Out of Your Head

It's time for a brief rant; please excuse the soapbox.

I think it was within the last couple of weeks when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, speaking to the national press corps, repeatedly confused Osama Bin Laden with Saddam Hussein. The Daily Show has already enjoyed the comic potential of this sadly frightening episode - in which one of the most powerful men in the world demonstrated an alarming level of hysteria as well as confusion - but I found it reminding me of a conversation I had a few months ago with a family friend.

She asked me to explain why I felt that President Bush wasn't as dumb as he sometimes seemed to be. Rumseld's frightening gaffe, I think, helps explain my position. Rumseld himself is a veteran of politics in the White House, the Pentagon, and Capitol Hill, and has demonstrated ruthless cleverness. How could he possibly confuse Bin Laden and Hussein? While I enjoy entertaining conspiracy theory - it is possible that this was yet another deliberate effort by the Bush administration to juxtapose two independent concepts (like Saddam Hussein and 9/11) through relentless talking points - his almost manic delivery suggests it was an accident.

I suspect that the tactics deployed by the Bush administration are so compelling that the politicians now believe their own hype. Logical contradictions and contrary facts have no place in this world-view, which is built on a bedrock of unquestioning faith. As the authors of All The President's Spin carefully demonstrate, misdirection is one of the most effective tactics the Bush PR machine uses. As Michael Gazzaniga observes in his discussion of how humanity thinks, we are more susceptible to such techniques than we imagine; he suggests that it's very much a part of how we see the world.

Gazzaniga describes a famous trick ("Out of Your Hat") performed by Harry Blackwell, Sr., in which the magician created the illusion of pulling a full-sized donkey out of his top hat. Magicians "use the simple device of redirecting our attention to make objects that are in our full view, that we know our retina transmitted to our brain, go unnoticed." (The Mind's Past, 1998.) By carefully directing the audience's attention towards a lovely assistant and some elaborate gestures - using speech to focus that attention - the audience completely overlooked another assistant simply walking on stage in full view with the donkey. It was only when Blackwell re-focused his audience's gaze towards the donkey that it "appeared" to them.

Now, imagine a situation in which the trick goes on as planned, but Blackwell has begun believing his own powers of conjuration. Perhaps he startles himself when the donkey appears. This is not unlike the situation we now face with the current administration. Through repetition, constant misdirection, relentless adherence to talking points, and fanatical secrecy, our current leadership has managed to convince itself that the illusion it's been selling to the American public is real.

Rumsfeld and Bush probably don't deserve to be singled out for this; self-delusion is part of how our minds function. Not only do we revise information as it comes in, we constantly re-write our own histories throughout the course of our lives. (Ronald Reagan, for instance, confounded his staff and the press corps with stories from his life that clearly never took place - and no one could ever really tell if Reagan himself was aware of the discrepancies.)

But this is hardly an excuse. Cynically accepting misdirection as a fundamental part of the way we perceive and communicate is insufficient. As I pointed out in my discussion of skaldic poetry (below) this kind of deception is only acceptable when all sides are completely aware of it. There is clearly a large portion of the American public that actively wishes to be deceived - and has little desire to be disabused of their comfortable illusions. Why believe that American forces might be systematically killing more Iraqis than the insurgents themselves? In the case of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal - which shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the documented history of American conduct in Vietnam - the most popular response to the issue, and Bush's rebuttal, was the repeated assertion that, in essence, "Americans don't do such things." It's almost as if we don't need Bush's help to look away from uncomfortable facts, towards attractive illusions of moral superiority.

The problem, however, is that Rumsfeld's conflation (the summation of years of effort to conflate Iraq and Al-Qaeda in the public's imagination) didn't take place during a magic show, and the news from Iraq - while determined by the conventions of narrative - is not a poetic fiction. We are fooling ourselves by our own active misdirection - from the world around us to what we think that world ought to be. Rumsfeld and Bush are not fools; they are devout believers in a lie.

The antidote, I think, is the same as the skaldic poet's, and the magician's - to constantly remind the listeners that they are playing a part in the act. In the case of politics, however, the audience must stop playing a passive role, and realize that it's playing a role in its own deception.