Aw Chuck, come on. When was any moral, political, philosophical or cultural term ever "clear" and unabused? After all, as Whitehead observed, the history of western philosophy is a series of footnotes to the vile abuse of such terms as "sophist" and "stronger" by that fount of clarity, Plato.
Carrol
------------
I know, it was yet another senior moment---romantic, delusional, naive---sounding like the political child I thought I was forty years ago. But... there still seems to me a qualitative and quantitative difference between academics or literary figures using ideas that don't really fit a discourse, but shore it up anyway, or re-casting previous work to bring it into a concordance with some current issue, and what I was trying to characterize.
Part of that difference is the steer quantity or volume of bullshit that is cranked out as part of the mass media stream and the politics of the day. For example, the think-tank industry supplies the basic raw materials (the doctored and cooked statistical reports and empirical findings), that are then interpretively processed over and over in ever larger batches, by ever larger numbers of producers, until a complete info-market saturation is achieved and whatever It is then becomes equivalent to demonstrable Fact---which is then in a critical position to be useful for the manufacture of Consent for some policy position---the very telos of which was the basis for the think-tank contract in the first place. So this isn't just a question of ideas per se, but what is empirical fact, what is material reality, what are concrete conditions. Partly it is just the usual propaganda or ideology machine.
However, the intentionally cooked up character, its quasi-empirical, quasi-scientific veneer, combined with the steer volume constitutes a different sort of abuse than morphing, trimming, amplifying, obscuring or mis-characterizing some academic school of thought.
So its the intentionally manufactured and doctored quality, plus its presentation as unassailable empirical fact, plus its mass volume that made me want to characterize this entire system as fascist or totalitarian. I mean on some level you're right, it is simply a personal complaint about wading through the mass of trivial Newspeak, spin-doctors, and dis-information.
On the other hand, it never, ever lets up, there is never a break in the flow, and the quantitative volume is used to completely drowned, overwhelm, and efface any other presentation----so in effect it determines, as it is intended to, the direction and result of all discourse on the matter---whatever that matter happens to be. Over time, the sequence of such fabrications becomes tantamount to `fact', `american opinion', US `social and political' history, US `culture'.
Then in a more narrow focus, what I think the current rightwing has managed to add (since about the Reagan era) to the already established mass production of bullshit is actually something of an innovation or what I think of as the discursive inversion.
I can't remember exactly when I first recognized it, but I think it was during some news interview with Eliot Abrams over the Iran-Contra affair. Newt Gingrich later turned it into a permanent method and it has since become an entire school followed by almost every republican politician I can think of. This is the discursive inversion. What it does is essentially re-polarize the entire universe of discourse in reverse order, much like Orwell described in 1984. Oceania has always been at Peace with Eurasia.
You can pick just about any rightwing republican idea and see it in operation. For example, begin with the premise that the social welfare state destroys the moral fabric of society and is the root cause of poverty, drugs and crime. Or begin discussing the problems with public education, when the premise is that the public school system has destroyed academic achievement levels because it has fostered a relativity of values under the name of tolerance and multiculturalism. Or that neoliberal favorite, that free market fundamentalism will erase the disparities between the haves and have nots. The only way these sorts of positions make any rational sense, is if you allow the entire universe of discourse to be turned inside out, and completely forget: 1) the social welfare state was created to stop the explosion of poverty from becoming a threatening revolutionary base, 2) public education has been brutalized by starving it to death from public funds, while filling it to overcapacity with non-English speaking immigrant kids, 3) free market profits depend on the separation between haves and have nots increasing.
We are saving Afghanistan by destroying it, so we can pay back the Taliban for hiding bin Laden, who probably planned and paid for WTC and Pentagon attacks, after the Pentagon stopped paying bin Laden to kill Russians, because they were trying to save Afghanistan by destroying it.
Oceania has always been at War with Eurasia.
Chuck Grimes