Poisoning the Well

Not long after the Cuban missile crisis and the JFK assassination, I watched a filmstrip series about the communist threat, entitled “Two Worlds.” It was a multi-part boxed set with somber narration on long-play records. An audible beep prompted the presenter to advance the slide. Anticommunist propaganda. It warned the “free world” to be wary of communists and their propaganda.

Today, “Two Worlds” would be a Red Scare collectible. The 1966 companion paperback is listed as an antique on e-Bay. The cover of the 307-page tract boasts over 1000 illustrations. The filmstrip’s details are lost to memory, save for general warnings that if communists ever took over America, the government would tap our phones, control our press, violate civil liberties, arrest and jail people without charge, hold political prisoners and use propaganda to manipulate us.

Good thing that never happened.

Instead, Americans got warrantless wiretapping; TV military analysts and Judith Miller and Michael Gordon; the Military Commissions Act; Jose Padilla and Don Siegelman; plus the White House Iraq Group, the Rendon Group and the Office of Special Plans. Think how much time and money the White House might have saved if it had outsourced its propaganda work to Hill & Knowlton, the ad men behind the pre-Desert Storm babies and incubators story.

Less public is the “pass it on” political spam that the flies under the radar – lies, distortions and worse which arrive after multiple forwards with dozens of e-mail addresses attached. Often with colorful, screamingly large text and the admonition, “Pass this one on to everyone on your list,” it is a phenomenon almost exclusive to the political right. Americans once warned to beware of propaganda now share it freely with friends, colleagues and relations. The saddest are the mailings which seem to originate with religious conservatives, the people who insist we should display the Nine Commandments in every courtroom.

Wait. Ten Commandments, you say? No, for e-propaganda traffickers, the commandment most important in a courtroom is out of fashion, the tenth one about not bearing false witness. A word of caution to them, a saying popular among American churchgoers: we become what we behold.

Expect to see a steady drip, drip, drip, of e-propaganda from now through the election. One e-mail making the rounds chronicles Obama’s 50 Lies. It is the predictable mix of distortions, smears and falsehoods presented in unusually large quantity. Anyone dedicating time to assemble and (purportedly) fact check fifty lies by a presidential candidate would have a hard time getting them this wrong – unless getting them wrong was the point. By contrast, this week I received a forward praising Cindy McCain, listing accurately – what a surprise – about a dozen facts about the wife of this year’s presumptive GOP candidate for president.

E-mail smears may be a cottage industry of the most radical blog partisans. Or, as with the administration efforts listed above, they might be something more sophisticated. (Anyone with information on the latter is encouraged to speak up.) Either way, the last decade and a half has seen a steady erosion of capital-T truth. Propaganda has been raised to an art form by an administration populated with doubt-free, "right-wing exuberants" disdainful of “the reality-based community.”

Because it is mostly invisible, there may be a tendency to dismiss such spam as stupid or unimportant, or at least as transparently propagandistic as “Two Worlds.” But that misses the point. First, it would not circulate so widely if it were not reinforcing what traffickers wish to believe (and what propagandists want them to believe). How widespread this phenomenon is has not been studied, to my knowledge, but should be. It is antithetical to the ideal of an informed electorate. Second, because these e-mails are part of a “death by a thousand cuts” strategy against opponents; they are meant to be disposable, water-cooler lies. Because many are snidely humorous, obvious errors are dismissed in a breezy, Coulteresque “it’s just a joke” way, and forwarded to friends anyway so they can be in on the fun. Thus the poison spreads from in-box to in-box like ant bait.

It is a strategy for gaining political advantage by poisoning minds. Not enough strychnine added in any dose to kill those who drink from democracy’s well rapidly, but slowly, over time. Maybe not even enough to poison the American body politic, but enough to poison its soul. We become what we behold.

Behold Swift Boaters, TV military analysts and WMDs. Behold Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

"Our nation's future stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different." - Adlai Stevenson, 1956

Rick Perlstein resurrected that Stevenson quote and took away the title for his new book. Add e-mail to Stevenson's list and you've updated it for 2008. (If I have obviously missed something Perlstein says in his book, it is because I am not through with it yet.)

In spite of the slow poisoning, Americans seem to have finally noticed something bitter in what they've been given to drink. Perhaps we will choose something cooler and fresher in November.