Author: Ophelia Benson

So there (see below) are two of my operating assumptions. That many words important for our understanding and conversation are not transparent, not self-evident – indeed are worse than that, are apparently self-evident and straightforward but in fact not. Thus we have a false sense of security when we use them, we take them for granted and at face value, and assume that everyone understands them exactly as we do. But such is not the case. My second operating assumption is that this matters, it’s a problem, it causes problems, and should never be lost sight of.

Elitism is one of those words. I have a running argument with a friend, who is forever telling me that I’m an elitist and he’s not. But he’s quite, quite wrong. He’s thoroughly confused, and as far as I can tell his confusion stems from my failure to admire the writing of Stephen King. But I take that to be a very odd definition of elitism.

This musing is relevant to Butterflies and Wheels because conflicting ideas about elitism are central to a lot of Fashionable Nonsense. There are people for instance who like to accuse scientists, all scientists, scientists by definition, of elitism, and they like to do it in pointlessly clotted arcane jargon that seems to serve no other purpose than exclusion of outsiders. Who exactly is the elitist? It all depends how you define the word…

We all have our operating assumptions, and it can be interesting and even useful sometimes to figure out what our own and other people’s are. One of my own that I often notice is not universal, is that Things Could Be Better. That improvement is needed, that there are errors and misunderstandings that need pointing out and fixing. Of course, in one sense, that’s too obvious to need stating, and everyone knows it: no one is fool enough to think everything everywhere is perfect at all times. But some people do seem to have a default assumption that the world is all right and
straightforward and self-evident and easily managed, that problems and confusions and mistakes are the exception not the rule. One could call it optimism, which is (for some reason) widely considered a good thing, but I must say it seems to me more like obtuseness and willful refusal to notice and pay attention.

For instance yesterday in a conversation about the war an acquaintance of mine announced confidently: ‘Intelligent people can see through propaganda.’ Even apart from the obvious question, is that really true, is it really that easy simply to ‘see through’ and be uninfluenced by propaganda? there is the more fundamental question, what is propaganda? How do we distinguish it from non-propaganda? From persuasion, advertising, public relations, editorials, journalism, political speech, rhetoric, reportage? Surely it’s obvious if one thinks about it for two seconds that my propaganda may be their patriotic address, and our rallying the troops is almost certainly their flaming propaganda. Propaganda is not (obviously – surely?) a self-evident category, or even one with some good clear-edged specifications we can all agree on like those that differentiate species or elements, it is in fact far less of a useful descriptive than it is a boo-word. (Well, so is Fashionable Nonsense! I hear you exclaim. Yes, we know!)

So that’s one of my operating assumptions: that our language and conversation and writing are full of these fuzzy, ill-defined, debatable, often emotive words and phrases, that their meaning is far from self-evident, that the different meanings they convey to different people is often not peripheral but at the very center of whatever is being debated, and that it’s lazy and obtuse and willfully unobservant to take words like ‘propaganda’ as straightforward and self-evident to all.

In ‘The New Yorker’ Seymour Hersh tells of the disagreements between the military and the Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. There is some of this in every war, and a lot of it is just each side protecting itself or as we put it in the vernacular, covering its ass. But it may be worse than usual this time. Or it may not.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of last week was the failure of the Shiite factions in southern Iraq to support the American and British invasion. Various branches of the Al Dawa faction, which operate underground, have been carrying out acts of terrorism against the Iraqi regime since the nineteen-eighties. But Al Dawa has also been hostile to American interests. Some in American intelligence have implicated the group in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which cost the lives of two hundred and forty-one marines. Nevertheless, in the months before the war the Bush Administration courted Al Dawa by including it among the opposition groups that would control postwar Iraq.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, the saying goes. At least, until a little more time passes and the enemy of my enemy becomes my worst enemy of all, as with those dear darling beloved pious freedom-loving god-fearing mujahaddin in Afghanistan a few years ago. ‘Courting’ Al Dawa sounds like a similar sort of arrangement. And it hasn’t worked after all. Maybe if the US had done a better job of hanging on to its friends it wouldn’t need to be ‘courting’ terrorist religious fanatics.

The Independent takes a look at Rumsfeld and the unfortunate arrogance of the US tone.

Mr Rumsfeld is not, therefore, the sole architect of America’s counter-productive posture of arrogance in this war. But his tenure at the Department of Defence does not help. He was openly contemptuous of the United Nations and has always asserted that the US can go it alone – without the British, at one recent stage.

Arrogance and contempt towards the UN, France, old Europe, and even the UK, and sucking up to terrorist groups. Possibly a somewhat flawed approach.

The war is in its 11th day, and it’s clear that the cheery expectation of a Blitzkrieg was ill-founded. Apparently shock and awe have succeeded only in turning Saddam Hussein from a hated tyrant to an admired resister of the invaders, a result fraught with horrible implications for the future, including the future of Tony Blair. It is a profoundly dispiriting thought that this war could well end up entrenching the ignorant callous provincial talentless Bush more firmly in power than ever while it undoes the vastly more worthwhile Blair. Jonathan Freedland comments here on Blair’s backbreaking efforts with the UN and Bush’s smug indifference to the whole matter. There is something intensely degrading about watching a person of Bush’s calibre lording it over someone of Blair’s. (That’s why I don’t watch it.)

Abdel Bari Atwan here describes the reversal of fortune Saddam Hussein’s reputation has undergone at the hands of the US president.

President George Bush has at least one achievement to his credit in his war against Saddam Hussein. He has transformed Saddam into a heroic champion in the eyes of many in the region and might elevate his status into that of a mythological figure if he succeeds in killing or capturing more British and American soldiers and in turning Baghdad into an Arab and Islamic Stalingrad…The allies committed a dangerous mistake when they relied on information supplied by the Iraqi opposition regarding the state of affairs within Iraq. They made an even bigger mistake when they spoke of installing a US military governor over Iraq, as this will serve only to stir up patriotic feelings among Iraqis and encourage them to bury their differences with Saddam and unite forces to repel an American occupation.

Depressing enough. After that perhaps a touch of wit would be refreshing, so try Alexei Sayle’s piece on Bush. There is plenty of sober truth along with the wit though. I was particularly struck by the observation that Bush is a ‘dry drunk,’ because a friend of mine has been fulminating about that (along with the more usual complaints) since long before the election. She is a judge who has decided a great many domestic abuse cases, so she knows what she’s talking about. Sayle tells us the dry drunk is one who has forcibly wrenched himself off alcohol without dealing with whatever caused the alcoholism to begin with, so is forever in pursuit of other outside fixes, such as shopping, religiosity, or military adventures.

If we look at the nation that President Bush leads, it also behaves in many ways like an addict. The United States is a gigantic John Candy of a country, straining its oversized elasticated pants from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The country is addicted to more or less everything, constantly craving greater and greater quantities of petrol, electricity, pointless sports, empty patriotism, fatty hormone-crammed meat, gigantic pedestrian-crushing four-wheel drive trucks, ever more baseball caps with nonsense written on them and unquestioning obedience from every nation on the planet.

And finally there is this one about the bottomless horribleness of US hard right politics and the tragedy of Blair’s alliance with it. I know the idea is that Blair has restrained Bush and made him that little bit less dangerous than he would have been otherwise. But surely he has also provided him with a tiny veneer of respectability that he wouldn’t have had otherwise, has enabled him to look that little bit less unilateral than he in fact is. Maybe it will prove to be for the good in the end, but I must say, I’m not very optimistic.

Well, here’s an intriguing little item by way of a break from war news. The abundance and popularity of porn on the Internet, and what that may do to men’s attitudes to women, and how strangely little attention the subject gets.

For a political perspective you would have to search to the very margins of feminist debate. It is as if an entire generation of research into the emotional effects of porn has simply been forgotten, leaving us with porn galore and not the faintest idea what it does.

The most sinister aspect of the whole subject is how inextricably confused lust seems to be with hostility, at least in this kind of pornography. (And is there any other kind?) Judging from the description (I have to be honest: I’ve never looked at this kind of, er, material) it’s not even slightly erotic, it’s more like assault. Slut this and slut that. It appears to be all about treating women as toilets (very literally) and hating and mocking them at the same time. It’s hard to see how that can help poisoning men’s attitudes to women…and the stuff is ubiquitous. Not a happy thought.

But the emotional consequences of casual porn use, or the effects of its cultural ubiquity, are completely ignored. Whether porn might be harmful to a non-addict is never even examined…Here is some evidence. Experiments were carried out on ‘normal’ men, not addicts, for research by Edward Donnerstein, a prominent academic and author. ‘On the first day,’ he reported, ‘when they see women being raped and aggressed against, it bothers them. By day five it does not bother them at all. In fact, they enjoy it.’…Even porn which wasn’t violent made the men twice as likely to say they felt aggressive towards women. This is not to say that porn turns men into rapists; it doesn’t need to, for it trespasses on the mind more subtly. The evidence proves that porn invites its audience to view women differently – as inferiors, as objects, only good for sex. This is the problem with pornography; it alters the way men look at women…and it even alters the way women look at themselves.

And this isn’t even Fashionable Nonsense. In fact if the author is correct it’s only ‘the very margins of feminist debate,’ which can be fertile territory for FN, that notice at all. That’s one of the worst aspects of FN: the way it can discredit useful, necessary, original lines of thought and inquiry. I used to like those margins of feminist debate, until they got cluttered up with touchy-feely irrationalists and earth mothers and science-haters.