The First Casualty
By this point, anyone with any sense in their heads regards every piece of “news” about the war with intense suspicion. Indeed, there are certain events taking place that we will never know the real story behind, despite an ample supply of facts to support every possible interpretation: kind of like the Florida recount, only with gunpowder.
Part of this is deliberate. There are some things neither side wants us to know for sure. Part of it is in the nature of how news is being collected and disseminated – the “five blind men describing an elephant” phenomenon. Part of it lies in the motives behind the news gathering operation, most of which have nothing to do with providing clear and accurate (or “fair and balanced”) reporting.
Whatever the causes, the result is a catastrophic breakdown in the information channel – not just because the facts aren’t getting through, but because we have been given reason to doubt the very possibility of such a thing as a fact. The real winner here will not be Saddam Hussein or George Bush, but Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher who delights in taking a sledge hammer to conventional notions of meaning. This is a big “I told you so” moment for the whole post-modern gang, whose common sense-defying theory is now being acted out on a world stage for everyone to witness.
The irony is that while all this po-mo mojo is widely assumed to be the product of the far Left of academia, the real beneficiary is in fact the reactionary Right. What a riot that the same folks who wear themselves out bashing “cultural relativism” and all evils of contemporary philosophy are the first to come storming through the breach in the walls of Enlightenment ontology.
Conservatives somehow made the very important discovery that, when everything is up for grabs, the folks with the biggest sticks get to claim the best stuff. The only thing that keeps power in check is the nexus of shared principles and assumptions – whether about public policy, morality, or reality itself. For the same reason that Bush and company can’t wait to disentangle themselves from any and all international organizations (and indeed the entire notion of internationalism per se) because of the constraints they place on the Will of the Stronger, right-wing pundits and corporate interests like Fox News whine and wail about the so-called liberal bias of mainstream journalism in an effort to cast doubt on the entire notion of objectivity. Once methodical, fact-based reporting loses its privilege of authoritativeness, the whole notion of truth (and indeed reality) comes up for grabs – and the winner (surprise, surprise!) is the one with the loudest voice. The far right, representing the most wealthy and powerful institutions in society, just can’t wait for that to happen.
This process has been underway for quite some time already, but it is accelerating to critical mass now that the war has conclusively demonstrated the constructed nature of reality. Over in Iraq, the truth is being buried under twenty-thousand ton munitions – and, as with the physical infrastructure, it will be right-wing corporations who get the contract to reconstruct it.
9:16:50 AM 
|
