Time's Arrow:


In this week's issue of Time Magazine, the following quote was found:

"Berg's death reset the moral equivalence meter and reminded the world who the enemy is.
U.S. officials said privately that they could not believe the terrorists has such a poor grasp of public relations."
Collateral Damage,
Michael Duffy, Matthew Cooper, and John F. Dickerson
Time Magazine, 5-24-04

What times we do live in my friends, that a man's gruesome death is reduced to being a hypothetical effect on a particular individual public relations campaign.
But then, public relations, the formation of mass attitudes has a unique language all it's own. Events are measured quite literally and then translated into a lexicon used to maintain support for a political program.
Over time this lexicon can and does subvert clear orderly thinking....it harasses the mind into assessing events in turns of their potential for political advantage.
It is a language of assessment and prioritization. It is the essential precursor to said manipulation of news and information.
It is crude to label all this "propaganda"...if Jacques Ellul is to be believed, truly effective propaganda cannot exist in a functioning democracy owing at the very least to the multiple uncontrolled sources of information.
"When democracies make effective propaganda" sayeth the French scholar :"They cease to be democracies".
We are not talking about propaganda here, if we were, the news out of Iraq would be infinitely rosy and uplifting not a body-bag to be seen no buggered POW's in sight.
But there in play a self replicating language at play here, it automatically limits the range of rationality and imposes a predetermined meaning on events.
It can't control events...but it sure can try.
The fact that a lexicon like this exists in a democracy is bad enough for the moment.
I think it is quite possible for language and clear thinking to decline within the confines of a democratic polity.
Quotes like the one above are the proof of it, and worse things of this nature go on all the time.
Facts are the only thing that can stem it's grow and it's abuse of rationality.
Facts break it down and facts prevent it from evolving into an all encompassing system of propaganda.
And in conclusion, facts are the last thing you will find in the reportage of "Time" magazine.