Perhaps the biggest story out of Washington this year is largely a nonstory. It gets intermittent coverage but little sustained media scrutiny: Almost 12 months ago, opposition to the war in Iraq was a pivotal factor that allowed Democrats to gain a majority in both houses of Congress. Today, the prevailing assumption is that the war will continue for many years with active US military participation.
A timeworn aphorism has it that “politics is the art of the possible.” If so, the perceptions of possibilities are largely guided by news media. Last November, in the days after the election, the option of US withdrawal from Iraq seemed quite feasible in political terms. But the word soon went out — from the front page of The New York Times to the proclamations of eminent pundits — reasserting the conventional media wisdom that withdrawal just wasn’t realistic. This process is not conspiratorial. It’s more insidious and ultimately more powerful than a mere cabal of individuals bent on a policy outcome. The dominant forces at work are deeply institutional; they can’t be voted out of office on Election Day.
Call it whatever you like — I’ve come to think of it as “the warfare state” — but the operative system is deeply embedded in the huge financial stake that exists in military spending. And wars, along with chronic scaremongering, are the most effective ways to boost that spending. With close to $2 billion a day now going from US taxpayers to military expenditures, there are plenty of sizable financial crumbs falling from the Pentagon’s table.
In theory, many other forces can counteract and overcome the vested interests in militarism that exist for a wide array of wealthy individuals and corporations. But the media’s routine failure to challenge — or even make note of — those vested interests gives them a cloak of near-invisibility.
We live in a society where efforts to gain publicity are as ubiquitous as water and air. But a lot of highly skilled work goes into avoiding publicity when a lucrative status quo is best maintained by functioning without harsh exposure.
Movie stars and musicians generally want publicity for their work. They see media coverage as a way of furthering their goals. But the war profiteers — thriving on close relationships between government decision-makers and top private military contractors — greatly prefer to tell their stories themselves.
Slick annual reports are the most favored vehicles for comprehensive storytelling among the firms that make a killing from large-scale killing. And, for the big players like Boeing, the option of TV commercials to burnish their patriotic images is often too enticing to pass up.
A mass-culture of advertising and public relations is generally assumed to be compatible — and even highly desirable — with democracy. But the ads and the PR are only tips of very dangerous icebergs. What goes on behind the scenes, with all the lobbying and campaign contributions and sweetheart Pentagon contracts, amounts to an obstacle course that sinks the most important potential vessels for democracy.
What citizens think is supposed to determine the course of their government. That concept is at once basic and, in the current political environment, apt to sound naive.
Well, the way things are going, there’s a crying need to go back to basics. And if it sounds naive to say that democracy is not a matter of money and privilege, then perhaps we’ve confused being naive with being idealistic.
Journalists should be a skeptical bunch. But if unstated cynicism keeps lowering our expectations and raising the thresholds for outrage, then the consequences are sure to be dire. Right now, those consequences include the continuation of a horrific war based on deception.
Until we can invigorate the principles of democracy by making them directly relevant to the present-day world, we’ll be condemned to repeat endless cycles of disconnects between lofty rhetoric and chilling realities.
— Norman Solomon’s latest book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” is now available in paperback. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
