Dope

The politics of war and popularity has been one of the great perils of democracy since Pitt the Younger played the patriot card in 1793. �We cannot arrange with our enemy in the present conjuncture, without abandoning the interest of mankind,� Burke wrote, in his �Letters �on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France,� which was Burke�s way of having it two ways: he simulated a moral interest such that the state could not refuse it, while pretending to decry any who would try to force the state to serve ideological interests. The latter was the letter of his indictment of the French revolutionaries � he claimed that they committed crimes in the name of an abstraction. Notice that the abstraction for which the French Revolutionaries were committing crimes was: the interest of mankind. Burke�s objections to the French Revolution became de facto state doctrine under Pitt - which is when the odd delusion was forged that the British empire was not simply a way of aggrandizing British interest, but was instead, mystically, in the interests of the subdued. This, of course, is the True Doctrine of the Neo-Con believers. The case Burke made carried the burden of legitimacy throughout the British-French conflict, up to 1815, and wrought havoc on the rights of Englishmen, as well as on their money.

This two-fold legitimation of war, which seeks to engraft its justification into the very tissue of the state�s legitimacy, is the path used to make any who oppose war unpatriotic, or enemies of the state. It�s a very fine maneuver, and it is being used now by the Bush regime to shift the boundaries of the war debate: it is no longer about the need for it, but the time we will have it. The social ostracism of the peace party is the practical correlate to the inevitability of war, the last few month�s media Muzak: a pervasive perversion of real reasons which operates much like Muzak, that pervasive perversion of real music, to obstruct thought. So those nations which might oppose our Iraqi action are discredited in sometimes laughable acts of propaganda. In the Sunday NYT, for instance, there was an article about the close ties between Iraq and France � ties that were, of course, cut during the Gulf war. There was even a graf showing the nations that traded with Iraq, and the arms they supplied, from Russia to France. Hey ho, however: there was no place there for the U.S. or the U.K. We�ve already published a partial inventory of products that went to Iraq from the U.S., taken from Jentleson�s book. Our sardonic laughter about the chart was increased by the fact that the Sunday NYT also published an article about businesses using misleading charts to disguise their true financial state.

:While other academic research over the last decade has established that financial charts are often designed to paint a rosier corporate picture than the numbers warrant, a study by Deanna Oxender Burgess, an accounting professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, goes a step further. It examined the effect of the chart design on readers of annual reports, who are mainly investors, stock analysts and shareholders.

"Dr. Burgess found that even slight distortions in a chart changed readers' perceptions of the information. "The danger is that people believe there's more growth than there really is or that performance isn't as poor, which could influence investment decisions," said Dr. Burgess, who conducted focus groups with 80 stockbrokers, bankers, accountants and business students."

Slight distortions in a chart � like the exclusion of two nations that, at one time, were making money on shipping those substances and technologies to Iraq that they now use to justify �regime change?� That's what I call a slight distortion.

Sometimes, coincidence really is the best artist.