors
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- http://www.rabble.ca/columnists_full.shtml?x=29676
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-
- Comment
- From George
- 1-17-4
-
- "When Bush came to office, many believed his ignorance
would be his downfall. Eventually Americans would realize that a President
who referred to Africa as "a nation" was unfit to lead. Now we
tell ourselves that if only Americans knew that they were being lied to,
they would surely revolt. But with the greatest of respect for the liar
books (Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Big Lies, The Lies of George
W. Bush, The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq et al), I'm no longer
convinced that America can be set free by the truth alone. "
-
- Oh, how true, Naomi, how true. Not enough Americans will
see the truth, even if it is right in front of their eyes, as they have
proved how willingly blind they are, to truth. Too many Americans intentionally
refuse to look at the truth. The virtual reality fake world is shattering,
whether they choose to see it, or not. Thank God the Truth does not depend
on American's 'seeing ' it, to still be the Truth.
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