McClellan's 'Matrix' moment
Bush's former press secretary has stumbled out of a White House that lets political rhetoric shape reality.
By Mark Dery
LA Times
June 7, 2008
Scott McClellan is having a "Matrix" moment -- the moment when you wake up, with a jolt, from the reassuring fictions of the media dream world to the face-slapping reality of unspun fact.
In "The Matrix," Laurence Fishburne parts the veil of illusion -- the computer-generated simulation that humanity experiences as reality -- to reveal the movie's post-apocalyptic world as an irradiated slag heap.
"Welcome to the Desert of the Real," he says, a riff on the postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard's pronouncement, in his book "Simulations," that we live in a "desert of the real" -- an ever more virtual reality where fact and firsthand experience are displaced by media fictions. Baudrillard's example is tailor-made for the Bush presidency: "Propaganda and advertising fuse in the same marketing and merchandising of objects and ideologies," he wrote.
This, in a word, is life in the Bush administration's Ministry of Truth, as described by McClellan in his frag 'em-and-run memoir. The former White House press secretary -- whose Secret Service code name, I kid you not, was "Matrix" -- recounts how he and the rest of Team Dubya got caught up in a "permanent campaign," a nonstop propaganda war whose weapons were "the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth and spin," and whose goal was to stage-manage the media narrative and thus public opinion.
Now that McClellan has broken free from what he calls the "Washington bubble," he can see the "massive marketing campaign" to sell the war in Iraq for the steaming heap of dookie it was: a public relations operation characterized by an, er, "lack of candor and honesty," as the author so masterfully understates it.
(Continued here.)
By Mark Dery
LA Times
June 7, 2008
Scott McClellan is having a "Matrix" moment -- the moment when you wake up, with a jolt, from the reassuring fictions of the media dream world to the face-slapping reality of unspun fact.
In "The Matrix," Laurence Fishburne parts the veil of illusion -- the computer-generated simulation that humanity experiences as reality -- to reveal the movie's post-apocalyptic world as an irradiated slag heap.
"Welcome to the Desert of the Real," he says, a riff on the postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard's pronouncement, in his book "Simulations," that we live in a "desert of the real" -- an ever more virtual reality where fact and firsthand experience are displaced by media fictions. Baudrillard's example is tailor-made for the Bush presidency: "Propaganda and advertising fuse in the same marketing and merchandising of objects and ideologies," he wrote.
This, in a word, is life in the Bush administration's Ministry of Truth, as described by McClellan in his frag 'em-and-run memoir. The former White House press secretary -- whose Secret Service code name, I kid you not, was "Matrix" -- recounts how he and the rest of Team Dubya got caught up in a "permanent campaign," a nonstop propaganda war whose weapons were "the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth and spin," and whose goal was to stage-manage the media narrative and thus public opinion.
Now that McClellan has broken free from what he calls the "Washington bubble," he can see the "massive marketing campaign" to sell the war in Iraq for the steaming heap of dookie it was: a public relations operation characterized by an, er, "lack of candor and honesty," as the author so masterfully understates it.
(Continued here.)
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