Catapulting the Propaganda

The President, Cindy Sheehan, and How Words Die

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." -- George Bush, "President Participates in Social Security Conversation in New York," May 24, 2005.

Forced from his five-week vacation idyll in Crawford by the mother of a dead boy he sent to war, the President has recently given two major speeches defending his war policies and, between biking and boating, held a brief news conference at Tamarack Resort in Donnelly, Idaho. On August 22nd, he addressed the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Salt Lake City for 30 minutes; on August 24th, he spoke for 43 minutes to families of the Idaho National Guard in the farming community of Nampa, Idaho.

As his poll figures continue on a downward spiral, he has found it necessary to put extra effort into "catapulting the propaganda." Though he struck a new note or two in each speech, these were exceedingly familiar, crush-the-terrorists, stay-the-course, path-to-victory speeches. That's hardly surprising, since his advisors and speechwriters have been wizards of repetition. No one has been publicly less spontaneous or more -- effectively -- repetitious than our President; but sometimes, as he says, you "keep repeating things over and over and over again" and what sinks in really is the truth rather than the propaganda. Sometimes, just that extra bit of repetition under less than perfect circumstances, and words that once struck fear or offered hope, that once explained well enough for most the nature of the world they faced, suddenly sound hollow. They begin to sound... well, repetitious, and so, false. Your message, which worked like a dream for so long, goes off-message, and then what do you do?

This is, I suspect, exactly what growing numbers of Americans are experiencing in relation to our President. It's a mysterious process really -- like leaving a dream world or perhaps deprogramming from a cult. Once you step outside the bubble, statements that only yesterday seemed heartfelt or powerful or fearful or resolute truths suddenly look like themselves, threadbare and impoverished. In due course, because the repetitious worldview in the President's speeches is clearly a believed one (for him, if not all of his advisors) and because it increasingly reads like a bad movie script for a fictional planet, he himself is likely to look no less threadbare and impoverished, no less -- to use a word not often associated with him -- pathetic and out of touch with reality to some of those who not so long ago supported him or his policies.

Under these circumstances, it's worth taking a close look at his recent speeches and comparing his linguistic landscape with that of Cindy Sheehan, at the moment a stand-in for the mute (and previously somewhat hidden) American dead from his war as well as an encroaching Iraqi catastrophe.

George's World of Words {mosgoogle right}

George Bush's speech-world remains anchored in the defining moment of his life, the attacks of September 11th, 2001 (cited 5 times in his VFW speech, 4 times in Idaho). It offers a landscape of overwhelming threat, but also of remarkable neatness. It paints a picture of a world embroiled in the first war of the 21st century, a war on a global scale, a war -- a word that peppers every statement he makes -- with multiple theaters ("from the streets of the Western capitals to the mountains of Afghanistan, to the tribal regions of Pakistan, to the islands of Southeast Asia and the Horn of Africa"). In his vision of our planet, a vast struggle on the scale of the Cold War, if not World War II, is underway, a Manichaean battle between two clear-cut sides, one good, one evil, in which you are either for or against. There can be no other choices between our mega-enemy, the terrorists, and us. As he put the matter in Idaho in reference to Iraq, the central theater in his global war, "The battle lines… are now clearly drawn for the world to see, and there is no middle ground."

The problem is that what the President "sees" and what Americans are now seeing seem to be diverging at a rapid rate. For George, the details matter not at all. You won't find any Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds at each other's throats in the President's Iraq, or unable to agree on a constitution, or at the edge of internecine warfare, or living in a country lacking electricity, oil, and jobs, or potentially installing an Islamic government in Baghdad allied to the neighboring Iranian fundamentalist regime, or any of the other obvious features of the present situation, most of which can finally be caught any night on the national news. In his Salt Lake City and Idaho speeches, the only "Iraqi" George even mentioned was a Jordanian, "the terrorist Zarqawi," against whom, in at least the President's fantasy life and in his recent radio address, Sunni and Shia Iraqis actually come together in mutual defense in a touching show of national unity.

In the President's world, there is just them, the enemy, aka the terrorists, and us, the people who (in a nearly copyrighted phrase) spread freedom to the rest of the world. When you look, for instance, at his speech in Idaho, the word terror (war on, sponsored, will be defeated) is used 13 times; terrorist or terrorists (threats, attack, murdered, harbor a, cells, defeat the, converged on Iraq, defiance of the, have sworn havoc, can kill the innocent, victory over, were to win, will fail, Zarqawi), 33 times; and terrorism (safe haven for), once -- for a total of 47 uses. (Now that's repetition for you!) However, in the remarkably equally balanced linguistic struggle between good and evil that weaves through the President's speeches, freedom (they despise our, spreading, spread the hope of, advancing the cause of, the march of) appears 37 times and, when free is thrown in, a triumphant total of 48 times. In addition, while the terrorists skulk in the shadows, freedom is no passive thing. It confronts, defeats, prevails, and conquers. No wonder they despise it so. (In the shorter VFW speech, the linguistic balance remains the same: terror and its cognates: 33; freedom with its fleet of frees, 36.) Add together the Idaho totals for the struggle -- 95 -- and you're talking about 1 out of every 48 words in that speech being either terror or freedom, with us or against us.

Admittedly, the President's speeches do sometimes show small signs of change at moments when reality forces its way onto the premises. For obvious reasons, for instance, weapons of mass destruction have disappeared from his speeches when the focus is Iraq (though mention Iran and…). Recently, Cindy Sheehan made herself such a thorn in the Presidential side that his speechwriters were forced to let him acknowledge the actual numbers of American dead. ("We have lost 1,864 members of our Armed Forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and 223 in Operation Enduring Freedom.") And the growing debate about withdrawal from Iraq, which began with unapproved statements from his own military, has forced the President's speechwriters to create a new jingle to describe our plan for the Iraqi future: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.".