Culture of Lies

[Alan Sondheim]

Culture of Lies


I was listening to the Colbert Report the other night; Carl Bernstein was
on. He answered briefly and to the point. His take on Bush and company:
lies. His take on current politics in this country: bought.

These are corporate behaviors, or behavior-sheaves, interconnected modes
of action. Corporations live them; lies are brought and formulated in the
workplace as everyday matters. Ethics is compartmentalized and doesn't
apply. Skip to Hiaasen's 60 Minutes interview and you'll find more of the
same analysis.

I lived within this culture when I taught at Florida International a few
years ago. I was dismissed and the tenure-track line canceled as well. I
was told by the department head the cut-back was financial and came from
the dean. I was told by the union representative that the cut-back came
from the department. When I took the job I was told that there was
suitable equipment and funds for the position. When I arrived there wasn't
any. My partner was told that a museology line was in place. There wasn't
any. I was told I'd be given fund-raising contacts. There weren't any. The
department announced to the local paper that it had built a new multi-
media classroom; it hadn't. I was told my situation was my fault; was the
dean' fault; was the department chair's fault; was the governor's fault.
Whatever happened there, and I don't know to this day, I behaved ethic-
ally (but neurotically); the surrounding culture didn't.

It's easy to live according to the cover-up and the world's technologic-
ally smarter than it was in Nixon's day. Lies are distanced through the
media; you can believe you're behaving ethically because otherwise you're
just speaking through a microphone. The public here buys into that; a
recent poll for example shows that 56% of those interviewed favored
government wire-tapping if needed. This is fundamentally against the
principles of America, as is the notion of the collusion of religion and
government, as well as military pre-emptive strikes. Growing up here means
growing up through WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Nicaragua, Granada, Iraq,
and hosts of other conflicts. We live within a militarism that has no need
to pay attention to the local verbal conflicts here. The majority of
Americans favor gun laws; we won't get them. The majority favors health
care; we won't get it and we're told on one hand that seniors are given
additional choices - at the same time the safety net is being eroded to
nothingness. We're told we have a crisis of social security at the same
time we're paying exponentially-increasing health-care costs and doctors
and drug companies are getting richer. To give you again an idea from
personal life - we live here in Brooklyn on around $18,000/year. My father
pays my health care, or most of it. It's the rock-bottom at $6000 a year.
There's also 'co-payments' every time I see a doctor or get medicine;
there's a $100 deductible on drugs yearly. This is obscene; we're so far
below the poverty level it's ridiculous, and at the same time, there's no
safety net - yet we pay taxes to fund Halliburton and an outrageous deadly
war in Iraq.

In an idea world, Bush Inc. would be held accountable; he won't be. The
culture closes, forecloses, on itself. It's everyday business, just like
Nazism was everyday business. But this is in for the long run; these
people are self-preserving. The scandals make no difference at all; the
truth is always seen as contestable, just as Darwin or weapons of mass
destruction are contestable. The culture of lies depends on one hand on a
population willing to put up with autocracy, desiring autocracy, as the
safety net disappears; it licks its masters because there's no other game
in town, except religion, already bought and sold and integrated. The
culture of lies depends on the other on a verbal sophistry which is based
on a notion of the insignificance of truth; truth is reserved for one's
inner soul, for the Rapture, for the back-room - men are like that. The
lie is possible because the language of finance, not personal and verbal
language, carries the greatest weight; it's not for nothing that we have
expressions like 'the buck stops here' and 'the bottom line.' This is also
the reason, by the way, that American political rhetoric is so filled with
sports talk; the game plan is to win at any cost. Sublimating truth into
the arena of arenas backs up a culture of gambling, the killer play (not
unlike the killer app) - a culture in which ontology has shifted from the
oath and linguistic performativity to stock-market performance. This is
fundamental, however trite it is (i.e. 'money talks' which just about sums
it up); the culture of lies _is_ a culture, and needs the security and
stability of big money for those who play, or those who hope to play, it.
It ensures it's the only game in town.

On the farther end of the spectrum is the rest of us, lying as well for
that matter, just as embedded. We're the embedded reporters in fact who
bring back from Iraq what the government and military want us to hear;
we're the 'crackers' and everyone else just getting by, moving through an
increasingly implosive world of drought, extinctions, and information,
leaving us behind. The superstructure has finally succeeded in taming the
base; the base is whatever the superstructure says it is, until famine
sets in, and then war - required as well by the superstructure. It's a
different ball-game.

There's no end to this analysis which has been told over and over again,
and we continue to tell it, just was empathetic magic is based on
repetition. It's no use, except for self-comfort late at night; the
culture of lies will bring us increasing war, violence, violation of human
rights, and poverty - all in the name of fighting terrorism, playing on
the internet, living the good life, betting on the Superbowl, making sure
we have 'no child left behind,' counting on the 'village' it takes to make
a child, waiting for the Rapture, fearing the hyperbolic hyperviolent God
fundamentalists purvey, and buying mostly on credit, houses, cars, SUVs,
cable television, high-definition TV, Ipods, camcorders, computers,
Internet connections, Caribbean cruises, ecotourisms (which are not that
'eco'), factory-'farmed' meats, hunting expeditions, fishing trips,
visiting the natives, mega-speakers, cell phones, camera phones,
text-messaging phones, video phones, back yard pools, swing sets, personal
trainers, gym memberships, fashionable clothing, anti-fashionable
clothing, guns, knives, sex-tapes, miserable health-care, processed foods,
the latest cosmetics, unbelievably bad school systems, Bibles, church
memberships, Wired magazine, Fortune magazine, Time magazine, Sports
Illustrated, Reader's Digest, plastic toys, plastic toy guns, skate-
boards, off-road vehicles (which tear up the wilderness), jet skis (which
pollute the water), power-boats (which have wounded every single manatee
still alive), yachts, cruise-control, lawsuits, and just about everything
else that keeps the American public way down (and falling) on the quality-
of-life index. This is the new world of freedom, as Absolut as it's going
to get, and we'll do everything we can to get to the finish line.