New Censorship: How scandals get neutralized

Posted by MacDood
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I picked up the new Harper's this morning to read on the BART, and was transfixed by the lead essay, "The New Censorship," an outtake from "The Middle Mind, Why Americans Don't Think for Themsleves," a book by Curtis White to be published in August. What I find fascinating about it is the very sharp and vehement analysis of how scandal after scandal can break in the news without tainting the political and business elites. Here are a couple of grafs I keyed in:

The New Censorship does not work by keeping things secret. Are our leaders liars and criminals? Is the government run by wealthy corporations and political elites? Are we all being slowly poisoned? The answer is yes to all of the above, and there's hardly a soul on these shores who doesn't know it. The reign of George II practically revels in this perverse transparency. Oil policy created in backrooms with lobbyists from Enron and ExxonMobil. Naked pandering to the electricity industry in rolling back clean-air mandates. Accounting firms such as Arthur Andersen buying even "watchdog" liberal senators such as Christopher Dodd. Elections rigged with brother Jeb's connivance in Florida. All of the details are utterly public, reported in newspapers, television newscasts and books, yet it's perfectly safe for this stuff to be known. The genius of the New Censorship is that it works through the obscenity of absolute openness. Iraq-gate wasn't a secret. The real secret is that it wasn't a secret, and certainly wasn't a scandal. It was business as usual. The betrayal of a public trust is a daily story manipulated by the media within the narrative confines of "scandal," when in fact it's all a part of the daily routine and everyone knows it. The media makes pornography out of the collective guilt of our politicians and business leaders. They make a yummy fetish of betrayed trust. We then consume it, mostly passively, because it is indistinguishable from our "entertainment" and because we suspect in some dim way that, bad as it surely is, it is working in our interests in the long run. What genius to have a system that allows you to behave badly, be exposed for it, and then have the sin recouped by the system as a resellable commodity! I mean, you have to admire the sheer, recuperative balls of it!

All this being the case, what consequences can we expect from the work of Chalmers Johnson or Noam Chomsky? None. Their writings are taken up as a part of the spectrum (a modestly disturbing part of the spectrum to be sure) of info-pornographics. The truth-function of Chomsky's work is neutralized because there are people who will participate in actions leading to death and worse all over the world and then tell you about it. In detail. In great detail. The truth is that everything is known, the revelations grotesquely vivid.

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