Free, promotional email list for Stay Free! print magazine

[Carrie McLaren <carrie AT stayfreemagazine.org>]

hey, I've been delinquent on the emails lately. Sorry about that. 
It's been a busy, busy summer here at the Stay Free! hacienda, 
working on the Illegal Art exhibit (www.illegal-art.org), a Stay 
Free! media literacy curriculum (12th grade), and a new issue of the 
zine (due out mid-November).

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The budding media educators among you should know about the inaugural 
conference for Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME). October 
18-20 in New Mexico. All the cool kids will be there: Mark Crispin 
Miller, Bob McChesney, Jean Kilbourne, etc. (I'll be speaking as 
well.) Registration info: http://www.acmecoalition.org

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I was on NPR today (8/19) talking about Tivo, ReplayTV and their 
effect on advertising. You can listen in RealAudio if you so desire:
http://www.moretothepoint.org/cgi-bin/db/kcrw.pl?show_code=tp&air_date=8/19/02&tmplt_type=show

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NEW ON THE STAY FREE! SITE:

Mark Crispin Miller on conspiracy theories, the Bush administration, etc.:
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/19/mcm.html

Mark Crispin Miller on conspiracies, media, and mad scientists

[ Interview by Carrie McLaren ]

After years of dropping Mark Crispin Miller's name in Stay Free!, I 
figured it was time to interview him. Miller is, after all, one of 
the sharpest thinkers around. His writings on television predicted 
the cult of irony-or whatever you call it when actual Presidential 
candidates mock themselves on Saturday Night Live, when sitcoms 
ridicule sitcoms, and when advertisements attack advertising. More 
recently, he has authored The Bush Dyslexicon, aided by his humble 
and ever-devoted assistant (me).

Miller works at New York University in the Department of Media 
Ecology. Though he bristles at being called an academic, Miller is 
exactly the sort of person that should be leading classrooms. He's an 
excellent speaker, with a genius for taking cultural products-be they 
Jell-O commercials or George W. Bush press conferences-and teasing 
out hidden meanings. (He's also funny, articulate, and knows how to 
swear.)

I talked to Mark at his home in November, between NPR appearances and 
babysitting duty. He is currently writing about the Marlboro Man for 
American Icons, a Yale University Press series that he also happens 
to be editing. His book Mad Scientists: Paranoid Delusion and the 
Craft of Propaganda (W. Norton) is due out in 2004.-CM

STAY FREE: Let's start with a simple one: Why are conspiracy theories 
so popular?

MCM: People are fascinated by the fundamental evil that seems to 
explain everything. Lately, this is why we've had the anomaly of, 
say, Rupert Murdoch's Twentieth Century Fox releasing films that 
feature media moguls as villains out to rule the world-villains much 
like Rupert Murdoch. Who's a bigger conspirator than he is? And yet 
he's given us The X-Files. Another example: Time Warner released 
Oliver Stone's JFK, that crackpot-classic statement of the case that 
American history was hijacked by a great cabal of devious 
manipulators. It just so happens that Stone himself, with Time Warner 
behind him, was instrumental in suppressing two rival projects on the 
Kennedy assassination. These are trivial examples of a genuine 
danger, which is that those most convinced that there is an evil 
world conspiracy tend to be the most evil world conspirators.

STAY FREE: Because they know what's inside their own heads?

MCM: Yes and no. The evil that they imagine is inside their heads-but 
they can't be said to know it, at least not consciously. What we're 
discussing is the tendency to paranoid projection. Out of your own 
deep hostility you envision a conspiracy so deep and hostile that 
you're justified in using any tactics to shatter it.

If you look at those who have propagated the most noxious doctrines 
of the twentieth century, you will find that they've been motivated 
by the fierce conviction that they have been the targets of a grand 
conspiracy against them. Hitler believed he was fighting back, 
righteously, against "the Jewish world conspiracy." [See pp. 30-31] 
Lenin and Stalin both believed they were fighting back against the 
capitalist powers-a view that had some basis in reality, of course, 
but that those Bolsheviks embraced to an insane degree. (In 1941, for 
example, Stalin actually believed that England posed a greater danger 
to the Soviet Union than the Nazis did.)

We see the same sort of paranoid projection among many of the leading 
lights of our Cold War-the first U.S. Secretary of Defense, James 
Forrestal, who was in fact clinically insane; the CIA's James 
Angleton; Richard Nixon; J. Edgar Hoover; Frank Wisner, who was in 
charge of the CIA's propaganda operations worldwide. Forrestal and 
Wisner both committed suicide because they were convinced the 
Communists were after them. Now, there was a grain of truth to this 
since the Soviet Union did exist and it was a hostile power. But it 
wasn't on the rise, and it wasn't trying to take over the world, and 
it certainly wasn't trying to destroy James Forrestal personally. We 
have to understand that there was just as much insanity in our own 
government as there was with the Nazis and the Bolsheviks.

This paranoid dynamic did not vanish when the Cold War ended. The 
U.S. is now dominated, once again, by rightists who believe 
themselves besieged. And the same conviction motivates Osama bin 
Laden and his followers. They see themselves as the victims of an 
expansionist Judeo-Christianity.

STAY FREE: Al Qaeda is itself a conspiracy.

MCM: Yes. We have to realize that the wildest notions of a deliberate 
plot are themselves tinged with the same dangerous energy that drives 
such plots. What we need today, therefore, is not just more alarmism, 
but a rational appraisal of the terrorist danger, a clear recognition 
of our own contribution to that danger, and a realistic examination 
of the weak spots in our system. Unfortunately, George W. Bush is 
motivated by an adolescent version of the same fantasy that drives 
the terrorists. He divides the whole world into Good and Evil, and 
has no doubt that God is on his side-just like bin Laden. So how can 
Bush guide the nation through this danger, when he himself sounds 
dangerous? How can he oversee the necessary national 
self-examination, when he's incapable of looking critically within? 
In this sense the media merely echoes him. Amid all the media's 
fulminations against al Qaeda, there has been no sober accounting of 
how the FBI and CIA screwed up. Those bureaucracies have done a lousy 
job, but that fact hasn't been investigated because too many of us 
are very comfortably locked into this hypnotic narrative of ourselves 
as the good victims and the enemy as purely evil.

STAY FREE: There's so much contradictory information out there. Tommy 
Thompson was on 60 Minutes the other night saying that we were 
prepared for biological warfare, that there was nothing to worry 
about. Yet The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have quoted 
experts saying the exact opposite. Do you think this kind of 
confusion contributes to conspiratorial thinking? I see some 
conspiratorial thinking as a normal function of getting along in the 
world. When, on September 11th, the plane in Pennsylvania went down, 
there was lots of speculation that the U.S. military shot it down.

MCM: Which I tend to think is true, by the way. I've heard from some 
folks in the military that that plane was shot down.

STAY FREE: But we have no real way of knowing, no expertise.

MCM: Yes, conspiratorial thinking is a normal response to a world in 
which information is either missing or untrustworthy. I think that 
quite a few Americans subscribe to some pretty wild notions of what's 
going on. There's nothing new in this, of course. There's always been 
a certain demented plurality that's bought just about any explanation 
that comes along. That explains the centuries-old mythology of 
anti-Semitism. There will always be people who believe that kind of 
thing. To a certain extent, religion itself makes people susceptible 
to such theorizing.

STAY FREE: How so?

MCM: Because it tends a propagate that Manichean picture of the 
universe as split between the good people and "the evil-doers." 
Christianity has spread this vision-even though it's considered a 
heresy to believe that evil is an active force in God's universe. 
According to orthodox Christianity, evil is not a positive force but 
the absence of God . . .

Continued at:
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/19/mcm.html


Sidebar:
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/19/bodysnatchers.html



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OF INTEREST ELSEWHERE: FAST FOOD AND DRUGS

"Mcdonald's says 'don't eat too much of our food' "
http://media.guardian.co.uk/marketingandpr/story/0,7494,725429,00.html
(Thanks to Iain Aitch)

"Burger King staff burned in team building firewalking session"
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_416979.html


...and Salon has done some awesome stories about drug marketing:

"Author and psychologist Bruce Levine pummels psychiatry, 
psychotropic drugs. and the role both may have played in the case of 
Andrea Yates"
http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/07/11/levine

"Celebrity pill pushers: Under the guise of public service, 
pharmaceutical companies are quietly paying stars to solicit new 
customers on TV talk shows with tales of personal suffering and 
blessed relief."
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2002/07/11/celebrity_drugs