May 12, 2004

How I won, didn't win, didn't fight, fought the war, what war?, join us!

"The perception right now is that we are not acting in a decisive fashion," John McCain said on ABC a few days ago, "and there's no greater mistake you can make in the conduct of warfare."

McCain is living in the 19th century. The quote above was the conclusion of a brief piece in the NYT (from before the Abu Ghraib turn, which is to say, back when information management was only implicitly job one of the war's masters), which proffers the situation in Falluja as unsettled, unstable, and the political problems verging on insoluble. This is no doubt true. What the article, and the thousands like it, and old-school warriors like Mr. McCain take as a given is the desire for, and desirability of, clearing things up.

And yet. The article can’t help but detail the exact opposite: the production of unclarity by military and government spokesmodels, at levels that beg the word hysterical. Here’s a redacted version.

...a new setback, amid questions... a top United States officer said today, contradicting news reports...Confusion over the situation in that besieged city...as the United States military and political leadership struggled to deal...enormously difficult for American forces to root out without resorting to force levels that could spark wide, new resistance... the coalition might gain short-term calm while risking longer-term instability...indicated today that the situation around Falluja was still in considerable flux....That represented a step back from news reports...” it will not be”...”He will not be”...without suggesting...Questions arose...did not address...The brigade might include... But General Myers insisted today that some aspects of reporting on General Saleh were "very, very inaccurate," without saying exactly why... multiple television appearances appeared designed to counter suggestions...unable to find a solution..."It's not a reversal".

All that in 865 words.

Decisiveness may be the warrior’s pal, but it is of as much use to an occupying force as uniforms with target decals on their breasts. In a wrong war, there are no right choices; every decision becomes a screen on which the immorality and unjustifiability of the occupation cannot help but appear, much as on the screens of camera-phones in Abu Ghraib. Do one clear, decisive, but immoral thing and you face retribution and disaffection. Experiment with a thousand, hesitating and faltering amongst’em, denying and changing, retrenching and revisiting, and you may discover that those not on site recoil and wander away, unable to find traction, bewildwered and info-wasted. This and no other is the prime lesson that Washington learned from Vietnam.

I have written about the sometimes-intense pleasure of living in an age rich in excess signification, in a largely chaotic data heaven. This is the hell of it. The truth of what Tim Clark calls “symbol management” in the United States isn’t the spinning of problematic facts into persuasive rhetoric. It’s deferral/differance as a PR stratgey, the unceasing proliferation of infinitely irresolved, competing claims which make hanging out in the public sphere vertiginous and exhausting, and send a plurality of perfectly lovely people slinking off to read mystery novels. No, I am not suggesting the deconstruction leads to moral relativism leads to no ethics, jerk. I am saying that an imperial army in an age of informatics would rather be an electron than a proton, vaguely everywhere and definitively nowhere. The spokesmodels of empire don’t care what you think, as long as you don’t think anything in particular. They’ll settle for the tired, reputedly humanist assumption that there are at least two sides to every story, or three, or eight, and let you nod off from quandariness. Patriotic zealots are just the lagniappe;the war guys don't really need to pitch the NRA guys.

This is the first of a two-part post; the second half will take up the issue of symbol management as regards domestic politics, starting with the propositions of the linguist George Lakoff on language and electoral politics, so admired by Sasha but, in the end, not so much here at jane dark's sugarhigh!

Posted by jane at May 12, 2004 01:59 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Great reading of zat aghast Dark. Streamers and confetti and much more and thanks.

Is that the same Lakoff of Metaphors we Live By?

best,
Szhirtz

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