Speed Kills

By Bob Harris

THERE’S A NEW disease sweeping across our beloved land, an epidemic virus that can affect your speech, impair your judgment, and even cause aggressive behavior. The infection is most rampant among the Pentagon, the White House, and the news media. And it’s almost completely undiagnosed. You may be suffering from it yourself.

I’m referring, of course, to … the tragedy of Speedmouth.

Speedmouth strikes swiftly. One day, someone says the entire phrase, “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” The next day, it comes out as “WMD.” “Chemical and Biological Warfare” quickly becomes CBW. “No Fly Zone” collapses into NFZ.

And once Speedmouth attacks, the disease spreads swiftly. What begins as a hallway parlance infecting isolated policy wonks (who contract the contagion when data overload affects their mental immune system), a Speedmouth infection can suddenly surface in a White House press briefing and instantly reproduce like Ebola into the mouths and keyboards of reporters eager to parrot any military phrase in an effort to sound really butch.

Next thing you know, even TV-exposed housewives in Kansas are afflicted, rattling off meaningless Speedmouth phrases over tea at the card table with the somber gravity of a nuclear briefing in the war room.

“Never mind the CNN PR SNAFU at OSU, the DCI’s POV on UNSCOM correlates with CIA and NSA intel, confirming the CW about AP reports on WMD and CBW, so the CCC is projecting A-10s and F-16s into the Iraqi SOG … gin.”

This, my friends, is a shocking case of Speedmouth. This poor woman has no idea what she’s saying, but she’s convinced it means we have to bomb someone.

Unfortunately, while we understand the cause, the only known cure is a long and difficult one:Read a book.

BY NOW YOU’VE READ various news reports about last week’s skirmish at Ohio State between two CNN reporters and three Clinton advisers on one side and a small but vocal minority of the folks they supposedly work for on the other. A large group of normals, caught in the middle, was left trying to decide whom to trust.

If you saw the fiasco live on the tube, you already know that much of what was said, both during and after the show, was completely false. First, let’s be clear about what that TV show was–and was not. This was not a “town meeting.” At a real town meeting, priorities are decided as a result of what the people have to say. This CNN deal was set up so the big shots could explain priorities that had already been decided. The two are fundamentally different. The first is a form of genuine democracy. The latter, which happens so often we’re starting not to notice the difference, is what Noam Chomsky calls “manufacturing consent.”

And CNN was not just reporting the news. It cut a deal with the White House to get exclusive rights to the show by footing the bill, handling the logistics, and giving the speakers a worldwide audience. CNN did not demand–as an objective reporter might –that people who disagree should receive equal space and time. So, bottom line: CNN paid to produce a high-profile TV talk show starring Bernard Shaw as Oprah, featuring a unanimous group from one side of the debate about Iraq, presented to sell the official policy to the people.

In fact, White House aides actually complained the next day that the audience hadn’t been screened in advance, so anyone who lined up for a ticket–even the riffraff who ask embarrassing questions!–could get in. In other words, the real problem was the sloppy intrusion of actual democracy into the staged event.

That so many commentators deemed Clinton foolish for allowing such an outbreak to occur–without noting that it’s also the fundamental thing we’re supposed to be defending–tells you more about us media people than it does the protesters.

Once the press and citizenry begin giving the president the power of a generalissimo, how long will it be until he actually becomes one? Personally, I didn’t much care for a lot of what the protesters said, and I sure wasn’t fond of the way they said it. But they deserve credit for being hip enough to treat the event like the cheap stunt that it was all along.

From the March 5-11, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Air, Fire & Earth

By Bob Harris

YOU’VE SURELY HEARD BY now about the tragedy in Aviano, Italy, where a U.S. jet cut the wire supporting a ski-lift gondola, causing 20 people to fall to their deaths. You’d surely hope that afterwards, somebody in the military would have stepped forward right away, explained what happened, and accepted responsibility in an honorable manner.

You’d hope.

Brig. Gen. Guy Vanderlinden (whom I loved on Barney Miller) is the deputy commander of NATO naval strike support forces in southern Europe, which are maintained so we can respond to trouble in northern Africa or the Middle East. (They’re also just in case Switzerland suddenly freaks out and declares war on France. Which could happen. You can’t trust the Swiss. Oh, sure, they look harmless with their clocks and lederhosen and instant cocoa. But I’m onto you, you twitchy Swiss misfits. I’m onto you.) Sorry. I digress.

Anyhow, so this Gen. Vanlindenhosen guy is explaining after the accident how a state-of-the-art EA-6B Prowler could happen to plow right into the cable supporting this ski lift and kill all these people. And this is what he said, direct quote:

“I do not believe the pilot diverted from the approved route.” Oh.

OK, Gen. Vanlandingpad, let’s see if I’ve got this straight: You’re saying that his approved route was directly into this ski lift. Y’all planned that.

As a training exercise, just in case Saddam Hussein equips the Republican Guard with ski lifts and gondolas. You’ve got a countermeasure. I see.

The Italians didn’t buy it. They said the pilot was miles off line and flying way too low. Which, after a bunch of denials, the Pentagon eventually admitted. The Marines also denied that the plane had a flight data recorder. Which they turned over to the Italians a couple of days later.

Will the Pentagon ever learn? What happened in Aviano was an accident. What happened afterward wasn’t.

And that’s why a lot of people don’t trust the military.

SOMETHING NEW and bad comes out about the tobacco companies almost every day. The latest: According to papers recently publicized by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the sultans of smoke spent years consciously targeting black people, even though they were fully aware that cigarettes can kill.

Genocide? Nah.

Remember, these very same tobacco executives also marketed specific cigarettes to women, younger smokers, and especially–judging from all the giant Marlboro ads–sexually insecure white men.

All of which is plenty bad enough. And it gets worse.

It turns out that in 1972, tobacco giant Brown & Williamson also planned to manipulate the taste of their cigarettes to attract new customers. One idea they considered was to lure young people by creating a cigarette simulating the taste of cola.

The documents flatly state, “It’s a well-known fact that teenagers like sweet products,” and then list a number of different ideas for inventing a sweetened, Pepsi-tasting cigarette.

What were they planning to call it? “Smoka-Cola”? I can just see the billboard slogan: “Your breath stinks–and you burp!” That’ll impress the chicks. Heck, they should have even caffeinated the stuff. That way, an avid user could start the day with coffee, cigarettes, and a sugary donut … and then burst into flames before lunch.

How do we punish the executives who lied to Congress about the existence of so many of these documents? Maybe we could just sentence them to a lifetime of using their own products.

LAB TESTS PROVE: Being poor can damn near drive you nuts. Believe it or not, my life wasn’t always this glamour-filled joyride of all-night political humor parties with buxom showgirls.

No, I was actually poor myself once.

Anybody who really deals with poverty can tell you that one of the worst effects is psychological. Look, y’ever go to a party, and you were sort of the geek? Maybe your clothes were out of style, or maybe you didn’t know anyone, and so it was hard to get anybody to talk to you? It takes about 10 minutes before you’re feeling lousy about yourself, even though objectively you’re still just as cool as ever.

OK, now imagine that’s the whole world. Everywhere you look, everyone is richer and better dressed, and they don’t even want to look at you because they find you depressing.

Only it’s not a party. It’s real life.

That could be hard to cope with, right? Now there’s scientific proof. A new study of almost 10,000 people in the United Kingdom has found that the lower your income, the more likely you are to suffer from depression and other common mental disorders.

Inversely, you might imagine that being rich might make you more emotionally stable. Actually, the study doesn’t show anything of the kind. Which wouldn’t surprise anyone in Los Angeles or Washington, where celebrity self-destruction is sort of a local feature.

St. Louis has the big arch; Pittsburgh has the inclined trains. L.A. and D.C. have Roberts Downey and Dornan.

Bottom line: Money really doesn’t buy happiness. But enough to get by can rent a reprieve from despair.

From the February 26-March 4, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Fornigate, Part II

By Bob Harris

HERE’S SOMETHING unexpected: Bill Clinton’s recent troubles may have diminished him in the eyes of some Americans, but opinion polls show that most of us actually couldn’t care less. Even though most think he hasn’t been entirely honest, Clinton’s approval rating is at an all-time high. What exactly does that mean?

Looking more closely, the polls also show that Clinton’s numbers went down only while his denials were carefully worded. “The charges I have seen are untrue” certainly sounds like there might be something we don’t know yet. However, once his denials became absolute, the approval ratings began to increase, rising dramatically after a State of the Union address that refused even to acknowledge the scandal’s existence.

The number of people who believe that illicit sex took place has remained fairly stable. So Clinton hasn’t changed anybody’s mind, though he has changed how they feel about what they think. The only logical conclusion: we really don’t mind when politicians lie. The only thing we do mind is when they do it unconvincingly.

Nixon, for example, was popular when he lied confidently. Look at the old newsreels. In the 1950s, he seemed to truly believe his congressional opponents were communist fellow travelers. Boom, bang, instant VP. But later on–about the time he claimed to have a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam (when in fact some of his aides were actually trying to derail peace talks)–he seemed to believe his own baloney less and less. Watch his face. By the time of the resignation speech, you could see in his eyes that even he knew there was hardly any point in pretending anymore. And so off to San Clemente he went.

JFK, on the other hand, was terrific. In the 1960 debates, Kennedy accused Nixon of being soft on Cuba, knowing full well (having earlier received a CIA briefing himself) that Vice President Nixon was in the loop on the CIA’s secret anti-Castro programs. No way could Nixon respond–hey, here, look at all this secret stuff we’re doing–so JFK nailed Nixon with a false charge, looked good doing it, and we’ve loved him ever since.

(That said, the current cottage industry in linking Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe, Sam Giancana, the Sasquatch, and assorted other sordid trysts isn’t to be trusted, either. If you follow the footnotes on these claims closely, you’ll find that they’re mostly facile repetitions of never-proven charges made 30 years ago and claims of “witnesses” like Judith Campbell Exner, whose stories grow larger and more detailed as years pass–precisely the opposite of genuine human recollections. However, following footnotes isn’t something many writers often do.

Similarly, virtually no evidence other than her say-so exists to support Monica Lewinsky’s story, but the press and public continue to act is if everything has already been proven.

Fair enough. Clinton wanted to be just like JFK; he’s finally getting the rest of his wish. If Hillary ever wears a pink pillbox hat, the first thing Bill should do is duck.

Ronald Reagan? Same deal: He could look us right in the eye and claim that 80 percent of air pollution came from trees, that Jimmy Carter never debated Gerald Ford, or that Grenada was a threat to national security–and say it all with such sincerity that it had to be true. Sure, Trident nuclear missiles can be recalled after launch. Sure, the Panama Canal Zone is U.S. soil. Sure, the Contras were the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. Sure, the congressional ban on aid to the Contras was never intended to apply to something like, oh, aid to the Contras. …

We loved that lying buffoon so much we’ve renamed Washington National Airport after him.

George Bush broke records for popularity during the Gulf War, when misplaced patriotism allowed him to lie with absolute confidence: Kuwait was a democracy; the U.N. coalition was more than a fig leaf for U.S. policy; Iraqis really ripped babies from incubators; smart bombs and stealth airplanes really work; and the war wasn’t ultimately about oil. We tied ribbons and sang songs and gave people dirty looks if they didn’t play along.

But Bush lost our confidence when he lost his own. He never really seemed to believe that the tax hike he approved wasn’t really a reversal of his “read my lips” pledge; that the best way to create jobs is by cutting the tax on capital gains; or that Dan Quayle was actually qualified for the job. And so off to the golf course he went.

This preference for leaders who can (a) tell us what we want to hear, even if it’s illogical or just plain false, and then (b) seem to be speaking the truth, even when we’re already certain they’re being dishonest, might explain why voters reward not the clearest thinkers but the most delusional.

So what the latest polls actually reveal isn’t anything unique. All it means is that we’ve decided that Clinton is officially in the major leagues. We don’t actually believe what he’s saying is true, but he says it so convincingly that we like having him as our leader.

Which leads me to make you this promise: From this day forward, I promise that I will lie to you on a regular basis. But I also promise to do my personal best to make sure you feel good about the way I do it.

It’s the least I can do to earn your trust.

From the February 12-18, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.