Reflections  

Splendid Hypocrisy — Displaying a seldom apparent sense of irony, our splendid system of justice has used perjured testimony and a jury containing at least one member who lied to gain a seat on the panel to convict Martha Stewart of a felony for lying to agents of the FBI, which has been made a crime by a Congress composed of people who are universally recognized as so unfailingly forthright that they are referred to as honorable. — K.R. Mudgeon

Blood Will Out — If leftists weren't possessed by their hatred of George Bush, they would denounce "Fahrenheit 9/11" as a bigoted film filled with "hate speech" and racism.

Moore talks about the Bush family's connections to Saudi Arabians with unconcealed disgust, as if just being a Saudi were enough to convict one of financing terror.

He flashes images of Bush family members shaking hands with guys in turbans as though he had caught them dealing heroin to schoolkids.

He complains about the percentage of the U.S. economy owned by Saudis. How would that play if you replaced "Saudis" with "Jews"?

It's a subtle thing, easy to miss if one enters the theater intent only on liking the movie and stoking one's hatred for Bush. Think of the anguish this could stir up in the American modern-liberal psyche. What's worse, a racist film or the evil Dubya? The possibilities for spin are endless. Let the dividers be divided for once. — Patrick Quealy

My own little ministry of information — I have a friend — probably you have one like this too — who can't resist sending me modern liberal news dispatches. Often it's some revelation of incompetence in the Bush administration, to which, he believes, I am slavishly devoted. Sometimes the information, real or alleged, is more general: Antarctica is melting, pipelines are exterminating all the elk, moose, and lichens in North America, fees are rising in the national parks, fewer babies have milk, more enjoy the products of Frito-Lay. I've asked him to stop sending me stuff, but that only makes him desist for a couple of weeks. Then the torrent begins anew. I think it's something genetic with him.

It's obvious, from my own example, that propaganda campaigns of this kind never win any converts. They are means of self-expression, nothing more. But why not express yourself? Why not retaliate in kind? And that's what I eventually decided to do. But why bother, I asked myself, with reporting the transitory and insignificant news of today? Why not let your modern liberal friends know all the news they've missed since modern liberalism began? News like this:

• "Trust-Busters" Solidify Monopoly Interests
• Wilson Fails to End All Wars
• New Deal Prolongs Depression
• FDR Gives Free Hand to Stalin
• Rationing: a Colossal Failure
• Social Security "Insurance" Swindle
• Hiss, Rosenbergs Proven to Have Spied for Russia
• "Urban Renewal" Devastates Inner Cities
• "Missile Gap" Called Kennedy Fabrication
• Bogus Count Gives JFK White House Win
• Racism Traced to Affirmative Action
• War on Poverty Ends in Stalemate
• Medicare, Medicaid 10 Times More Costly than Predicted
• The "Creative" Constitution: High Court Invents, Government Mandates
• "I Lied for LBJ": Bill Moyers, the Early Years
• Tonkin Gulf Attack Proved Fraudulent
• It Was "Sex" All Right: Physiologists Dispute Clinton Claim
• Thousands Succumb to Canada-Style "Health Care"

You see the possibilities. But again, be forewarned. This is strictly a means of self-expression. You will never bring a modern liberal to his senses by telling him simple facts. When I sent my friend a list of headlines like these, he replied, "Either you've got a terrific filing system, or you're making things up." Then he sent me another item from PBS. — Stephen Cox

For an eternity in hell, press 6 — Americans and other citizens of what used to be known as the Free World increasingly live like rats in a laboratory maze. You imagine some devil-god in a white coat studying them as they issue out of a serpentine suburban cul-de-sac and inch forward through tangled expressway interchanges and funnel-like tunnels, over backed-up bridges and onto abandon-hope-all-ye-who-enter exit ramps on their way to their offices, where they occupy one cubicle in a fluorescent-lit labyrinth of them and spend the day on a computer where diverging electronic corridors lead to diverging electronic corridors and boxes within boxes, before they return home to sit in front of the TV with remote in hand, frantically switching through a series of snares and dead ends before finding themselves back where they started, or going on the Internet to pursue something that is always just around the corner in an infinity of corners. In order to qualify for the necessities of modern life or to fix them when they routinely go wrong they call "Customer Service" and are presented with a multitude of baffling options luring them into baffling steel-trap commitments, and when they have second thoughts or make a mistake, they can't take a step back, they have to start — "to return to the main menu, press 8" — where they began — "Please listen carefully to the following options." On weekends, after threading their way through another Gordian Knot of traffic, they lurch in and out of row after indistinguishable row of a mall parking lot the size of a strife-torn Balkan country in order to find the space that will allow them to stagger into the mall and its bewildering, enticing array of shops, each of them offering convenient access to the ultimate inescapable maze, credit-card debt. As for the government, federal, state, local, it looms before them as a Kafkaesque apparition of numbing bureaucratic anterooms and couloirs, opaque sentences festooned with self-immolating clauses and syntactical tickets to nowhere, abstruse forms and schedules, exceptions and exemptions, subtractions of line 43e from 43b (see page 2347, column B, subsection 101-R, under Penalties, Annulments, and Annihilations), along with hall-of-mirrors election campaigns and courts of law that routinely defer their provisional suspended judgments, all of it presided over by implacable, remote, rulebound, yet ingeniously arbitrary authorities whose function is to frustrate, whose prestige, pomp, and circumstance consist in making one wait and wait.

No wonder popular culture stays in business by selling experiences that seem to retain what is vanishing from the rest of the culture, a sense of resolution, a beginning, a middle, an end, an occasional earth-moving climax, experiences like sports, action movies, happily-ever-after fables and melodramas, winner-take-all reality shows, and sex. But escapism doesn't offer escape, a way out of the real-life maze. Wittgenstein said that the only purpose of philosophy is to let the fly out of the bottle. It may be too much to ask, expecting a politician to perform a similar service, but as free citizens morph into goaded, prodded, and yanked statistical marketing artifacts, rich in options, poor in a sense of direction, full of information but clueless, it would be nice if some eloquently modest political anti-Daedalus suddenly showed up, dazzling us not by crafting new escape-proof foreign and domestic labyrinths but by offering to dismantle a few. — Eric Kenning

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