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VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE WEST |
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11. Three Short Excursions into the Unreasonable The received wisdom about bureaucratic inefficiency is that governments are too big. Size has been identified as an evil. A promulgator of indolence, waste and confusion. There is no historic proof for this. Both the Roman Empire and the Roman Church functioned perfectly well under those conditions. Gigantic trading companies have functioned smoothly since the Hanseatic League in the fourteenth century -- and not primarily because of the profit motive, but because everyone was clear about what they were there to buy and sell. With a clear belief in the purpose of an organization, bodies of any size seem to find a reasonable way to operate. What, then, are the origins of our incorrect assumptions linking government size with inefficiency? The explanation might well be the unidimensional style of modern structures. These structures do not appear to be simple. Often they seem incomprehensibly complex. That is only because the rational approach requires that everything be laid out in a logical manner. Large organizations often are not suited to this rigorously skeletal approach. Trying to force them into a logical outline has the effect of destroying their natural impetus and tying everyone up in relationships instead of letting them act. Modern structure also assumes that all functions are alike; therefore, all functions may be modernized. By "modernized" is meant subjected to universal standards of organization and efficiency. This inevitably involves the measurement of production, of profitability, a belief that lean is efficient, a belief that employees weigh down production. But some functions are profoundly manual or profoundly mechanical. To "modernize" their structure is to render them inefficient. And some functions are properly labour-intensive. To attempt to modernize them through leanness will simply make them ineffective. Some functions are not meant to be profitable. They exist to lay the groundwork for the profitable functions of others. These non-profit functions of the state -- such as transportation and communications -- make it possible for the citizen and the economic structure to carryon their business. To the extent that making either transportation or communications profitable harms the state's basic infrastructure, the citizen's ability to operate at full capacity is also harmed. Nevertheless, the marketplace measurement of profitability has been applied to the American, Canadian and English rail systems and to the American and Canadian postal systems. This includes the assumption that competition will improve service in communications, a devotion to computerized methodology, arguments in favour of lean manpower, and calculations of new investment versus possible financial returns. As a result Canada, once owner of the most complex rail structure in the world, is busy shutting it down, while the remaining trains are being shaken apart on medieval railbeds. The United States, driven by the same theories, destroyed its system before anyone else and is now trying to put it back together. As for Britain, much of its population has no choice but to use the trains. If they could avoid them, they would. The more these systems decline, the more the economists and planners say that they can but go on declining. They assert that there are a shrinking number of potential passengers and a lessening need for, rail transport. The reality is that the transport experts have decided rail transport is outdated. Their investment in new equipment is therefore almost negligible. In order to cover their losses, they raise the cost for the passenger, while offering fewer and fewer services. They have created a self-fulfilling prophecy. The British, for example, invest one-third of what the Germans spend per passenger kilometre. And they compensate for the resulting decline in users by charging one-third more per kilometre travelled. The Germans, on the other hand, like the French, continue to treat their rail system as a fundamental need, adhering to the nineteenth-century idea of a national and eventually continental infrastructure, which requires massive investment without any rational plan for a clear financial return. As a result they have maintained a large staff at all levels. They continue to take the old-fashioned view of customer service, of cleanliness, of maximum number -- and therefore maximum choices -- in the use of trains, of good food and of reliability. They have spent money and employed people to ensure that these goals are implemented. They have developed the best technology in order to produce the fastest trains in the world, capable of doing more than 260 kph. They are building new railbeds to ensure that the passenger gets a perfectly smooth ride. The result is that passenger service is growing. The trains are full. In France property values in the countryside are rising according to their proximity to fast-train (TGV) stations. Business is attracted to provincial towns served by the TGV, thus helping decentralization. The balance of payments is helped by the money not spent on imported fuel for less fuel-efficient transport systems, such as cars and airplanes; and by the ·sale all over Europe of railway technology. The essence of this success is that the ,entire sector was treated as providing an essential public service, therefore worthy of the best high technology in the context of a labour-, maintenance- and investment-intensive industry in which making a profit was secondary. *** The example of the postal systems is even more blatant. The more the United States and Canada modernize -- or rationalize -- their mail delivery, the less mail they can deliver at a slower rate to fewer places, with increasing irregularity and at both greater expense and higher cost to the user. Why? Because no systems analysis can justify mail deliveries six days a week. Nor delivery to rural areas. Systems analysis tells us not to deliver to private doors. It tells us to leave mail in grouped boxes, which the public must walk to, whatever their age and whatever the weather. The British and the French have done none of these things. Instead they have continued to offer the fullest, fastest and most accessible services possible. Two deliveries a day in Paris -- to even the most inaccessible door. Flaw1ess delivery time. They have turned post offices into the most varied communication centres possible. By offering more and better services they have encouraged people to use the post office. The resulting customers make the whole process more and more viable. Meanwhile, in Canada, in order to cut employment costs, post offices are being closed. The postal service is being franchised to variety stores as a sideline. These offer little more than stamps. They also cut the public off from their public servants in the post office. The question of employment is particularly interesting. Humans deliver mail. If you reduce costs by reducing employment, you undermine the system's performance. This sets in motion the spin towards shrinking services. Systems analysis doesn't understand this because it is busy trying to make each element of government service profitable, without realizing that a public service is not a separate, private corporation but part of a whole which is the entire public structure. If the profitability of a service were to be measured accurately, it would have to take into account the effect of that service on the lives and businesses of the population. It can't be denied that employees are expensive. Their wages and social costs must be borne by the post office, which is the state, which is by extension the taxpaying citizen. But unemployment is also expensive. The same state has to pay for the unemployed person by contributing to his or her social security. Keeping someone unemployed can easily be as expensive as employing them, since one must add to social security payments the cost of administering that service. The expert's answer is to apply artificial and narrow employment-cost calculations and therefore to dismantle such programs. But this creates chronic poverty, which, quite apart from the moral question it poses, also costs the state a great deal. Whatever surrounds the poor -- property, consumption, education levels, law and order, health levels -- declines to their level and creates new expenses for the government. And while employment has its costs, it also adds to productivity. Unemployment is entirely an economic negative. If the employment of a man or woman makes the mail system work better, for example, which in turn strengthens the communications networks, which in turn boosts commercial activity, then the cost of those jobs is in itself a profit. North American post offices ought to be busy hiring more employees. They should be building more post offices to get closer to the public and installing new communications services in order to make themselves as useful as possible by keeping up with technology. They should be dreaming of armies of men and women carrying mail wherever the public wishes it. Instead they dream of a mechanized service in which the public receives as little as possible but comes to central depots to collect mail from a box. As so often in the late twentieth century, words are used as nonsense. Economists repeat endlessly that the age of the service industry is upon us. But to serve, after all, means to provide services to another. And yet in the most basic services, which have traditionally been the responsibility of the state because they have been considered to be part of the musculature of the civil body, we now seek profit above all and, if possible, that the served should serve. There is a whole series of governmental and paragovernmental services in which the assumptions of modern management are quite simply wrong. In education is it cheaper to keep a teacher unemployed or employed? All the costs must be calculated, not just salary. The cost to the state of that teacher's own education, for example. And the increased value to the future economy of the education given to a child in a class of twenty, or better still ten, rather than the current thirty or forty, And the cost to the state of rampant illiteracy. All the Western nations now admit that their universal education systems are not working. They are all searching for new grand remedies, most of which have to do with reforms in structure, method and content. But education -- quantity and quality -- is above all the result of teaching. And teaching requires teachers, the more the better. A national education strategy may sound reassuring, but without more bodies a strategy is just a strategy. The same sort of arguments can be made about road building and maintenance, ferry services, health care, environmental costs, libraries, public transport and university-taught advanced technology. However, the current attitude towards general economic troubles is to tighten the belt. Printing money is indeed inflationary. But investing in areas which will not· respond to the treatment of lean reorganization, because the profit they offer, while indirect, is essential, is just as real a form of efficiency and creativity. The current idea of profit and loss completely misses this larger sense of what constitutes profitability. Worse, it doesn't admit that different types of organizations respond positively to fundamentally different management assumptions. The businessmen, who are now constantly being called in to advise governments, miss these differences. And yet private corporations are often extremely flexible in their own attitudes towards efficiency. The criteria used by large corporations in their corporate acquisition policies, their debt policies, their remuneration policies for employed executives, their long-term planning policies would be considered scandalously inefficient, cavalier and amateurish if they were used by governments. That doesn't necessarily mean that the corporations are. wrong. What it means is that they are insisting upon imaginary corporate standards of profitability and efficiency from government which they wouldn't dream of applying to themselves. As Maurice Strong -- the environmentalist, businessman and Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations -- has pointed out, the most successful international organizations are the multinationals. Why? Because they simply adapt their needs and standards to wherever they are functioning at that moment. [1] They have made an economic virtue out of size and, when it comes to organization, out of flexibility and imagination. They have, in effect, invented new ways to count. These are probably inappropriate to public management. What they demonstrate, however, is that government should not be a prisoner of pedestrian economic cliches relating to size, efficiency and value. Like the multinationals, government must invent new ways to count. II The remarkable ineffectiveness of our governments in managing international economic cooperation over the last twenty years as well as the unravelling of the revolutionary international accords .and structures of the 1940s and 1950s, must be put down to the internal failure of national structures. The systems managers ground to a halt on their own territory, where they had all the levers in their own hands. Confused by their inexplicable failure, they pushed their problems out into the international sphere. There they were able to act with an irresponsibility which would have been impossible at home. The inequality of the players and the absence of strong structures and effective enforcement agencies permitted them to do what they wished in search of short-term gains. They had to destroy international stability and, in particular, international financial stability. The United States, given its great natural strength, was able again and again to shift its problems over its borders. The 1961 launch of international arms consumption, largely in order to balance the trade deficit; the 1973 encouragement of a first oil price rise in order to help the Iranians pay for their pro-Western armament program; and the subsequent attempt to wipe out the enormous oil price increases through the use of general inflation were all the insane acts of rational men who had come' to the end of their tether. These decisions were no worse than, for example, those of the Western Europeans to replace their old working class with a new lumpen proletariat of Third World labourers. The record is littered with economists and technocrats of the day -- socialists, conservatives and liberals -- explaining the brilliance of this plan. That it would lead to a racial crisis within twenty years was not in their briefing books. Nor were the results of the race to sell arms to the Third World, into which they leaped as fast as the United States. Nor are the consequences of an organized European overfishing policy in the Atlantic reserves -- a policy which is still in effect. The single most selfish and destructive Western economic act of the last forty years remains, however, the unilateral American decision in 1973 to break the postwar agreement on pegged currencies as an easy way to deal with its international deficit. At the time this was euphemistically called a conversion to floating currencies. Then as now there were experts who justified it with great flurries of figures. However, the reality was that it meant a return to international financial anarchy. It was the ensuing chaos which made the European Monetary System (the Snake) a necessity. The import-export balance, the deficits, the inflation needs of the United States, whipped each of the European currencies up and down in an uncoordinated manner, wreaking havoc on their industrial production, competitiveness and trade. The wild fluctuations in currencies and commodities which the Nixon policies invited drew the business community's eye gradually away from solid industrial investment to the roulette wheel of paper manipulation and paper profits. This created a business atmosphere dominated by reorganizations, mergers, and takeovers, none of which contributed to new production. The whole process made real economic growth almost impossible to achieve. In practical terms the 1973 decision destroyed the unity of the industrialized nations. By playing national problems ruthlessly against those of allies, Washington created three rival blocs. This meant that Japan was freed to play its own game. As for the European Community, its members abruptly realized that their only real option was to succeed as a community. From a psychological point of view, the Europe of 1992 was born in the currency float and oil price rise of 1973. And with each unilateral economic or military initiative taken by increasingly nationalist American governments over the last two decades, there has been an almost immediate reaction to further strengthen European unity. When one watched the Community walk into the 1989 GATT meeting in Montreal with a single voice and walk out in protest against American demands, it was clear how far things had gone and how superficial, for example, the theoretically close links between Thatcher and Reagan really were. The international monetary disorder did eventually force the creation of the Group of Five (G5), which subsequently became the G7. This committee of the seven leading industrial powers was a desperate attempt to limit the damage caused by the multilateral roller coaster and to forge at least minimum economic links among them. [2] The striving for a common European financial policy is another more limited attempt to do the same thing. But the small size of these groups, the tensions within them, and the informal nature of the G7's operations, indicate that few countries are willing to tie themselves down again so long as the inward-looking management structures, which each has now been obliged to impose upon itself at home, make the profit-loss results of any international agreement so unclear. As a result we are all still strapped into the great economic roller coaster, which continues its violent ride. III It is difficult to approach the question of substantive change in our society in a sensible manner. Those who enter public life, and are therefore responsible for dealing with change, have more often than not become obstacles to, rather than facilitators of, open debate. The modern politician, cut off from so much of the real action and driven by a highly honed but aimless desire for power, presents himself increasingly as a consumer good. Among the early models of this product was the urbane British prime minister of the early 196Os, Harold Macmillan. Grandson of a crofter and beneficiary of a new fortune made by his family in publishing, he had married a duke's daughter, adjusted his manner upwards to conform with that of the ruling caste and worked hard to leave the impression -- through world-weary diffidence and dry humour -- that he was a lot smarter and a great deal more in control of events than he actually was. His successor, the Labour leader Harold Wilson, devoted himself to tuning his accent and manner downwards and was careful always to sound less intelligent than he was. He also kept a pipe in his mouth, unlit, as a sort of rumpled, populist symbol, which his manner of dressing confirmed. The prop became the man: a comfy, trustworthy fellow who smokes a pipe. This image had nothing to do with the man. Son of an industrial chemist and himself a product of Oxford, he stayed on there to collaborate on the Beveridge report, which laid out the technical structure of a future welfare state. He was the wartime director of economics and statistics in the civil service and originator of the Labour blueprint to nationalize the coal industry. In other words, he was a state-of-the-art technocrat. What's more, once in power he fiercely controlled, wherever possible, media reports about himself. This was possible in large part thanks to his ready use of Lord Goodman, one of the country's leading legal figures. Of course, politicians have always used props. This was part of a tradition which had more to do with theatrics than with camouflage. Churchill and Roosevelt were among the last major examples of the old cavalier approach. Capes, siren suits, bevies of wartime uniforms, outlandish cigarette holders, cigars and hats. Considering that one of them was more or less obese and the other a cripple, they used their bodies and their faces in a seemingly endless variety of ways. Their physical attitudes immediately conveyed to the public a political intent -- glares, belligerence, laughter, fury. Their speech combined the patrician with the populist thanks to a direct and pared-down elegance which revealed the force of their propositions. All these mannerisms demonstrated the fact that both men were nonconformists in pursuit of change. Their range of theatrics didn't have the same function as the single, fixed image does for the breed of politicians which arrived on the scene in force with Macmillan and Wilson. These new men were seeking a "role" in or behind which they could function for life. The image was for the vote. Thus disguised, the politician could serve whatever interests he thought appropriate. Those of the Churchill-Roosevelt school used their props to illustrate and sell their policies. The modern politicians use theirs to disguise their ideas and activities. One consequence of this is that the politician now tends to wear a single sort of suit. The cameramen will discover him always, everywhere, looking like himself thanks to a simple, familiar image designed for the viewer. The only question is whether that image has been Wisely chosen. Will it wear well as he ages and progresses in his career? Or will it reveal itself as too regional or tied to a period or a cause? The aim is to find an all-purpose image, smooth and meaningless, which can survive happily in all times and under all circumstances. With the growth in political public relations sophistication, most images now come in two parts: statesman and populist. Formal and informal. Giscard's single- breasted, gray suit versus his gray flannels with V-neck sweater. Reagan's presidential suit versus his cowboy outfit. Carter's off-the-rack single-breasted suit against his blue Jeans. The politician who dares to present himself today through more than two images is extremely rare. The feeling is that more than two would confuse the public. For an actual illustration of the situation, one need only compare the contemporary generation of politicians in France with President Mitterrand, a survivor fr6m two generations before. Mitterrand has a fine-tuned presence, which turns on literacy and great intelligence, set against a background of mystery. His dark, extravagant hats and cloaks are intended to link him. with Leon Blum, the first Socialist prime minister, who was a romantic figure in the first half of the century, a poet and a duelist before becoming a government leader. Mitterrand was in the Resistance, was involved in still unexplained incidents during the Algerian war and has written many political books in a romantic, civilized style. A psychiatrist might well say that these hats and cloaks are also symbols of the mystery in which Mitterrand has always wrapped himself in order to avoid being pinned down by short-term politics. The new generation in France has neither mystery nor literacy. Efficiency is represented by a gray suit, so they wear one, thus blending in with the bureaucrats, who wear the same uniform. They are all conforming to the original Jesuit premise that simple dress should be worn not in humility but in the interests of anonymity. In place of mystery there is power and secrecy hidden behind the predictable diction and clothes of the specialist. Most of them still daren't smile in public for fear of confusing their image with that of an actor or a singer, which would prevent their being seen as statesmen. Meanwhile, even Canada, which thought itself immune to packaging, has twice chosen, in Brian Mulroney, a politician delivered in a cellophane wrapper of frozen superficiality. He is to be found alternately singing "When Irish Eyes are Smiling" while publicly hugging his wife and children, or dropping into a grave, double-breasted whisper to play the man of state. Of course, it is the United States which dominates the Western imagination and which has set the pace by producing bevies of constructa-kit presidential candidates, as if the goal were perfect presidential plastic. Robert Dole, Senate minority leader and a former vice presidential nominee, is an intelligent man who has done enough things in his life to prove that he exists as a real person: But he has a stormy character and this has worked very much to his disadvantage. As a result of being a wounded war hero, he has a withered arm. physical deformities now tend to be seen as sinister rather than admirable. The world of images, like that of the Catholic priest or the absolute monarch, seems to require a minimum level of physical perfection. The Catholic priest must be physically perfect because deformity implies some dark intervention not unrelated to cloven hooves. The king must be handsome and brave, so that his subjects may bask in his glory. The modern politician must be perfect, that is to say, perfectly inoffensive. He therefore concentrates on the removal of bumps which annoy. Dole was covered with them when he launched himself into the 1988 race for the Republican presidential nomination. He hired a consultant, Dorothy Sarnoff, to help redefine his image. During the campaign, Ms. Sarnoff volunteered the following to an interviewer when she was asked if Dole had changed: "Of course. I changed him. He was the best student I ever had. A nice, nice man. I took away his snide." Another adviser, John Sears, architect of Ronald Reagan's primary victories in 1980, added that, "Mere competence is not going to get you the nomination. If Bob Dole can convince people he has a vision that's credible and that's better than the other candidate's, he'll be nominated and elected." [3] The word "vision" seems out of place in such a statement. But in Sears's mouth, vision becomes one with image, while still suggesting statesmanship and magnanimity. He uses "vision" to mean "image" the way some people use "the loved one" to mean the dead. A few words and an inoffensive smile." A kinder, gentler America." No policies attached. No indication of how and when. Just a soft, bumpless label which reflects the mood of the day. Mr. Dole failed, but the interesting thing is that Ms. Sarnoff and Mr. Sears felt free to talk in such a way in public, for quotation, during the campaign. The general term for this is personality politics, which means the exact opposite of what it says. It mainly involves creating personality where there isn't any or controlling and disguising personality where it is too real. And even then these manufactured personas may fail absolutely because they are ill chosen or incompetently exploited when dealing with the real world. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that modern politicians avoid whenever possible unstructured encounters with reality. They attempt to limit their visibility in public and before the press to manufactured events, which are meant to provide facsimiles of reality. Meaningless telephone-to-the-ear and miner-hat photos have grown into major industries for politicians and advisers. But these are only the still shots of a far-more-complicated business. What matters are complete manufactured events which have symbolic value and are both plotted and scripted. For example, George Bush began his presidency by walking down the hall to call on his Vice President. This event was officially announced before it happened and was intended to demonstrate that the President had full confidence in Dan Quayle, who was already being criticized as a lightweight. Nothing actually happened to Mr. Bush in the hallway and nothing in particular was said in Mr. Quayle's office. No doubt the Vice President got up from behind his desk, came forward and shook the President's hand. It was a symbolic visit. The President had honoured the Vice President by going to him. The lives of a dozen and a half elected presidents and prime ministers are blocked out With these sorts of representative simulations. Some of them are quite extraordinary. Mrs. Thatcher's appearance at the local funeral for the village victims of the Lockerbie air crash was intended to demonstrate her sympathy for the suffering of ordinary citizens. This came at a time when most citizens· seemed to feel. that she and her economic policies served only the rich. The de rigueur trip of every Western leader who visits Southeast Asia to the Cambodian border refugee camps indicates humanitarian concern, while the Cambodian troubles have stretched on for more than a decade in large part because the West has ambiguous attitudes towards the different players. These and hundreds of other minor events are played out every day. They are the equivalent of royal movements -- or rather of the protocol appropriate to Ruritanian royalty. But the actors in these cases are not fictional princes from a light romantic novel. There is also a whole industry of pretend events which are not even symbolic. President Reagan's salutes are still the reigning example of these. As Commander in Chief, it was entirely proper for him to receive the salutes of the nation's soldiers. Why he, in civilian dress, should have saluted them back isn't at all clear. But for him to salute political gatherings and television cameras was worse than meaningless. To do this on his last appearance before a Republican Convention made a mockery of his responsibilities as Commander in Chief. The salute, after all, is one of the few symbolic gestures which does mean something. It represents the link of obedience between those who command and those who are willing to risk their lives if so ordered. In the last days before President Bush's inauguration, the White House revealed the exact events which would take Ronald Reagan out of the presidency and out of town. After the inauguration, President Bush would accompany Mr. Reagan to a helicopter on the Capitol grounds. As Mr. Reagan entered the helicopter, he would turn at the last moment and salute President Bush. The press reported this planned scenario faithfully so that everyone would watch for it. Mr. Reagan's salute seemed to be a vague combination of John the Baptist christening Christ in the river Jordan and of General Douglas MacArthur -- who was fired in 1951 from the Korean War command-closing his subsequent dramatic self- defence before a joint session of Congress with the line: "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away." Had President Bush not responded with a salute, the symbolism would have been debated all over Washington. A calculated insult? A declaration of independence? A betrayal? The Washington Post was able to report the next day: "Mr. Reagan, on the steps of the helicopter, saluted Mr. Bush, who was on the steps of the Capitol. Mr. Bush then saluted back." [4] But that week had been full of images and sounds which bore no relationship to reality. In President Reagan's farewell address he had insisted on the effect that his eight years of government had had on the world:
Five days later, the American Department of Justice released the result of its internal investigation, which concluded that President Reagan's friend, Edwin Meese, while serving as U.S. chief legal officer, had breached federal ethics standards on numerous occasions. He had "engaged in conduct. which should not be tolerated of any government employee, especially not the Attorney General." [6] A few days later one of the worst financial scandals in modern French politics erupted, involving close friends of President Mitterrand and insider trading. The first to resign was the Minister of Finance's Chief of Staff. A few days later, the British government began lying to its public on a daily basis in order to cover up the scandal involving an epidemic of salmonella poisoning from eggs. The reason seemed to be fear of a collapse in the sale of eggs. That same week, the ongoing massive Mafia trials in Italy backfired with a series of acquittals which were followed by suggestions of improper interference in the judicial process from obscure powers, thus confirming that organized crime was more influential than ever in Italian business and government. In the same month a Swiss minister had to resign over political-financial charges, a political corruption story took on major proportions in Austria, and in Athens the Koskotas scandal exploded again, involving the corruption of a personal friend of the Greek Prime Minister, soon to fall himself. Meanwhile, ministers and senior officials in Japan continued to resign over a case of industry corrupting public officials. Those involved included ex-Prime Minister Nakasone, known as the most Americanized of the Japanese leaders. And a few weeks later, the American Senate confirmation hearings of ex-Senator Tower would begin, thus highlighting the growing legal, as opposed to illegal, corruption of the people's representatives. Within a year Reagan made a personal visit to Japan on behalf of a Japanese corporation. For the use of his immense prestige, he charged two million dollars. He had, after all, walked away. from Washington with a 68 percent public approval rating. [7] The only possible conclusion is that the American people believed his image and disbelieved events, believed a projected reality and disbelieved an observed one. When the Iran-Contra hearings seemed to show that the President didn't know what was going on around him, the aging actor strung together a series of symbolic acts in order to demonstrate that he was in charge. The scenario called for the President to go to the Pentagon, to walk through the corridors, to meet with the Chiefs of Staff, to consult with them, to walk on farther in order eventually to hold a press conference on the results of his consultation, Every step of the way, photo opportunities were organized, Images were created and transmitted. There is no question that, as a product of the remarkable Hollywood B-movie mythmaking school and subsequently of television product advertising, Reagan was well trained to increase the already wide gap between illusion and reality in public debate. In fact, this is a talent which he seems always to have possessed. In his prepresidential memoirs, Where's the Rest of Me, he talks of his wartime experience making training movies for bomber pilots as if he had actually been a combatant. He doesn't actually say it, but that is the impression left. Mr. Reagan's professionalism permitted him to create images which were particularly galling to honest and competent critics whose grasp on a catastrophic reality seemed to carry no public weight against his imaginary victories and reassuring images. There was some tendency on the part of the responsible practitioners of public debate -- politicians, journalists and intellectuals -- to conclude from this that there was a problem with the citizen, who seemed unable to grasp the obvious difference between reality and advertising. The problem may have been the public's, but it was created elsewhere and there was very little a citizen or even groups of citizens could do about it. As for the press -- the public's principal source of more-or-less detached information -- they have never been in such a difficult situation. In terms of imagery, it is almost impossible for them to come up with pictures which reflect political realities. Public figures simply do not offer exposed flanks. Even George Bush has little difficulty in presenting helpful images. The Iraq war provided him opportunities to simulate the grandiose and the historic. But not long after his inauguration, the following item was to be found in newspapers around the world -- in this case the London Times:
What was Bush doing? He was symbolically and spontaneously demonstrating that he is a regular. kind of guy who doesn't have a swelled head. The contrived nature of the event makes it impossible to know whether this message is accurate. More to the point, it is difficult to see its relevance to Bush's official functions. The relevant point is that those who hold power bombard the media with these segmented, artificial images which, although false, cannot be ignored because the actors really are the government. By filling the public place in this way, they have deformed, if not actually drowned, reality. It is almost impossible in such an atmosphere for the press to help the citizen take part in an open debate on public affairs. The government won't debate. Communications, in its mind, means controlled presentations of governmental policies through the intermediaries of imaginary personalities and false events.
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