It was Marx who described religion as the opiate of the people. Twentieth-first century Americans have television as a general anesthetic. Our collective attention deficit disorder -- a disease of morbid intellectual laziness -- has permitted the careful packaging of pseudo-information by Madison Avenue to assume an illusion of reality.

To the behavioral psychologist, the truth about the hijacker's nationalities might seem a victim of a chronic state of inattention. Conditioning has rendered Americans hyper-responsive to emotional and sensory dynamics triggered by the news media, and relatively uninterested in intellectual content. Nobody understands this better than Rupert Murdoch, who has created an empire out of punchy anti-intellectualism. And few understand better how to use it to their advantage than the Bush White House. George W. Bush is, after all, the anti-intellectual's president.

The prescient moment came last winter, when leaked reports began to emerge about the Pentagon's plan to formally establish an Office of Strategic Influence -- euphemistic for a Department of Propaganda. Most disturbing was that the explicitly stated function of the office to disseminate disinformation to American allies. The idea was received poorly in Europe and elsewhere, and before the reaction got out of hand, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld publicly announced that the plan would be abandoned -- but not before we had had a glimpse of the modus operandi of the Bush Pentagon.

For the better part of a year, the administration made persistent, forceful efforts to dictate the tone of news content, undermining opposing views with references to patriotism, national security or subversion of the commander in chief. It was aided by unconditional editorial support from traditional right-wing organs such as Fox and the Wall Street Journal. With the invocation of 9/11 and terrorism as the universal legitimizer, the raison d'être for plans close to the administration's heart were skillfully rephrased. For example, controversial initiatives such as a national missile defense system and oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge found themselves reinvented and reissued in the language of terrorism.

More penetrating, though, was the use of that language to sanctify a colossal reactionary surge in ultra-conservative ideology. Hypnotized by evocations of fear, Americans have consented to a Strangelovian military doctrine, one that makes the quantum shift from a defensive military position to one of preemptive aggression. Similarly, by appealing to the smoldering sense of national paranoia, the Justice Department has been permitted to revive the principles of McCarthyism, long regarded as a shameful episode of xenophobic fervor.

Chillingly coupled with a presidential power to arbitrarily detain without recourse to any form of international or American law, the Orwellian techniques of the Justice Department have brought scathing criticism from Amnesty International and other rights groups across the globe. And an unknown number of people, without charge, are either detained or on a suspected terrorist list.

Recent Stories